Sowing Dragon's Teeth

• Share

Operation Just Cause was less than eight hours old, but General Colin Powell was all but declaring victory. As Defense Secretary Dick Cheney looked on approvingly, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff boasted that a 24,000- man U.S. force had "decapitated" Manuel Antonio Noriega's army and seized control of strategic facilities along the Panama Canal. Though the crafty dictator was still on the loose, Powell said that it was only a matter of time before U.S. soldiers tracked him down. The only bad news in Powell's rosy report was the uncertain fate of a dozen American hostages, seized by fleeing Panamanian irregulars as they cut and ran from approaching American troops.

On the battleground in Panama, however, a far less optimistic drama was unfolding. Confounding Pentagon hopes that Noriega's Panama Defense Forces would quickly crumble under a devastating U.S. onslaught, the fugitive dictator's men were preparing a determined counterattack. Instead of the quick and decisive knockout U.S. commanders had sought, the invasion was in danger of degenerating into a nasty street fight in densely populated Panama City. House-to-house fighting in a crowded urban area was something military planners were leery of because of the threat to civilians.

In recent months the Pentagon had quietly bolstered American forces in Panama in preparation for a possible strike, adding 4,500 combat troops, as well as tanks and attack helicopters, to the 8,500 soldiers already deployed at U.S. bases. The force was so strong that Pentagon planners had briefly considered dispatching a column of U.S. troops to nab Noriega during an ill- ! fated uprising by P.D.F. officers last October. That daring plan was quickly -- and, as it turned out, wisely -- discarded as too risky and uncertain.

Just how risky became clear as Operation Just Cause got under way. Many of Noriega's 4,000 best troops, including units that had raced to his rescue during the failed coup, were posted far outside Panama City. Another, less predictable menace was posed by the brutal Dignity Battalions: 8,000 fanatical pro-Noriega irregulars who had savagely attacked opposition leaders in the aftermath of last May's aborted election. Confronted by superior American forces, many P.D.F. soldiers slipped away, only to reappear later and launch counterattacks in Panama City.

When George Bush ordered military action against the increasingly arrogant dictator, the Pentagon put the finishing touches on the option it preferred and had been secretly preparing to implement: a massive simultaneous assault on all P.D.F. strongholds by a combination of forces already in Panama and a huge airlift of reinforcements from bases in the U.S.