Manuel Noriega

Panamanian strongman general and dictator who controls law enforcement, immigration and customs. In 1989, U.S. federal prosecutors brought down 12 indictments against him. He was accused by the U.S. of taking at least $4.6 million in payoffs from the Medellin cartel of Columbia to protect cocaine shipments.

Noriega began a relationship with the CIA in 1960 when, as a young cadet at Peru's Chorillos Military Academy, he agreed to feed the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency information on leftist students. Soon after he was drawing a monthly retainer.

When Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos established an intelligence capability, Torrijos picked Noriega, then his transit police chief, to oversee the intelligence-gathering operation and his past experience at the military academy was a plus. He studied intelligence and counter-intelligence under American officers at Ft. Gulick in Panama in July 1967, psychological operations at Ft. Bragg in September 1967, and then returned to the School of the Americas in Panama for a two-month course in military intelligence for officers. His instructors remember that it was psychological warfare that interested him the most. On 17 June 1971, President Nixon told Congress they had gathered information that Torrijos and his spy chief, Noriega, were facilitating the heroin trade through Panamanian embassies, consulates, airports and customs offices in the Far East and the Americas. By the mid-'70s he was becoming known as "rent-a-colonel" and was known as a double agent.

In 1976 Noriega, then head of Panamanian intelligence, bribed U.S. Army personnel in Panama to obtain the electronic intercepts by the U.S. National Security Agency. NSA officials, who regarded the case as a serious breach of security, were incensed when the Army declined to prosecute the soldiers involved. Noriega met with then CIA director, George Bush, in December 1976. Noriega was then dropped from the CIA in 1977 by the Carter administration.