General Manuel Noriega NORIEGA (born February 11, 1934) was a Panamanian soldier and the de facto military leader of Panama from 1983 to 1989. He was initially a strong ally of the United States and was regularly paid by the CIA from the late 1950s to 1986. By the late 1980s his actions became increasingly unacceptable to U.S. policy-makers, and he was overthrown and captured by a U.S. invading force in 1989, taken to the U.S., offered trial, and imprisoned in 1992. He remained imprisoned in a federal prison in Miami, Florida. (Bill Gentile/Zuma Press/TNS)
General Manuel Noriega NORIEGA (born February 11, 1934) was a Panamanian soldier and the de facto military leader of Panama from 1983 to 1989. He was initially a strong ally of the United States and was regularly paid by the CIA from the late 1950s to 1986. By the late 1980s his actions became increasingly unacceptable to U.S. policy-makers, and he was overthrown and captured by a U.S. invading force in 1989, taken to the U.S., offered trial, and imprisoned in 1992. He remained imprisoned in a federal prison in Miami, Florida. (Bill Gentile/Zuma Press/TNS) Credit: Bill Gentile

Miami — Manuel Noriega, who went from Panamanian military strongman to Miami jailbird in the blink of a geopolitical eye after picking a fight with Washington that ended with the U.S. invasion of his country, died late Monday, a few months after surgery to remove a brain tumor went bad.

The 83-year-old Noriega died in Panama City, his final stop on a 27-year-long tour of the world’s prisons — 17 of them in Miami — after American troops toppled him in a brief but bloody military engagement in the week before Christmas, 1989.

Noriega served the prison time for convictions on drug-related charges in the United States and France, and for murder in Panama. In Panama, he was released to house arrest in January in preparation for his surgery.

“The death of Manuel A. Noriega closes a chapter in our history,” Panama’s president, Juan Carlos Varela, tweeted on Tuesday.

Once a feared dictator whose political enemies were liable to go falling from helicopters or be found headless in remote jungle clearings, Noriega had been reduced by the hardships of jail and the harsh vicissitudes of time to a palsied old man in a wheelchair in the final years before his death.

“Nobody feared him anymore,” said R.M. Koster, co-author of In The Time Of The Tyrants, an astringent history of military rule in Panama that focused heavily on Noriega. “Nobody even knew who he was, hardly.”

It was a strange and unexpected denouement to the story of Noriega, who grew up an orphan in a festering Panama City slum but cannily and cunningly rose to be the military dictator of the country sitting astride the single most important shipping route in the world.

First as Panama’s military intelligence chief and then as head of its army — the de facto ruler in a country where the impotent civilian government didn’t even rise to the status of a puppet — Noriega spied for and upon some of the major Cold War powers, particularly the United States and Cuba.

Neither side trusted him very much, but neither side wanted to do without him, either. “He gives us incredibly good intel on Cuba,” said one U.S. intelligence official in 1986, as Washington’s relationship with Noriega was growing strained. “But who knows what he’s giving them on us?”

That wasn’t always the case. Starting in the 1950s as a low-level informer on the socialist student crowd he ran with in high school, Noriega cooperated with American intelligence services under seven U.S. presidents. And in the early days, he was a star.

A secret 1976 Defense Intelligence Report, since declassified, called Noriega, then 32, “intelligent, aggressive, ambitious and ultranationalistic. … He is a man of action and not afraid to make decisions.” Added the report, presciently: “It should be of no surprise to some day find this officer in the position of commandant of the (Panamanian National Guard) and perhaps a dictator” of Panama. He would achieve both, but ultimately to Washington’s dismay rather than satisfaction.

Despite growing up in a ratty Panama City slum riddled by prostitution, drunkenness and random acts of violence, Noriega had a surprisingly bookish bent and graduated from the country’s best public high school. But as a poor creole in a country dominated by a well-to-do white business elite, he had little chance at fulfilling his ambition of medical school.

Instead, he won a scholarship to a Peruvian military school — Panama had no military academy of its own — and after graduating in 1962, returned to join his country’s National Guard as a newly minted second lieutenant. His commander was an ambitious young major named Omar Torrijos, who recognized Noriega’s military acumen and slum-bred ruthlessness as potential assets.

Six years later, after Torrijos deposed Panama’s civilian government in a coup, he put Noriega in charge of not only military intelligence but political dirty tricks against labor unions, student groups and political reformers. The links Noriega formed with intelligence agencies around the world helped him consolidate power when Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1981.