INDIANAPOLIS — "A strongman out of control, a murdered Marine and the special agents caught in the middle of an invasion."
That's the tagline of the new book, "Ghosts of Panama" by "NCIS" actor Mark Harmon and retired NCIS special agent Leon Carroll, Jr.
"The story is about a group of special agents in Panama in 1989 who are looking at an upcoming invasion to Panama, and they found a source that had some inner connections to the Noriega administration," Carroll said. "They worked that source and were able to come up with some valuable information. From a reactive standpoint, the straw that broke the camel's back was the murder of Lt. Robert Paz and also the real poor treatment of the Curtis family, who witnessed Paz being shot."
Starring as Leroy Jethro Gibbs in more than 400 episodes of "NCIS" – which stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service – Harmon became attached to the real-life stories the episodes were based on.
"Leon and I would talk, as the technical advisor, he was my guy, so I would talk to him every day about the way to do certain things, always interested in his knowledge about that," Harmon said. "We became close friends because of that and always talked about, one day, if we have an opportunity to tell the true stories, we're gonna take a whack at doing that."
In 2023, Harmon and Carroll teamed up to release "Ghosts of Honolulu," a story about Pearl Harbor that went on to become a New York Times Bestseller.
In their follow-up book, Carroll pulled from his own experiences as an NCIS agent in Panama at the time.
"What I wanted to see were the actions of the agents themselves, but more importantly, how their families were affected by the work that they were doing," Carroll said. "This case, the people that were actually involved and the wives and children of the agents, we were able to talk to, so that was very important to me."
With two books completed in their series, are more on the horizon for Harmon and Carroll?
"There's a lot of stories. When we went into this project, I came up with five," Carroll said. "We're looking at how this one will do, and we'll make a decision whether to move on with whatever story we can come up with."
"Ghosts of Panama" is now available to buy in stores and online.