Six Minutes To Freedom (17 page)

Authors: John Gilstrap,Kurt Muse

BOOK: Six Minutes To Freedom

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Kimberly was beginning to feel human again. She had new shoes, a shirt and a pair of long pants, plus some underwear and just enough makeup to let her feel like a girl. But by the end of the secondday in Panama City, Florida, she was ready to go someplace where the Waffle House was not, in fact, the most happening place there was.

Their keepers—Joey Skinner insisted that they were CIA, and that sounded right to Kimberly—were still jumpy about letting them go anywhere or do anything. They acted like assassins were lurking around every corner waiting to take them out. They also wouldn’t let them contact their mother by phone. They said that she was aware that they were safe, but that for some reason they
weren’t
safe to use the telephone.It didn’t make any sense to Kimberly, and frankly she was gettingtired of hanging around all the gloomy cloak-and-dagger types.

She’d been watching the news a lot these past few days—what else was there to do?—hoping to hear some kind of story about her dad, but there was nothing. With all this hullabaloo and all the activity surroundingtheir escape from Panama, you’d have thought that the story would have at least been big enough for some mention on CNN.

Yet, there was nothing.

At the end of their second day, Father Frank announced to them that it was time to leave. He reviewed some security concerns: it was important that they all stay together, that they keep their conversations to a minimum, that they not speak of where they are coming from or where they are going, and in general that they should strive to be as invisibleas they could possibly be.

Kimberly found herself respecting Father Frank for not even asking them if they had any questions. He acknowledged up front that he had no information to share with them. Unlike the others, though, it wasn’t a matter of not knowing; it was merely a matter of keeping the secrets secret. At one level it was annoying as hell, but on another it truly was irrelevant. They were going where they were going, and when they got there, everyone would know what the plan was. Knowing before then was just so much icing on the cake.

They drove in the Jeeps to the airport at Fort Walton Beach, avoidingall the normal travel procedures—Immigration, boarding gate, the whole nine yards—and instead boarded the Boeing 727 via the exteriorstairway that led to the Jetway. It was not lost on Kimberly that on a commercial flight headed to Atlanta the first twenty-five seats in the coach section of the aircraft were empty while the rear of the aircraftwas packed with travelers.

If there had ever been any doubt that the CIA was involved, that fact alone made the doubt go away.

As they settled into their seats, Erik asked Kimberly why they were going to Atlanta when their mom was in Florida, but Kimberly told him to be quiet, citing the security speech they’d received at the hotel. The truth of it was she had no idea. Still, the one thing she was beginningto learn was that their handlers were most concerned about makingsure that she and her little brother ended up where they were supposed to be, on a schedule that only the handlers understood.

The flight to Atlanta was entirely uneventful. Father Frank sat across the aisle from the Muse children, and as they flew, he seemed completelycomfortable lounging back in his seat and reading the in-flight magazine. This whole ordeal seemed as normal to him as just another day at the office.

On final approach into Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport, though, he started to show signs of unease, shifting in his seat and checkinghis wristwatch two or three times a minute. His nervousness raised Kimberly’s anxiety as well, but not enough for her to share it with Erik or the family. Clearly, though, something interesting was about to happen.

They touched down without incident, and after the pilot deployed the reversers and the brakes to bring the 727 to a halt, they taxied not to the terminal itself, but to a spot on the tarmac that was out of the normal traffic flow. When they were at a full stop, Father Frank stood in the aisle and made an announcement to the passengers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry for the delay, but at this time I need for the passengers who arrived with me to move forward and deplane to the waiting cars. Everyone else, please stay in your seats, and we’ll have you to your gate shortly. Thank you very much.” Typical of everythingabout Father Frank, the directions were short and to the point.

As one, the group of refugees, who were still little more than strangers to each other, thanks to the isolation in which they’d been kept, rose and headed through the first-class cabin to the aircraft’s front door, where an internal stairway that Kimberly didn’t even know existedon these airplanes had been deployed. They walked down to the tarmac, where a line of four black vans sat waiting, their engines running.Kimberly and Erik entered first, as always, followed closely by the Skinners, and then by various other refugees, just so many strange faces.

As soon as all the seats were filled, the van began to roll.

To Kimberly’s eye, the driver didn’t appear to be that much older than she herself. She had blond hair and a bright smile. “Hi, everybody,how are you today?” Her voice seemed oddly cheerful under the circumstances and had a southern twang to it.

The response from her passengers was mostly a grudging silence. “Well, I understand you’ve had a tough couple of days. I hope you all enjoy your time in Miami.”

So that’s where we’re going
, Kimberly thought.

“Whoa!” said a voice from the back of the van. “What do you mean Miami?”

Kimberly turned with the rest of the occupants to see a man in a business suit sitting among the refugees. He clearly was very American, and now that she thought about it, Kimberly realized that she’d never seen him before.

“I’m not going to Miami,” the man said. “I’m going to Chicago.”

All the cheer drained from the driver’s face. “Excuse me?”

The guy in the suit copped an attitude. “You said we were going to Miami. I don’t want to go to Miami. I have to be in Chicago.”

The driver’s eyes narrowed. “Are you part of the special charter group?”

The guy shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

The driver looked to the rest of the group. “Is he with you?”

Kimberly shrugged. She’d been surrounded by so many refugees and handlers these past couple of days, she didn’t know one person from the next.

The guy in the suit seemed to sense that he’d stirred a hornet’s nest. “Look, I didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”

“Didn’t they tell everybody who was not part of this group to stay in their seats?”

The guy shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess maybe. I was in the middleof a book. I saw people get up, so I followed.”

The driver cursed under her breath and spoke into a portable radio, the speaker for which was plugged into her ear. She listened to the response,stopped the van, climbed out her door, and walked to the passengerdoor on the right-hand side. She pulled it open and motioned to the party crasher. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the van.”

The man’s face formed a giant O. “
What?
”

“You’re not supposed to be here. I need you to exit the van.”

The guy looked around to get his bearings. “We’re in the middle of the runway!”

“No, sir, we’re in a taxiway, and someone will be by to pick you up shortly. Now I have to ask you to leave.”

Kimberly could see the leading edges of panic invading the guy’s face. “You can’t do that.”

“Please don’t make this ugly, sir.” She positioned her arm in such a way as to show that she was armed.

“This is outrageous!”

“Now, sir.”

“Okay, I’ll go to Miami.”

“
Now
, sir. You can spend the night tonight in Chicago, or in a jail cell in Atlanta. You need to choose right this instant.”

The last Kimberly saw of the man in the suit, he was cursing himselfpurple, shaking his fist, and kicking the pavement in the middle of a remote taxiway.

It helped to know that someone was having nearly as bad a day as she.

Frustration levels within the intelligence, diplomatic, and military communities in Panama had climbed off the charts. The officialline from the Noriega regime still maintained that they’d never heard of a Kurt Muse and that they certainly did not have him in custody.It was as if the man had disappeared into the ether.

But he hadn’t, and people with jobs significantly above the pay grades of anyone in Panama wanted to know exactly where Muse was, what charges he was being held on, and when the regime intended to give him back.

Marcos Ostrander had been named for the moment as Kurt’s de facto lawyer, and he was doing everything he could to keep the heat turned all the way to high, but there was only so much one could do when the party on the other side of the bar refuses to admit that it has custody. He was expressing his frustration with a midlevel official of the U.S. embassy when the discussion turned to the injustice of it all. Here, these PDF goons get to travel at will, protected by the U.S. government,passing in and out of Miami as if it were a suburb of Panama City on visas that were virtually guaranteed to be granted, yet those same people had the audacity to physically hide an American citizen from his lawyer.

It’d be a hell of a thing, they said, if these bastards were stuck in their own country for a while. Cancel those visas—cut the PDF power structure off from their mistresses and shopping sprees—and by God they bet there’d be action pretty soon.

The words hadn’t finished echoing in the room before the two men looked at each other. Who exactly did have the authority to cancel visas to the United States?

Well, certainly the ambassador, but he himself answered to the very highest levels of the government, where political concerns often trumped practical ones. Short of him, neither Marcos nor his midlevel friend knew for sure.

The good news was, if they didn’t know, then Noriega probably wouldn’t know either. A plan was hatched. On his own authority—presumed, but never granted—the staffer picked up the phone and made a call. Just like that, all Panamanian visas to the United States were canceled. From president to peasant, every Panamanian was stranded in their own country until Noriega coughed up Kurt FrederickMuse.

It actually only took a few hours.

The following morning at 10:00 the PDF organized a press conferencein which Kurt Muse was presented to the world as a spy for the U.S. government.

PART 2

“No One Walks Out Alive”

At forty-six, U.S. Air Force Colonel Jim Ruffer had lived enough lives for two people. Born in 1943 to an Army cryptographer, he had spent his early years in Hawaii, and finally followed his brother into the Marine Corps, where he joined the famed Black Sheep Squadronand flew ninety-two combat missions over Vietnam. When he was done with that war, he spent five months in Japan before finally decidingthat what he really wanted to do with his life was to become a doctor.

While attending med school in Mexico, he met Margarita, with whom he quite literally fell in love at first sight. They married, and afterhe became a physician, Ruffer longed for the action again and rejoinedthe military, this time as a Navy flight surgeon. He found the job fascinating, but after five years at sea aboard aircraft carriers, he decidedthat his real love was waiting for him at home, enduring the long separations that made Navy life so difficult for everyone who chose that line of work.

Discharged honorably, he and Margarita moved to Idaho and Jim hung out his shingle as a private practitioner. It was everything he expectedfrom life as a small-town doctor where practitioners of the medical arts were few and far between. In fact, it was much, much more. Day after day, night after night, the phone rang constantly with citizens of his community in need of help and hand-holding. The psychologicalrewards were tremendous, even if the financial ones were not, but when it finally occurred to him that after months of private practice he had never once completed an entire bath without being interruptedby a phone call, he realized that it was time to move on yet again.

The U.S. military had been good to Jim in the past, and when the time came for him to seek greener pastures, he didn’t search for green at all, but rather for Air Force blue. After eight months of private practice,he once again found himself in the role of a flight surgeon, this time for NASA’s Voyager program.

For Margarita, however—the patient one who had endured so much time as a loving wife without a husband—it had been too long since she’d lived in a Spanish-speaking country, so when an opportunityarose for Jim to take a position at Howard Air Force base in the Canal Zone, he jumped at it.

The duty in Panama was unique, to say the least. Besides routine medical chores, he also found himself serving as understudy to CommandSurgeon Mike McConnell, and in that role, Jim Ruffer found himself often in the company of senior command officers attending meetings and strategy sessions that were much more complex and highly classified than anything he’d attended previously.

He also found himself investigating illnesses of a nature he’d not encounteredin the past. For example, in an effort to protect Howard Air Force Base from intrusions and security penetrations, the commanders had planted boonie rats on motor bikes in the jungles to keep an eye on the various trails and clandestine routes of entry. Over the course of just a few weeks, fourteen of these soldiers were attacked by vampirebats. Not deadly in the Bram Stoker sense of the word, the bats were nonetheless a huge morale problem and not an insignificant threat for the transmission of rabies and other diseases.

Thus, working with the epidemiological section, Jim Ruffer, MD, soon became an expert on the elimination of vampire bats.

The solution was not one to garner the support of the animal rights movement, but it was very effective: They staked out a goat that had been smeared with the blood thinner coumadin (which is also a componentof rat poison). When the bats attacked, they took the coumadin back to their caves with them. As the critters would preen each other, the drug would get into their system and they’d bleed to death through their gastronitestinal system.

It was amazing, sometimes, where military medicine took a guy.

On April 13, 1989, Jim Ruffer was on the second floor of Gorgas Hospital, the former French hospital on the hills above Chorrillo, the worst conceivable section of Panama City, when he received a phone call from Lieutenant Colonel Robert Perry of the Treaty Affairs office. An Army guy and a fellow Mormon, Rob Perry had always given him the feeling that he was an intel guy at heart. After brief pleasantries, Perry said, “So, Jim, do you have a little black bag with medical stuff in it?”

Is the Pope Catholic? “Sure.”

“Okay, I want you to do me a favor and grab it and meet a car out front in ten minutes.”

This didn’t sound right. “What’s up?”

“We can talk in the car,” Perry said. “Ten minutes, right?”

“I’ll be there.”

Nine minutes and sixty seconds later, an Army staff car pulled to the curb in front of Gorgas, and Jim Ruffer climbed inside. Next to Perry sat a young State Department staffer who was all business and impressed Jim as an up-and-comer on the diplomatic front.

“Here it is,” Perry said, getting right down to it. “Kurt Muse, an American citizen and DoD dependent, was arrested six days ago and has been kept under wraps. Since his arrest, the PDF has maintained that they know nothing about him or his whereabouts, and now, suddenly,after we canceled the bastards’ visas, they’re coughing him up for some bogus press conference. We want you to take a look at him and tell us if he’s been treated all right.”

“He’s been there for six days?” Jim asked, making sure he’d heard correctly.

Perry nodded.

“Then he’s not all right.”

Kurt knew something was coming, but he didn’t know what. The DENI headquarters was buzzing with a new excitement, and he could see out the window on the far end of the room that people were gatheringin large numbers. He had an idea that it was about time for his perp walk, the parade in front of the television cameras for the world to see—

What, exactly? A local businessman who helped to bring shame and dishonor to a dictator who considered himself the owner of an entirecountry. His fears were confirmed when a new player entered his tiny room. Kurt recognized him right away as Lieutenant Colonel NivaldoMadriñán, the chief of the DENI, and a neighbor who lived not a hundred yards from Kurt’s house in El Avance.

“So, Mr. Muse, you are the spy I’ve been hearing so much about.”

“I’m not a spy.” This exact exchange had happened so many times now, with so many different players that it was beginning to feel programmed.

“You are in a lot of trouble.”

“I can see that. Are you planning to file charges against me any time soon?”

Madriñán’s eyes narrowed. Clearly, he was here to ask questions, not answer them. “We have arranged a press conference. We will make a statement, and we will present you to the cameras, but we have instructedthe reporters not to ask questions, and I am now instructing you not to answer any questions. Have I made myself clear?”

“What are you afraid I’ll say?”

Madriñán’s eyes grew hotter. “Do you suffer from high blood pressure,Mr. Muse?”

The sudden change in subject was a little unnerving. “No.”

“How about insomnia?”

“No.”

A hint of a smile appeared on Madriñán’s face. “Well, you’re soon going to suffer from both.”

Robert Perry girded himself for battle as they drove toward DENI headquarters. It felt like he’d done nothing but gird himself for battle over the past two years, and in his case, it was a 360-degree battle front. On the one hand, as the Treaty Affairs officer and the cochair of the Binational Joint Committee provided for in the Panama Canal Treaty, he was charged with protecting the interests of U.S. forces and their families in Panama; on the other hand, he had to deal with GeneralWoerner, the commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command, whose overarching mission in life seemed to be focused on turning the other cheek. The fact that the State Department was continually puttingpressure on Congress and the president to stomp on Noriega and his abuses didn’t help a bit. The more dogmatic State became, the more entrenched and resistant the push back from DoD.

Caught in the middle of the clashing political titans was Robert Perry, who just wanted the abuses to stop. A year before, in the summerof 1987, he’d sent a letter to Woerner detailing Perry’s deepening concern over the treatment of military personnel in Panama. Woerner didn’t buy it; he wanted hard data that he had to know was unavailable.Statistics notwithstanding, Perry had been stationed in Panama before, and he knew what he knew; he saw the changes. The fact that Woerner didn’t want to hear it didn’t change a thing.

Noriega constantly fanned the flames of anti-American sentiments among his troops, boasting publicly and privately that he had PresidentBush’s “balls in my pocket.” As the conditions deteriorated, the PDF became steadily bolder. In one recent incident, an American citizenhad been arrested for smoking pot, and rather than following through with the normal flow of the judicial process, the PDF goons had beaten the guy to a pulp and thrown him into the trunk of his car. Because that hadn’t been enough fun, they’d taken turns sexually abusinghis wife while he listened helplessly to her screams. Perry couldn’t stand it.

It had been several days since Perry had gotten the call that an American citizen had been picked up for running the illegal radio station,Voice of Liberty. When word got to Woerner, the general was pissed and ill-inclined to get involved. As far as he was concerned, it was just another case of the CIA conducting ops on his facilities withouthim being aware of it. If the Agency got itself into a bind, then it could by God get itself out of it without involving Army resources.

But it wasn’t anywhere near that simple. First of all, Major Alan Mansfield of the Provost Marshal’s office had moved heaven and earth to accomplish some amazing feats to spirit Muse’s family to safety, and through that activity, an Agency operative from Langley had taken up residence on Fort Clayton and was stirring as many pots as he could find to get a grasp on exactly what was happening.

Trouble was, if the reports were true that this Muse fellow had in fact violated Panamanian law on Panamanian soil, then there wasn’t a hell of a lot that Treaty Affairs could do for him. Then came the bombshellthat nearly blew Woerner out of his chair: Muse was a DoD dependent. His wife was a teacher in the DoD school system, and that relationshipbrought Muse directly under the jurisdiction of the Panama Canal Treaty, thus invoking many of the rights afforded to American citizens on American soil. Habeus corpus was among the most basic of these.

Woerner was angry; he wanted nothing to do with a man and his toy radio. The last thing he wanted, he said to Perry, was to get involvedin yet one more tussle that was going to justify more harassmentof U.S. forces by the PDF. Nonetheless, he was in a corner legally, and he grudgingly stopped blocking Perry’s efforts to take care of the CIA spy.

The first step, of course, was getting the bastards to admit that they had custody in the first place, and the PDF was in no hurry to produce him. In fact, Perry’s cochair on the Panamanian side of the Treaty AffairsCommission had made it abundantly clear that the powers that be were none too pleased to hear of the Treaty jurisdiction. It was safe to assume that they had had some interesting and awful experiences lyingin wait for Mr. Muse and that a good deal of the fun would be derailedbecause of Perry’s involvement.

Perry was grateful for the opportunity. He knew what Muse was going through, what hellholes Noriega’s interrogation pits could be. Nivaldo Madriñán was one very, very bad man, who was more than capable of unspeakable tortures. The sooner they could get in contact with Muse, the more likely it was that they could intervene in some meaningful way.

Which, of course, was the last thing the PDF was inclined to see happen, thus all the denials and delays. The cancellation of the visas had been a masterstroke, he thought, and he couldn’t wait for the opportunityto shake the hand of the man who had come up with it.

So now they were holding a press conference to show off the man of whom they continued to deny that they had custody. Who the hell did these people think they were? It was time to play hardball.

The U.S. government car arrived at DENI headquarters. “Okay,” Perry said to his entourage. “We go in there like we own the place, understand?They’re not going to be happy that we’re here, and I could not care less.”

The three men moved as one, out of their vehicle and through the front doors of the station. They waded through the crowd toward the office marked
COMMANDING OFFICER.
They were still twenty feet from the doorway when an armed guard stepped forward to block their path. Perry didn’t slow down until his nose and the guard’s were separatedonly by inches. Perry said in flawless Spanish, “We’re here to see Kurt Frederick Muse, an American citizen in your custody.”

The guard was joined by others. “I cannot let you pass.”

“Then I demand to see the commanding officer.”

A second guard, the latest to join the little clutch of uniforms, said, “Colonel Madriñán is not here.”

“You’re lying. He’s conducting a press conference, for God’s sake.”

“He is not here. I need to ask you to leave.”

Perry recoiled at the thought. “You can ask whatever you want, but we’re not going away until we speak to Colonel Madriñán.”

“He is not here.” This time the guard’s tone was heavy and threatening.