(2 of 4)
The ill-fated flight began at Ilopango military base, on the outskirts of San Salvador. The camouflaged Viet Nam-era C-123K air transport, with Panamanian registration HPF821, lifted off late Sunday morning with four crewmen aboard, droned south over the Pacific Ocean, then headed east near the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan border. About 60 miles inland, the plane veered northeast toward the Nicaraguan garrison town of San Carlos. According to Nicaraguan accounts, as the craft dropped down to 2,500 ft. and prepared to discharge its cargo, a 19-year-old Sandinista soldier, José Fernando Corales Aleman, raised his shoulder-held, Soviet-made ground-to-air missile launcher and fired. The lumbering aircraft shuddered when the rocket found its target, then spiraled earthward, trailing smoke. While the soldiers cheered and slapped one an other on the back, a parachute popped open and a lone figure floated down behind some hills several miles away.
The army patrol that found the wreckage in the rain-soaked jungle also discovered a propaganda windfall. Not only was the craft loaded with black-market arms--70 Soviet-made AK-47 rifles, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, rocket grenades, boots and other supplies--but two of the three dead crew members found inside were Americans. The pair were later identified as William J. Cooper, 61, of Reno, and Wallace Elaine Sawyer Jr., 41, of Magnolia, Ark. A day later searchers cornered Hasenfus hiding in an abandoned shack. Though he was armed with a pistol and a knife, he offered no resistance, and was marched off to a Sandinista base camp. The following day he was helicoptered to Managua, where, unshaven and haggard, he made a brief statement to the press: "My name is Gene Hasenfus. I come from Marinette, Wis. I was captured yesterday in southern Nicaragua. Thank you." He was then whisked away to detention and interrogated at El Chipote prison. Captain Ricardo Wheelock, chief of army intelligence, proudly called Hasenfus the Nicaraguans' first U.S. "prisoner of war."
The shooting down of the plane touched off a round of recriminations between Washington and Managua. "We now have Americans dying in Mr. Reagan's dirty war," said the Foreign Ministry's Bendaña. In Washington, Administration officials insisted that the arms drop was a "private" matter they knew nothing about. Said State Department Spokesman Charles Redman: "The U.S. Government had no connections with the flight, the plane, the crew or the cargo." Declared Kathy Pherson, spokeswoman for the CIA: "The guy doesn't work for us, and CIA is not involved. There are congressional restrictions on assistance to the contras, and we do not break those restrictions."
There was plenty of reason to believe, however, that U.S. officials were dissembling. Cooper carried an identification card issued by Southern Air Transport, a Miami-based corporation once owned by the CIA and known still to have links to the agency. The firm denied involvement in the attempted arms delivery, although it admitted once employing Cooper as a pilot. Hasenfus and Sawyer held ID cards issued by the Salvadoran army that identified them as military advisers.