SMUGGLER: Barry Seal

Less than a month after Seal's funeral, on March 16, 1986, President Ronald Reagan showed one of the photos Seal had taken of Pablo Escobar and Nicaraguan government official Federico Vaughan loading cocaine onto Seal's C-123 cargo plane, The Fat Lady.

"I know every American parent concerned about the drug problem will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking," Reagan said. "This picture, secretly taken at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Federico Vaughan, a top aide to one of the nine commandantes who rule Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics bound for the United States."

Seven months later, on October 5, a Sandinista shoulder-fired anti-aircraft rocket shot down Barry Seal's old C-123, The Fat Lady, over Nicaragua. The two American pilots, Wallace Sawyer Jr. and William Cooper, died in the crash, along with a Nicaraguan man. The American cargo handler, Eugene Hasenfus, parachuted out and was captured by Nicaraguan soldiers.

The crashed plane was loaded with weapons for the Contras.

Hasenfus told his captors he was on a mission for the CIA and that his agency contact was Max Gomez, the cover name for Felix Rodriguez, the man Oliver North had sent to El Salvador to oversee Contra resupply operations.

During the Vietnam War, Hasenfus, a former Marine, had worked for the CIA front company Air America in Southeast Asia. At the time Nicaraguan troops shot down The Fat Lady, pilots Sawyer and Cooper were working for Southern Air Transport, a shadowy air cargo service once owned by the CIA, that was still being used by Oliver North and the National Security Council to smuggle weapons to moderate elements inside Iran in exchange for their help in getting American hostages released in Lebanon.

It was the start of the Iran-Contra scandal.