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It seemed highly unlikely that the American adventurers could have obtained the help of El Salvador, the beneficiary this year of about $500 million in federal aid, without the knowledge and consent of U.S. officials. Salvadoran President José Napoleón Duarte formally denied that the plane had taken off from San Salvador. But it has long been an open secret that the Salvadoran air base at Ilopango is a major supply point for the contras.
Any doubt that the plane had CIA connections was dispelled by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which confirmed late in the week that the aircraft had been used in a sophisticated 1984 sting operation designed to show that Sandinista officials were involved in the international drug trade. Hidden cameras installed in the plane by the CIA filmed a Nicaraguan Interior Ministry official loading sacks of cocaine into the cargo hold. Last March, President Reagan showed a still photo of the sting operation to a nationwide TV audience during speech advocating resumption of U.S. military aid to the contras.
Administration officials tried to counter charges that the U.S. had sponsored the Hasenfus flight by suggesting that he and the crew had been working for retired Army Major General John K. Singlaub, 65, the controversial head of a Phoenix-based group called the World Anti-Communist League, which raises money to support anti-Communist insurgents around the world. A frequent visitor to El Salvador, Singlaub is said to have helped the contras buy arms, but he denies any connection to the downed plane or its unfortunate crew.
In his second press conference, Hasenfus said he was recruited to work in Central America last June by Cooper, the plane's pilot, whom U.S. intelligence sources describe as a veteran of CIA operations and the leader of the airborne contra-aid group in El Salvador. Hasenfus said he and Cooper had both flown missions in Southeast Asia for Air America, a CIA-owned carrier, during the Viet Nam era. Since June, Hasenfus claimed, he had flown on ten missions, four from Aguacate, a contra base in Honduras, and six from Ilopango. He said he was paid $3,000 a month to work as a "kicker," the crewman who pushes cargo bales out of flying airplanes. Logbooks and other documents found in the wreckage of the C-123K showed that it had dropped some 130,000 lbs. of military supplies into Nicaragua.
Administration officials insisted that Hasenfus was singing under duress. Said Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams: "I'm confident they are telling him, 'If you say the things we want to hear, you'll be out in no time. If you don't cooperate, you'll be in prison for 30 years.' I hope no one will believe anything Hasenfus says until he can speak freely." Hasenfus was permitted to meet briefly with his wife Sally Jean, who traveled to Nicaragua from Wisconsin. At week's end two coffins containing the bodies of Cooper and Sawyer were unceremoniously dumped outside the U.S. embassy by Nicaraguans just after an anti-American demonstration. Embassy staffers denounced the Sandinista action as "ghoulish." The bodies were later flown back to the U.S.