Editor's Letter

Maximum Chief

On page 140, T. D. Allman reports on the man who's knocked Khomeini and Qaddafi off the charts as Washington's Most Hated Dictator of the Year—Panama's "Maximum Chief," General Noriega. Allman arrived in Panama City to find General Noriega in a very good mood. De-

spite repeated U.S. assertions that Noriega would be ousted within days, the strongman was making the gringos sweat. A shock attack on their bastion, the Marriott hotel, had terrorized the foreign news media, and as Allman interviewed friends and confidants of the general, he could sense the fear that was holding the Panamanian people captive.

He also got a sense of the history that has produced Noriega. How American foreign policy created the situation and how the Comandante rose to it. Delving into the myths and uncertainties of Noriega's rise to power, Allman portrays a pockmarked youth with Iago's gift for intrigue and opportunism who worked his way up from the fringes of the demimonde by flattering friendships with older men and an amoral eagerness to do whatever was expedient.

Personally depraved and politically brilliant, Noriega was the wrong man in the right place at the right time.

Allman also makes us feel firsthand the pain of Panama's people, betrayed and brutalized by decades under the mili-

tary. "Tell America we are hungry," one man tells p Allman as they flee the tear gas of Noriega's "Dober§ mans." "Tell Reagan we need help," says another, i ^ The final eerie pronouncement comes from Tito | fg Arias, Dame Margot Fonteyn's Panamanian husband, l> ^ himself paralyzed by a bullet. "Peace is coming,"

" i 4 he whispers, "the peace of the cemetery."

T. D. Allman is a foreign correspondent in the grand tradition. He graduated from Harvard in 1966 and went into the Peace Corps. Wandering around Southeast Asia he landed a job as a correspondent for the Bangkok Post in Laos. Within two months, at age twenty-two, he had broken the story of the C.I.A.'s secret war, and his reports were picked up by The New York Times and Time. Since then he has written two books, Unmanifest Destiny, about military intervention in the Third World, and Miami: City of the Future. He did the controversial Cory Aquino profile for V.F. He's a maverick personality with a probing mind and a sympathetic heart. "I don't start with any preconceived notions," he says. "I let the story happen to me."

Editor in chief