Manuel Noriega holed up in the Vatican embassy, and US psychological operations parked loudspeakers outside and took requests.
Documented
The siege, on the record
After Operation Just Cause began December 20, 1989, Noriega took refuge in the Apostolic Nunciature on December 24. US forces ringed the compound, and from December 25 loudspeakers blasted rock music at the building: the Clash, AC/DC, Guns N' Roses, Jethro Tull, Van Halen, Rick Astley. On December 27 the effort was turned over to the 4th Psychological Operations Group. The Vatican protested to Washington, and the music stopped after about three days. Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, after Mass, in his uniform.
Assessment: Fully documented in the operational record and contemporaneous wire reporting. What the record cannot say is what the music did to the man; it can only say when it started, who ran it, who complained, and when he walked out.
Stories
The opera lover and the requests
The lore that grew around the siege: Noriega was an opera devotee force-fed hair metal, soldiers phoned in song requests like a battlefield radio station, and Never Gonna Give You Up played at a dictator twenty years before the internet made it a weapon for everyone. The folk version reads as comedy. The troops at the perimeter read it as morale.
Assessment: Stories: the opera-loving detail is widely repeated and thinly sourced; the request-line atmosphere comes from reporters on the scene. The comedy is real; the causation is decoration.
Interesting claims
The audience was never Noriega
The media reading: a siege televised globally, with a setlist that included I Fought the Law, is a press release with a beat. Psychological operations run in two directions, at the besieged and at everyone watching, and this one's second audience was the entire planet. Noriega surrendered on his own terms, after Mass, with his Bible. The music's effect on him is unknown; its effect on the narrative was total, and the narrative was the territory.
Assessment: Interesting: the two-audience structure is standard psyops doctrine, documented in the field manuals themselves. Whether Panama 1989 was pressure or programming is a question the archive leaves aimed at every siege broadcast since.
Sources and further reading
contemporaneous UPI and Los Angeles Times reporting on the Nunciature siege, December 1989
the operational record of Operation Just Cause and Operation Nifty Package
the 4th Psychological Operations Group's takeover of the loudspeakers, December 27 1989
the Holy See's protest to the Bush White House and the stand-down of the music
Worth asking
Was the music aimed at the man inside the embassy, or at the television audience outside it?