Leon Carroll Jr. is on a mission — one he considers more important than any since his tenure as special agent in charge of the Puget Sound Field Office of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, where he oversaw criminal investigations and counterintelligence operations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and the five western provinces of Canada.
Carroll is selling copies of his book, Ghosts of Panama, and donating the proceeds to help students at Dana Middle School participate in a class trip to Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., during the 2025 holiday season. The trip aims to educate students about American governance. This trip is separate from the annual trip to Washington D.C. that’s been taking place for the past six years.
Teacher Chinedu Ezeh and Carroll met at a Rotary Club police and student dialogue meeting. Carroll got to know Ezeh and his role as a restorative justice advisor and they began discussing the challenges of broadening the horizons of economically disadvantaged students without outside financial help. Carroll, with the backing of the Rotary Club San Pedro, launched a fundraising drive, supported by the sale of his book Ghosts of Panama.
“The Ghosts of Panama tells the real-life story of Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents in Panama during the 1980s, when military dictator Manuel Noriega was in power,” Carroll said.
In 1989, Carroll led the NCIS office at Fort Amador in Panama. A year after Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces, Carroll reviewed the case files and learned in detail about NCIS agents’ pursuit of the dictator.
“It dawned on me that I had heard some of the quotes in these reports actually said on the news when George Herbert Walker Bush announced the invasion of Panama,” Carroll said. “Up to that point, I had no idea what the office I was running really had to do with that particular action.”
Twenty years later, actor Mark Harmon reached out to Carroll.
“We had been talking about telling real stories about agents doing real things instead of fiction for a TV show,” Carroll said. “Mark said, ‘Do you want to team up with me?’ He told me he had been asked to do a book but only wanted to do it with me based on what we had discussed.”
Carroll agreed. The two met with a publisher, along with their agents, who were interested in capitalizing on Harmon’s popularity. The publisher asked Carroll to propose five book ideas. One of them — NCIS Goes to Panama — became their second book.
The project took about a year and a half to complete. Carroll and Harmon interviewed all the agents involved, most of whom Carroll knew, though none were present when he took over in 1991.
“We were essentially starting from scratch, conducting Zoom interviews for hours,” Carroll said. “One agent, Rick Yell, a retired counterintelligence specialist now living outside Nashville, Tennessee, stood out as the protagonist of our story.”
Yell was operating beyond his area of expertise, attempting to recruit a confidential informant to uncover drug trafficking operations. At the time, Panama served as a key transshipment point for narcotics coming out of Colombia.
“A lot of that is detailed in the book,” Carroll said. “But the key thing Yell did was find a source with close ties to Noriega’s government. The source had access to high-level meetings through family connections and would report what he overheard.”
Over time, tensions escalated between Noriega and the United States. According to Carroll, Noriega had misappropriated funds from various intelligence budgets, including those of the U.S. Eventually, the dictator began retaliating against American citizens in Panama.
“Noriega was his own double agent, using the information he was feeding us against us,” Carroll said. “As the U.S. government intensified its actions against him, he became increasingly hostile toward Americans.”
Carroll and Harmon’s book sheds light on this critical period in U.S.-Panama relations, offering readers a firsthand account of the intelligence operations that led to Noriega’s downfall.
When asked if he thought the United States got what it bargained for after the invasion, Carroll said, “I think immediately after … yes. They got regime change.” Caroll noted that it was hard to put the government back together again afterward.
Ezeh said he hopes to have raised funds for 20 to 30 students at $4,000 each or $80,000 to $120,000 by the end of May 2025.
For any who want to get their hands on this book and support a worthy cause, email Leon Caroll at rotarysp.youthservices@gmail.com.