by Nick Schou
After several months of writing stories that meant absolutely nothing to him, and commuting back to Sacramento every weekend, he ran out of reasons to stay at the paper. “Gary didn’t like to back down,” Sue says. “But he was tired of fighting.” On November 19, 1997, he tendered his formal resignation from the Mercury News. Webb told Bowden that he carried the resignation letter in his briefcase for weeks before he signed it. “Writing my name on that thing meant the end of my career,” he said. “I saw it as some sort of a surrender. It was like signing my . . . death certificate.”
After twenty years in journalism and just over a year after the publication of the biggest story of his life, Gary Webb suddenly found himself unemployed.
TEN
Lister
LESS THAN A week after the Mercury News formally announced Gary Webb’s resignation, the CIA released its official response to “Dark Alliance.” Although a declassified version of the report hadn’t yet been made public, the agency leaked an executive summary to the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper that had been the most critical of Webb’s story.
“CIA Probe Absolves Agency on L.A. Crack,” read the triumphal headline of a December 18 story by LA Times writers Doyle McManus and James Risen. “The CIA has completed a report declaring it was not responsible for introducing crack cocaine to Los Angeles.” But a careful reading of the story revealed that the CIA’s Inspector General failed to question numerous former agents involved in the agency’s support of the Nicaraguan contras. Although McManus and Risen characterized the report as the most “intensive” in the history of the CIA, agency investigators had no authority to force anyone to talk.
One former CIA officer admitted the agency had interviewed him “simply to go through all the motions of touching all the bases.” Former CIA officer Duane R. Clarridge, who ran the agency’s covert war against the Sandinistas, refused to answer any questions, and told the LA Times he wrote the CIA a letter describing its investigation as “bullshit.” Pete Carey covered the release of the report for the Mercury News. His story reported that CIA investigators had argued with a witness who claimed the CIA knew about drug trafficking by people the agency had used on various assignments. “You guys don’t want to know the truth,” Carey quoted the witness as telling the CIA.
While the early news accounts of the CIA’s self-vindication got front-page treatment in the nation’s major newspapers, the actual report, released a month later, just as the media began obsessing over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, did not. Although the bulk of the report contained nothing to directly vindicate “Dark Alliance,” the CIA acknowledged for the first time that the agency had intervened in the infamous Frogman case of January 1983, when a group of Nicaraguan traffickers were arrested shortly after unloading 430 pounds of cocaine from a Colombian freighter in the waters off San Francisco.
A year after the arrests, the CIA asked the Justice Department to return $36,800 that had been seized from the traffickers. The cash, the CIA argued, wasn’t drug money, but funds intended for the contras. In its report, the agency claimed it did this “to protect an operational equity, i.e., a contra support group in which it had an operational interest.” CIA lawyers asked the federal prosecutor handling the Frogman case not to report their request, because “there are sufficient factual details which would cause certain damage to our image and program in Central America.”
The leader of the drug ring—according to law enforcement records Webb had uncovered—was none other than Norwin Meneses. The DEA never charged Meneses in the scheme, however, and the portion of the CIA report dealing with the Frogman case didn’t mention his tie to the smuggling operation.
Shortly after the CIA released its 1998 report, the Justice Department’s Inspector General published the results of its investigation, which also cleared the CIA of wrongdoing. “Meneses was investigated several times over the course of many years,” the report stated. “Some of his associates were successfully prosecuted, although the DEA never obtained sufficient evidence to prosecute Meneses. Contrary to the Mercury News claims, we did not find that these investigations were halted because of any alleged connection between Meneses and the Contras or the CIA.”
The Justice Department also stated that while Blandon was a major trafficker, it found no evidence that he had provided “substantial” drug money to support the contras. Of Blandon’s associate, Ronald Lister, the report stated that while the documents seized at his home in 1986 “largely corroborate his account that he was seeking to sell military and security equipment and weaponry to the Contras and factions in El Salvador,” the agency had “found no evidence that he was successful in this venture.”
Investigators did uncover an FBI memo concerning an informant who overheard Lister bragging over drinks that he worked for Oliver North, who directed the Reagan administration’s secret contra arms-supply network. Although the Justice Department said it found no evidence to support or contradict that claim, an “Operation Homeport” code sheet found among North’s notes shows that, perhaps coincidentally, he typed the word “Lister” as the code word for “advisers”—on a list that includes code words for everything from “missiles” and “grenades” to “Lebanon” and “hostages.”
The report also revealed that the FBI investigated Lister’s various arms deals at least five times between 1983 and 1986. In September 1983, the FBI probed Lister for illegally selling weapons to El Salvador and “other countries,” and for arranging covert loans from Saudi Arabia to the Salvadoran government. Without elaborating on the specifics of those deals, the Justice Department simply concluded that none of the investigations bolstered Lister’s claim of CIA affiliation. “We did not find that he had any such affiliation,” the report stated. “Rather, such comments were part of a pattern of deception that Lister engaged in for years when attempting to shield his illegal activities.”
THERE’S MUCH MORE to Lister’s story than the Justice Department, the newspapers that criticized “Dark Alliance,” or the CIA itself would care to admit, however. As an investigative reporter for OC Weekly, I spent months digging into Lister and his claim of CIA affiliation. While it was clear Lister was a habitual liar and eventually a coke addict, his friends and business contacts included former CIA officials and covert operatives who were active in Central America and elsewhere during the 1980s. These strange—and to Webb’s critics, rather inconvenient—relationships were never adequately answered by the Justice Department or CIA, which to this day have refused to release uncensored copies of their files on Lister because of “national security” concerns—an odd claim assuming Lister had no involvement with matters of national security.
In its response to “Dark Alliance,” the LA Times dismissed Lister as a “con artist,” and quoted Lister’s employee, Christopher Moore, who had traveled to El Salvador with Lister, saying he didn’t believe “nine-tenths” of what Lister told him. The paper also reported that Scott Weekly, Lister’s supposed CIA contact was not a CIA agent, but a right-wing mercenary who in the early 1980s, had unsuccessfully searched for U.S. prisoners of war in Laos with Bo Gritz, a former Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Special Forces. Photographs of Weekly from Gritz’ memoir, Called to Serve, show Weekly in the jungle, weaving indigenous baskets with the phrase “Happy Reagan,” apparently intended as gifts for local tribesmen.
According to press accounts in the early 1980s, Weekly, an explosive expert known as “Dr. Death,” was an ex-Navy SEAL who won two bronze stars in Vietnam. While VeriSEAL, an organization that monitors SEAL impersonators, claims it has no records Weekly ever served in the outfit, he did attend the U.S. Naval Academy for three years. Although he failed to graduate—his lawyer, Lynn Ball, told me the Navy booted him for having an affair with an admiral’s daughter—one of his classmates was none other than Oliver North.
After “Dark Alliance,” the L.A. Sheriff’s Department questioned Lister and Weekly about their relationship to the CIA. Both Lister and Weekly acknowledged working together, b
ut refused to elaborate. Lister told them their focus on the CIA was miscast. “You have to remember, there are thirty-two intelligence agencies out there; the CIA is just one of them,” he said. Notes seized at Lister’s home referred to Weekly as a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) “subcontractor” who had “worked in El Salvador for us.” When investigators asked Weekly about the DIA, he refused to confirm or deny his relationship with the agency. “Let me put it this way, there is not one ounce of love lost between the DIA and me,” Weekly said. “It’s a non-subject. As far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t piss on them if their face was on fire.”
Weekly’s animosity to the DIA goes unexplained in the Sheriff’s report, but may involve his 1986 arrest for smuggling plastic explosives on a domestic flight from Oklahoma City to Las Vegas. Weekly spent fourteen months in prison for refusing to explain his actions, but the judge released him after determining that he had worked with the National Security Council’s Defense Security Assistance Administration in a covert operation on federal government land in Nevada. Courtroom records from Weekly’s trial in Oklahoma City show the explosives were used in a covert operation aimed at uniting the leaders of various Afghan rebel factions by providing them with lessons in explosives.
At Weekly’s re-sentencing hearing, he and Gritz testified they carried out the operation in the Nevada desert with the permission of a U.S. Army colonel named Nestor Piño, who then worked with Oliver North’s National Security Council, and that they were paid by Osman Kalderim, an employee of Stanford Technology, a private company established by two of North’s Iran contra associates, Richard Secord and Albert Hakim, to help arm the contras. Letters of introduction Gritz published in his book show that within days of Lister’s famous claim that Weekly worked for the CIA, Weekly and Gritz were meeting at the White House with National Security Council officials about the Nevada operation.
In 2001, French television journalist Paul Moreira interviewed ex-CIA agent Milton Bearden, who ran the agency’s covert war in Afghanistan, about the mission. “The CIA could have been involved in that Bo Gritz thing,” Bearden said. “I’m aware of that. I know about that. There’s something like that. But it doesn’t matter.” Bearden’s statement—five years after “Dark Alliance”—provided the first confirmation that Weekly was at times working for the CIA. And it directly contradicts the CIA’s sworn declaration that it had no ties whatsoever to Weekly—an assertion that fueled the mainstream media’s attacks on “Dark Alliance.”
According to Moreira, Bearden made those comments shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “He was very surprised that I even knew about the existence of Bo Gritz,” Moreira said. “In France, we call people like Gritz and Weekly barbouzes or ‘beards’ because they are a bunch of illegal guys who get used from time to time by government agencies when some action is not strictly legal. You cannot wage a war without these type of guys.”
While behind bars, Weekly spoke with investigators for Mark Richards, an Iran contra prosecutor, about his participation in CIA activity in Central America. In a 1987 deposition obtained through the Freedom of Information Act from the National Archives, Richards said that Weekly “had post[ed] on tape that he’s tied into CIA and [Eugene] Hasenfus,” a reference to the hapless CIA-paid cargo handler who was shot down over Nicaragua in October 1986. Richards claimed that Weekly’s telephone logs showed several calls to National Security Council officials, and that his investigators had found evidence that Weekly worked with Bo Gritz and a certain Tom “Lafrance” in San Diego.
When I tried to interview Weekly about Lister at his house in San Diego in early 1997, he didn’t answer the door. After I peeked over his fence, he rushed outside, fists clenched, straight toward me. Upon learning I was a reporter—unarmed, except for a pad and pencil—he went back inside his house and refused to answer any questions.
However, Gritz told me that Weekly had likely met Lister at a San Diego automatic weapons dealership. Through the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, I discovered that there were only a handful of weapons dealers in San Diego licensed to sell fully automatic weapons, including Lafrance Specialties. The company’s owner, Tim Lafrance—the “Tom” Lafrance mentioned in Richard’s notes—works exclusively for government and military clients around the world.
In a series of interviews in 1996 and 1997, Lafrance stated that he had traveled to El Salvador with Lister and Weekly. He described Lister as a CIA asset and said his security company was a “favored vendor” used by the CIA “to do things it couldn’t do.” Lister “never received a paycheck from them,” Lafrance said. “Very few people work directly for the agency. They deal with some pretty seedy bastards. Dealing with Lister, they probably got the clean end of the stick.”
The ostensible reason for the trip was that Lister was negotiating to sell arms and security gear to the Salvadoran armed forces. Lafrance said he knew Lister’s connections were good when he personally applied for a temporary import/export license from the State Department. “It came back in two days,” he said. “Usually, it takes three months.” While in El Salvador, Lafrance claimed, they stayed with the Atlcatl Battalion, the elite, U.S.-trained division that was the pride of the Salvadoran military during the civil war. “They gave us an opportunity to demonstrate our hardware.”
But once they arrived in El Salvador, Lafrance continued, the real mission began: selling weapons to the contras. Government documents show that Lister didn’t go unnoticed in El Salvador. A Freedom of Information Act request filed with the National Archives produced a May 12, 1987 FBI report concerning Lister’s presence in the country. 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 traveled to El Salvador in 1982 and was “selling weapons to the contras.” Cruz also told the FBI that members of the CIA team working with Hasenfus had stayed at his hotel, and that after his plane was shot down by the Sandinistas, somebody had cleaned out their rooms.
Further evidence of Lister’s unusual “security” work in Central America was an October 1982 contract proposal that was seized in Lister’s home four years later and released by the Sheriff’s Department in 1996. Written in Spanish, the proposal was addressed to General Jose Guillermo Garcia, the Minister of Defense of El Salvador. Garcia, like Lister’s other Salvadoran business contact, Roberto D’Aubuisson, had attended the U.S. Army School of the Americas, whose graduates read like a roster of Latin American CIA assets and human rights violators.
A member of the military junta that took over El Salvador in 1979, Garcia helped cover up the 1981 Atctatl battalion massacre of more than eight hundred villagers at the village of El Mozote. In 2002, he and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, director of El Salvador’s National Guard and Garcia’s successor as Defense Minister, were fined $54.6 million by a Florida federal jury after being sued by several Salvadoran torture victims.
No two men were more powerful—or more feared—in El Salvador circa October 1982 than Garcia, the country’s military leader, or D’Aubuisson, the reputed leader of the right-wing death squads. The pair jointly presided over a reign of terror responsible for hundreds of disappearances and murders each month. In particular, as Joan Didion wrote in her book Salvador, sixty-eight political murders occurred during the first half of that month.
“At the end of October 1982,” Didion reported, “the offices in the Hotel Camino Real in San Salvador of the Associated Press, United Press International Television News, NBC News, CBS News and ABC News were raided and searched by members of the El Salvador National Police carrying submachine guns; 15 leaders of legally recognized political and labor groups . . . were disappeared . . . the Salvadoran Ministry of Defense announced that eight of the 15 disappeared citizens were, in fact, in government custody; and the State Department announced that the Reagan administration believed that it had ‘turned the corner’ in its campaign for political stability in Centra
l America.”
In the midst of that carnage, Lister proposed to provide Garcia and other Salvadoran defense officials with security services, including the expertise of CIA-trained physical security experts and a manufacturer of “unique weapons.” On the front page was the name of Lister’s “technical director,” a man named Richard E. Wilker. Lafrance recalled Wilker as the person who introduced him to Lister. “Wilker had heard about my stuff through the agency,” Lafrance said. “He said he a had a friend who wanted to talk about a deal. I called to check, and [CIA headquarters in] Langley said [Wilker] was still working for the agency. So I started doing business with Lister and Wilker.”
Although a quick check of California corporate records for Lister’s company listed nobody by that name, Wilker worked for another Newport Beach company, Intersect, Inc. One of Intersect’s principals, John Vandewerker, recalled that Lister and Wilker had a “touchy” time getting out of El Salvador. He denied that either man worked for the CIA, but nervously confirmed that he himself was a retired CIA agent.
The company’s founder, Robert Barry Ashby, lives in northern Virginia. In a 1996 interview, Ashby recalled that Lister and Wilker had traveled to El Salvador together. He also denied that Lister or Wilker had any connection to the CIA, and said he knew this because he had retired from the agency in the mid-1970s. When I told Ashby that Lister was a convicted drug dealer who had claimed to work for the CIA, Ashby got nervous. “Has it ever occurred to you that some people might not be happy about what you’re writing about?” he said.
