Donald Trump, George H.W. Bush and the Fall of Noriega

Updated | "Did you send cocaine to the United States?"

"Jamás, jamás, jamás!" the man in the orange jumpsuit said. Never, never, never!

It was 1995 and I was inside a federal prison in Miami, interviewing General Manuel Antonio Noriega in a claustrophobic cell. The Panamanian strongman was smaller than I had remembered from when I had tried—and failed—to speak to him years earlier in Panama. He didn’t resemble the machete-wielding murderer the U.S. had made him out to be.

I thought of this encounter earlier this month when I learned Noriega was in a coma after brain surgery in a hospital in Panama City. After that initial prison interview, Random House hired me to gather Noriega’s memoirs for a book. What emerged was less a story about Noriega than a cautionary tale about an American president who misled the country for political purposes.

Following about a year of Miami jailhouse interviews, Random House published the memoir, The publisher paid a flat fee for my work, and I had no financial connection to Noriega. Separately and independently, I evaluated what he had to say and provided more than 70 pages of my own analysis of U.S. policy leading up