Tracks in the Snow
by Nick Schou
LA Weekly!
May 22, 1997
Of the several lines of attack mounted
against the San Jose Mercury News' August
1996 Dark Alliance series linking
Nicaraguan contras to L.A. crack wholesaler
Ricky Ross, conservative critics and
mainstream reporters have agreed on one in
particular that investigative reporter Gary
Webb failed to deliver on the implied
connection between the cocaine trafficking
operation and the U.S. government or its
intelligence agencies.
Nowhere in his reporting was Webb able to
produce documentation of official sanction
no back-channel memo acknowledging CIA
support for Ross' Nicaraguan supplier, Oscar
Danilo Blandon.
But even as the Mercury News itself steps
back from the sensational series it published
last year (see sidebar next page), new
sources and documents developed over the past
three months tie a pivotal figure in the
Blandon smuggling operation to clandestine
efforts to arm the Nicaraguan contras.
The key figure here is not Blandon, who was
an admitted contra supporter and fund-raiser,
but whose ties to the U.S. intelligence
community have proved difficult to establish.
Moreover, while Blandon's history of major
drug trafficking is undisputed, he has proven
consistently unreliable and contradicted his
own sworn testimony on his work to support
the contras.
Instead, this new link between the
Blandon/Ross drug smuggling ring and American
covert operations runs through Ronald J.
Lister, a former Laguna Beach police officer
who worked closely with Blandon between 1982
and 1988. He is acknowledged by Blandon as
the source of a wide array of weapons and
surveillance equipment Blandon then passed on
to Ross; the pair traded ownerships in
properties used as drug drops; and police
records show that Blandon was listed on a
business card as vice president of Mundy
Security Group, a consulting firm Lister
started.
In addition, informants told law enforcement
investigators in 1986 that Lister had
transported hundreds of kilos of cocaine
and millions of dollars in cash for the
smuggling ring. Last year, Lister told
sheriff's investigators that he had moved $50
million to $60 million in cash for Blandon
from L.A. to banks in Miami.
It was Lister who first raised the specter of
U.S. intelligence involvement when,
confronted during a search of his house by
L.A. County sheriff's deputies in 1986, he
declared, according to the deputies' report,
that he worked with the CIA and [that] his
friends in Washington weren't going to like
what was going on.
Lister never did say what that work for the
CIA was, and when questioned by L.A. County
sheriff's investigators last year, he laughed
off the notion he had been a spy. Lister
acknowledged that he was a contra
sympathizer, but said, It wasn't like I was
doing it for the CIA or anyone else. Pressed
for details, Lister replied, If you want me
to give you an example of how I helped [the
contras], there's times I went to Miami. I
sat and talked to them about security, and I
showed them a particular type of paint that
they could use, that at that time was a fire
retardant, and showed them some type of
equipment they could buy that would be good
for the field et cetera, et cetera, like
that.
It was a strange comment, and in light of
subsequent investigation by the Weekly, an
understatement. Throughout the mid-1980s,
Lister maintained a series of relationships
with characters who worked in a twilight
world on the fringes of U.S. intelligence.
One of those operatives, speaking here on the
record for the first time, asserts that
Lister was directly involved in supplying
arms and ammunition to the U.S.-backed
contras who were fighting to topple the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
It was the sort of project that required
high-level clearances and connections inside
the federal government. It was the primary
project of the U.S. intelligence
establishment at the time. And it was one of
Lister's enterprises at the time he was a
principal in the Blandon/Ross drug ring.
The new source attesting to Lister's work
with the contras is Timothy Lafrance, a San
Diego dealer in automatic and specialty
weapons who has manufactured guns for use in
Hollywood productions such as Rambo and in
the TV show Miami Vice. In a recent interview
with the Weekly, Lafrance described Lister's
contra-support operation in detail.
Lafrance said the operation was carried out
at the direction of the CIA and under the
cover of an Orange County security consulting
company, the Newport Beach-based Pyramid
International Security Consultants, which
Lister founded in 1980. Pyramid, Lafrance
claimed, was a private vendor that the CIA
used to do things [the agency] couldn't do.
He also claims he became involved as a
weapons specialist, and even helped set up
production facilities to assemble contra
armaments outside the U.S. He said he made
several trips to Central America, two of them
with Lister, during the years the contra army
was in the field.
Lafrance was not eager to discuss his
involvement with Lister and the contra cause.
He was initially identified to this reporter
as a likely contact by Bo Gritz, the highly
decorated Green Beret who became disaffected
from his government and has launched his own
militia group, Center for Action. Reached by
telephone six months ago at the unlisted
number he uses at his gun shop, Lafrance
admitted knowing Lister and some of his
associates, but insisted that his name be
kept off the record. He refused to speak
about Central America and the contras, and
subsequent to the initial interview, refused
to return further phone calls. However, when
it was later learned that Lafrance had been
named in hearings on the Iran-contra
operation, and when he was informed that his
name was found in those records, he agreed to
tell more of his story. This time he spoke
openly about Central America.
Lafrance described one of his contra-support
trips with Lister in detail. He said he
became convinced the operation had official
sanction when he personally applied for a
temporary import-export license from the
State Department. It was for Pyramid, and it
came back approved in two days, said
Lafrance. Usually it takes three months.
The ostensible reason for the trip was that
Lister and Pyramid International were
negotiating to sell arms and specialized
equipment to Salvadoran government ministries
and officials of the military high command,
Lafrance said. We went down to Central
America with two giant boxes full of machine
guns and ammunition, he continued. To a
State Department official it looks very
legitimate on the outside private
companies, et cetera. The cover was that we
were down there to provide security,
armor-proofing for vehicles, limos and homes.
My end was the weapons [and tactics
training], how to make a three-car stop if
you're shot at, how to use cars as shields.
We were housed by the Atlacatl Battalion,
said Lafrance, a reference to the elite,
U.S.-trained division that was the pride of
the Salvadoran military during the years of
civil war. They gave us the opportunity to
demonstrate our hardware.
But Lafrance said the real mission of the
Salvadoran trip was providing weapons and
equipment to the contra forces fighting from
bases in neighboring Honduras. The whole
idea was to set up an operation in El
Salvador that would allow us to get around
U.S. laws and supply the contras with guns,
said Lafrance. The smart way to do that was
to find a military base. To keep from
arousing suspicion, Lafrance claimed, all the
weaponry he brought to El Salvador also left
the country with him at the end of the trip.
It's much easier to build the weapons down
there, he explained, and that's eventually
what we did.
Lafrance told how the Pyramid International
team set up shop at a mass-transit center,
run by the military, in downtown San
Salvador. That's where we made the weapons,
he said. You could have 50 guys working in a
machine shop, and nobody would know about
it. From there, Lafrance claimed, the
weapons were transported to a Salvadoran
military airstrip in Morazon province. Then
they were airlifted to contra bases in
neighboring Honduras. We made almost all our
drops by helicopter, buzzing the treetops.
Asked to describe the key players working
with Lister in the Pyramid-contra scheme,
Lafrance named other figures who shared
various ties to U.S. intelligence. These
included Scott Weekly, a former U.S. Navy
SEAL who, Lafrance claimed, on occasion
worked for both the CIA and the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA), a little-known
outfit connected to the National Security
Council. The NSC was the White House office
in charge of the illegal contra supply
network.
Also named by Lafrance was Richard E. Wilker,
whom corporate papers show as having been an
employee of Pyramid International in 1982.
Lafrance said he first met Wilker in the late
1970s when Wilker was working for Intersect
Inc., another Orange County firm that did
specialized manufacturing under government
contract. Intersect was founded by a former
CIA agent, according to two of the principals
at the firm. According to Lafrance, Wilker
was also a former CIA agent.
I met Lister through Wilker, said Lafrance.
Wilker had heard about my stuff from the
agency. He said he had a friend who wanted to
talk about a deal. I called to check, and
Langley said [Wilker] was still working for
the agency. So I started doing business with
Lister and Wilker.
Of Lister's relationship to the CIA, Lafrance
had this to say: He wasn't getting a
paycheck from them. He may have said he did,
but his connection was . . . with Wilker.
Very few people ever work directly for the
agency.
There is documentary corroboration of a
number of points in Lafrance's description of
Lister's Central American operations.
Requests filed by the Weekly under the
Freedom of Information Act for documents
relating to Lister were denied out of hand by
the FBI and are still pending at the CIA, but
similar requests filed with the National
Archives were more fruitful.
A May 12, 1987, FBI report released by the
National Archives substantiates Lafrance's
allegations that Lister's Salvadoran business
trips involved providing weapons to the
Nicaraguan contras. The report describes an
interview that month with Federico Cruz, who
approached an FBI office in Mobile, Alabama,
seeking Lister's whereabouts.
Cruz, who owned the Ramada Inn in San
Salvador, claimed Lister stayed in El
Salvador for two or three months in 1982 and
was selling weapons to the contras. Cruz
also told the FBI that his hotel had been
used by the CIA team that accompanied Eugene
Hasenfus, the U.S. cargo handler whose
October 1986 capture after his plane was shot
down over Nicaragua sparked the entire
Iran-contra scandal. Cruz said someone had
removed all the Americans' personal
belongings from their rooms. Cruz wanted the
FBI's help in obtaining U.S. citizenship, and
in forcing Lister to repay him a large sum of
money. The FBI declined to assist Cruz in
either matter.
Further documentation of Lafrance's story
comes from the L.A. County Sheriff's
Department, which seized a stack of Lister's
personal papers in the 1986 raid on his
Mission Viejo home. The documents were
confiscated along with a cache of security
and surveillance equipment, boxes of
ammunition, photos of Lister apparently taken
at a contra training camps and military
training films.
Nearly all of that evidence disappeared from
sight, and the investigation into the Blandon
ring remained the subject of rumor until
after Webb's story appeared. Even then,
formal requests for release of the records
were ignored until Congresswoman Maxine
Waters paid a surprise visit to a sheriff's
department records chamber, demanding access
to the missing police files from the
10-year-old narcotics investigation. Caught
off-guard by her action, the records
custodians turned them loose.
Two of the documents seized from Lister's
home are telling. One is a printed contract
proposal for Lister's company, Pyramid
International. Dated October 1982, written in
Spanish and running over 35 pages, it appears
to refer to the security work cited by
Lafrance as a cover for the contra-support
operation. It shows that Lister was
negotiating the contract directly with Jos
Guillermo Garc a, who was then El Salvador's
minister of defense. Garc a, one of the
military leaders who took control of that
country in a 1979 coup, has been linked by El
Salvador's Truth Commission to the rape and
murder of four American nuns and the 1981
massacre of more than 400 peasants at El
Mozote.
The other key document consists of 10 pages
of handwritten notes in which Lister jotted
down details from myriad negotiations over
international arms sales and other
transactions. In one of the entries, Scott
Weekly's name appears among a list of several
names including that of the late Roberto
D'Aubuisson, best known as a graduate of the
U.S. Army School of the Americas in Ft.
Benning, Georgia, as the founder of the
rightist ARENA party, and leader of El
Salvador's infamous paramilitary death
squads.
Elsewhere in the handwritten memo, Lister
refers to a regular meeting with DIA
subcontractor Scott Weekly. Scott had worked
in El Salvador for us.
David Scott Weekly was first profiled in
these pages when Lister's notes were released
last year. That story was based largely on
interviews with Bo Gritz, Weekly's sometime
partner in paramilitary operations, as well
as records from a 1987 Oklahoma City trial in
which Weekly was convicted of smuggling C-4
explosives onto two civilian flights.
Weekly declined to be interviewed for that
story and, when questioned by sheriff's
investigators, acknowledged working with
Lister but declined to answer direct
questions about possible intelligence
connections. He refused to say whether he had
ever worked with the CIA, and then asserted
he wouldn't admit such a relationship even if
he had.
In fact, Weekly has in the past admitted to
having exactly such a relationship. The
comments surfaced in connection with the 1987
trial, but have not been made public until
now.
Court records from that trial show that the
explosives in question were used in a
short-lived training operation for a handful
of Afghan rebel leaders at a remote desert
airstrip near Sandy Valley, Nevada. Gritz
said the prosecution was part of a White
House effort to discredit him and Weekly
after they returned from a secret POW mission
to Burma with videotaped interviews asserting
that top CIA officials were involved in the
Iron Triangle heroin trade.
Additional new background material on Weekly
turns up in notes made by Mark Richard, a
U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., based on
conversations with Weekly's federal
prosecutor. Richard submitted them to
congressional investigators in 1987 as part
of a deposition for the initial Iran-contra
hearings. Those notes, obtained from the
National Archives through a FOIA request,
show that Weekly had post[ed] on tape that
he's tied into CIA and Hasenfus, and that
Weekly said he reports to people reporting
to [George] Bush. Richard's memo also
reveals that Weekly had made a number of toll
calls to the National Security Council.
Finally, Richard's notes say that Oklahoma
City prosecutors found evidence that Weekly
worked for Bo Gritz and Tom Lafrance in San
Diego.
Weekly was convicted in Oklahoma City, but
after spending 14 months of a five-year
prison sentence, he was granted a
resentencing hearing based on evidence that
Weekly's Nevada training mission had indeed
been carried out with the knowledge of U.S.
government officials. On July 15, 1988, his
sentence was reduced to time already served,
and he was released.
Located late last month at his San Diego
home, Weekly refused an offer to be
interviewed for this story and chased the
reporter from his front door.
Perhaps the most significant name to turn up
on the handwritten list alongside D'Aubuisson
and Weekly was that of Bill Nelson. During
the interview with sheriff's investigators
last year, Lister claimed to draw a blank on
all the other names, but he recalled Nelson
as the vice president of security for the
Irvine-based construction giant Fluor Corp.
Contacted by the Weekly, a Fluor official
first denied any record of employing a Bill
Nelson; then, after being provided with
William E. Nelson's death certificate, which
listed Fluor as his place of employment, the
official confirmed that Nelson had worked
there from July 1977 to February 1985 as vice
president for security and administration.
Nelson died of natural causes two years ago,
but Mark Mansfield of the CIA's media office
confirmed that, before he worked for Fluor,
Nelson had joined the CIA in 1948, rising to
the top ranks of the agency. From 1973 to
1976, Nelson was deputy director of
operations, in charge of all of the agency's
covert operations, including its
controversial and ill-fated forays into Chile
and Angola.
Another source on Nelson is John Vandewerker,
one of the founders of Intersect and himself
a former CIA agent. Vandewerker claimed in an
interview that he met Lister through his
employee, Richard Wilker, and stated that
either Lister or Wilker had once helped him
apply for a job with Nelson at Fluor.
What, in the end, was Lister's relationship
with Nelson? What was Lister's relationship
to the CIA? Who sponsored his work for the
contras?
The answers to these questions are unknown,
and perhaps unknowable, given the murky,
secretive context of his story. But clearly
Lister is more than the bumbling ex-cop
dismissed out of hand by the mainstream
press. He dealt in large quantities of drugs
and cash. He was able to quickly move large
quantities of sophisticated, restricted
technology across international boundaries.
According to Timothy Lafrance, Lister was on
the ground and in the air - in the war
zones of Central America. And his partners
included, besides Danilo Blandon, a crew of
intelligence operatives.
This new information on Lister's ties to the
shadowy world of covert operations falls just
short of being the smoking gun that reporter
Webb sought for his Dark Alliance series.
But Lister's story does add weight to the
very assertions that the mainstream press
judged to be deficient in Webb's work. And it
underscores the point that it is the CIA, not
Webb, that still has the most to answer for
on this matter.
Questions or comments?
Email letters to the editor: letters@laweekly.com
Copyright 1997, Los Angeles Weekly, Inc. All rights reserved.
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