Copyright 1996 Stern Publishing, Inc.  
                                  LA Weekly
                               November 22, 1996
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 21
HEADLINE: THE SPECTER OF THE SPOOK
WHO IS RON LISTER AND WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HIS MUCH-MALIGNED TESTIMONY?
BYLINE: BY NICK SCHOU

 BODY:
If John Deutch hopes to quiet the turmoil over allegations that his Central
Intelligence Agency helped bring crack cocaine to Southern California, he'll
have to explain the strange course -- from government witness to federal
prisoner and back -- of former cop, former smuggler and self-styled agency
operative Ronald Jay Lister.

Lister's purported agency contacts first surfaced in 1986, when he was
accosted by Sheriff's deputies during a raid on his Mission Viejo home. Clad
in a bathrobe but otherwise composed, Lister warned the deputies that he
"worked with the CIA," and that "his friends in Washington weren't going to
like what was going on," according to a Sheriff's report from the time.

The sheriffs ignored Lister and went ahead with their search. Located on the
premises was a bizarre cache of paramilitary gear: high-tech surveillance
equipment, military training manuals, documents, photos, passports,
ammunition, "Intel" police-radio scanners and other sophisticated equipment.
After Lister handed deputies the combination to a safe at another house, they
departed without arresting him. A search of Lister's Crestline property, which
police believed to be a cocaine storage house, turned up nothing but a scale
and a bottle of solution used to cut cocaine.

The seized property failed to support an arrest on drug charges, but the array
of military paraphernalia buttressed other allegations made in the affidavit
accompanying the search warrant -- that Lister and his accomplices were
working to assist the CIA-sponsored contra army in Nicaragua.

The following day, according to former L.A. County Narcotics Detective Bobby
Juarez, the CIA's interest was confirmed when the fruits of the search were
confiscated from the department's evidence room. In an interview last month
with San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, Juarez said a colleague
informed him at the time, "The CIA came in and took everything."

In an October 21 article about Lister, the Los Angeles Times dismissed him as
a cocaine addict and con artist who tried to impress business contacts and
deter police by claiming that his work was "CIA-approved." And Deutch's agency
has issued a flat denial: "Mr. Lister was never employed by or affiliated with
the CIA in any way."

But a review of court documents, corporate papers and testimony from the
recent San Diego trial of notorious Los Angeles drug trafficker Ricky Donnell
Ross shows that, while Lister was a hustler who worked both sides of the
law-enforcement fence, there is evidence that he was on occasion a partner in
covert operations in Central America. In fact, in documents he filed with the
court, Ross asserted that the government itself presented Lister as a
prosecution witness before a grand jury -- testifying about those very
activities.

A shadowy figure who rebuffed repeated efforts by the Weekly to contact him
following his release from custody late this summer, Ron Lister spent much of
the 1970s working as a burglary detective with the Laguna Beach Police
Department. He resigned in May 1980, and soon began to branch out. By his own
account and by the testimony of Ricky Ross' onetime supplier, Nicaraguan drug
smuggler Oscar Danilo Blandon, Lister was active in Blandon's trafficking
operations in the early 1980s.

During the same period, Lister pursued myriad business and real estate
investment interests. He and his wife, Stephanie Lister, were known in Mission
Viejo social circles as fund-raisers, and Lister headed two Orange County
companies, Mundy Security Group and Pyramid International Security Consultants
Inc. A heavily redacted FBI teletype uncovered by Webb shows that Lister paid
$374,000 cash for one of his Mission Viejo homes. He told an unnamed source
that he needed to delay the payment because he was buying an airplane in
Florida and that his international security work was "CIA-approved."

An October 18, 1982, contract proposal by Lister's Pyramid International,
discovered by police when they raided Lister's home four years later,
describes some of his "security" work. The proposal -- written in Spanish and
running over 35 pages -- shows that Lister was negotiating a prospective deal
directly with Salvadoran Army General Jose Guillermo Garcia, then the minister
of defense and a close ally of death-squad don Roberto D'Aubuisson. The
proposal refers to months of negotiations between Lister's company and
Salvadoran "officials of the Ministry of Defense and the High Staff of the
Armed Forces.

"Since the recent elections," it continues, Pyramid International "initiated
conversations with the Government of El Salvador (GOSAL) with the conviction
it can assist the new government in its goal of combating the tyrannical
forces of the left, promoted and assisted by the current governments of
Nicaragua, Cuba and the Soviet Union."

Both the Mercury News and the Times located Christopher Moore, a former Mundy
Security employee who was sent by Lister to El Salvador to work on the
security deal, which apparently fell through. While Moore told the Mercury
News that he met face-to-face with D'Aubuisson and confirmed that Pyramid had
separately secured a U.S. contract to provide security for a military base in
San Salvador, the Times was more disparaging. Moore was quoted describing the
entire Salvadoran operation as "bizarre," and said of Lister, "I didn't know
nine-tenths of what he told me." The Weekly could not reach Moore for comment.

If Lister was making progress as a security adviser, he had trouble keeping
his own personal conduct in line. He was by his own account a problem drug
user, and the subject of continuous police scrutiny. He was finally arrested
in 1988, when he was caught red-handed selling two kilograms of cocaine to an
undercover Costa Mesa policeman.

Lister pleaded guilty to selling coke and was released with three years
probation after spending only seven days in the Orange County jail -- despite
being busted holding enough drugs to land him at least eight years in prison.
Records unsealed by an O.C. Superior Court judge last month show Lister's
quick release had a string attached -- he agreed to give state narcotics
investigators "information regarding large-scale marijuana smugglers who have
'boatloads' of marijuana currently in the Southern California area ready for
off-loading."

A year later, in 1989, Lister was arrested again, by deputies who had
infiltrated a drug-smuggling network in San Diego. He was tried with five
others at San Diego's federal courthouse for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
After spending several months in jail, Lister signed a new plea-bargain
agreement. Records show the document was sealed and placed in a courthouse
vault.

As part of the deal, Lister agreed to plead guilty not only to federal drug
charges, but also to a 1986 tax-fraud indictment, charges Lister had somehow
managed to escape for years. (In a pro se declaration to the court, Lister
later alleged the tax-fraud indictment had never been prosecuted because of
the intervention of an unnamed government agency.)

In return for his pleas, Lister was again released on bail from San Diego's
Metropolitan Correctional Center with the promise that if he continued to
cooperate with law enforcement in building drug cases, his sentence would be
reduced. But court records show that in July 1991, federal prosecutors led by
U.S. Attorney Amalia Meza fought to overturn Lister's plea bargain and place
him back in custody.

Meza charged Lister with violating the plea bargain by traveling to Mexico.
Drug Enforcement Agency Agent Chuck Jones (who later secured Danilo Blandon's
release from prison to use him in a sting against Ricky Ross) accused Lister
of continuing to deal drugs while on trial and laundering money for Colombian
drug traffickers.

Lister was arrested and placed in jail for the duration of his trial. Within
weeks of his re-incarceration, the court sentenced him to 97 months in prison,
and he was remanded to the federal penitentiary in Lompoc.

Contacted last month, Meza refused to discuss Lister's case or disclose the
subject of his sealed plea agreement. A motion made by Lister to dismiss his
defense counsel, Lynn Ball, accused Meza of revoking the plea agreement
because "the Special Projects Department of the U.S. Justice Department in
Washington, D.C." had taken control of that investigation away from her
office.

There is no other mention of such a seizure in the court record, and Meza and
Ball refused to confirm or deny Lister's claim.

In documents Lister sent the court from his prison cell in Lompoc, he provided
startling details of his grand jury testimony.

Lister told the court in pro se filings that, in return for a grant of
immunity, he "testified before five grand jury panels in the Southern District
of California under the direction of U.S. Attorney Meza. The content of the
information disclosed to the grand jury was of a highly classified nature
pertinent to the Iran-contra scandal."

While Meza has refused to comment on the case, Lister's version of events was
corroborated in a separate filing with the court by his appeals lawyer, San
Diego attorney Robert E. Boyce.

Boyce cited statements made at trial by Ball that Lister had provided "hours
and hours of debriefing and testimony before the grand jury." As well, Boyce
cited Lister's uncontradicted court testimony that he had told the grand jury
about "his activities in Central America concerning certain key figures from
Nicaragua alleged to have been involved in the Iran-contra scandal" and his
role in a "major Central American cartel" from 1982 to 1986.

Lister told the court that he had compiled and submitted 2,500 pages of
documentation supporting his testimony. "I did it in detail, location,
activity," claimed Lister. "I gave them physical evidence, phone bills, travel
tickets, everything possible back from those days, which most people don't
keep, but I do keep good records -- to assist them in this investigation. They
were excited about it."

Lister's sentence was reduced in 1993 when the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled
that federal prosecutors had failed to adequately inform him of his right
against self-incrimination. On the question of whether Lister's sealed
plea-bargain agreement had been violated by either party, however, the court
balked, saying it had been unable to review the agreement because it appeared
to be missing.

Attorney Boyce now claims he cannot remember having seen Lister's plea
bargain, though court records show it was unsealed and that a copy was
released to him.

Lister's trial attorney Ball, who was removed on Lister's motion, dismisses
Lister's claims to be working for the CIA as unrealistic. "The one big thing
about Ron Lister being in the CIA," he says, "is that he was sentenced to
eight years in federal prison. Does that sound like what happens to CIA
agents? Ron has a history of trouble with cocaine abuse. That's what got him
into trouble."

While Lister's international security operations and connections remain murky,
Blandon recalled on the stand his involvement with the ex-cop, the contra drug
ring and "Freeway" Ricky Ross.

Speaking under oath at Ross' trial, Blandon testified this March that Lister
and an associate, Bill Downing (Mundy Security Group's technical expert),
supplied him with high-tech surveillance equipment, police-radio scanners,
assault rifles and money counters -- much of which Blandon said he sold or
gave to Ross.

For his part, Ross said he was too busy selling crack to worry about becoming
a major weapons dealer but added that Blandon had many other South-Central
clients. While Ross said he never met Lister or knew of Blandon's relationship
with him, he confirmed that Blandon provided him with high-tech weapons and
equipment, the likes of which Ross had only seen in Scarface.

"We had military stuff, a gun that sat on a tripod," said Ross. "We had six or
seven Thompsons. We had Mack 10s with silencers, Uzis with silencers. He was
telling us he could get us anything we wanted, explosives -- whatever we
wanted, he could get it.

"The guys would lose handguns all the time," Ross continued. "You know, like
driving down the street, the police would come. They'd throw the gun out of
the car and then, you know, we'd have to get them another gun."

Ross said Blandon kept him equipped with high-tech gear that allowed him to
avoid police detection for years -- contraband Blandon said he got from
Lister. "We got cellular phones," Ross said. " Blandon was giving us scanners
that everyone wanted because you could listen to the police talk on them. He
had these other things that when you put them on the phone . . . the phone
couldn't be bugged. He had all kinds of gadgets."

Ross said a favorite pastime was listening to narcotics-enforcement officers
over their police-radio scanners while he and his friends counted money from
their latest crack deal. "If you wanted to lock onto a conversation, you just
pushed a button," he said. "You could hear where the police were at, what
house they were raiding. We used to listen to them while we were counting the
money, just like we were right there with them.

"We heard them raiding our friends' houses, you know," he continued. "The
police were even chasing me one time.  My partners heard it over the scanner,
and a guy came and picked me up so I was able to get away." Ross also recalled
Blandon telling him about the 1986 raids shortly after they occurred.

"I heard about his house getting raided after it happened," said Ross. "
Blandon mentioned it and laughed it off, and we kept going. That kind of was
the way that they were treating cocaine then," he explained with a laugh. "It
was, like, normal. Everybody that got busted with cocaine got off."

The Bureau of Prisons reports that Lister was released from an Arizona federal
penitentiary June 7 after completing a drug-treatment program. He has refused
repeated offers to share his story with the press.

Despite being removed from Lister's trial four years ago, defense attorney
Ball claims he still gets calls from his old client from time to time. "As
long as I don't charge him, he'll talk to me," says Ball. "He wants to put
this behind him." GRAPHIC: Photo: Lister (center): Laguna beach days

   Credit: News-Post Photo
   Photo: Under arrest: Lister in 1989
   Credit: None