The journalists had traveled all day -- by vehicle across Costa Rica, then by canoe up the San Juan River -- to reach a guerrilla outpost called La Penca on the Nicaraguan side of the border. It was May 30, 1984, and the former Sandinista hero turned Contra rebel commander Eden Pastora had called a press conference in the jungle. The reporters arrived after dark. Pastora wanted to wait until morning, but the questions started anyway, and soon the camera crews had crowded around a chest-high table in the main room of a wooden hut on stilts. Among them was a man carrying a stolen Danish passport in the name of Per Anker Hansen. He guarded his aluminum camera case with unusual zeal, wrapping the unwieldy box in plastic. At some point he placed it under the table. Then news footage captured him gesturing at his camera as if it had malfunctioned, and he left the room. Seconds later, the hut exploded.
The bomb ripped through the confined space of the hut, killing seven people and seriously wounding a dozen more. Among the dead were American journalist Linda Frazier, Costa Rican cameraman Jorge Quiros, and his assistant Evelio Sequeira, along with four of Pastora's fighters. Pastora himself, the presumed target, survived with serious injuries to both legs. The blast left the wounded crying out for help in the jungle darkness, far from any hospital or rescue service. 'Hansen,' unhurt by the explosion, was evacuated to San Jose with the other victims and promptly vanished. The attack became one of the most notorious violations of press neutrality during the Central American conflicts of the 1980s, later compared to the 2001 assassination of Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud by Al-Qaeda operatives posing as journalists.
Tony Avirgan, an American journalist wounded in the blast, and his wife Martha Honey spent years investigating the bombing and concluded that the CIA was responsible. In 1986, the Christic Institute filed a twenty-four-million-dollar lawsuit on their behalf against figures linked to Oliver North's covert operations network, including Richard Secord, Albert Hakim, and Thomas Clines. The case was dismissed, and the Christic Institute was ordered to pay one million dollars in sanctions. Meanwhile, a Costa Rican magistrate in 1990 accused the CIA of orchestrating the attack through intermediaries and charged Cuban-American CIA asset Felipe Vidal and American rancher John Hull with murder. Neither was successfully prosecuted. For years, the bombing seemed to fit neatly into the narrative of CIA malfeasance in Central America -- a rogue agency eliminating an inconvenient Contra leader who refused to take orders.
In 1993, the identity of 'Per Anker Hansen' was revealed. He was not a CIA operative but an Argentine leftist named Vital Roberto Gaguine, who had died in 1989 during a guerrilla attack on a military base in Argentina. The revelation upended the prevailing theory. Then, in 2009, Swedish journalist Peter Torbiornsson came forward with a confession that reshaped the story entirely. Torbiornsson admitted that at the time of the bombing he had sympathized strongly with the Sandinista cause. He revealed that Renan Montero, a Cuban military counter-intelligence officer working with the Sandinista Ministry of the Interior, had introduced him to 'Hansen' in Managua and asked him to escort the man to Pastora's press conference. Torbiornsson had realized his companion was a spy but did not suspect he was an assassin. He had unwittingly provided journalistic cover for the bomber.
Tormented by his role, Torbiornsson traveled to Managua in January 2009 and filed a declaration with Nicaraguan police naming Montero, former Sandinista Minister of the Interior Tomas Borge, and former state security chief Lenin Cerna as the masterminds. He produced a documentary film, Last Chapter, Goodbye Nicaragua, which premiered at the 2011 DocsBarcelona International Film Festival. The film includes an interview with Luis Carrion, who was Borge's deputy at the time and who states that he learned shortly after the event that the bombing was an operation carried out by the Interior Ministry's intelligence directorate. Torbiornsson also claimed that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega privately admitted to him, five years after the attack, that his government had orchestrated the bombing -- but later chose to cover it up, securing Pastora's silence by giving him a position in a subsequent Sandinista administration. The San Juan River still flows past La Penca. The hut is long gone. The truth arrived in pieces over three decades, and some of those pieces still do not fit together cleanly.
La Penca is located at 11.51N, 85.97W on the northern bank of the San Juan River, which forms the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The area is remote jungle terrain with no nearby airports. The San Juan River is a useful visual landmark, winding eastward toward the Caribbean. Nearest significant airport is Daniel Oduber Quiros International Airport (MRLB) in Liberia, Costa Rica, approximately 130 km to the southwest. Augusto C. Sandino International Airport (MNMG) in Managua is approximately 200 km to the northwest. Low-altitude flight over this border area may be restricted.