Friend of Hasenfus : CIA Airline Veteran Flew for Contras, Missed Fatal Sortie

When Bill Cooper telephoned last June, Dan Gamelin didn’t hesitate. A month later, the San Diego County man was flying missions over Central America, supplying weapons to contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government.

“He just called, pretty much out of the blue, and asked if I wanted to go to work,” recalled Gamelin, a brawny, blue-eyed welder who lives in this middle-class beachfront community north of San Diego.

Few details were discussed during that initial telephone conversation, Gamelin said, but he knew the job would be dangerous. Above all else, Gamelin trusted William J. Cooper, even though he hadn’t spoken to the Reno pilot for two years and hadn’t worked with him in more than a decade. Such were the bonds they and others forged during the Vietnam War while flying together in high-risk missions throughout Southeast Asia.

“When Bill Cooper said, ‘We need you,”’ Gamelin explained, “you didn’t sit there and question it.”

Gamelin said he would take the job.

A month and a few telephone calls later, the two men and Eugene Hasenfus, another colleague from Vietnam days, met at Miami International Airport. Soon, the three aging warriors were on their way to El Salvador, embarking on a mission that would end on Oct. 5, when Nicaraguan troops shot down a cargo plane carrying arms for anti-Sandinista contra rebels. Cooper, the 62-year-old pilot of the aircraft, was among the three men killed. Hasenfus, 45, who was captured when he parachuted to safety, remains a prisoner in Nicaragua.

(Hasenfus was convicted Saturday of supplying arms to contra rebels and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment by a Nicaraguan court.)

Gamelin says he could easily have been aboard that final flight. However, he acknowledges participating in the contra supply operation for four months and working with Cooper and Hasenfus on an unspecified number of missions throughout Central America. The three men, all ex-employees of Air America, the former CIA-owned airline, apparently were at the core of a network of fliers who operated the covert supply operation.

Gamelin, whose name was found on documents aboard the aircraft wreckage and whose home telephone number was among those dialed from a San Salvador safe house used during the operation, agreed to talk generally about the mysterious supply program. But many details--including the origins of its financial support--still remain murky about the operation, which, according to recovered documents made public by Nicaraguan officials, involved more than 70 flights between December, 1985, and the final mission last month.

Gamelin says he has agreed to talk about the missions only to elicit support for a fund-raising drive, called the Eugene Hasenfus Support Fund, that he and one other Air America colleague have set up in the Pacific Savings Bank in Carlsbad. He said the proceeds are to be used to assist Hasenfus’ wife and three children, and, if there is any surplus, the family of Wallace Blaine (Buzz) Sawyer Jr., the co-pilot from Arkansas who was also killed in the crash.

“Gene’s family needs the help; they’ve got to pay bills,” said Gamelin, who spoke at his comfortable home here in a den decorated with model World War II-era bombers and a color photograph of an airborne C-123 cargo plane similar to the one shot down on Oct. 5. “I sometimes wish I could trade places with Gene in the slammer down there for a while, but I can’t.”

Despite reports of potential CIA involvement in the contra supply operation, Gamelin says he saw no evidence of any official U.S. cooperation. He says Cooper did the hiring and recruiting. Pressing Cooper for more details about the operation’s backers would have violated the group’s unwritten code, he says, adding that there was, however, a kind of unspecified understanding.

“I think they (U.S. officials) knew what we were doing, and naturally condoned what we were doing. I think a lot of people out there want to fight these Communists, especially when they hit our continent,” said Gamelin, a bespectacled Midwesterner whose mild manner belies his many brushes with danger. “Bill Cooper was the boss . . . Gene (Hasenfus) and I, we were just the coolies.”

The contra air supply operation, Gamelin insists, was ill-equipped and under-funded from the outset. All hands were required to pitch in to assist on fueling and loading the aircraft, he says. Airborne navigational gear was outdated, he says, and the contra fighters on the ground lacked the equipment and training to correctly prepare “drop zones” where supplies were to be delivered via parachute. Consequently, he said, relatively dangerous daylight flights were substituted for the more ideal nighttime missions. Captured documents show missions from air bases in El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica, with occasional resupply trips to the United States.

“We had 30-year-old Korean War (era) equipment and they (the Sandinistas) had the latest Soviet equipment,” said Gamelin, grinning at reports of a super-sophisticated spy operation. “We ran this on a shoestring . . . That’s why Cooper wanted to get people who had experience, who knew what they were doing . . . If we did have all the money people say we had, we wouldn’t have been banged out of the sky . . . Sometimes they didn’t have money to pay us. There was not all this money coming in, secret money.”

Both Gamelin and Hasenfus had extensive experience as “kickers”--cargo handlers--during their service with Air America. In Southeast Asia and in Central America, their duty was identical: to prepare loads of up to five tons of ammunition, food and other supplies for airborne deliveries that often would be made while experiencing severe turbulence and facing enemy fire. It is a difficult, hazardous task that requires technical expertise, precise timing and faith in your colleagues’ abilities, according to the fliers.

“It’s like a ballet, but a ballet on a roller coaster--and a ballet three feet from a 1,200-foot drop,” said Miles Lechtman, an ex-Air America cargo specialist who is a friend and Carlsbad neighbor of Gamelin.

With congressional restrictions barring direct U.S. government or military aid, the sponsors of the secret operation apparently decided that the former Air America fliers represented the best available pool of talent--they were well-trained, trustworthy and tight-lipped. “If I were running this kind of operation and didn’t have access to military personnel, they’d be the kind of people I would want,” said William M. Leary, a professor of history at the University of Georgia who has studied CIA air operations in Southeast Asia.

The Minnesota-born Gamelin, 45, a former Green Beret who saw action in Vietnam, said he joined Air America in 1968, returning to the United States in 1973 with his Laotian wife. Back home, Gamelin took up welding and, in 1976, settled in California. He has two children, 12 and 14.

Like other Air America alumni, Gamelin acknowledges an occasional restlessness about his current, comparatively sedentary existence. He concedes a periodic desire for the travel, danger and friendship of the old days in Southeast Asia. The camaraderie of Air America veterans is legendary; the ex-fliers keep in close touch through annual reunions and other contacts.

“Maybe we were a little crazy,” Gamelin says of himself and his Air America co-workers. “I think the people who do these kinds of things are by nature a little adventurous. I don’t think that ever gets out of your system . . . Obviously, you don’t find too many CPAs doing this kind of thing . . . We were willing to stick up and fight for what we believed in.”

So when Bill Cooper called last June, Gamelin was ready. At Cooper’s request, he says, he also telephoned Hasenfus at his home in Wisconsin. Hasenfus, out of work and experiencing financial problems, expressed interest in the $3,000 a month job, Gamelin said. The reunion in Miami last July quickly brought back old times.

“Gene had put on a little weight but he had that same old smile, that smile that made you feel good,” Gamelin recalled. “When we run into our old (Air America) buddies, we seem to pick up where we left off.”

The mens’ motivations varied. For Hasenfus, an ex-Marine, the money was important.

“He needed a job pretty badly,” Gamelin said. “I don’t think I ever heard Gene say anything about politics. He is just a guy who has a lot of common sense and was good at his job . . . Gene wouldn’t get into the books and read up on the situation as I would.”

Personally, Gamelin says, he himself could have earned more as a welder. Instead, he says he was motivated by his dislike of Communism and his belief that the operation was morally correct--as well as his admitted desire for the under-fire camaraderie of the old days.

“I don’t think anybody can understand the bond between people like us, because they’ve never worked in a situation like this . . . and you can’t explain it. You just can’t. It’s just like trying to explain being on one of those planes. You can’t.”

Other Air America veterans were apparently approached and said they couldn’t make it.

“I just didn’t want to put my family through it,” said Lechtman, who says he declined to participate in the operation.

Mercenaries, soldiers of fortune--these are phrases sometimes used to describe participants in the contra supply operation, but Gamelin and others insist that the stereotype is untrue. “These aren’t the kind of people you see wearing their fatigues and ‘I Hate the Commies’ T-shirts at soldier-of-fortune conventions,” noted Leary, the Georgia professor who has studied CIA air operations. “People like Dan Gamelin have seen action and, indeed, faced grave danger.”

Asked how he felt about those who asserted that the contra supply operation was providing weapons to kill innocent Nicaraguan civilians, Gamelin responded that the Nicaraguan regime also used violence. “We felt like we were doing the right thing,” he said.

Gamelin declined to provide many details about his stint in Central America, but he did say that much of the mission’s time was spent ensuring that basic tasks, such as the loading of the aircraft, were performed correctly. He and Hasenfus shared a room in a San Salvador hotel, he said. Both worked shifts of about one month and then returned home for 10 days or so on breaks.

“I think everybody was a little disillusioned with the equipment that they had, but at the same time, we knew that Cooper was trying to do the best that he could . . . He probably did the work of four people . . . He was trying to do it all, being a pilot, loading equipment, trying to save money . . . He was really preoccupied . . . I think the last thing he ever thought was that he would be shot down.”

Gamelin would not comment on any ground contacts in Central America, but he denied that the U.S. embassy provided any assistance. “I’m sure they (embassy officials) had access to a lot of information that would have helped us,” he said.

After a break back home in Carlsbad, Gamelin said, he returned to San Salvador on Oct. 5th--arriving about one hour after the departure of the ill-fated cargo plane. “Actually, Cooper called me up a few days before and said ‘Get down here yesterday,’ ” Gamelin recalled, adding that he couldn’t rearrange his return flight--luckily for him, as it turned out.

Although it was evident that something was wrong when the Oct. 5th mission didn’t return, Gamelin says it was unclear whether the flight had been shot down until someone heard a report on the following day. “I think they heard it on Cuban radio,” Gamelin said. “We heard a parachute was seen.”

Soon, the bad news became known: Cooper, Sawyer and a Nicaragua crewman had been killed; Hasenfus was a prisoner. Gamelin said he spent the next few days attempting to clean out personal items from the hotel room and safe houses in El Salvador, making telephone calls to families back home, and dodging an increasingly curious press corps before he returned to California on Oct. 13. Complicating matters was the earthquake that struck San Salvador on Oct. 10.

“I hope something good comes out of all this,” says Gamelin. “I’d just like to see old Eugene get out quick and get back to his family.” He pauses, then adds: “Like I told ‘Buzz’ Sawyer once, ‘Nobody ever said it would be easy.’ ”