Crew of Ill-Fated Plane Part of Fraternity of Ex-CIA Fliers : 3 Lived, Flew, Crashed in Shadow World

Bill Cooper was down on his luck.

For more than 40 years he had been a pilot in the thick of the action--flying combat missions in Korea, ramrodding covert flight operations in Vietnam for the CIA and making risky civilian supply drops in Lebanon. He had crashed into the Pacific and had been kidnaped in Beirut.

Now, in 1984, he was reduced to haunting the airfields of northern Nevada, scrabbling for one-shot jobs as a co-pilot on short-haul freight flights.

He had been retired by his last employer, Trans-Mediterranean Airlines, when he turned 60. He had sent out dozens of resumes, made scores of telephone calls to buddies. Out of work, with his house in foreclosure and his second wife gone, he couldn’t find another permanent flying job.

‘The Secret Soldiers’

Then came the call he must have hoped for, from someone in the scattered fraternity of free-lance pilots and private-contract airlines that make up what a friend called “the secret soldiers of the Cold War.” Bill Cooper was invited to fly arms and ammunition to the rebels fighting Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista regime.

From that telephone call, and the calls that Cooper soon made to recruit others in the fraternity, would grow a chain of events that last week ended in anguish for families in Nevada, southern Arkansas and northern Wisconsin, a chain that laid bare the gritty realities that underlie the Reagan Administration’s covert maneuvering against the Sandinistas.

Cooper’s arms-laden cargo plane was shot down last Sunday in the jungles of Nicaragua, killing him, his co-pilot and leaving a third crew member alive in the hands of Sandinista soldiers.

Surprising Details

In the week since the crash, interviews with the three men’s friends and family members, government officials, intelligence sources, academic experts and others have yielded surprising details of the Administration’s secret activities on the contras’ behalf--and of the lives of the anonymous gun bearers who toiled and died last week in yet another of the nation’s secret wars.

“These are the men who fly, not just for the money or for the adventure but for causes they believe in, for what they consider good causes,” said University of Georgia Prof. William Leary, who interviewed Cooper and other members of the fraternity for a book on the CIA’s past covert air operations.

“They get very angry if you call them soldiers of fortune,” Leary said. “They are people who believe in what they are doing.”

Web of Private Aid

Two years ago, after an outraged Congress banned further military aid to the contras, a group of White House and Administration officials, operating with President Reagan’s blessings, knit together a web of private military and financial assistance that would sidestep the legal restrictions imposed by Congress and keep the contras fighting while Reagan campaigned in the United States for resumption of direct aid.

While taking care that no U.S. government funds were directly involved and that the CIA was kept at arms’ length, Reagan, Vice President George Bush and other officials made it clear, both to conservative donors at home and allied governments abroad, that they hoped others would aid the contras where Congress did not. And, several U.S. officials and rebel sources said, Reagan and Bush detailed aides to help the private aid network get organized--with instructions to insulate the Administration from any direct responsibility for its operations.

A National Security Council aide, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, for example, put rebel officials in touch with Americans who could help get money and arms. U.S. officials and rebel sources have said North also put the contras in contact with Richard Secord, a retired air force general experienced in arms sales and supply lines. Secord, among other things, later arranged for the purchase of several small airplanes for the contras’ air force, according to sales documents.

In White House offices, it was an exercise in realpolitik, a kind of bloodless string-pulling.

But for William J. Cooper, co-pilot Wallace B. Sawyer Jr., and Eugene Hasenfus--the “cargo kicker” who survived in part because he had had the foresight to stop by his brother’s house near Oshkosh, Wis., a little earlier and borrow a parachute--the reality was quite different.

“He was proud of what he did,” says Cooper’s daughter, Mitzi Cooper Binder, who insisted in an interview late last week that her father was not a mercenary. “A lot of people say they believe in something, but how many of them would die for it? He saw the threat. Communism was real to him. A lot of Americans have a hard time dealing with that. But my dad believed. He really believed.”

“It was with the right side. He wouldn’t fight for just anyone,” added his first wife, Windy Cooper.

Others in Reno give another reason why Cooper, at an age when he might have been looking toward retirement, was so anxious for another full-time flying assignment.

“It was just a way for him to get back in the game, to be with the guys,” said one friend who had flown with him on covert missions for the CIA in Southeast Asia.

The friend described the almost irresistible pull of the secret world of men who once flew for the CIA, “the Company,” as it is known to insiders. He said Cooper, like himself, had “trouble identifying with a lot of people” who were not part of the club. “There is no social business--except with ex-Company guys. . . . That was a fraternity.

‘We Could Talk’

“He and I, we could talk, we could identify with each other.”

They did not talk directly about Cooper’s specific assignment; the unwritten rules prohibited that.

“He never told me anything about it, and I didn’t ask. I’ve been around long enough to know not to ask,” said another friend from the old days.

One of the friends, both of whom talked on the condition they not be identified, had worked, in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam with Cooper for Air America--the CIA-owned airline that operated across Southeast Asia from the 1960s until it went out of business in 1975.

“What he did in Central America was the same thing he did in Southeast Asia,” the second friend said.

CIA Was ‘Customer’

Veterans of Air America never referred directly to the CIA in those days. Rather, they would make vague references to “the customer”--the one that paid them and gave them their missions.

Cooper’s friends agreed that he was an expert pilot, especially skilled at flying the bulky twin-engine C-123 cargo plane, a craft of Vietnam-era vintage. It was a C-123 that crashed in Nicaragua.

“If he had some (clear) place to land, he might have made it,” one friend said. “But those trees, there’s no surviving. They just eat up your airplane.

”. . . But Coop went out just the way he would have wanted to go--a blaze of glory,” he added.

From the beginning, flying was Cooper’s life. As a present for his ninth birthday, his mother gave him an hourlong flight in an airplane. Seven years later, when World War II began, he enlisted in the Navy at age 16, winning medals as a gunner aboard fighters in the Pacific and later as a fighter pilot, relatives said.

Back to Active Service

After the war, he returned to Reno, where his mother lived, enrolled in the University of Nevada, majored in physical education and played on the university basketball team. But he was quick to drop out of school when the Navy called him back to active service and sent him to Korea.

That began a pattern that continued throughout his life. He was gone far more than he was home. After months at a time overseas, he would call to say he would be “home on Saturday.” And last August, when he returned from Central America for his daughter Joni’s wedding, he arrived at the Methodist church just in time to give her away.

His three daughters often spent summers with him in Southeast Asia. They knew he was a pilot, but it wasn’t until they were adults that they knew he was flying for the CIA. They then joked with him that he was a James Bond, a thought that was funny to them because he seemed too shy and easygoing.

The Central American assignment came after what a friend described as a troubling two years for Cooper. In about 1983, he borrowed money--$50,000, according to one friend--to help his second wife, Betty, open a business. It was a combination fish-and-chips and Chinese food restaurant but it did poorly. Betty, whom he had met in Hong Kong during the 1960s, was 20 years his junior and had worked as a cocktail waitress in a Reno casino.

Home Foreclosed

In 1984, they were divorced, and she has since married a casino executive.

About the time of his second divorce, Cooper lost a home in Reno to foreclosure. And when Trans-Mediterranean Airlines ran into financial problems because of the civil war in Lebanon, where the company was based, he lost several thousand dollars in retirement pay.

He spent much of the year after his second divorce with his daughter, Joni, and hanging around with his buddies at the airfield in Reno.

Then, finally, came the call enlisting him for duty in Central America. Precisely who called remains a mystery, but Cooper’s role was clearly more than just that of a pilot--he was also recruiting others. Friends said he asked several times about other men, trying to check on their backgrounds and reliability.

Soon he contacted Gene Hasenfus.

Eugene Hasenfus, while not a pilot, was one of Cooper’s friends--and a member of the fraternity. He, too, had worked for Air America in Southeast Asia.

After Hasenfus left the Marines in 1965--he served five years as an air delivery specialist, meaning that he was an expert in rigging parachutes and positioning cargo for supply drops--he accepted a position doing the same type of work for the CIA’s company.

“His dad said he was making more money than the law would allow,” I.W. Stephenson, a family friend, recalled last week.

After returning from Southeast Asia, Hasenfus had settled into the routine of life in northern Wisconsin. He had a working wife and three children, aged 12, 10 and 6, a job as a steel erector on construction projects, and a comfortable brick house beneath tall trees at the end of a secluded lane on the shore of Green Bay.

Autumn mornings were sometimes spent hunting for deer in the thick woods, summer evenings fishing in a nearby lake. Sunday afternoons were for drinking beer at The Stein, the local tavern, and rooting for the Green Bay Packers.

‘Wouldn’t Do the Work’

He hadn’t done too well in high school. “School wasn’t his cup of tea,” recalled his high school football coach, William J. Jones, and he graduated “near the bottom” of his class. “He just wouldn’t do the work. I remember one time I had to talk to him because it looked like he might not be able to graduate.”

A high school pal, Larry Roetzer, recalled that he “liked to drink beer, get in fights and chase women--like everybody else.”

And younger men he worked with on construction jobs still called him “The Killer” and saw him as a man with a taste for danger and adventure.

“He would challenge things most people wouldn’t challenge,” one co-worker, John Ruleau, said. “Gene . . . he was very set in his ways. He was more aggressive than most people as far as taking chances.”

As a steelworker, Hasenfus was regularly required to do highly dangerous work--standing on beams several stories up as he set steel girders. And he was known among fellow workers to take shortcuts occasionally when it came to safety.

But Hasenfus’ brother, William, said those days soon passed.

‘He Settled Down’

“He had his gung-ho days when he was single, but not now. He settled down and became a family man. He even quit jumping (parachuting). His most exciting activity was hunting and fishing.”

Another brother, Dennis, said Gene didn’t go looking for trouble.

“He wasn’t a kid anymore,” he said. “He is 45 years old and he had become a family man.”

Nonetheless, Hasenfus was intensely proud of his service with the CIA’s Air America. One of his old buddies from that period, former Green Beret Bill Buzard, who flew to Nicaragua with Hasenfus’ wife last week after the crash, actually lived in Menominee, Mich., just across the river from Marinette, Wis. They used to get invitations to Air America reunions.

“They were intensely proud of it and felt they were able to do a lot more for their country” than they had been able to do in the military, Buzard’s ex-wife Dawn recalled last week. “They got a lot of guys out of the jungle. They could get the job done the way they wanted. They could do a lot of things they weren’t allowed to do in the Army.”

“These guys are like comrades,” she said.

Last spring, Gene Hasenfus’ apparently settled life seemed to begin changing.

A fellow steelworker, Richard Payette, said he was “getting more high-strung.”

Weeks Away From Home

“I think he was having a little problem at home, . . . family problems or money problems,” Payette said. “He mentioned it one day--it was a little of both.”

Other family members deny any domestic problems, but his work often forced him to spend weeks at a time away from his family, living in motels on out-of-state jobs. Last January he was laid off by the construction company that had employed him for 10 years. “Lack of work,” the company said.

It apparently was several months ago that he got the call from Cooper, his old friend from their Air America days. Soon he headed for Florida, telling family members that he was going to work for an air cargo company.

Hasenfus had been making good money--$18.75 an hour as a foreman--when he was laid off.

As it turned out, the “air cargo job” paid just as well--$3,000 a month, plus expenses, Hasenfus said last week.

‘Open-Ended Kind of Job’

His relatives assumed the job involved packing and unpacking air freight.

“He didn’t act like the work he was doing was dangerous or anything,” said brother Dennis. “Deer season is coming up next month, and he was definitely planning on being around for that. It seemed like it was an open-ended kind of job; he could take a week off when he wanted to.”

After the crash and his capture in Nicaragua, Hasenfus, who was put on display by his captors for a press conference, said his employer was a company named Corporate Air Services.

The mailing address for a company using this name turned out to be the same as that of another firm, Southern Air Transport, that once was owned by the CIA. The company now has nothing to do with the agency, its executives insist.

What Southern Air Transport officials have acknowledged is that until last year, one of their pilots was a 1968 graduate of the Air Force Academy named Buz Sawyer.

Wallace Blaine Sawyer Jr., 42, of Magnolia, Ark., had flown cargo missions for the Air Force in Thailand and loved flying, but he was the kind of man who grew uncomfortable with the rigid procedures and paper work of the military, and in 1974 he resigned his commission.

After leaving the service, he worked as a contract pilot operating in all parts of the world.

“He hated the bureaucracy and red tape. He didn’t like anything pompous or showy,” said Bill F. Jennings, an Arkansas lawyer and longtime friend, using Sawyer’s childhood nickname. “Gus was very plain, ordinary and quiet.”

Growing up in Magnolia, a college town of 11,000 in southern Arkansas, Sawyer was known best for his quiet determination and for an interest in planes that he had demonstrated from childhood.

Jennings said that he, Sawyer and their friends spent a lot of time showing off model airplanes and playing in each other’s yards.

‘He Got the Work Done’

“Growing up in Magnolia was great in those days,” Jennings said.

In high school, Sawyer surprised many of his friends with his athletic prowess.

“It’s amazing because if you saw Gus on the street, you wouldn’t think he was so coordinated. He walked kind of slow and moved kind of slow. Some people play sports to look good in shorts. Gus didn’t have style but he got the work done. If there was one thing about Gus, he got the work done.”

“It was a good town, a friendly place,” Jennings said of Magnolia. And it was the place to which Sawyer returned between his flying jobs overseas. He lived in a comfortable, tree-shaded brick house in the nicer part of town with his second wife, a native of Thailand, and their 3-year-old son.

Every Sunday that he was home, he would attend the Methodist church on Main Street. And he would often spend evenings in the backyard of his parents’ home on a quiet street in Magnolia.

There, his 61-year-old father, a silver-haired retired oil company executive, recalls, conversation sometimes turned to the CIA.

‘No, . . . Not Involved’

“I’d ask him the same question maybe once or twice every year: ‘Are you involved with the CIA?’ And he would say, ‘No, I’m not involved.’ ”

The father said he would ask because he knew that his son was flying in the hot spots of the world, including Angola. “He said he was flying diesel fuel in Angola, and I believed him.”

But, he said, even if his son knowingly was involved with the CIA in the ill-fated Nicaraguan mission, “we think he was doing the right thing. He didn’t tell us about it, but we think it was right.

“He was opposed to communism and to the communists’ getting a foothold in the United States. He had a strong dislike for the growing Soviet influence in the world.”

To his friend Jennings, Sawyer was not an adventurous or impulsive person--not a soldier of fortune by temperament. “He was quiet and gentle, tight-lipped, with a wry sense of humor. People tell me I’m laid-back, but Gus was even more so. He was not a Rambo. He would have laughed himself silly at Rambo.

“But if you needed a job done, he would be the person you’d give it to. He would have walked into a lion’s den if that’s what the job called for.”

Exactly how Buz Sawyer--the nickname comes from the former comic strip about daring pilot “Buzz Sawyer”--joined forces with Cooper and Hasenfus remains unclear. But, several sources suggest, it probably came through the fraternity of ex-CIA pilots. And it probably happened in Miami; more precisely, in a corner of Miami International Airport known as “Corrosion Corner” for all the aging airplanes parked in a sprawling system of aviation lots.

It is there that Southern Air Transport has its headquarters, in a long, boxy building with gray metal siding and a peaked roof, over which a large American flag flutters. Next to it is an animal import-export center operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When the breeze comes from the east, as it often does, the smell of manure from quarantined livestock wafts across the Tarmac where Southern Air parks its planes, the same Tarmac where Bill Cooper parked the camouflaged C-123 on several occasions when he flew it to Miami for maintenance.

Records show that Southern Air paid landing, parking and weighing fees for the plane, and that it issued Cooper a company identification card. Company officials deny owning the airplane or having any connection with its Central American mission. They also deny having any connection with something called Corporate Air, which listed itself as having the same address.

Corporate Air, for which Gene Hasenfus said he worked, was not registered with the airport, the state of Florida or the FAA.

Such tangled skeins are not unusual for Corrosion Corner. Nicaraguan rebels have their main Miami headquarters in a modern office complex just across NW 36th Street from Southern Air. Officials of the United Nicaraguan Opposition, the rebel umbrella organization, say that is a coincidence.

Long before Bill Cooper, Buz Sawyer and Gene Hasenfus took off on their last mission in the camouflaged C-123 that once belonged to the Air Force, the informal fraternity to which they belonged had planned to hold a reunion in Reno next weekend.

It was to be a gathering of what they often referred to as “contract pilots,” but most had done their contracting with firms like Air America and Southern Air Transport. Said William Leary, the professor who wrote the book, “Perilous Missions,” about such pilots: “These are people who believe in what they are doing. They are a special breed.”

Bill Cooper will be in Reno in time for the reunion: His body was being flown home from Nicaragua on Friday.

Gaylord Shaw reported from Washington and Dan Morain reported from Reno, Nev. Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Maura Dolan, David Treadwell, Doyle McManus, Bill Curry and Bill Long.