Next, she replaced the apple slice with a piece of white bread—a dead, impure substance, she said. Once again, she told Díaz Herrera to try to keep his arm raised while she attempted to force it down. It collapsed; he couldn’t do it. Astonished, he burst out laughing. They repeated the exercise with a cigarette. Again, his arm fell. This, she said, was prana. Pure things give off positive energy; impure things don’t. For Díaz Herrera, the effect was world-shaking.
“At that moment there was a connection,” he said. “It was the beginning of a love story with a spiritual component.” It wasn’t just that Devi had charmed him. Noriega had his dark magic—perhaps prana could give Díaz Herrera the strength he needed to overcome his adversary. It was the start of what the colonel would later call La Guerra Esotérica, or “The Esoteric War.”
—
Díaz Herrera had already tried to get rid of Noriega by more prosaic means. In 1985, when Noriega was out of the country, he attempted a coup, ordering troops into the capital and trying to turn key colonels against their leader. Yet the CIA, which kept Noriega on the payroll and used him to funnel money and weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua, tipped him off that there was a plot afoot. It almost certainly would have failed anyway—the other colonels depended on Noriega’s largesse. “Díaz Herrera had a silvery tongue, but Noriega had a Midas touch,” writes journalist Frederick Kempe. When it became clear that Noriega wasn’t going anywhere, the shrewd Díaz Herrera managed to deflect blame for the attempted betrayal onto the country’s figurehead president, Nicolás Ardito Barletta.
Barletta, who owed his position to an election that Díaz Herrera and Noriega fixed, was forced out. Díaz Herrera stayed put. At first, Noriega saw him as a sort of insurance policy. The colonel was a cousin of former Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos, a widely adored populist who died in a 1981 plane crash. Like Torrijos, he was a left-wing social democrat. As long as Díaz Herrera was Noriega’s number two, the Americans couldn’t turn on their client without risking handing power to a purported socialist. Yet Díaz Herrera knew that Noriega suspected him, and the atmosphere at the Comandancia, the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Force, was tense and menacing.
Slowly, Noriega started freezing Díaz Herrera out. He confined him to a desk job, excluded him from important meetings, and dismissed any advice he offered. He warned the colonel’s mistresses away and refused to let him travel to barracks outside the capital, where he could solidify his relationships with local commanders. He spread rumors that the Americans believed that Díaz Herrera had murdered opposition leader Hugo Spadafora, a dashing physician and guerrilla fighter, the previous year.
Just before he was killed, Spadafora had returned to Panama from exile in Costa Rica, threatening to reveal Noriega’s epic corruption, particularly his involvement in drug and arms trafficking. When Spadafora’s body was found—he’d been tortured, mutilated, and beheaded—it created a national and international uproar. Did Noriega intend to pin the crime on the colonel?
Díaz Herrera felt backed into a corner, unsure of his options. After meeting Devi, he grasped at her teachings like a mystical lifeline.
At the time, Shama happened to be in Buenos Aires. She was the latest of Devi’s protégés to try to write Devi’s biography and had gone to conduct interviews. Soon, though, like Paul O’Brien, she gave up on getting her friend to sit still long enough to unspool her story in a clear, linear way. Besides, her own schedule quickly filled up—Devi had told many people about Shama’s abilities, and she found herself agreeing to give reading after reading, using an interpreter for those who didn’t speak English. After seeing six people a day for six days straight, Shama was utterly drained. So when Díaz Herrera tried to make an appointment, she told him she was taking that day, a Sunday, off.
He told Shama that he was leaving the next day and absolutely had to have a reading. She replied that she was sorry, but she was exhausted and was heading to a girlfriend’s house for lunch. “I didn’t realize you don’t say no to a Latin leader,” she said.
Somehow, he figured out where she was and showed up at her friend’s apartment. “My girlfriend opens the door, and in walks Díaz Herrera with all his secret service men, with an open bottle of vodka,” Shama recalled. He seemed roguishly charming rather than menacing. “He had this personality that was so charismatic, you couldn’t say no,” said Shama. “He had that smile like Desi Arnaz. He was very short, not threatening—if anything, just the opposite.”
He, meanwhile, was instantly taken with the intense, dark-haired beauty—with her pale skin and straight, heavy bangs, she looked, he said, like Liz Taylor in Cleopatra. Later, he told friends she was the most exotic woman he had ever met. He called her “La Gringa.”
She agreed to give him a reading, with her hostess acting as an interpreter. First, she had him stare at a spot between and slightly above her beautiful eyes, where the mystical third eye is believed to reside. For nearly two minutes they sat silently while she investigated his aura.
Then, suddenly, she seemed alarmed. “Oh my God, who are you?” she asked him. The vision that came upon her was one of the strongest she’d ever had. “You have a big mission in life,” she told him. “A big cause is calling upon you for your help. It involves tens of thousands of people, maybe millions. There’s a big plot right now to diminish you.” He would be involved in a huge fight, she continued. “Don’t expect to win in the short run. You should be prepared to be seen by the world as having lost the fight. You’ll think you’re going to die, but you will not die.”
Fortified by the vodka, Díaz Herrera wasn’t that frightened. “I just kept staring at this beautiful gringa,” he said. “I just wanted to invite her to bed.” But the idea that it was his destiny to confront Noriega took root in his churning mind.
On the way home, Díaz Herrera studied a book that Devi had given him, a Spanish translation of Samuel Sandweiss’s The Holy Man…and the Psychiatrist. Devi may have moved away from the Sai Baba organization, but she still believed in Baba’s abilities—indeed, she’d told the Panamanian colonel and his wife all about Baba’s many miracles. Sandweiss’s book made a powerful impression on Díaz Herrera. “What good is it to dabble among the waves near the shore, and swear that the sea has no pearls in it and that all tales about them are false?” Sandweiss quotes Sai Baba (italics in original). To realize Baba’s gifts, a devotee had to dive deep. Díaz Herrera was about to take the plunge.
Returning to Panama, Díaz Herrera seemed to lose interest in everything but his own spiritual development. Believing that he could meditate more easily if he were lighter, he went on a diet and grew gaunt. Sometimes he’d sit silently at his desk, his faraway eyes seeming lost in thought. When other officers stared at him, he’d snap, “A little session of meditation wouldn’t hurt you.” He kept bananas in his office to perform Devi’s prana demonstration for anyone who was interested, and for some who weren’t.
Díaz Herrera set up a Sai Baba temple in his home, and in February 1987 he sent for Shama, enlisting his English-speaking friend José de Jesús “Chuchú” Martínez to make the arrangements. An orthodox Marxist and Sorbonne-trained mathematician, Chuchú thought Díaz Herrera had lost his mind. If this was what things had come to—American psychics!—the whole country was doomed. Still, Chuchú was loyal, and ultimately he did as he was asked.
At first, Shama said no. When Díaz Herrera, speaking through Chuchú, insisted, she said she’d consult her master, Sai Baba. The next day, she told them that she’d received a message from the avatar, and that they could send her a ticket to Panama City. It was the first of several trips over the course of the year. Most of the time she came alone, though once, at Díaz Herrera’s request, she brought a nutritionist specializing in a New Age therapy called psychokinesiology.
“He put me up in an incredible penthouse apartment,” said Shama. “Every time I went there I was just treated like Princess Diana. They were so nice to me it was incredible.” As soon as she arrived the firs
t time, she went to Díaz Herrera’s powder-blue mansion in the ritzy suburban neighborhood of Altos del Golf (“Golf Heights”), not far from where Noriega lived. Protected by high white walls, the mansion was adorned by four Grecian columns and two sphinxes. There was a grand two-story entryway, marble floors throughout, and a swimming pool in the big emerald yard shaded by lush vegetation. Inside, Shama said, she would give everybody readings, “the whole family, even second cousins. It was all such an incredible joyous adventure.”
For Panamanians, it was quite a bit more than that. Shama told Díaz Herrera that in a past life he had been the nineteenth-century Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. Looking him up in the encyclopedia, Díaz Herrera discovered that his former self had been a great romantic idealist. About more urgent matters, Shama, after seeing a photo of Noriega, told her host, “Noriega is your enemy. He is the man I was talking about in Buenos Aires. He is evil, and he will do anything in his power to destroy you.”
To Díaz Herrera, her abilities were indisputable. How else could this woman from California so fully comprehend Noriega? Every time they spoke, he would try to extract more and more details of what he was up against. She was, he said, “like military intelligence, psychic military intelligence.”
Maybe he had disdained such things before, but no more. After all, he’d read that the Soviets were doing tests to find proof of telepathy, and they were atheists! If the world’s most committed materialists took psychic powers seriously as a tool in the Cold War, surely such powers could help him.
He would need to relax and focus. To help with that, he invited Devi to Panama City. She was delighted to come—it would give her the opportunity to spread the message of yoga to yet another country. The colonel installed her in his mother-in-law’s house, next door to his own. His office took charge of her daily schedule, setting up TV interviews and visits to charities and a children’s hospital. He arranged for her to deliver a speech at a local university and introduced her to the packed audience.
She tried to teach Díaz Herrera how to breathe, putting his hands on her belly so he could feel the expansion when she inhaled deeply. But he was a very busy man, and as much as he admired her, he found it hard, at first, to give her his undivided attention.
One day, she rang his buzzer just as he was heading out. She gave him a long, tight, silent hug. He hugged her back but was impatient; his car was waiting for him. “You’re leaving?” she said sweetly. “When are you going to be able to give me three minutes, without a telephone, without anybody calling you?”
He smiled—she wasn’t an easy person to say no to. “Fifteen minutes,” he said.
“Oooh,” she replied, her face alight, “fifteen minutes! We can do marvels in fifteen minutes!”
They went into his room. She took his hand, transmitting, he said, maternal love. Then she gave him what felt like an initiation.
Many years before, Sai Baba had given her a gaudy ring with a sapphire surrounded by seven diamond-tipped golden rays. Having long ago given up jewelry, she didn’t particularly like the ring, though she didn’t say anything to Baba. The next day, he asked for it back, put it in his palm, and blew. When he opened his hand, there was a diamond solitaire in its place. “Every time you wish, you will see me in the ring, but no one else will,” he said.
Throughout everything that had happened—her infatuation with Premananda, her break with the Sai organization, her move to Argentina—Devi had never taken the ring off. Now she used it to bless the man who hoped to bring down Noriega. Through the ring, she said, Sai Baba was offering the colonel a mantra. She put her hands on Díaz Herrera’s head while she said it: “Rama, Rama, Rama.” (As an avatar of Vishnu, Rama exemplified courage and honor.) Díaz Herrera closed his eyes and repeated: “Rama, Rama, Rama.”
He started talking to her about his battle with Noriega—how outraged he was by the dictator’s rampant criminality, how desperate he was to overthrow him, how helpless he felt in the wake of his failed coup attempt. It was like a confession. “What do I do with this man?” he asked. “What do I do with him?”
“The only thing I can tell you to do is to visualize him, shut your eyes, and send him love and light,” she said.
“How can I send him light and love?” asked Díaz Herrera, indignant.
“But then,” she continued, “take the decision to act according to your conscience.”
It was as if she were sanctifying his dream of revolution. Her words, he said, were a two-sided message: “Love and light, but throw him out.”
They spoke more: of life and death, karma and dharma. When they emerged after an hour and a half, he was completely relaxed. “I left there on a different frequency,” he said. “We had a tremendous love. Besides my mother, nobody has loved me like Mataji. Nobody.”
A few days later, Devi asked Díaz Herrera if she could accompany him to his office. He tried to put her off—he adored her, but he was also a little bit embarrassed to be seen with her in front of his military colleagues.
“You’re going to be bored,” he told her.
“No, no[,] I want to go,” she replied. “I’m not going to bother you. [T]ake me to your office.”
All the way there, she held his hand in the backseat. He felt the eyes of his bodyguards watching them in the rearview mirror, and he knew they thought he’d gone mad.
At the office, she sat on a couch while he attended to some paperwork. It didn’t take her long, he said, to win over all his secretaries and every military man who passed through. “She was very magnetic and attractive, and the people who would see her smile, even though they didn’t know who she was, felt that they were in front of a great person, an exquisite woman,” he said.
Noriega, of course, heard all about it. Word came to Díaz Herrera that the dictator had been asking, “Who does Roberto have in his office, a psychic and a yogi?” For the colonel, this was not necessarily a bad thing. The dictator believed in this stuff. Perhaps he would be intimidated by the spiritual firepower his rival was amassing.
Díaz Herrera continued to squire his spiritual adviser around town. He took her as his date to a dinner party on an Italian cruise ship, where she performed a mind-over-matter demonstration on the ship’s burly Russian captain. Enlisting three other petite ladies, they each put two fingers underneath him and, imagining him to be as light as a feather, lifted him up. This is, of course, a classic girls’ slumber party game, but neither Díaz Herrera nor the captain was ever a little girl, and they were flabbergasted. Devi was the star of the evening.
Most nights, Devi dined at Díaz Herrera’s home, and after dinner she’d lead the couple and a few close friends in meditation. During these sessions, she’d expound on the dangers of materialism and the necessity of detachment. She repeated a parable that Sai Baba often told. “When a peasant wants to catch a monkey, he uses a big pot with a narrow mouth as a trap,” the swami once said. “Inside the pot, he puts edibles which the monkey loves. The monkey finds the pot and puts its paws inside it to grasp as much of the stuff as he can hold. Once it does so, it is unable to pull out its paws from the small mouth of the pot. The monkey imagines that someone inside the pot is holdings its paws, so it struggles and attempts to run away with the pot, only to fail and get trapped. No one is holding the monkey; it has trapped itself because of its greed.”
So, too, were people bound by their fear of losing their material possessions. “The moment you give up the pleasures and detach yourself, you will be free,” said Devi. The story had a striking impact on Díaz Herrera. He was hardly innocent of the regime’s corruption. His chateau and Mercedes had been bought with the money he’d made selling Panamanian visas to Cuban émigrés. He had relished the perquisites of power, but if he was truly going to take on Noriega, he had to make his peace with losing them. He still hoped he wouldn’t have to, but he was getting ready.
Then Devi returned to Buenos Aires having set in motion events that would change Latin American history.
—<
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Contrary to Díaz Herrera’s hopes, word of his new metaphysical reinforcements failed to cow the dictator. Certainly Noriega had been momentarily unnerved, but Trilha, his psychic, assured him that he had nothing to fear. “Trilha showed Noriega on an astrological map that, as an Aquarius, he had a strong field of protection and mental clarity that Díaz Herrera lacked,” wrote Kempe. So rather than placating his second-in-command, Noriega spurned him even more. He’d briefly considered a plan to rid himself of Díaz Herrera by making him ambassador to Japan, a prestigious and lucrative position. Instead, deciding it was no longer worth the trouble of keeping him around, he simply retired him.
For three days after he was cashiered, Díaz Herrera tried frantically to reach his old boss, but Noriega dodged him. Finally, Díaz Herrera had his guard deliver a handwritten note to Noriega’s house. “You want to begin a total war with me, and I am trying to avoid it, for Lorena, Sandra, and Thais,” wrote the colonel, referring to Noriega’s daughters. “But I am not afraid of you. If you don’t talk to me, you are going to confront a total war on my behalf. Don’t run away from me. Call me.” He heard nothing.
“Now,” said Díaz Herrera, “my plan was to make Panama explode. I had to shake everybody like an earthquake.” He’d tried to defeat Noriega militarily and failed. He would need to win over the minds of the people. He could denounce Noriega, but he knew that he was himself regarded as no better than an accomplice. He would have to make a grand gesture, to show a willingness to make real sacrifices, to renounce his monkey-like attachment to the spoils of corruption.
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