Delta Force

Delta Force is the American special-operations unit that attempts to storm the Vatican nunciature during the U.S. invasion of Panama. Its failed assault marks the military danger at the center of Lorenzo Quart’s earlier diplomatic mission: Quart helps prevent the raid, and General Noriega ultimately surrenders without the assault taking place.

The Panama standoff

After the invasion began, Quart arrived urgently at the nunciature, officially to assist the nuncio but in practice to monitor negotiations and report directly to the Institute for External Works. The building sheltered Noriega and a disparate group of refugees, while American forces surrounded it. The pressure was both military and psychological: loudspeakers blared rock music around the clock, and the nuncio required those seeking asylum to attend daily Mass.

The attempted assault

On the critical night of the siege, Delta Force commandos, their noses painted black, tried to storm the nunciature. Quart kept in telephone contact with the archbishops of New York and Chicago until he secured President Bush’s intervention to stop the entry. The episode presents the operation as averted through a chain of diplomatic communications, not through a direct confrontation between Quart and the commandos.

Aftermath and narrative significance

Noriega surrendered without imposing many conditions, and the people sheltered in the nunciature were dispersed. Quart’s intervention demonstrates the unusual reach of his work for the Institute for External Works: in this account, ecclesiastical connections become a means of influencing a military decision at the highest political level. Delta Force remains a brief but consequential presence, embodying the threat of force that makes the negotiation urgent.