United States Arms Sales Iran

In the almost four years since he was shot down over Nicaragua, helping to touch off what was to become known as the Iran-Contra scandal, life hasn't been easy for Eugene Hasenfus. He says he was out of work for a year, his three children suffer continuing harassment at school and he is more than $100,000 in debt. In April the family's house in Marinette, Wis., burned down. "I wish I could change history, but I can't," Hasenfus, 49, said here Monday. "I just have to live with it."

A jury in Miami was selected to decide a lawsuit that blames retired Air Force Major Gen. Richard V. Secord and a CIA-linked airline for the 1986 plane crash in Nicaragua that helped trigger the Iran-Contra probe. Cargo handler Eugene Hasenfus, who was captured and held for about three months after Nicaraguan troops shot down the plane, and the family of the plane's co-pilot, Wallace Sawyer Jr.

A small freighter that delivered U.S. guns to Nicaraguan rebels at a time when Congress had banned government aid to the contras later took part in an abortive attempt by Lt. Col. Oliver L. North to free American hostages in Lebanon with $1 million in ransom, government and maritime sources said Thursday.

Bantam Books is rushing the Tower Commission's report into print, and copies are to be available in bookstores next Monday. "We decided (to publish) because there seemed to be an urgency to its contents that matched the public's potential broad-based fascination with what it has to say," Stuart Applebaum, a vice president of the company, said Thursday.

Assistant Minority Leader Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) accused White House reporters Wednesday of doing a "sadistic little disservice to your country" by asking President Reagan questions about Iran for the sole purpose of "sticking it in his bazoo."

Former White House aide Oliver L. North charged Saturday that President Ronald Reagan knew the secret that lay at the heart of the Iran-Contra affair--the diversion of money from Iranian weapons sales to the Nicaraguan rebels--and lied about it to protect himself from disgrace. But North, in excerpts from his memoirs released on Saturday, offered no concrete evidence to support his charge and conceded that he never spoke to Reagan about the diversion.

Congressional Iran-Contra investigators discovered but kept secret a diversion to Israeli intelligence of more than $1 million in proceeds from the Ronald Reagan Administration's sale of arms to Iran, the New York Times Magazine reports. Today's issue of the magazine also reports, in an article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, that senators decided before the much-publicized Iran-Contra hearings that they would not "go after" President Reagan.

Former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was involved in an ill-starred 1982 plot to overthrow Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that also involved several people who would emerge three years later as key figures in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages affair, according to a book scheduled to be published next week. The previously secret plan had the approval of the late CIA Director William J.

The 1986 death in London of an Iranian arms merchant-turned-government informant, a death previously linked to a rare sudden onset of leukemia, is under investigation by the U.S. Customs Service at the request of federal prosecutors in New York, The Times has learned. "We've asked the Customs Service to review all the facts to see if there was foul play," Rudolph W. Giuliani, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in an interview.

Hours after President Reagan's first news conference defending arms sales to Iran last November, Secretary of State George P. Shultz's legal staff wrote a devastating point-by-point rebuttal that portrayed the scheme as a political and strategic debacle, newly released documents show. But the memo, written as a briefing paper to help Shultz change the President's mind on the issue, was intercepted by the secretary of state's legal adviser, Abraham D.