Newsgroups: or.politics,talk.politics.drugs Date: Mon, 30 Dec 1996 13:25:35 -0800 (PST) From: "Anti-Prohibition Lg." <[aal 01] at [teleport.com]> To: [p--i--t] at [whitehouse.gov], [vice president] at [whitehouse.gov] Subject: ART: LA Weekly news on Crack/Cocaine (fwd) For those in Oregon please note the connection with EVERGREEN AIR based in McMinnville. Floyd. *** DRUG WAR, or DRUG PEACE? *** New Dope on the Contra-Crack Connection Mystery man Lister's business partners had strong ties to U.S. intelligence The principals in the case have all completed prison terms, and none has ever provided a full accounting of his schemes. But new evidence revealed in the past week provides important details that illuminate possible links between U.S. intelligence and the shadowy network alleged to have sold drugs in Los Angeles to finance the illicit contra war in Nicaragua. The drug wholesaler in the scheme was Danilo Blandon, a contra supporter and convicted trafficker who says he started in the trade to fund the contras, but stayed in the game solely for profit. Blandon's primary retailer, according to evidence presented at trial this year, was Donnell "Freeway Ricky" Ross, a notorious crack racketeer recently sentenced to life in prison. Another player in Blandon's operation is just coming into focus. Ronald J. Lister was first linked to Blandon during a series of investigative raids conducted by the Sheriff's Department in 1986. Lister was recently identified as the source of a wide range of arms and electronic intelligence gear to Blandon and Ross. Now, more is coming out. One key source of new information is the Sheriff's Department, which conducted a two-month investigation into the contra-crack charges after the San Jose Mercury-News broke the story last August. Sheriff Sherman Block declared last week that his inquiry effectively cleared the CIA of complicity in the scheme. But the report afforded Lister a much more important role in the Blandon organization than was previously understood. Law-enforcement officers investigating the Blandon operation in 1986 knew of Lister as a "mule" who transported millions of dollars in drug money to Miami. They say the cash was laundered there, presumably to pay off suppliers, and allegedly to provide assistance to the contras. More important, interviews and documentation released in connection with Block's report indicate that, while Lister may not have been a CIA agent, he certainly acted like one. He was for years engaged in international sales of arms and security equipment - some of it restricted and illegal to sell abroad - with potential customers as far-flung as Iran, Eastern Europe, Hong Kong and El Salvador. In addition, the report confirmed Lister's connection to an active participant in the murky underworld of Reagan-era covert operations: three-year Naval Academy classmate of Oliver North and current San Diego resident David Scott Weekly. After getting his start fighting in Vietnam with the U.S. Navy SEALs, Weekly pursued an adventuresome career as a mercenary who specialized in sabotage and deep-cover penetration. He is best known for his portrayal in the Hollywood treatment of former Special Forces Colonel Bo Gritz's 1983 POW expedition to Southeast Asia. The film Uncommon Valor featured a blond explosives expert from San Diego, and Gritz, now famous as a militia leader, likes to refer to Weekly as "the Real MacGyver." While Lister was laundering money for the Blandon ring and pitching "security" contracts to the Salvadoran military, Weekly was carrying out covert operations being directed through the Vice President Bush-headed National Security Council. Both Lister and Weekly were interviewed by Sheriff's investigators. It was the first time they have been questioned in connection with the alleged contra scheme. While both were guarded in their comments, both acknowledged an occasional working relationship that lasted several years. Scott Weekly's name first surfaced on October 27, 1986, when L.A. Sheriff's deputies and narcotics detectives targeting the Blandon ring searched Lister's Mission Viejo home. They confiscated paramilitary equipment, training films, photos of Lister apparently taken at military training camps in Central America and boxes of documents. According to deputies who participated in the raid, an agitated Lister told them they were making a big mistake and threatened to report the officers to his contact in Washington, "Mr. Weekly of the CIA." Lister's strange words were first published by the Mercury-News in August. Two months later, the Los Angeles Times dismissed the man who uttered them as a coke addict who made bogus claims in a ludicrous bid to throw the police off his trail. But Block's report gives foundation for Lister's claim that he was connected. In a 10-page handwritten note made by Lister in 1985 or 1986 - the document was confiscated during the raid of his house and released last week by Sheriff Block - Lister wrote that he had "regular meeting [sic] with DIA subcontractor Scott Weekly. Scott had worked in El Salvador for us." The scribbled notes appear to refer to Lister's early-1980s "security" dealings with that country's military and government leaders through two Orange County companies he headed, Pyramid International Security Consultants and Mundy Security Group. And DIA appears to refer to the Defense Intelligence Agency - a little-known intelligence outfit connected to the National Security Council. Other documents seized from Lister's home show that Lister was arranging a contract for Pyramid to provide equipment and CIA-trained "physical security personnel" to Salvadoran Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia. Pyramid employee Christopher Moore flew to San Salvador to meet with Garcia's ally, ARENA party founder and death-squad don Roberto D'Aubuisson. Lister's other Salvadoran contract proposals involved a failed deal to sell school buses and medical supplies to the Christian Democrat government, and security services for a French-built air base. The air-base deal apparently went through. In his handwritten notes, Lister also wrote Weekly's name next to that of D'Aubuisson and Christian Democrat politician Ray Prendes - two key Salvadoran officials and business contacts for Pyramid. Lister explained during the recent interviews with deputies that he "often met with Scott Weekly because Weekly was very knowledgeable in the area of commercially available military-related systems." Lister added that he occasionally used Weekly "as a consultant." The report noted, "[Lister] said he still considered Weekly to be a friend." An independent source contacted by the Weekly helped flesh out the nature of the Lister and Weekly collaboration. The source, a knowledgeable arms merchant who insisted on anonymity, said he worked with Lister and Weekly in the early 1980s. The source said Lister's business deals in Central America were successful thanks to the cooperation of the DIA, which at that time answered to Oliver North. Speaking of Lister's dealings with D'Aubuisson, the source laughed, "Somebody from the DIA wanted it to happen." The source also described a second figure in Lister's company as intelligence-connected - Richard Edward Wilker, named in the Pyramid contract as the technical director at the firm. The source described Wilker as a CIA agent who left the agency in the wake of the Edmund Wilson/Quadaffi arms scandal of the 1970s. Two additional sources on Wilker are Robert Barry Ashby and John S. Vandewerker, both security consultants who worked with Wilker at Intersect, Inc., a security consulting firm which went out of business in the early 1980s. They claim Wilker never worked for the CIA, but both Vandewerker and Ashby, admit they worked for the agency themselves. They said Intersect pursued military and security contracts in Latin America. Vandewerker said he stopped working for the CIA in 1974. He also added that, through Wilker, he met Lister in the early 1980s and confirmed that Wilker traveled to El Salvador on business trips with Pyramid in the early 1980s. Efforts to locate Richard Wilker to comment for this story were unsuccessful. Both Wilker and Weekly accompanied Lister to El Salvador and Nicaragua on repeated trips in the early and mid-1980s, the anonymous source claimed. Other records and sources confirm that Lister and Weekly have continued their occasional collaboration to the present day. Court records filed during Lister's San Diego trial on 1989 cocaine charges show the pair working together as late as 1991 - while Lister was out on bail under the terms of a plea-bargain agreement, which is still under court seal. (Both Lister and federal attorneys in San Diego have ignored requests that they move to unseal the agreement.) San Diego attorney Lynn Ball, who represented Lister until Lister had him taken off the case, claims he came to represent Lister after receiving a telephone call from his old Navy acquaintance Scott Weekly. "Weekly called me and said Lister was in the bucket and that you should go over and see him. How in the world they knew each other, I don't know," Ball said in an interview. Ball explained that, as part of his effort to get Lister released on bail in 1990, he helped convince the court to allow Lister to work with Weekly at the San Diego offices of Markon Corporation, a mysterious company Ball said was engaged in international commodities exchange. In 1991, Lister traveled to Mexico with Weekly on Markon's behalf, a trip he would later regret. Upon his return to the United States, Lister was thrown back in jail and Markon's offices were raided by the DEA. Prosecution briefs filed in Lister's 1989 cocaine trial assert that Markon was "nothing more than a front organization" set up to launder money from drug and weapons sales. Ball denied Markon Corp. was anything but a legitimate business. In a brief filed in federal court, Ball claimed that an eight-month investigation by the DEA had failed to turn up any evidence that Markon Corp. was involved in illegal activities. Ball repeatedly denied that Lister worked for the CIA, but was less certain about Weekly. "I heard he was a SEAL. The SEALs worked under the CIA in 'Nam. If he was a SEAL, maybe he was working for the CIA." Lister and Weekly demurred when Sheriff's investigators asked them to describe their connections to the U.S. intelligence agencies that helped secretly arm the Nicaraguan contras in the mid-1980s. Lister told investigators their focus on the CIA was miscast: "There's a bigger picture here," the report quotes Lister as saying. "You've got to remember, there's 32 intelligence agencies out there. The CIA is just one of them." As an example of another, Lister suggested the National Security Council. When Weekly was asked if he had worked for the DIA, he said, "Let me put it this way - there is not one ounce of love lost between the DIA and me. It is even more aggressive than that . . . It's a non-subject - that's as much as I'm going to say about it. As far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't piss on them if their face was on fire." Scott Weekly's animosity toward the DIA goes unexplained in Block's report but almost certainly stems from his 1986 conviction in an Oklahoma City federal courthouse for smuggling C-4 explosives onboard two civilian airliners bound to Las Vegas. After turning himself in to federal agents, Weekly pleaded guilty to explosives-smuggling charges but refused to give the names of anyone else who was involved. After Weekly served 14 months of a five-year prison sentence, the court granted him a new hearing that focused on new evidence about the explosives. Court documents and recent interviews show the explosives were used by Weekly in a short-lived covert U.S. operation aimed at uniting the leaders of various Afghan rebel factions by providing them lessons in how to blow up Soviet tanks. Weekly and his friend Bo Gritz testified they carried out the operation on Bureau of Land Management property near Sandy Valley, Nevada. Gritz testified that he received permission to use the site, which consisted of little more than an airstrip and a chain-link fence, from an organization called "Evergreen." In a recent interview, Gritz confirmed that Evergreen was actually Evergreen International Airlines, identified elsewhere as a proprietary company spun off by the CIA after Congress ordered the agency to "dissolve" its secret airline, Air America, in 1978. Evergreen officials have denied links to the agency. At the same hearing, Judge Wayne Alley pressed Gritz and Weekly about the extent to which the U.S. government was involved in an operation he suspected violated the U.S. Arms Export Control Act. Both answered they had discussed the mission with U.S. Army Colonel Nestor Pino - a Cuban-American who participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion and worked with the NSC's Defense Security Assistance Administration - and a State Department official named William Bode. In addition, Weekly and Gritz said, they were paid by Osman Kalderim, a representative of a company named Stanford Technology. According to the final report on the Iran-contra scandal by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, Stanford Technology was a private company set up by two of Oliver North's associates in Iran-contra, retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord and Iranian businessman Albert Hakim - to fund the secret arming of the Nicaraguan contras. According to Gritz, the Nevada prosecution was part of a White House effort to discredit him after he returned from a late-1986 POW mission to Burma with videotaped "interviews" asserting that the CIA was smuggling opiates out of Southeast Asia. The ill-fated Burma mission would end Gritz's and Weekly's smooth relationship with U.S. covert operators. The Afghan operation in Nevada was itself cut short when Gritz and Weekly were called to a late-October 1986 meeting at the White House in order to launch the Burma project. "On Halloween," said Gritz in a recent interview, "[National Security Council official Thomas] Harvey called me from the White House. Harvey said [Vice President] Bush had it on good authority that [Burmese warlord] Khun Sa had POWs and . . . Scott and I flew to D.C. to meet Harvey, who gave us some documents. I asked him, 'Do you want us to stop the Afghan training operation?' He said, 'Yeah.'" The documents - which Gritz published in his 1991 autobiography, Called To Serve - were letters of safe passage that he and Weekly carried with them to Southeast Asia. A letter written on National Security Council letterhead and given to Weekly describes him as "an operational agent cooperating with this office." Weekly's high-level meeting at the White House took place just days after Ronald Lister told police about a well-placed contact in Washington named Mr. Weekly.