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By Jill Smolowe

About the timetable, at least, there were few arguments: at 8 a.m. last Tuesday, a line of jeeps and canvas-covered military trucks roared up Avenue A in Panama City and disgorged armed troops at the headquarters of the Panama Defense Forces. The soldiers joined 200 others stationed there, and gunfire soon erupted inside and outside the building. Within 90 minutes, the rebels had seized the Comandancia, as it is known locally, and trapped Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega in a small part of the compound. At 11:30, the insurgents issued a statement on national radio proclaiming their coup a success.

But the sounds of battle soon erupted again, this time mortar and grenade explosions and gunfire from forces loyal to Noriega. The firefight claimed the lives of ten rebels and wounded 18 loyalist troops and five civilians. By 2 that afternoon, Noriega's supporters were rounding up the last of the rebels. It was all over but the pompous pronouncements in Panama -- and the recriminations in Washington.

For more than two years, the U.S. Government has encouraged the Panamanian military to overthrow its corrupt commander and turn him over to American authorities to stand trial on drug charges. Last week, after a group of rebellious officers actually had Noriega under their guns, debate raged in Washington about whether the characteristically cautious Bush Administration could have -- and should have -- done more to help the coup's leaders. Senators, senior officials and military officers alike wondered: Had the U.S. fumbled its best opportunity to seize Noriega? Or had it sidestepped a diplomatically dangerous and probably ineffective intervention?

Bush and his deputies replied, with considerable justification, that it would have been irresponsible to implicate the U.S. fully in a fuzzy coup scheme that would have riled much of Latin America. Still, their tangled and tentative reaction to the uprising raised disturbing questions about the Administration's ability to respond to a crisis. In the three days leading up to and during the coup, the U.S. was hobbled by a breakdown of communications, a distressing lack of reliable intelligence and an obvious dearth of contingency plans should the call for a revolt against Noriega finally be answered.

At the least, the Administration was caught in embarrassing contradictions about its role. Two hours after the coup collapsed, Noriega offered his version of events. "This is part of the continuing aggression and penetration of the P.D.F. by the U.S.," he charged on national television. As evidence, the general's supporters pointed to U.S. Army helicopters that passed close to the Comandancia during the fighting and the hundreds of troops who were deployed, within areas under U.S. jurisdiction, in positions blocking two of the roads leading into the city. That forced Noriega's allies to use alternate routes to transport loyal units from the elite Battalion 2000 to the fighting.

At first, the U.S. retorted that its limited maneuvers were intended only to safeguard American lives and property, as permitted under the Panama Canal treaties. "There were rumors around that this was some sort of an American operation," President Bush said on Tuesday. "I can tell you that is not true." Two days later senior officials acknowledged that they had acted at the request of the rebels.

Bush's deputies had difficulty answering congressional questions concerning what they knew about the attempted coup, when they knew it, and why they opted for such a muted response. White House chief of staff John Sununu ordered an investigation of the Administration's handling of the failed coup, as did two congressional committees. Conceded a senior White House official: "You could ) make a good case that we had something of an intelligence failure." Said another: "There's no excuse. We've had a big presence in Panama and close ties with its military for a long time."

The first intimations of a plot came on Sunday, when Major Moises Giroldi Vera, leader of the failed attempt, told U.S. officials in Panama that an uprising was imminent. The news was surprising, since Giroldi was a Noriega loyalist who played a key role in quelling the previous military revolt in March 1988. "Giroldi's a bastard, a sort of mini-Noriega," says a Pentagon official. "Warning signs went up. We feared a Noriega trap." Fueling that suspicion was the fact that two principal U.S. players -- General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Maxwell Thurman, chief of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama -- had taken up their posts just that weekend. The timing of the coup seemed calculated to take advantage of their greenness.

Discussion went up the line to the President's top advisers. By Sunday night, according to a senior Defense Department official, "the basic conclusion was that if ((Giroldi)) was going to do it, he would have to do it largely alone." At 2:30 a.m. Monday, Powell was awakened by a phone call from a U.S. military officer in Panama. The rebel soldiers, Powell was told, wanted Southcom to assist the uprising by blocking two access roads near Fort Amador and the Bridge of the Americas, but otherwise wanted no U.S. involvement that might discredit them. Through Monday, as they waited in vain for news of Giroldi's move, Bush and his aides decided that if a coup were mounted, they would honor the blockade request.

When Thurman called Tuesday morning to say fighting had broken out, Powell promptly asked, "Where's Noriega?" That seemingly obvious question produced a host of answers that further muddied events. The roadblocks were ordered and the 12,000 troops attached to the U.S. Southern Command were put on Delta alert, a battle-ready status that calls for American forces to secure U.S. facilities. At about 11:45 p.m. two rebel lieutenants appeared at the gate of Fort Clayton, the main U.S. Army base in the canal zone, and were ushered into an office to meet with Southcom's deputy commander, Army South Brigadier General Mark Cisneros. The rebels insisted they were holding Noriega.

For reasons that are still unclear, Bush was not told of this for almost an hour. At that point, Washington passed word to the rebel officers that the U.S. "was prepared to lift this burden from their hands." The rebels refused. "They were clearly not of a mind to turn ((Noriega)) over to us," Defense Secretary Richard Cheney said later. "They were not willing to have him extradited to the U.S." Soon after, word arrived in Washington that the coup attempt had collapsed.

The rebels' refusal to turn over Noriega was relayed via military channels to the White House. But the Administration claims that the same communication, dispatched to the U.S. embassy in Panama City and on to the State Department and CIA, was garbled in transmission. According to a senior White House official, the message should have read the rebels "won't" turn over Noriega but instead stated the rebels "want" to surrender him. This mistaken communication quickly made its way to Capitol Hill, where Congressmen lined up to denounce the Administration for passing up such a prime opportunity.

If the rebels held Noriega for as long as four hours, as U.S. and Panamanian officials claim, why did they not take him at gunpoint from the compound or perhaps even kill him? Instead, they let him go under circumstances that seem macabre by all accounts of what happened. Noriega insists he was not armed. "My pistol, my machine gun is the righteousness of my resistance to U.S. interference," he told Spanish TV. Less grandiose accounts from P.D.F. headquarters say the general was actually never placed under arrest but was trapped inside his offices, protected only by two bodyguards with submachine guns.

Noriega's opponents claim that the dictator secured his release by radioing orders to aides to take hostage the families of the coup leaders. Another version, circulated by sources close to Noriega, had the dictator holding off his attackers until he was confident that loyalist troops had surrounded the building. Then he confronted Giroldi and barked, "To be a commander, you have to have balls. You don't have balls." By that account, Giroldi surrendered and was killed soon afterward.

The weakness of the rebels' resolve underscored the limited nature of their goals. Although the revolt involved high-level military officials close to Noriega, the attacking force was led primarily by mid-level officers frustrated by their failure to secure pay raises and promotions. Giroldi made no pretension to acting out of patriotic motives. The single rebel communique issued during the coup stated, "This is strictly a military movement. There is no politics involved." The dissidents even offered to recognize Francisco Rodriguez as President. Rodriguez is the man Noriega designated provisional President in September, four months after nullifying sham elections that blatantly and bloodily snatched victory from opposition candidate Guillermo Endara. Giroldi had "no program, no civilian connections, nothing we could latch onto," said an aide to Cheney.

The plotters' intentions were further thrown into question by the amateurishness of their operation. After Giroldi and his co-conspirators alerted Washington that 1,000 troops would take part in the coup, fewer than 300 turned out for the fireworks. In particularly unprofessional fashion, the coup planners made little attempt to keep their operation secret. Not only did the Americans know about the plot but so did at least one Panamanian exile in Miami. There were even reports in Panama that Noriega knew of the plot but not when the coup would be attempted.

Yet as details of the botched coup emerge, it seems clear that the rebel force had potential that Washington underestimated. Noriega's subsequent roundup of plotters showed that the effort reached deep into the dictator's circle. Among the 37 arrested were three of the general's closest and most trusted associates: Colonel Guillermo Wong, head of military intelligence, Colonel Julio Ow Young, who oversees personnel for the dreaded Doberman militias that have repeatedly been turned on opposition rallies, and Lieut. Colonel Armando Palacios Gondola, head of an organization that supervised joint military operations with U.S. troops.

The helter-skelter quality of the plan was hardly enough to coax the U.S. into precipitate action. Instead, the Administration's prudent response was in keeping with the policy it has been enunciating for months. Bush, while he has repeatedly urged the P.D.F. to overthrow Noriega, has also maintained that the Panamanians must solve their own problems, with Latin leaders applying diplomatic pressure and the U.S. providing moral support.

Notably, none of the region's leaders stepped forward to criticize Washington's inaction, a reflection of continuing Latin sensitivity about Yanqui intervention anywhere in the hemisphere. Says a Bush aide: "The U.S. has always underestimated the nationalistic instincts of Latin American leaders and publics."

The Administration's caution may have been reinforced by the presence of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico, who was in the White House Tuesday morning to meet with Bush. As the coup unfolded, Bush briefed Salinas on the developments; not surprisingly, the President did not do the same for General Dmitri Yazov, the Soviet Defense Minister, who visited the Oval Office Tuesday afternoon.

Still, Bush's forceful calls for Noriega's ouster have created expectations in some quarters that the U.S. would intervene at some critical juncture to assist a coup attempt. The President's unwillingness to back tough talk with forceful action did not go unnoticed on Capitol Hill. No sooner had the shooting stopped in Panama than the shouting began in congressional chambers, resulting in some of the oddest political couplings in recent memory.

As could be expected, ultra-conservative Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina lambasted the Administration's timidity, deriding Bush's entourage as the "Keystone Kops" and denouncing a "total lack of planning." More surprising were the Democrats who lined up to criticize the Administration's caution: in the past, many of them had espoused anti-interventionist sentiments in Nicaragua and toward the Navy escorts of Kuwaiti oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq war. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts called the episode "a black mark on our diplomacy and our values." Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin declared, "We should go in and capture Noriega." Aspin differentiated between military intervention and "a snatch. All I want is Noriega." In the face of such belligerence, Republican Senator Robert Dole cracked, "Suddenly the place is filled with hawks. They were all doves during the Persian Gulf."

In only a few instances did calmer heads prevail. "It's not our business to use military force to change governments we don't like," said Democratic Senator Alan Cranston of California. Said Ambler Moss, former U.S. Ambassador to Panama: "What is needed now is patience and diplomacy."

In Panama, where civilian opponents of the regime are noticeably more pro- interventionist than their neighbors in the region, there was also considerable grumbling. "The U.S. is like a dog that barks a lot but bites not at all," said opposition leader Ricardo Arias Calderon. On Thursday, Noriega ordered a crackdown to weed out traitors. That night, P.D.F. troops attacked the opposition headquarters and hauled away several people, including Endara. The opposition leader was later released and at week's end was holed up inside the Vatican embassy.

Through it all, the Bush Administration defended its actions without apology. "It's easy to be an armchair general," Secretary of State James Baker said with evident irritation to his Capitol Hill critics. "You don't ((risk American lives)) on the basis of someone else's plans and in response to rapidly changing circumstances."

Moreover, the steady U.S. pressure is having its effect. So is Noriega's behavior. Leaders throughout the hemisphere have made clear their disdain for the Panamanian regime. Following the sham elections in May, many countries withdrew their ambassadors from Panama, and they have yet to send them back. "Noriega is dividing the Latin community over what to do about him, but everyone is upset with the situation," says a Latin leader. "Even the Cubans don't want him there."

The confrontation between Panama City and Washington may soon shift to a dispute over implementation of the treaty under which Panama is due to gain control of the Panama Canal by 1999. At year's end administration of the Canal Commission is supposed to be turned over to a Panamanian official. But some Congressmen, led by Helms, are demanding that the new administrator be confirmed by the Senate. One name has been floated -- and Helms has already shot it down.

For all his triumphant fist waving, Noriega could hardly feel reassured by last week's events. The rebellion was the second failed attempt against him by the Panamanian military in the past 18 months, raising questions about whom the general can trust among his forces. Although a housecleaning of the P.D.F. will follow, Noriega can no longer count on even his inner circle. "This was no gringo plot," says a source close to Noriega. "This came from the general's inner core." That much, at least, can give Panamanians -- and Washington -- hope that Noriega's days are numbered.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame and Bruce van Voorst/Washington and John Moody/Panama City