Kill the Messenger (22 page)

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 Central 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.

The fact that Lister—just a “con artist” in the words of the
LA Times
—was on speaking terms with retired CIA agents is weird, to say the least. But Lister had even more unusual friends. While researching “Dark Alliance,” Webb had discovered that Lister apparently was meeting with a retired CIA covert operations chief. Lister's employee, Christopher Moore, who told Webb he met face to face with D'Aubuisson, said that before leaving for El Salvador, Lister met frequently with an executive at an Orange County construction company—a man whom Lister claimed was an ex-CIA official.

“I can't remember his name, but Ron was always running off to meetings with him, supposedly,” Moore told Webb. “Ron said the guy was the former deputy director of operations or something, real high up there. All I know is that this supposed contact of his was working at the Fluor Corp., because I had to call Ron out there a couple of times.” As Lister and Moore prepared to travel to the war-wracked country, Lister told Moore that they'd be “protected” on the trip.

In the raid on Lister's house, deputies found a handwritten list of his business contacts. Next to Scott Weekly and Roberto D'Aubuisson was the name Bill Nelson. When Sheriff's detectives interviewed Lister about Nelson in 1996, he claimed Nelson was a vice president for security at Fluor Corp. That would be a distinct understatement. In the early 1990s, David Corn of the
Nation
magazine had interviewed William E. Nelson for his book,
Blond Ghost
, a biography of CIA agent Ted Shackley. Nelson knew Shackley because before he joined Fluor Corp., Nelson was the CIA's deputy director of operations.

Nelson died of natural causes in 1995, so there was no way to ask him why his name was in Lister's notes. It wasn't until six years after Webb published “Dark Alliance” that I received heavily censored FBI records about Lister and Nelson in response to a 1997 Freedom of Information Act request. The records confirmed that Lister and Nelson had an eight years business relationship. The exact nature of that relationship remains unclear, because the FBI refuses to release uncensored copies, arguing that to do so would jeopardize U.S. national security.

But what is clear from the heavily redacted records is that, in 1985—while Lister was still laundering drug money to the contras and providing weapons to Blandon—the FBI began investigating one of his international arms deals. The investigation somehow led to Nelson, who told the FBI he had recently stopped doing business with Lister after the latter got in trouble with the FBI. Nelson admitted calling other retired CIA agents on Lister's behalf, but told Lister “nobody at the CIA can help you until you clear yourself with the FBI.”

Nelson also admitted that Lister had sought his advice before testifying before a grand jury. “He [Lister] then told of his meeting with the FBI and that he had been subpoenaed before the grand jury in San Francisco,” the FBI memo states. “He told Nelson he was terrified. Nelson said go . . . [Lister] admitted being stupid and that he had done a dumb thing. Nelson said [Lister] left and then called back after his grand-jury appearance and said he did really well.”

During his FBI interrogation, Nelson claimed Lister had also applied for a job with Fluor. “He was never offered a job,” the memo states. The FBI censored the next sentence, but the memo continues, “Nelson thought Fluor might be able to use his [Lister's] company. Nelson said [Lister] started traveling overseas, Lebanon and Central America, and he always had some scheme that never materialized.”

In a late 1996 interview, Vandewerker told me Lister had also helped him apply for a job at Fluor. “For a while, I tried to get a job at Fluor when I stopped working, and I know Rich [Wilker] was trying to sell something to Fluor,” he said.

The fact that Nelson seemed to be a source of potential employment for ex-CIA agents like Vandewerker, not to mention a “con artist” like Lister, is ironic, given that one of Nelson's final acts at the CIA was to recommend the agency terminate full-time jobs for agents who were “marginal” performers. “We owe these people a lot,” Nelson wrote then-CIA director George Bush in a 1976 memo. “But not a lifetime job.”

Although Lister escaped arrest during the 1986 raid on
his Mission Viejo house, his coke dealing quickly caught up with him. Two years later, he tried to sell two kilos of cocaine to a prostitute he met at a Newport Beach boat party. The woman turned out to be a Costa Mesa police informant, and Lister ended up behind bars for the first time since he began working with Blandon and Meneses six years earlier. Two kilos was enough to land Lister in prison for years; instead he walked out of jail after only two days.

Lister had signed a deal with the Orange County district attorney's office. After he told police about “boatloads” of marijuana off the coast of California ready for “offloading,” prosecutors let him go. But his new career as an informant was short-lived. The following year, San Diego police arrested Lister again, this time in connection with a local cocaine distribution ring.

Lister got out on bail, and got a job working with his friend Scott Weekly in San Diego. But Lister quickly came to the DEA's attention during their investigation of Jose Urda, Jr., a Chula Vista accountant who was laundering money for the Colombian coke cartels. Urda told undercover DEA agents posing as Colombian drug merchants that his colleague, a San Diego car dealer, had met Lister in San Diego's Metropolitan Correctional Center. After Urda requested his assistance, Lister agreed to help Urda launder $30,000 per day for his Colombian clients.

During their investigation, undercover DEA agents posing as Colombian traffickers infiltrated a meeting with Lister in Urda's living room. Also present were a pair of actual Colombian dealers who wanted $500,000 back from Lister, who said he couldn't return the cash because he had laundered it
with the CIA's help and didn't want to arouse the bank's suspicion. In fact, Lister bragged, he “used to transport multi-hundred kilos of cocaine from Cali, Colombia, to the U.S.” with the CIA's help.

The Colombians weren't impressed. The DEA agents in the room overheard one of them remark in Spanish that Lister was a “dead man.” Without blowing their cover, one of the agents told Lister he'd better find the money. According to a DEA report, “Lister replied that he had nothing to fear since he worked for the CIA.” The Colombians meant business, and Lister came close to regretting his bluster. On June 19, 1991, federal agents at an immigration checkpoint near San Diego nabbed a four-member cartel hit team that had been dispatched to kill Lister.

That year, a jury convicted Lister on drug-trafficking charges; he was sentenced to ninety-seven months in prison and sixty months of probation. Lister appealed, asserting that while an informant, he had testified before two federal grand juries about a “major Central American cartel” and his “activities in Central America concerning certain key figures from Nicaragua alleged to have been involved in the Iran contra scandal.”

In establishing grounds for a softer sentence, Lister told the court he had certainly run drugs, but he had also cooperated with the government. He claimed he gave prosecutors thousands of pages of documents and notes regarding his work for the CIA “from 1982 to 1986 and beyond, and I did it in detail, location, activity,” he said. “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 got out of prison shortly after “Dark Alliance” appeared, and has rebuffed all efforts to be interviewed. While much mystery surrounds—and most likely always will surround—the exact nature of his ties to the CIA, what is certain is that he was more than simply a “con artist,” as asserted by the
LA Times
. Lister's business deals with powerful Salvadoran officials, his role in supplying the contras with arms, his relationship to retired CIA officials, and his ties to Blandon and Meneses all suggest that the “Dark Alliance” drug ring had closer ties to the CIA then even Webb could have known.