Some Americans who volunteer to fight in foreign wars are remembered as heroes. Many others are lucky to be remembered at all. Still others, like Eugene Hasenfus, hope to be forgotten.
I remember Hasenfus well. As an intrepid journalist in the 1980s, I covered the wars in Central America as a stringer for the Village Voice and as a freelance photographer for TIME, Life, and U.S. News and World Report. Those were heady days for so many of us Americans — soldiers, aid workers, religious missionaries, diplomats — who became obsessed with the sprawling insurgent wars in the region. Those battles soon enough included then-President Reagan, who pledged to stop the spread of “Soviet-style Communism” in the Central America.
The tiny region soon became magnified in importance, and Americans often seemed like foreign invaders and occupiers, intent on pursuing agendas all their own.
Still, not all of us were paid mercenaries like Hasenfus. Instead, we were unwilling to inject ourselves directly into battle, whatever the bloody cost.
As mercenaries go, Hasenfus was exceedingly naive, even hapless.
Born in a small, rural Midwestern town, the 41-year-old ex-Marine achieved global notoriety when a C-123 military cargo plane aiding the counterrevolutionary insurgents in Nicaragua was shot down by the Sandinista government, nearly derailing U.S. policy in Central America.
Hasenfus was aboard that plane, along with three others. A longtime CIA contract employee recruited for the mission by a shadowy network of former military intelligence operatives with ties to the Reagan White House, he was the sole survivor of the crash, which killed the two American pilots and a Nicaraguan radio operator.
The incident — and Hasenfus’ role — was controversial because it came at the height of the Reagan administration’s high-profile campaign to dislodge the first radical Marxist movement to seize power in the Western hemisphere since Castro’s Cuban revolution.
Officially, the United States was no longer aiding the Nicaraguan rebels, known as the Contras, because the U.S. Congress had cut off all “covert” military aid to them two years earlier.
Lieutenant Col. Oliver North testifies during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987.
But secretly, a White House National Security Council staffer, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, had organized a “private” re-supply operation to aid the Contras through a network of former CIA operatives led by Richard Secord, a retired U.S. Air Force major general.
Hasenfus, no fighter himself, had agreed to sign on as a “cargo kicker” whose sole mission was to stand in the back of the C-123 supply plane and push supplies out an open hatch when ordered to do so by the plane’s pilot.
But on October 5, 1986, Sandinista troops armed with anti-aircraft missiles shot down his plane.
Hasenfus managed to parachute to safety, but he was captured by a government patrol a day later as he slept in a makeshift hammock.
The Sandinistas paraded Hasenfus before the news media and accused the Reagan administration of having bankrolled and directed the operation, a charge the administration denied.
But eventually, when the truth spilled out, it caused a national scandal. North, while at NSC, had funded the operation with proceeds collected from the illicit sale of arms to Iran to free American hostages held there.
And North, it turned out, was also operating with the concurrence of his boss, U.S. National Security Advisor John Poindexter, who was forced to resign, along with the top officials.
But few people believed it was a “rogue” NSC operation. As a special Senate investigation got underway, there was talk of a high-level cover-up that included Reagan as well as his then–vice president George H.W. Bush.
Hasenfus himself claimed that the operation was sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.S. government — a charge he would later recant. Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh spent months gathering evidence that Reagan and Bush were criminally culpable for bypassing Congress and lying to investigators about what they knew and had approved.
In the end, Reagan and Bush survived. Bush, of course, went on to inherit the presidency.
And some of the key players like North, who became a conservative folk hero, went on to build new careers. Even those who received criminal convictions, in some cases for perjury, were eventually pardoned.
Hasenfus from the beginning was considered something of a laughingstock, a loyal foot-soldier and hapless pawn of people and forces much larger than himself.
U.S. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), who was a fierce critic of Reagan’s Central America policy, flew to Managua to secure Hasenfus’ release. The Sandinistas, having obtained an enormous publicity advantage from his capture, were happy to pardon and release him on “humanitarian” grounds.
Hasenfus returned to his hometown of Marinette, Wisconsin, where townsfolk greeted him with confusion and amusement. Was he a patriot or a fool? Some of his longtime friends abandoned him.
A few did consider him a patriot.
But he was largely unemployable. No one in the U.S. government or even the private military contractor sector would touch him again. He survived on low-wage jobs and barely managed to scrape by.
In 1987, Hasenfus sued General Secord and 300 of his associates for fraud, saying he’d never been paid for his “patriotic” work as they’d agreed. He also charged that the Contra re-supply planes had been poorly maintained and lacked proper navigational equipment.
But Hasenfus crossed a line. His story is a cautionary tale for those who insist on insinuating themselves into foreign wars not their own.
In 1990, a court ruled that Secord had employed Hasenfus but awarded him no money. In the end, Hasenfus never saw a dime.
His notoriety survived, however. In 1988, Eclipse Enterprises issued a series of satirical trading cards collections, including one depicting the leading personalities of the “Iran-Contra affair.” Hasenfus was on one of the cards.
A website noted: “It will soon be possible to trade a Charles Keating for a Eugene Hasenfus.”
But things continued downhill for Hasenfus. He and his wife divorced, and he lost custody of his son. In 2000, he was arrested by Wisconsin police for indecent exposure. It was the first of his several arrests for indecent exposure.
Since then, Hasenfus has retreated into obscurity, his whereabouts unknown.
I actually knew about the Hasenfus operation. As a stringer I had tagged along with some U.S. military advisors who were helping to direct anti-Sandinista activities from an Air Force base in neighboring El Salvador. I even snapped a few photos of the resupply planes that were published in US News and World Report in 1985, months before Hasenfus was shot down.
Many of my friends and colleagues, who were aware of my clandestine reporting activities, thought I was taking too many risks. Some feared for my life.
Unlike Hasenfus, I never wore a parachute.
But Hasenfus crossed a line. His story is a cautionary tale for those who insist on insinuating themselves into foreign wars not their own.
Hasenfus thought he was doing the right thing for himself and his country. Maybe he was, but powerful people on all sides exploited, then abandoned, him.
He escaped with his life but ended up losing it all.
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