Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (22 page)
The man never even cracked a smile.
WITH THE CAST REMOVED, my recovery accelerated. I began going to physical therapy two to three times a week. I still didn’t have a left bicep, so I had to use my right arm to make my left one move. For example, I would grip a long stick with my left hand. I would then grasp the stick with my right hand and use it as a kind of handle to raise my left forearm up and down in a curl motion.
A couple of weeks passed. Then Walter Reed Army Medical Center sent a hand specialist named Dr. Chin down to give me a “nerve conduction test.” In an exam room at Womack, the doctor explained that the purpose of the test was to check the functioning of my radial-ulnar nerve, the one that controls the movement of the hand and fingers.
“If the nerve is regenerating, the electrical pulses will stimulate it and your hand will involuntarily open and close,” Chin said.
I lay down on a table, and Chin came to me with needles. They resembled acupuncture probes, except that each slim metal spike had a wire attached to it, through which electrical current was supposed to flow from the machine Chin brought with him from D.C. I felt slight pricking as, one by one, Chin slid the probes through my skin into my nerve. Then he stepped away from the table and positioned himself on the side of the machine, whose readout I couldn’t see.
“How’s that?” he said.
“How’s what?” I said, looking over at him.
“Do you feel anything?”
“Nope. Not a thing.”
I could see Chin manipulating something on the other side of the machine.
Ouch!
I felt something all right—an electrical shock. But not in my hand—in my neck. Then it zapped into my chest, then my torso. My legs began to heave and buck. My toes started to twitch and buzz. Chin kept cranking up the power until my whole body flopped on the table like a fish on a beach.
All the while my fingers remained perfectly still.
“Turn that thing off!” I finally shouted. “You’re electrocuting me!”
Instantly, the current stopped, but all over my body, my muscles seemed to quiver and I felt slightly nauseated.
Dr. Chin walked over to the table and looked down at me. “You have no nerve conduction whatsoever in that arm,” he said. “What you have is bruised nerves from the shock and the trauma of the bullet. It is worse than having a severed nerve. If it was severed, there would be a chance it could grow back or be reattached. But in your case, the nerve is too damaged. There’s nothing we can do to help you.”
“Well, thank you,” I said, “I appreciate you looking at me.”
There was no discussion of how, with no conductivity in the nerve that controlled my hand, I was able to move it on my own.
By February, my x-rays showed that the humerus had mended itself. I kept working with weights, and in March made a water jump, parachuting into a lake on Fort Bragg. And though I still had a tough road ahead, I was able to use my arm again—even doing push-ups.
Doctors at Womack now told me it appeared I would make a full recovery. They would not need to go back into my arm to put in plates and screws. Now where had I heard that before?
Panama 1989–1990
PETE SCHOOMAKER WAS DELTA’S C.O., and I was deputy commander by the time Manuel Noriega’s goons tossed Kurt Muse into a tiny cell at
Carcel Modelo
and murdered a man in front of him. Outfitted with rape and torture rooms, the ironically named “Model Prison” was a hellhole—the Angola Prison of Panama. Starving, beaten prisoners were packed into tiny cells, dressed in rags, and sleeping on filthy pallets of thin foam. The prison was not so much a correctional institution as a retribution center for enemies of Noriega, Panama’s military dictator. Noriega paid judges to convict innocent men of trumped up charges then send them to
Modelo
, where the corridors often echoed with screams. Most men who went in never came out again. Not alive, anyway.
That was clearly what Noriega had in mind for Kurt Muse. But the dictator had a little problem: Muse was an American citizen under the protection of the Panama Canal Treaty. Three weeks after the cell clanged shut behind him in the spring of 1989, Delta was tasked to rescue him.
We sent Jim Knight, a guy I had known since my first day in the Army, and a small team down to the U.S. Southern Command in the capital, Panama City. Perched high on Quarry Heights, the dominant hill in the city, SouthCom offered an eagle-eye view of
Carcel Modelo
, no more than half a mile away. Using spotting scopes and cameras, Jim and his team began filling in the intel blanks. What were the possible entry points to the prison? Where were the potential landing zones, and what were the obstacles? Were the prisoners, particularly Kurt Muse, ever brought outside? How many guards patrolled the prison? What were their patterns of movement?
In one report back to Bragg, Jim noted the presence of a small cupola with a door in it located on the prison roof. In five days of constant surveillance, not a single guard had ever gone up there.
I smiled at the news. Noriega might as well have put out a welcome mat.
As we began planning the rescue, we got to know a lot about our guy. Kurt Frederick Muse moved to Panama at age five with his mother, Peggy, and father, Charlie, who wanted to escape the American rat race and raise their kids in a simpler way of life. Though they lived near the Panama Canal Zone, which was full of Americans who associated mainly with each other, the Muses lived on the local economy. Charlie Muse ran a successful printing business; Kurt attended Panamanian schools and grew up playing in the streets with the local children, a big blond kid in a sea of dark-eyed, brown-skinned friends.
As he grew up, Muse fell in love with the lush tropical country and considered it home. He married Annie, an American schoolteacher, and they had two kids, Kimberly and Erik. As years passed, the Muses watched as Manuel Noriega rose to power, putting more and more of Panama under his thumb. U.S. intelligence agencies also kept close tabs on Noriega’s rise, and at times even enabled it. The general made nice, allowing the U.S. to set up listening posts in Panama. He funneled U.S. money to pro-American forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua. He also pretended to oppose cocaine trafficking and fed tips to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and CIA, ostensibly to help the agencies in their battle against the Colombian cartels. For this he earned annual payments from then–CIA director George H.W. Bush.
The truth was, Noriega only tipped the Americans to enough trafficking to make the “War on Drugs” look like a success. Meanwhile, he became closely allied with Colombia’s ruthless Medellin cartel, where a young thug named Pablo Escobar was busy moving up from car theft to murder.
By the mid-1980s, Muse and patriots across Panama had grown to hate Noriega. Along the way, somebody stuck him with a nickname, “the Pineapple,” which referred to his acne-scarred face. Then a series of events began chilling American relations with Noriega. The body of Hugo Spadafora, a vocal Noriega critic, was found tortured and decapitated. A former member of Noriega’s inner circle revealed that the general ordered Spadafora—and many others—murdered.
As Delta compiled background on Muse, it quickly became clear how he’d gotten his butt in a sling. He despised the Pineapple’s increasingly martial rule and the way his Panamanian Defense Force (PDF) goons now lurked on every street corner, harassing peaceful citizens. Muse and a close circle of friends took to harassing the PDF in return. Using portable radios, they played tricks on the soldiers, sending them on snipe hunts, or pretending to be superior officers and chastising them on the air.
But in 1987, the radio game turned serious.
By accident, Kurt and his friends discovered a radio link to the repeater station used by
Radio Nacional
to carry Noriega’s propaganda-packed public speeches live. The friends instantly realized what their discovery meant: If they could obtain a transmitter powerful enough to do the job, they could override Noriega’s speeches with their own messages. They could rally the citizens of Panama to reject the dictator, band together at the next election and take back their country. That they could humiliate Noriega in the process was like a cherry on top of the whole plan, a plan they knew could mean death, or worse, for them and their families.
1
Their first opportunity came on October 11, 1987. Noriega was scheduled to address a captive audience of thousands in a Loyalty Day speech at a baseball stadium. The speech would be broadcast live across Panama. In preparation, Kurt and his friends secretly obtained a transmitter—contraband, since only Noriega’s cronies could obtain radio licenses—and recorded a special inaugural message that would launch
La Voz del la Libertad
, the Voice of Liberty. On the day of the speech, the conspirators gathered around the transmitter in the home of a friend and tuned into
Radio Nacional
, waiting for the perfect moment.
2
They waited as one of Noriega’s lapdogs introduced him. They waited while the crowd broke into wild obedient cheers. They waited as Noriega waved to the stands and basked in the applause. Then, when Noriega opened his speech, Kurt pressed the transmit button, and every Panamanian listening to
Radio Nacional
heard this:
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a message of hope from the free and democratic people of Panama. Our date with destiny approaches. One day we will finally have an opportunity to cast our vote against the tyranny of General Noriega’s dictatorship . . . You know the many tools that the oppressors have to keep us from the polling places. We beseech you to be brave, to persevere . . . Together we can bury General Noriega’s dictatorship under a mountain of ballots . . . The end of their dictatorship is near! Together we can run them out! The free and democratic people of Panama now return this radio station to its broadcast of oppression.
3
Kurt Muse had just signed his own death warrant.
OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, Muse and his friends continued operating
La Voz
, infuriating the Pineapple with more messages encouraging free Panamanians to take back their country. Noriega and his PDF tore Panama apart, hunting down the source of the insurgent transmissions. Meanwhile, tensions mounted between Noriega and the United States. For years, he had been allowed to manipulate his relationship with U.S. agencies, playing DoD against State—generals against diplomats. But with increasingly corrupt elections, the Spadafora murder, and mounting visible evidence of Noriega’s involvement with the Colombian cartels, the little dictator had become a violent liability.
In 1988, the U.S. indicted Noriega on federal drug trafficking charges. Also, the CIA began funneling clandestine aid to
La Voz
, providing Muse with more radio equipment as well as money to pay for leases on apartments where the only occupants were rebel transmitters. Using them, Muse’s group continued to stir rebellion, hoping—along with Bush 41 and the State Department—that Panamanians would dump the Pineapple in the presidential election scheduled for May 1989.
Muse and his friends counted the days until the election. They felt
La Voz
had stirred a grassroots uprising and waited to see its effect in the voting booth. But in early April, with just a month to go, Kurt Muse arrived home in Panama on a flight from Miami—then vanished. For several days, no one knew for sure what happened to him. His friends and family were certain he’d been arrested in connection with
La Voz
. Which, in Noriega’s Panama, was about the same as a death sentence. In fact, death would have been high on the list of favorable outcomes compared to what happened to most Noriega prisoners.
Because high echelons of the American government had been funding Muse’s radio operation, DoD, State, and CIA immediately took an intense interest in his whereabouts. At first, Noriega’s power structure said they didn’t know a thing. Kurt Muse? Who’s that? Never heard of him.
But the U.S. government applied a little pressure, revoking all visas for Panamanians visiting the United States. Instantly, Noriega produced Kurt in a splashy press conference in which he announced he had caught “an American spy.”
FROM THE MOMENT WE RECEIVED THE ORDER to plan Kurt Muse’s rescue, Delta didn’t see taking down
Modelo
as a big deal. We really didn’t. Noriega’s thugs were experts at torture, but they were amateur soldiers. We felt we could strike quickly, grab the “Precious Cargo” (Muse), and be gone before the PDF could react.
But we did have two concerns. Noriega’s military headquarters, the
Comandancia
, sat right next to the prison. If we inserted by helicopter, PDF soldiers walking regular guard rotation would likely send some stray rounds zinging our way. We also worried about other Americans caught outside U.S. bases. The Pineapple had been ratcheting up harassment of Americans living in the Canal Zone. When he found out we’d snatched his political prize out from under his nose, no American would be safe.
In May 1989, Noriega allowed the presidential election to go ahead, and it appeared that the popular uprising aided by
La Voz
would win the day. As the vote count proceeded, the three-candidate ticket running against Noriega’s puppet candidates pulled into the lead. Immediately, Noriega tried to rig the results, but his fake tallies arrived at the election centers too late: The real results were already public and the anti-Noriega ticket won. Jubilation broke out in the streets, and the next day, the winners, including president-elect Guillermo Endara, rolled through Panama City in a motorcade. But Noriega’s goon squad intercepted the winners and beat them to a pulp. Pictures of the bloodied men were broadcast all over the world, bringing Noriega’s brutal rule to the world’s attention.
Noriega named a longtime associate, Francisco Rodriguez, as acting president. But the U.S. declared Endara the real president. That was when Delta’s mission was expanded: Now President Bush wanted U.S. Special Operations not only to snatch Muse, but also to take down Manuel Noriega’s entire regime.
