Executive Committee
Bishop John Adams, Chairman
Rev. Carroll Baltimore, 1st Vice Chairman
Art Nicoletti, 2nd Vice Chairman
Dr. Dick Bozian, Secretary
Rev. Daniel Brown Treasurer
Executive Committee
Bishop John Adams, Chairman
Rev. Carroll Baltimore, 1st Vice Chairman
Art Nicoletti, 2nd Vice Chairman
Dr. Dick Bozian, Secretary
Rev. Daniel Brown Treasurer
Dr. Norman A. Bailey
Testimony Before the Select Committee on
Narcotics
Testimony before the Select Committee on
Narcotics Abuse and Control
U.S. House of Representatives
Congressman Charles Rangel (NY-D)
March 29th, 1988
Testimony by
Dr. Norman A. Bailey
Formerly Special Assistant to President Reagan for National Security
Affairs, and Senior Director of International Economic Affairs, The
National Security Council
It should be noted that Dr. Bailey’s testimony received a very low priority by the media. After you read the testimony, judge for yourself if you agree or disagree.
Dr. Norman A. Bailey:
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity
to testify this morning on the involvement of the Panama Defense
Forces and their commander,
General Manuel
Antonio Noriega currently and for many years in the past in
activities which represent and have represented a clear,
unquestionable and obvious multiple threat to the national security
in a narrow sense and the national interests in a broader sense, of
the United States of America.
It is also a story of how clear and incontrovertible evidence was at best ignored and at worst hidden and denied by many different agencies and departments of the government of the United States in such a way as to provide cover and protection for these activities while at the same time assuring that they did the maximum damage to those very interests that the officials involved were sworn to uphold and defend.
In March of 1981 I was appointed o the position of Director of Planning on the staff of the National Security Council, eventually becoming Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director of International Economic Affairs. I resigned from the NSC as of October 31, 1983, but remained as a consultant to the Council for six months thereafter. In connection with my duties and in collaboration with the White House Office of Drug Enforcement, then headed by Dr. Carlton Turner, whom I cannot praise highly enough as an individual and public official who at not time lost sight of the true interests of the country, I attempted to trace movements of large quantities of cash around the world, on the justified assumption that such movements were the result of criminal activities of one kind or another, since non-criminal payments of any size are almost exclusively made by check or electronic transfer.
I discovered that the National Bank of Panama returns hundreds of millions of dollars in banknotes to the Federal Reserve every year, obviously the result of criminal activity, and this led me to examine what those activities might be. My search led me to a trail of startling length and breadth. Since at least the mid-1970's (my investigation did not go farther back than that), the Panama Defense Forces (formerly the National Guard) and its high officials have been extensively and directly engaged in, or engaged in aiding and abetting, activities in the following fields, all inimical to the national interests of the United States:
Drug Trafficking, including loading and unloading ships and planes and acting as host to meetings of drug barons from elsewhere in Latin America, and Facilitating the movement of ships and planes using Panama as a trans-shipment point.
Gun running, to the Sandinistas, the Contras, the Salvadorian guerrillas, the M-19 and FARC in Columbia, and anyone else who could pay for these services.
Technology transfer to the Soviet Bloc and circumvention of the embargo on trade with Cuba and the Sandinistas.
Money laundering in conjunction with all the above activities through the extensive banking facilities available in the Republic.
In order to facilitate these activities the PDF has gradually taken over more and more of the governmental functions ordinarily performed by civilians, until by now Panama is by far the most highly militarized country in the Western Hemisphere, much more so than Cuba for example, or Chile. attached to this Testimony is a document detailing all the functions controlled by the PDF as well as a summary of the Panamanian budget for 1968, the year of the military coup which ended Panamian democracy and brought General Omar Torrijos to power, and the last year the budget of the National Guard was published.
The current military dictator of Panama, Noriega, was a protégé of Torrijos and for many years served as his Chief of Intelligence (G-2). After Torrijos accidental death Noriega became Deputy Commander of the PDF under General Paredes and then Commander. both his predecessor and his former deputy, Colonel Diaz Herrera, have recently detailed and corroborated all the facts detailed in this Testimony and much more. In addition to involvement in all the activities outlined above, Noriega has been personally involved in at least two others:
He has been for many years first a double agent working simultaneously for Castro and the CIA, and later a triple agent, working also for the Sandinistas.
Murder, having ordered the assassination of Dr. Hugo Spadafora in September of 1985, reportedly upon the orders of the drug barons of South America, who are reported to have met with him in Cuzco, Peru, in the summer of 1985. It is not known if the beheading of Dr. Spadafora was Noriega's idea or that of the PDF soldiers who carried out his orders.
All of the above only touched the surface of the activities of the PDF and Noriega for the past decade and a half at least. Available to me as an official of the NSC and available to any authorized official of the U.S. government is a plethora of human intelligence, electronic intercepts and satellite and overflight photography that taken together constitute not a "smoking gun" but rather a twenty-one cannon barrage of evidence. Obviously I have none of this documentation with me, but I would like to refer to an unclassified but official Memorandum of the United States command in Panama, dated 1 November 1985, attached. Paragraph 7 of that document reads in part: "...the leadership of PDF disregards human rights, is often arbitrary, high-handed, and is involved in illegal activities (.e.g. drugs), The U.S. government is aware of this situation..." Indeed it was and is, and for along time, complete with names of companies, banks, individuals, etc. in excruciating detail. The only possible reasons or excuse for being ignorant of it would be because the person involved did not want to know or find out the willfully ignored the overwhelming evidence.
I should point out that the same information, although not in the same detail, has been available to anyone who can read the newspapers, at least in the series in the Hearst newspapers by Knut Royce in 1985 and the series in the New York Times by Seymour Hersh in 1986. They are both very accurate. I myself have on various occasions challenged the government of Panama, the Panamanian Embassy or the PDF to sue me for libel in calumny, so that I can demand the release of the relevant classified documents. This challenge was never responded to for obvious reasons.
It saddens me to think that for reasons deemed good and sufficient, Democratic and Republican administrations, liberal and conservative administrations, career officials and political appointees have all conspired for years to protect and abet a group of despicable international outlaws. while we were bombing Libya we were using and apparently paying officials of an army and a government in this Hemisphere as corrupt and as dangerous to the national interests of the United States as any in the world. How appropriately ironic that when the U.S. government finally turned against Noriega and the PDF, at least fifteen years late, the dictator in his desperation turned to the Libyans to bail him out financially, offering them a training ground for terrorists in return. How ironic also that the Libyans didn't trust him enough to accept.