Books: Canal Caper

GETTING TO KNOW THE GENERAL by Graham Greene

Simon & Schuster; 249 pages; $14.95

In the winter of 1976, a telegram arrived for Graham Greene in Antibes. Would he come to Panama as the guest of its leader, Brigadier General Omar Torrijos Herrera? "I thought of it as only a rather comic adventure," recalls Greene, "inspired by an invitation from a complete stranger." But the comedy was to pass through surrealism to tragedy, and the stranger was to become an intimate.

Torrijos, who had wrested power from the ruling Arias family in 1968, was a showman, a strongman and a dreamer, an irresistible combination for Greene. The general was also a friend of Tito's, an admirer of Gabriel GarcÍa Márquez's novels and a lover of numerous mistresses. "How could one fail," writes Greene with pointed sincerity, "to like this man?" The general had remained in power be cause of what Greene acknowledges was "a streak of cynical wisdom." Torrijos liked to announce, "I don't want to enter into history. I want to enter into the Ca nal Zone." If diplomacy failed to establish Panamanian sovereignty over the U.S. -built canal, there was always sabo tage: blow a hole in the Gatun Dam, and it would take three years for rain to refill it. Meanwhile, he would mount a guerrilla war in the mountains.

He never got the confrontation he patently desired. In 1977 Torrijos and President Carter signed a new agreement, abolishing the zone - but preserving certain American controls -at a Washington ceremony. Near the front row was Greene, long unpopular in Washington for his pro-Castro sympathies; the general had provided a Panamanian diplomatic passport.

Torrijos subsequently sent the author on low-profile "missions" to Belize, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, relying on the old Caribbean hand (Our Man in Havana, The Comedians) to give the general a borrowed stature. The author was aware of the maneuver; he once confided to Castro, "I am not a messenger. I am the message."

Nevertheless, Greene complied with the dictator's wishes. During the Torrijos years, he worked on a novel, Monsignor Quixote, about the adventures of a simple village priest abroad in the world. In Panama, he was a real-life counterpart. By his own evidence, he served as the go-between in a kidnaping, learned about the hoax of the "Virgin that perspires," failed to write a book about Panama, finally located a well-made rum punch, and saw a "horseman [ride] by carrying a cock on his hand in the way a waiter carries a tray."

For the author, "this bizarre and beautiful little country" was a mixture of fantasy and mistrust. One popular song, he notes, was titled Your Love Is a Yesterday's Newspaper; local drivers were cautious about letting their wheels go across the border between the Panama and U.S. zones because ".. . if you were involved in a traffic offense on the wrong side of the street, you would be judged in an American court." In contrast to the new towers of Panama City lay a sprawling slum called Hollywood; even remote villages had Walt Disney figures as roadside totems. Greene once grumbled to Torrijos, "Next time the students want to demonstrate .. . can't you tell them to burn all those Donald Ducks?"