Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  Hers was a war of attrition, wearing down the internal resistance of the government one official at a time. It was a war of countless tiny victories that began with finally talking a secretary into taking her call, and then finally getting the decision maker to listen to what she had to say. Her job, as she saw it, was to be a persistent, friendly, and utterly relentless pain in the neck to as many powerful people as she could draft into her cause.

  Ultimately, though, the big breakthrough came not from her hand at all, but from that of her daughter. Annie’s letters were written and managedthe way these things were supposed to be done. She did the researchto find out who was in charge of a particular agency or who the keeper was of some esoteric piece of information she needed and then crafted a delicately worded, politically balanced letter in hopes that it would work its way through the chain of command to the desk of the decision makers. Clearly, she’d had some successes, but she’d suffered nearly as many defeats, and the whole thing was extremely frustrating.

  Kimberly, however, didn’t know about the etiquette and arcane courtesies of dealing with governmental bureaucrats. All she knew was that she wanted her dad back and that there was one person on the planet who could make that happen. She sat down at her desk, worked through a rough draft, corrected it, and finally crafted her final version, written by hand in the loopy, precise handwriting of a teenage girl:

  June 21, 1989

  Dear President Bush,

  My name is Kimberly Anne Muse. I am writing this letter not for me but for my father, Kurt Frederick Muse. As you should know by now, he is a political prisoner in Panama and has been so for the past two and a half months. I, being a teenager, didn’t think there is much I could do but sit around and wait for an outcome.But you know, President Bush, I got very tired of just waitingand watching my father slip away from me. So I decided to go to the top, and besides God, whom I continue to pray to, you’re it. I’m asking you now to hear my plea for help.

  My dad has lived in Panama for the past thirty five years, so he has naturally acquired a love for the country. Once he saw that this country was being sucked of its life, like marrow from the bone, he decided to try to put an end to it. What resulted was an underground radio station that told the people to stand up for what they believed in and vote. As we saw in the May elections the effort put out by this united group of people worked: The Panamanians voted in record numbers and the opposition won by an overwhelming seventy-five to twenty-five percent. But this happened over one month ago and still Noriega has not left power. Despite numerous treaty violations; the fact that the sixty days allotted by the Panamanian law to gather information for a case has been ignored; and that the Noriega-run government has not charged my dad of any specific crime; he still sits there in prison waiting to be released. President Bush, I want to ask you this: Is speaking up for what you believe in a crime? You don’t have to answer that because the answer lies right in our U.S. Constitution.But is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness only good for Americans or does it pertain to other peoples of the world like China, Nicaragua and Panama, countries that are fighting for these seemingly simple rights.

  President Bush, I’m not asking for something as impossible as world peace; but please let’s try and get closer by helping my country of birth out of its situation. Most importantly to me, let’s try to get the Panamanian government to release my Dad. I know you have a family that loves you as I love my Dad. If anything were to happen to you they would try their hardest to work out the problem. Because so much time has passed since I’ve seen my father and no signs of releasing him have been shown, I am askingfor your help.

  Mr. Bush I have lost close to everything. I don’t want to includemy father on that list. I beg of you, from the deepest part of my heart, to please take more serious measures to help obtain my Dad’s release so that he may then fulfill his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness with his loving family.

  Bless you,

  Kimberly A. Muse

  A realist, Kimberly understood how households work all over the world, irrespective of how powerful the family. Thus, she sent a secondletter to the White House, this one to the First Lady:

  June 26, 1989

  Dear Mrs. Bush,

  Knowing that your husband is such a busy man and that sometimes letters addressed to him never reach his desk I am enclosingtwo letters. Since I trust and respect your opinion I would be honored if you would read your copy and then deliver the other to your husband, President Bush.

  Thank you,

  Kimberly A. Muse

  It’s unclear which letter reached the president’s desk, but the letter did arrive in the Oval Office, and as the situation in Panama heated up, there was a personal element to the national strategy that now had the attention of the president of the United States. At the highest levels of the government, a name few people had heard before was suddenly featured in the President’s Daily Briefing.

  From that moment on, Kurt Muse’s welfare became a strategic and tactical consideration in every action taken regarding the Noriega regime.

  34

  Sept 6, 1989

  Time: 9:40

  Dear Daddy,

  I miss you, and love you. I want you to come back. I’m in soccer.This Friday the 8 of September of 89 and the next day Saturdaythe 9 of September we have a scrimmage against another school. And Sept 16 a Saturday is our first game. Dad this is just what I wanted. Well I’ve gone threw two days of school. I met alot of friends. You know that almost every friday the Lake BraddockBruins play against their oppenants.

  Dad I love you alot. Xoxoxoxoxo

  Miss you

  From Erik

  Love you

  Sept. 6, 1989

  Keep the faith, Musy. God and I aren’t resting. I agree that words are cheap ... I’m not fooled. I’m with you every step of the way ... and that is not an idle threat.

  K & E adore your letters. They need them for strength.

  Kimberly is beginning to doubt God’s wisdom and love. My message to her was that while we don’t understand God’s timing we must continue to have faith.

  Our house is nice but not a home. It is really quite empty without you. But Kurt you’d be so proud. Erik has become so responsible.He picks out his clothing, does his homework, packs his backpack, collects his notes, money, etc. and makes K’s and his lunch.

  He does all of this without being asked.

  K has taken him under her wing at the new school. He’s managingwell—getting all of his assignments, being on time, etc.

  K is making friends but being careful about just who they are. This puts her under a certain amount of stress. The caliber of kids varies here but I trust her judgment. Any words of encouragementfrom you—specific suggestions, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

  Today we went to a lady orthodontist—a great, honest, capableand pregnant lady.

  Kimberly will be finished in 4 to 6 months with a monthly fee only due on her. Erik will need a full 2 yrs new braces, a night brace—so ... it has to be done.

  I paid for the dirty car with the differential problems. That was smart.

  I’m working on the red Taurus. With all this leg work it should definitely be a good buy. I’m getting my dad’s, uncle’s and Timmy’s opinion.

  I adore you Kurt. We need your letters, too.

  Lots of love,

  Annie

  35

  The change in priorities could not have been more obvious to Marcos Ostrander. As the endless hot summer dissolved into an endlesshot autumn, the tensions between the United States and the Panamanianregime got steadily worse, with daily harassments of U.S. military personnel by the swaggering PDF forces, bolstered by the unceasingbluster of Noriega. General Woerner, of course, still resisted pushingback, seemingly holding on to the notion that peace at any cost was worth some daily humiliations and the occasional outbreak of violence.

  It was getting more and more difficult to get in to see Kurt these days. Checkpoints
had been set up on the main avenues into Chorrillo, and any vehicles bearing Americans in uniform were routinely stopped and sometimes detained. Ostrander and Ruffer had adopted the strategyof never making eye contact with the guards as they beckoned for them to stop and to just continue through the checkpoints. It was alwaysa hazardous strategy that occasionally pushed the limits toward a violent clash, but with Perry’s concurrence, Ruffer and Ostrander remainedunanimous in their commitment to visit Kurt on the agreed upon schedule.

  The visits, however, had become more complicated, and not only with regard to their logistics. Ostrander didn’t have the need to know, and therefore did not attempt to ask, but it seemed apparent to him that some sort of rescue mission was being cobbled together. Before and after every meeting at Modelo, he was ordered to report to the Tunnel at Quarry Heights, first to receive a list of questions, and then to debrief a bunch of scruffy-looking men in civvies on what he had been able to discover. They wanted the numbers and composition of the guards, the layout of the interior of the prison, the numbers of steps leading from one floor to another, the type of locks on the exteriordoors and on Kurt’s cell itself. They wanted to know details on the types of armaments that were visible, and any other information they could find on the names and backgrounds on individual guards.

  Kurt himself proved to be a tremendously reliable source for much of this information. Through idle chats he had with the guards, and simply by being ever-vigilant, he was able to funnel out all kinds of personal information about the guards on his floor. He knew which guards were the violent ones and which were mostly passive. They’d learned that Cáceres and Correa were vicious ideologues who would unquestionably lay down their lives for the Pineapple, while LieutenantDominguez was merely a passive civil servant whose career ambitionbegan and ended with pacing the halls of Modelo. He didn’t participate in the endless political patter that Muse had to listen to every single day.

  Ruffer had likewise been summoned to the Tunnel a couple of times, but for him the questions dealt more with Muse’s psychological stability. Had he given up yet? Was he depressed? Had he been turned? Of course, all the answers were in the negative. Simply put, Muse was increasingly impatient with the U.S. government’s toleration of Manuel Noriega, he was sick to death of “Wimp Woerner,” and he was ready to see the country act like the superpower it was and to quit bowing at the feet of a dictator.

  Ostrander and Ruffer were careful in their reports to quote as directlyas they could and to make their observations as precise as possible.When they were walking, they were counting their steps, and when they were listening to the guards, they were listening to the dialectsthat were being spoken. Since the elections, they were beginning to pick up more and more Cuban dialects, leading the G-2 guys—the Intelligence guys—to draw all kinds of conclusions, none of which were positive for the Pineapple’s future.

  For Ostrander, the only conclusion to be drawn from this questioningin the Tunnel was that someone was planning a prison break. He had learned and was later able to confirm that the spooks at Hurlburt Field in Florida had constructed a three-quarters-scale model of ModeloPrison out in the middle of nowhere and that live-fire exercises could be heard during the night. It pleased him that the plans were that advanced, but of course, the big question would be the timing of any raid. Because this would be a land-based operation, it made sense that when the balloon went up, the execution would fall to Delta Force, a supersecret commando group whose existence was never officially acknowledgedby the government, but whose exploits were quickly becomingthe stuff of Army legend. If the rumors were close to being true, these guys could crash a building, kill the bad guys, and rescue the good guys before anyone even knew that the shooting had started.

  It would have been a mistake, of course, for Ostrander to even hint of his suspicions to Kurt. It wasn’t so much that Muse would reveal the plans to the enemy—God knew he had been damned tight-lipped as it was—but more because he thought it unwise to falsely raise any hopes. Planning a rescue operation was a completely different matter from executing one, and for the time being Marcos didn’t see the catalystfor armed invasion anywhere on the horizon.

  Besides, planning was what Delta did. Again, Marcos had no firsthandknowledge, but the word on the street in the top-secret world that was so much a part of Marcos’s life was that Delta started planning a rescue mission the moment it heard that American hostages had been taken anywhere overseas. Of those planned missions, precious few were executed, for any number of reasons, and some were taken more seriouslythan others. The presence of a faux Modelo somewhere in the Florida outback told Marcos that this was one of the serious ones, but it never made sense to unnecessarily introduce hope into a prisoner’s life.

  Any doubt Ostrander might have harbored on the issue was more than mitigated by Kurt’s impatience to get the hell out of that place. Marcos kept him pretty up to date with the politics of the region, and the more Kurt heard, the more he seemed to be getting frustrated by General Woerner’s lack of action. How many indignities did the people of Panama have to suffer before he got off his ass and did something? Kurt knew through Ostrander and Ruffer that the priorities were changingon the Isthmus, so why did Woerner continue to sit on his hands?

  In the months that Kurt, Jim Ruffer, and Marcos Ostrander had been meeting thrice-weekly, they’d developed a certain rhythm of communicationthat suited all of them. If Kurt had something important to say to Ostrander—his political lifeline—he would wear socks to their meetings, and in the days surrounding the elections, there’d been socks for almost every meeting. As a way of sticking his thumb in the eyes of his captors, Kurt had even figured out a way to communicate with his family without enduring the indignity of the official censors.

  Marcos routinely brought books in for Kurt to read, everything from The Hunt for Red October to The Count of Monte Cristo. The books came one at a time. When Kurt finished one, he was allowed to have another. On the way into the prison, Correa or one of his lieutenantswould thoroughly examine the book to search for any contraband.On the way out, though, Kurt noticed that the search was always a cursory one, and when Lieutenant Dominguez did the searching,he always held the paperback by its spine and riffled its pages. The outgoing search took no more than a few seconds.

  With this in mind, Kurt had taken to jotting long notes to his family in the gutter where the pages met the book binding. The notes would go on for pages and pages, consisting of hundreds of words whose value lay as much in the small victory they represented as they did in the news they passed along to the family. Of course, Annie, Kimberly, and Erik had to refrain from similar tactics for incoming books. For them, the only option was to write the good old-fashioned newsy letter. Truth be told, of the three, Annie was the only one fully cognizant of how cripplingthe intrusion of censors could be, and as such, her letters tended to be written with fairly stilted language. Kimberly only wished him luck and good things in her letters, while Erik poured out his emotional responses to everything from the Orioles to the Washington Redskins, which he was quickly adopting as his home team.

  Ostrander also learned that Kurt had been keeping a journal of his daily activities and travails. As it turned out, the one book that every prisoner was allowed to have, and whose presence was never questioned,was the Holy Bible; in Kurt’s case, a five-by-seven-inch King James version printed on onion skin paper. The last twelve pages of Kurt’s copy were blank. He didn’t know if it was a printing anomaly or if it was intended as a space to write notes, but Kurt carefully tore out one page at a time as needed and wrote his diary in the smallest possible hand. To keep the forbidden chronicle from being found by the guards as they tossed his cell, he stored the pages inside the void space in his stick deodorant tube, where the thumbscrew at the bottom of the tube allowed you to extend the deodorant stick as it was used. Knowing how put off Panamanians were by all by-products of personalhygiene, Kurt made sure that there were always a few armpit hairs on the surface of the stick,
so that a curious guard would take only a cursory glance and then quickly put the deodorant down.

  By the time September rolled around, Kurt had just about had it with the delays and the lack of progress. Marcos shared with him that the kids were missing him, dreading the start of school in yet another new community, and Kurt was growing impatient with the fact that his parents—his father in particular—continued to be angry at him for having put the family in this kind of situation. He could only imagine what was becoming of Intergraphic. Kurt hadn’t heard anything at all from Carol and David, and he knew that that kind of silence could only mean continuing anger. The whole world, it seemed, was turning against him, and still nobody seemed to be doing anything about it.

  Kurt wore socks to one of the September meetings, and Ruffer kept his part of their time together short. When it was Ostrander’s turn, Dr. Ruffer started chatting up the guards on something soccer-related, and Ostrander had his moment alone.

  “How are you today, Kurt?” Marcos asked, careful as always not to speak directly to any issue.

  “I’m good,” Kurt said. “I’m very, very good.” There was a smugnessto his tone that made Ostrander scowl.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that.”

  “This is the secret,” Kurt said, handing over a hardcover copy of The Godfather. “This is a very good book.”