After Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, Hand was posted to Vietnam, where he received a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, and the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest military award in the United States.
"[8] According to other unnamed sources cited by Kwitny, Hand helped train guerrilla forces in Laos and worked with the Air America crews that supplied them.
[10] He was a close associate of Bernie Houghton, the owner of the Bourbon & Beefsteak bar in Sydney's Kings Cross, a nightspot notorious for drug use.
In January 1975, Hand spent over a year in southern Africa seeking to arrange arms deals, at a time when the CIA was providing support to groups such as UNITA in Angola.
Efforts to arrange deals included incorporating a company in Pretoria, South Africa, and sending Bernie Houghton with two Nugan Hand employees to the United States to meet Edwin P.
He then fled Australia under a false identity, that of a Sydney butcher named Alan Glenn Winter, on a flight to Fiji in late June 1981.
[16] In March 1987, Theodore Shackley responded to an article in The New York Times about the Nugan Hand Bank scandal with a letter to the editor stating that the newspaper had incorrectly described his activities in a manner than served to negatively affect public confidence in the CIA.