Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  Marcos nodded as he took the book. “I’m glad to hear that. I’ve only seen the movie.”

  “Well, you should read the book. You should read it carefully. There’s a lot in there.”

  Marcos turned the book over in his hands. “I’ll do that,” he said.

  “I mean really. There’s a lot in that book.”

  Marcos suppressed a smile. Jesus, Kurt had never been much for subtlety. I got it, Marcos wanted to say. You’ve hidden something in the book. How obvious do you want to make it?

  When the meeting ended ten minutes later, Lieutenant Dominguez gave the book a cursory look and handed it back. Ostrander waited until he was back at the Tunnel before he started searching for the message.It wasn’t Kurt’s typical message in the gutter space, that was obviousfrom the very beginning. In fact, as far as Marcos could tell, the book was pristine. It took him the better part of a half hour to notice the small bubble that appeared in the binding when he opened the book all the way. Kurt Muse, king of the void space.

  Using a pencil, Marcos probed the space in the binding, dislodging a fan-folded piece of lined yellow paper. It was a letter to President Bush.

  Modelo Prison, Panama, Sept. 7

  Dear Mr. President:

  I’ve been held in solitary confinement in this prison for over five months, and it now appears I will not be afforded the opportunityto face my accusers. Not only have they denied me due process, the regime’s attorney general now informs me that I will continue to be held hostage “until we see how the situation develops.”By a most fortunate condition as a dependent spouse of a U.S. Forces employee (my wife is a DoDDS teacher), I’m coveredunder the Panama Canal Treaties, provisions of which clearly entitle the U.S. to my custody. In spite of a Herculean effortby the men and women of our office of Treaty Affairs to gain my custody, the Panamanian military have now refused to even discuss the matter. A flagrant treaty violation exists, one that by their own admission involves a political hostage. It is my understandingthat having exhausted all local means of peaceful compliance,that the CINC Southern Command deferred my case to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for procedural instructions. Mr. President,I’ve lived in Panama most of my life and in the last 4 years have come to know the regime’s workings quite well. Without question I can assure you that Mr. Noriega and his band of thugs will only release Panama from their chokehold when we apply force, military force. When you order that to happen, Mr. President,over two million Panamanians and this U.S. Citizen will be in your debt and free at last.

  Very truly yours,

  Kurt F. Muse

  36

  On October 8, 1989, the senior members of Manuel Noriega’smilitary staff staged a coup. When they had the dictator in custody, the coup organizers pleaded with American authorities for protection against a countercoup, even as they tried to protect their deposed leader from penalty or reprisals.

  American commanders, however, under the new, days-old command of General Maxwell Thurman, sensed that the Pineapple might be usingthe new American command structure to set a trap, and insisted that Noriega be delivered to them. Before a solution could be negotiated,the coup collapsed.

  Samantha Skinner, David and Carol’s oldest daughter, watched the news of the coup unfold on CNN from the safety of her college dormitoryat the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and decided that she needed to see if her Uncle Kurt was all right. She dialed ModeloPrison directly, and someone answered on the second or third ring.

  “Carcel Modelo,” said a man’s voice.

  “My name is Samantha Skinner,” she explained in flawless Spanish.

  “I’m Kurt Muse’s niece, and I’m calling to see if he’s okay. May I speak to him please?”

  She expected a stern rebuke, a lecture on the inappropriateness of her request. What she got instead was a very matter-of-fact, “We’re having a coup right now. He may be home very soon.”

  37

  Kurt’s first inkling of the coup came with a spattering of gunfire from beyond the walls of his cell—from beyond the walls of the prison, in fact, from the Comandancia compound on the other side of the street. Startled, he rolled off his cot and dashed to the window. It was the most amazing thing. He saw PDF troops holding other PDF troops at gunpoint, the losers with their hands in the air, surrendering to the winners.

  He didn’t realize it at the time—in fact, the whole incident seemed minor, with maybe fifty rounds fired in total and no injuries that he could see—but he had just witnessed the heart of the coup, where Manuel Noriega’s elite antiriot police, the so-called Dobermen, and a PDF infantry company had turned their weapons on what turned out to be precious few Noriega loyalists. Just like that, a government had been toppled.

  For a few hours.

  The next time Kurt was awakened, it was by the full-scale counterassault,and it came like thunder from hell. Gunfire erupted from all over, tearing at the humid air with a relentless cacophony of explosions.Again he darted to his window, and with a single glance, he knew that the Comandancia had been retaken. Armored personnel carriers surrounded the walled facility, and loyal soldiers swarmed to take their government back from the rebels.

  As Kurt watched the bedlam unravel, a heavy machine gun opened up from just yards away to his left, spraying deadly cover fire over the heads of the invaders and into the grounds of the Comandancia. They had set the gun up in the window of the cell next to Kurt’s, a perfect vantage point from which to accomplish its mission. Repelled by the deafening noise, Kurt dropped to the floor to take cover from the returnfire that never materialized.

  The counterassault was over in a matter of minutes and relative quiet returned, punctuated by the single gunshots that marked the initial executions that would ultimately consume every officer and noncom involved in the attempted coup. Within moments after the shooting stopped, the truckloads of new prisoners started to arrive.

  Inside the walls of Modelo Prison, Kurt could hear the sounds of panic, men running and shouting. They were preparing for something, and just in case that something included a chance to get away, Kurt put on his shoes and socks and prepared to take advantage of any opportunitythat might arise.

  He heard the sound of doors opening and closing, and of many feet in the concrete hallways. Through his window, he could see a large portion of the prison population being loaded into trucks and driven out through the walls of Modelo, off to God knew where, but what he later learned was Coiba Prison, an island fortress off the coast of Panama.

  They’d barely left when truckloads of new prisoners arrived to take their place. These, however, were prisoners in military uniforms, and they were bloodied and battered. At first, Kurt was reminded of the groups that arrived on the heels of the stolen elections, but there was a viciousness to the treatment of these new arrivals that made the post-electioncruelty seem like schoolyard play. These men were beaten every step of the way as they were herded into the Modelo dungeons, and the screams commenced almost immediately.

  At least one prisoner—a military officer of unknown rank—never made it that far. With his hands and feet shackled, he was still in the prison yard when a loyalist soldier knocked him to the ground, slipped a black plastic bag over his head, and fastened it at the prisoner’s neck with a length of tape. The prisoner suffocated right there on the filthy concrete, flopping and writhing like a fish on a dock.

  With the changeover of the prison population came a changeover in the guard staff as well. The somewhat bumbling, often laughable incompetents that Kurt had come to know were now replaced with regularsoldiers who accepted the sadistic side of their job with a particularglee.

  Over the course of just a couple of hours, Modelo Prison transformedfrom a common prison to a medieval torture chamber. Gone were the mere beatings with wire-reinforced rubber tubes. Now the beatings were meted out with fists, bats, and tire irons. This was no longer about instilling fear; it was about exacting punishment on soldierswho had taken up arms against their leaders. All too often, t
hat punishment was death.

  There simply weren’t enough spaces for the torturers to work their craft. With the cells and dungeons filled with dissenters awaiting their turn, the beatings spilled out into the hallways and, ultimately, the officers’quarters, which were located across the hall from Kurt’s cell. That brought the screaming and the pounding and the bleeding so close that Kurt could smell it. It was as if each blow somehow reverberatedthrough the concrete.

  Kurt watched, helpless, hopeless, and appalled, as one poor soul, bound to a chair, was dragged out into the hallway. He begged for mercy as PDF soldiers wrapped his head in a white T-shirt—white for the color of the opposition. They beat him with their fists for ten, fifteenminutes. They beat him long past unconsciousness, long past their own apparent exhaustion. They beat him until the white shirt had turned crimson, completely saturated and dripping with blood.

  Kurt was certain that he had just witnessed a man’s murder. He felt sick for the man and for his family, and ashamed of himself for not looking away; but it was like the cliché about not looking at a train wreck. Over the years, through the nightmares that would follow, Kurt would learn to find some solace in being the sole witness to what actuallyoccurred there that night. He never learned the name of the murderedman, and he’ll never know what the official record shows for his cause of death, but God knows the true cause, and so do Kurt and the men who pummeled him.

  There is no sound on the planet, Kurt learned, that is as horrific as the sound of a man being tortured. The pleading screams of agony, the cries for mercy, were so pitiful, so awful, that they became a physical presence in the building, every bit as much a part of the architecture as the concrete and mortar that held it all together. It became a part of Kurt, too, from that night on. The heavy wet sound of wood against skin, the snap of bones, the shrieks of pure pain. The look of satisfactionon the torturers’ faces. All of it would remain with Kurt forever.

  Witnessing such unspeakable suffering, it was impossible not to wonder, if only for a fleeting moment, whether Kurt was somehow responsiblefor the torment of these fractured and tortured revolutionaries.These soldiers and Dobermen had been his focus, after all. These were the very people whom La Voz de La Libertad had been hoping to reach through their broadcasts. From the earliest days of their illicit transmissions, La Voz had prompted and prodded these men to turn their backs on corruption and embrace the principles of their parents and their church. Over and over again, Kurt and his compatriots had begged men just like those who shook Modelo with their screams to rise up and do what was right.

  Now, here they were, paying the ultimate price for their patriotism.

  Kurt closed his eyes and tried to push the horrors away. This was not what he’d hoped for, not what he’d planned.

  He forced himself to think of his successes, his goals. He forced himself to think about the day he saved the de facto president of Panama from certain arrest.

  38

  For a brief moment in time, in late 1988, Roderick Esquivel,a gynecologist from Panama City, was the de facto chief executiveof a tiny republic caught in a spiral of corruption. Within hours of his ascendancy, he was marked for arrest. A soft spoken, dignified professional, Dr. Esquivel had been a long-time critic of President Eric Arturo DelValle, whose own rise to the presidency reeked of corruptionof the worst kind.

  On October 11, 1984, by a margin of fewer than two thousand votes, the world recognized the election of Nicolás Ardito-Barletta as the president of Panama, with DelValle and Esquivel installed as first and second vice presidents, respectively. A former officer of the World Bank, Barletta seemed well qualified on paper, but he was elected withouta significant power base, and as such he appeared to Noriega—who had just appointed himself leader of the army and the national police—to be an easy pawn. He lasted only eleven months in office beforehe was forced to resign.

  While conservative economic policy was the principal trigger for his resignation, many people—Kurt among them—believed that Noriega had forced him out for fear that he would reveal Noriega’s role in the brutal murder and mutilation of Hugo Spadafora.

  A prominent critic of the Panamanian military, Spadafora—a leader in the anti-Sandinista campaigns in Nicaragua—had announced that he had information linking Manuel Noriega to drug trafficking and illegal arms dealings. When last seen alive in the Costa Rican border areas,Spadafora had been in the custody of Panamanian security forces. On September 14, 1985, his castrated and beheaded body was discoverednear the Panamanian border. That Noriega was responsible was never proven, but accepted by many as fact.

  The coincidence that Barletta was pressured out of office within days of announcing his intention to investigate the army’s involvement in Spadafora’s murder was just too much for Kurt to accept.

  With Barletta gone, Vice President DelValle became Panama’s third president in less than four years.

  The new president did not bring a sense of calm, however. Protests over Spadafora’s murder only added to the already-growing protests over the economy. Barely a month after taking office, the DelValle governmentwas forced to close all its schools for several days due to lack of funding.

  As officials in the United States decried the ouster of Barletta, DelValletried to quell the rising domestic discontent by reintroducing the populist policies reversed by the previous administration. Prices for milk and gasoline were lowered, and the new president promised that labor groups and the private sector would be involved in any future negotiationswith the International Monetary Fund. He seemed willing to promise anything to anyone who would listen, but in the end, economicrealities could not be denied. Soon, the austerity measures were reinstated, and the public uproar grew louder.

  A general strike protesting the DelValle economic policies was averted only by the intercession of General Noriega and his troops, a move that was just the first of several that showed who was truly in charge of the government. Whatever doubt might have remained disappearedentirely in October 1986 when DelValle fired four cabinet ministers and installed Noriega’s hand-picked candidates to replace them.

  As Noriega built his power base, the Western world took note of the blatant corruption. The U.S. House of Representatives opened up hearings on the political shenanigans even as the columnist Seymour Hersh published a series of articles alleging high-level Panamanian involvementin drug trafficking, murder, and the smuggling of sensitive information to America’s enemies in Cuba.

  As the world protested, the Noriega regime, as led by his puppet DelValle, continued to push the tiny nation in any direction the generalwished it to go.

  The end of it all began on June 1, 1987. On the heels of a years-longpower struggle within the PDF, Noriega forced his chief of staff, Colonel Roberto Diaz Herrera, to resign. A week later, Herrera took to the airwaves and to the soapbox, publicly accusing Noriega of activeinvolvement not only in the death of Hugo Spadafora—still a very raw wound for the Panamanian people—but also of the former dictatorOmar Torrijos, whose death in a plane crash years before had alwaysbeen the source of much mumbling. Furthermore, Herrera played on the closeness of the Barletta victory in 1984 to accuse Noriega and DelValle both of massive election fraud.

  The response of the Panamanian people was both immediate and vocal. Businessmen (including Kurt and his coconspirators as representativesof the Panamanian Rotary Clubs) participated in the formation of the National Civic Crusade to demand changes in the government. Demonstrations spread like wildfire, prompting the president to declarea state of emergency, thus suspending constitutional rights and silencing all official avenues of dissent. But the National Civic Crusade would not be silenced. Protestors called for a national strike that paralyzedthe nation for days. The government responded to these strikes with violence.

  Protests and strikes raged throughout the summer and fall of 1987, crippling the economy and throwing the government into chaos. It was in the midst of all this that Kurt launched La Voz de la Libertad, stirringthe revolut
ionary juices even as they successfully kept their own identities a carefully protected (and frantically sought) secret.

  On February 4, 1988, a federal grand jury in Miami, Florida, indictedGeneral Manuel Noriega on charges of drug trafficking.

  To preserve his presidency—and his own ass—President DelValle took the only action available to him. He announced in a televised speech that he was relieving Noriega of command of the Panamanian Defense Forces.

  Kurt was in the home of Pablo Martinez, discussing the strategy for their next radio broadcast, when DelValle dropped his political bomb. A soft-spoken man with an encyclopedic knowledge of Panamanian history and politics, Martinez had been the only “professional” politicianamong Kurt’s coconspirators, and his job was to make sure that the points made during the broadcasts of La Voz de la Libertad were both coherent and consistent. Kurt’s wont had always been to make the messages angry and vitriolic, while Pablo sat on them all to keep the messages calm and rational.

  “Did you hear that?” Pablo asked Kurt, rising from his chair and moving to the near-muted television.

  “Hear what?”

  “DelValle just fired the Pineapple.”

  “What?” It would have been easier to believe that the earth had been knocked off its axis. Sure enough, there was the Panamanian president on television making the announcement that due to the recentcontroversy created by Colonel Herrera and the indictment from the American grand jury in Miami, the general was being relieved of his command.

  “He’s a dead man,” Kurt said of the president. As the words passed his lips, he knew that what he’d intended as hyperbole was anything but. It was a prediction for the future.

  Almost immediately after the announcement was made, the ever-present(and always-illegal) scanner on Pablo’s desk jumped to life with radio traffic. A lot of it was chatter, idle gossip about the news that had just broken, but within a few moments, they heard an announcement that startled them both: orders were issued to arrest not only President DelValle but Vice President Roderick Esquivel as well.