It really didn’t take an FBI agent to figure out who or what Scott Weekly was. A librarian could have done it. Weekly had been something of an inadvertent celebrity back in 1983. A story in the Los Angeles Times, in fact, gave him the nickname that would stick with him for years: Doctor Death.
“Scott’s kind of a tough little guy,” said Ronald Lister’s longtime attorney, Lynn Ball. “He got busted out of the Naval Academy and entered the service as an enlisted man. Went on to become a SEAL. Then after he got out, he had some friends in Virginia. Essentially, Scott was involved in the same kind of bullshit that Ron was—providing security.”
A federal public defender told a judge in 1987 that Weekly was “some sort of a combination between John Wayne and Rambo and Oliver North, perhaps, and James Bond... He does have an involvement, a lengthy involvement, in some rather mysterious activities.”
Weekly, a classmate of North’s at Annapolis, would later say he was kicked out of the Naval Academy in 1968 “because of the buildup of a large number of demerits.” He joined the SEALs—the navy’s most elite band of fighters—and became a demolition and weapons expert, thus earning his macabre sobriquet. He was awarded two Bronze Stars in Vietnam, where, according to his lawyer, he was involved in “extensive combat duty and numerous intelligence operations.” He later married the daughter of an admiral.
A U.S. Customs agent told federal investigators that Weekly’s stint with the SEALS gave him “contacts in the intelligence community, including the CIA and NSA (National Security Agency).”
In 1983, he and several other Americans were arrested in Nakhon Phanom, a small Thai village near the border of Laos, while on a covert mission to gather intelligence on American soldiers missing from the Vietnam war. The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency had wanted to find out, once and for all, if rumors of American POWs being held in Laotian prison camps were true. (It was from this incident that the Sylvester Stallone movie Rambo took its inspiration.)
Leading the expedition was former Army Green Beret lieutenant colonel James “Bo” Gritz, a decorated Vietnam war hero and former commander of the U.S. Special Forces in the Panama Canal Zone. Though he ostensibly retired from the military in 1979, Gritz said that for several years afterward he worked with an army intelligence unit known as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), trying to locate American POWs in Southeast Asia. According to author Steven Emerson, the ISA, known in military intelligence circles as “the Activity,” provided Gritz with “tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of cameras, polygraph equipment (to cheek the veracity of Indochinese sources), radio communications systems and plane tickets to Bangkok. Gritz was also given satellite photos and other intelligence data.” The operation was code-named “Grand Eagle.” Dr. Death was Gritz’s right-hand man.
In congressional testimony, Gritz said “Grand Eagle” was officially shelved after a bureaucratic dispute between “the Activity” and the DIA. Deputy DIA director Admiral Allan Paulson confirmed to Congress that a “Department of Defense organization... proposed an operation using Mr. Gritz in a collection capacity,” but Paulson said the operation was turned down “at the first level of the approval process.”
The official rejection didn’t end the mission, however. With the ISA’s equipment and money at their disposal, Gritz and Weekly proceeded under the ironic code name “Operation Lazarus.” Weekly’s contributions, according to a 1983 Soldier of Fortune magazine story, included “having silencers altered to fit the 9-mm submachine guns to be used by Gritz and the team.”
The first mission, in November 1982, resulted in a firefight with Laotian forces, and one member of Gritz’s team was killed. As he prepared to make another stab at infiltrating Laos in early 1983, word of his mission was leaked to Soldier of Fortune magazine and picked up by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. Exposed, Gritz and his squad were arrested by Thai police at the edge of the Mekong River and charged with possession of an illegal radio transmitter. Gritz, Weekly, and two others—an antiterrorism expert and the daughter of a missing U.S. pilot—were jailed and held for trial.
In a letter to the L.A. Times, Gritz said that “CIA-DIA knew” of the mission and provided him with a variety of high-tech gear. Both agencies disavowed any knowledge of Gritz’s missions but the denials were difficult to believe. “U.S. sources in Bangkok said the radio was the latest in U.S.-made spy gear with a powerful transmitter that was to have been used to send messages from Laos straight to Washington,” United Press International reported. “The disclosure of the radio’s type and purpose bolstered the credibility of Gritz’s statements that his first mission into Laos last November and his apparently just-completed second mission was carried out with the blessing of U.S. intelligence officials.”
UPI’s perceptiveness was short-lived. Those telling paragraphs were cut from the UPI story that moved later that afternoon, and from then on most press reports uncritically accepted the government’s denials. Gritz and Weekly were dismissed as beer-can commandos off on their own private mission.
A year later, however, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported that Gritz’s team had been sent into Southeast Asia “with at least initial support from the CIA and the Pentagon.” Anderson based that conclusion on confidential court records filed in a federal fraud case in Honolulu, Hawaii, involving a polo-playing investment banker named Ronald Ray Rewald, who was accused of stealing millions from his bankrupt company’s clients. Rewald claimed his investment company had been a conduit for the CIA to secretly funnel money to covert operations around the world, and that the agency had suddenly yanked its accounts, causing the firm to collapse.
The CIA admitted to Congress that Rewald’s company “had some ties to the CIA” and that several CIA officials had investment accounts there. Anderson put it more bluntly: “Rewald’s investment firm was hipdeep in active or retired CIA employees.”
In an affidavit, Rewald said the CIA “had originally committed its support” to Gritz’s mission and that Rewald “did supply a few thousand dollars to support the mission at the CIA’s behest.” According to Anderson, the “bombshell of Rewald’s exhibits is a confidential letter to Gritz on official DIA stationery” instructing Gritz to “pull together evidence to convince political skeptics of the POW existence.”
(As an aside, Rewald also told Anderson that he was approached in 1982 by “a senior CIA official and asked if he would help in a CIA drug-smuggling operation. When Rewald told the CIA official that he had no one in his firm with experience in drug operations, the CIA man contradicted him and named [a Rewald] employee who had been a longtime CIA contract agent active in Southeast Asia.” The CIA disputed Anderson’s column, but the columnist never backed down. Rewald was convicted of fraud and sentenced to an astonishing eighty years in federal prison.)
When a police investigator asked Scott Weekly in 1996 about his relationship with the CIA, Weekly replied that it really didn’t matter what answer he gave. There was no way the police could ever confirm it. “He also agreed that if he was in the CIA, he wouldn’t tell me anyway,” the officer wrote. In 1998, the CIA Inspector General reported it could find no evidence that Weekly “had any relationship with the CIA.”
Another officer tried to check out Weekly’s military background by calling the Office of Veterans Affairs in Los Angeles. According to his report, an odd thing happened: “Scott Weekly’s name was found in the database. The person on the telephone calmly read Weekly’s name to me and suddenly exclaimed, ‘Whoa!’ He quickly informed me that due to provisions of the Privacy Act, only the fact that he was a veteran could be confirmed. No information about length of service, branch, or MOS [Military Occupational Specialty] could be released without a subpoena or the consent of Weekly.”
Notwithstanding Lister’s claim to the Majors that “Mr. Weekly knows what I’m doing,” it is difficult to say with certainty if Weekly knew of Lister’s cocaine dealings with Danilo Blandón. Weekly denies it. But there is no doubt that between 1982 and 1986, Scott Weekly was helping out on the flip side of Blandón’s criminal enterprise: the sale of exotic weapons and communications gear, some of which was being sold to Freeway Rick and his fellow crack dealers in South Central Los Angeles. A U.S. Customs agent, John Kellogg, testified in 1988 that he believed Weekly was an arms merchant who “was involved in international munitions deals.”
“And how did you come to that belief?” Kellogg was asked by a federal judge.
“Though his various contacts with me and his foreign travels,” Kellogg replied. “He would come back after several months’ absence and come into my office and say, ‘I believe you need to know about this,’ and then detail very specific information concerning munitions dealers that were under investigation by the Customs Service and others.”
According to interviews Weekly did with ATF agents in 1987, he admitted “that he had been involved with the Contras in the past, when Pastora was in power.” A U.S. Customs official told the ATF “that Weekly was acting at the direction of Customs when he was involved with the Contras.”
Lister confirmed that he “often met with Scott Weekly because Weekly was very knowledgeable in the area of commercially available military related systems.” He said Weekly was “a dependable source of information as to which systems were declassified and, hence, legal to sell.”
In the final weeks of 1986, less than a month after Lister identified “Mr. Weekly” to the sheriff’s raid team as his CIA contact, evidence surfaced suggesting that Lister’s description wasn’t far off the mark.
At the time Lister made that claim, Scott Weekly was participating in at least two covert operations involving the National Security Council and a special unit inside the U.S. State Department that was working closely with Oliver North and the CIA.
Both Weekly and Gritz have testified that in early 1986 they were asked to conduct training exercises for another of the CIA’s secret armies: the anti-Communist Afghan resistance movement—the Mujahedeen. Before undertaking that mission, they said, they sought and obtained the approval of two State Department officials in Washington: William R. Bode, a special assistant to the undersecretary of state for security assistance, and Bode’s aide, army colonel Nestor Pino Marina.
Eugene Wheaton, a former air force security expert who knows both men personally, believes Bode and Pino were CIA agents working under State Department cover on the Contra project with Oliver North. “That office...was CIA through and through,” says Wheaton, whose name shows up repeatedly in Bode’s daily agendas and Oliver North’s notebooks during 1985-86. There is some independent evidence to support Wheaton’s conclusions. In an interview with Iran-Contra investigators, former CIA Central American Task Force chief Alan Fiers Jr. admitted that he and North in late 1985 discussed an unnamed “paramilitary covert action program” involving Pino and Bode and a company called Falcon Wings Inc. What that program involved is not known; the rest of Fiers’s interview was censored on national security grounds.
Undersecretary of State William Schneider told the FBI in 1988 that Bode and Pino were responsible for Central America and their jobs involved “keeping in touch with DOD [Department of Defense] and other government agencies to determine if U.S. assistance programs to the area were working.” One of those programs appears to have been the secret Contra maritime operations North and CIA station chief Joseph Fernández were running in Costa Rica, using Kevlar speedboats and offshore shrimp trawlers as motherships. As discussed in an earlier chapter, those murky missions were being spearheaded by two CIA-linked drug traffickers working with the Southern Front Contras—Bay of Pigs veterans Felipe Vidal and Dagoberto Nuñez. In an interview with Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s office, Pino confirmed that he and Bode met with North to discuss the purchase of the speedboats. During that meeting, Pino said, North unexpectedly announced that he could wind up behind bars. “North did refer to going to jail,” Pino confirmed, but he said his “impression was that the phrase was common usage in the military before an inspection.”
Colonel Pino, another Bay of Pigs veteran, has a history of involvement with the CIA and covert operations. In 1982 he became the U.S. Army’s “action officer” on the civil war in El Salvador. Pino was a close friend of former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, who was overseeing North’s Contra resupply operation at Ilopango air base in El Salvador at the time. Rodriguez, in fact, says he first met Ollie North through Bode and Pino. Like Rodriguez, Pino was close to Salvadoran Air Force general Rafael Bustillo, who ran the Ilopango base. Pino referred to Bustillo as “family,” and the Salvadoran general sometimes stayed at Pino’s house in Virginia while visiting Washington.
As for Bode, he was described by his boss, Undersecretary Schneider, as “a deployable asset...who was used on non-routine projects.” Bode’s desk calendars, obtained from the National Archives, show frequent meetings in 1985 and 1986 with North and CIA operative Robert Owen, North’s liaison to the Contras and the Cuban mercenaries working on the Southern Front.
Gritz testified that he approached Bode and Pino to discuss the Afghan training program he and Weekly were asked to conduct because “I’ve worked for intelligence agencies and I wanted to make sure that we weren’t doing something that was illegal...Mr. Bode was enthusiastic, as a matter of fact, I would call him excited. He said that not only did he approve of the proposal but that he would provide other Afghan groups, since there was a division of about six or seven subgroups, that he would provide other people for us to train also. Later, in further meetings, I did provide him with a detailed training proposal. Initially I gave him an outline for a training proposal of seventy-six days.” Gritz said Bode shortened the training schedule to thirty days “and eliminated some of the classes that he felt were too sensitive for the Mujahedeen at the time. It included various secure communications [courses] that we had planned to give.”
In a 1987 interview, Bode confirmed that he had met with Gritz about the training program and “gave him the names of one or two people to talk to,” but he denied he authorized the operation. “Just the fact that we met and had talks didn’t authorize anything,” Bode insisted. “The Afghan program is a covert program, okay? All CIA, or perhaps a little bit of Defense Department. The State Department does not get involved in those things.” (As anyone who has studied the CIA can attest, the State Department has provided cover for more CIA officers over the years than any other section of government save the military.)
Bode’s assistant, Nestor Pino, also denied that he had officially authorized the missions, but said he was “convinced that the effort(s) taken by Colonel Gritz to train Afghan Freedom Fighters are in consonance with and complimentary of U.S. policy for Afghanistan and that Colonel Gritz and Mr. Weekly saw it that way.” Their activities, Pino declared, “were inspired by a strong desire to support the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation and by an even stronger desire to advance the interests of the United States.”
In federal court, Weekly and Gritz testified that the money to pay for the Afghan training exercises came from Stanford Technology, one of the companies fronting for Oliver North’s “Enterprise,” the quasi-governmental arms dealership at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal. Stanford Technology was used by North and his agents to launder the profits of the Iranian missile sales. During the Iran-Contra deposition of Stanford Technology’s owner, Albert Hakim, he admitted that approximately $900,000 from his various front companies was paid out “for miscellaneous projects at the request of Lt. Col. North.”
In late 1986 Gritz and Weekly’s training program—conducted in the Nevada desert on land owned by the federal government—was accidentally exposed by a law student in Oklahoma City who was married to a policeman. “She was sitting in her apartment one night when Weekly and this cop show up with 200 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives,” recalled former federal prosecutor Stephen Korotash, who handled the case. “They were looking to store it somewhere. She happened to mention it to her father and Dad called the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms].” The ATF learned that Weekly had loaded the C-4 aboard two commercial passenger flights to Las Vegas and then left the country. An ATF report on the Weekly investigation, found in the CIA’s files during an internal probe in 1997, “indicated that Weekly claimed he had done this for CIA.”
ATF agents initially suspected that Weekly might be a terrorist until they got a look at his long-distance telephone records for September and October of 1986. Among other things, they found calls to Colonel Pino at the State Department; to William Logan, southwest regional director of the U.S. Customs Service; to the National Security Council; and to defense contractor United Technologies.
The agents broke the news to federal prosecutor Korotash, who was not pleased. The storm over the Iran-Contra scandal was then reaching a crescendo and the last thing Korotash wanted was to be dragged into that maelstrom. “My first thought was: ‘Oh, great. Here I am picking my nose in Oklahoma and now I’ve stumbled into a Contra deal.’ That’s what I thought this was and I can remember thinking, ‘How in the hell did I get ahold of a case like this?”’
No stranger to the workings of government, Korotash bounced the Weekly investigation up the bureaucratic ladder, and it kept right on bouncing, all the way to the top of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Justice Department in Washington. Records show that on December 2, 1986, Assistant U.S. Attorney General William E Weld was briefed on the case. According to Weld’s notes of the briefing, Weekly was somehow connected to the U.S. State Department and had made long-distance phone calls to a Lieutenant Colonel Tom Harvey, who was on the staff of the National Security Council. (Gritz has said Harvey was supervising the POW hunt he and Weekly were on at the time and provided them with White House and NSC credentials. Harvey has denied that.)
Korotash’s supervisor, Oklahoma City U.S. attorney William Price, asked Weld, if he should “proceed with such cases?” Weld told him to go ahead, and then asked one of his aides, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark M. Richard, to look into the case.
Richard already had some background in this area. Earlier that year he’d been given an award by the CIA for “Protection of National Security during Criminal Prosecutions.” A CIA spokesman said Richard was honored for “his outstanding work in the case against Ronald Rewald,” the Honolulu investment banker who claims his investment firm funneled CIA money to covert operations, including Weekly and Gritz’s earliest POW missions. Thanks to Richard’s efforts, Rewald’s ties to the CIA were not permitted to surface publicly at his criminal trial.
Richard called U.S. Attorney Bill Price on December 11, 1986, and was briefed on the investigation. Several months later, Richard was grilled about that briefing in a deposition taken by Iran-Contra committee lawyer Pamela Naughton. According to a transcript of the deposition, Naughton confronted Richard with two sheets of lined paper filled with handwritten notes.
“Tell me what that is,” Naughton said. “Is that your handwriting, first of all?”
“I’d plead guilty to that,” Richard cracked. “This is the gist of the conversation I had with Mr. Price and his briefing of me regarding an individual who had been arrested and his possible involvement in some CIA/Contra-related activities.”
“Now, about a third of the way down—individual’s name was Weekly? Is that—am I reading that correctly?” Naughton asked. “W-E-E-K-L-Y?”
“Yes.”
“About a third of the way down it says—if I’m reading correctly—‘Weekly posts on tape that he’s tied into CIA and Hasenfus. Said he reports to people reporting to Bush.’ What does that mean?”
“I don’t know what the ‘post’ means, but apparently there was a tape recording,” Richard answered. “This is a matter which had just arisen in the U.S. Attorney’s office. I was getting briefed...it’s an individual who had been arrested and is asserting, or there is a suggestion of, a relationship to the CIA and Hasenfus and the exportation of explosives to the countries.” (At the time of Richard’s conversation with Bill Price, Weekly was actually about two weeks away from being arrested; he was still in Burma with Bo Gritz on their latest POW hunt. Price was apparently briefing Richard on the tapes of intercontinental telephone conversations Weekly was having with his police officer friend in Oklahoma City. Who made the tapes and how the Justice Department obtained them isn’t clear.)
“And he’s alleging or indicating to someone that he’s connected with the CIA and that he is reporting to people who report to Bush?” Naughton asked.
“That’s what he’s asserting,” Richard agreed.
“What is the current status, if you know?”
“I cannot—as far as I recall, it was referred to the—”
“Referred to the Independent Counsel?” Naughton asked.
“To the IC,” Richard confirmed. “And I just don’t know the status.”
Because the case had been turned over to Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-Contra committees didn’t pursue the Weekly matter further, Naughton said. Unfortunately, neither did Walsh, because Walsh had nothing but the sketchiest details about the Weekly case. The tapes on which Weekly discusses the CIA, Hasenfus, and George Bush do not appear to have been turned over, nor were Weekly’s phone records made available to Walsh’s office.
While no evidence has surfaced suggesting that State Department officials Bode and Pino knew of Blandón’s criminal enterprises, records show that they were not neophytes on the subject of the Contras and cocaine. At the same time they were dealing with Scott Weekly, the two men were trying desperately to get another CIA-linked cocaine trafficker out of prison because of his past assistance to the Contras.
The federal prisoner, José Bucso Rosa, had been indicted in 1984 for his part in a bizarre scheme to assassinate the president of Honduras, Roberto Suazo Cordova, and stage a coup d’état, using the proceeds of a giant cocaine sale to finance it. President Suazo had drawn Bueso Rosa’s wrath by dumping Honduran Army chief General Gustavo Álvarez, a fanatical anti-Communist who was one of the fathers and chief supporters of the Contras. Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general, had been one of Álvarez’s top aides, and the cocaine coup was intended to restore Álvarez and his men to power.
Unfortunately for the plotters, the two American military officers they hired to murder Suazo went to the FBI. In late October 1984, a collection of Cubans and Honduran arms merchants was arrested at a remote inland airstrip in Florida with 764 pounds of cocaine, valued at between $10 million and $40 million wholesale. “The announcements at the time of the arrests made by the Departments of State and Justice quite properly categorized this case as a triumph for the Administration’s policy against terrorism and against narcotics,” former State Department official Francis J. McNeil would later testify. But not everyone in the Reagan administration was happy about it. Bueso Rosa was one of the CIA’s main collaborators in Honduras on the Contra project, working closely with the agency in setting up Contra bases, supply lines, aircraft repairs, and a host of other, still classified, activities.
In the summer of 1986 the Honduran’s attorney flew to Washington and met with Colonel Pino, who began a vigorous lobbying campaign at State and Justice to turn Bueso Rosa loose, even though he had been indicted for racketeering, conspiracy, and attempted murder-for-hire. “The colonel assert [ed] an American intelligence interest in Bueso Rosa, in getting Bueso Rosa off,” McNeil testified. As Pino explained to Iran-Contra investigators, “General Bueso Rosa...had information which he could use against us, as he had been privy to a large amount of specific information.”
To get Washington’s attention, Bueso Rosa’s lawyers subpoenaed Oliver North, CIA officer Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, former U.S. ambassador to Honduras John D. Negroponte, and former U.S. Army general Paul Gorman to testify at the Honduran’s racketeering trial as defense witnesses. In several computer messages to NSC chief John Poindexter in September 1986, North fretted that the case could become a major headache for the Administration. “The problem with the Bueso case is that Bueso was the man whom Negroponte, Gorman, Clarridge and I worked out arrangements [censored],” North wrote. “Only Gorman, Clarridge and I were fully aware of all that Bueso was doing on our behalf.”
North’s computer messages about Bueso Rosa are revealing for another reason: they illustrate just how skewed the Reagan administration’s sense of justice had become regarding its “War on Drugs.” At the same time Reagan and Bush were whipping the American public into a frenzy over street-corner crack dealers, North and other top administration officials were livid that Bueso Rosa had even been charged with a crime. “Justice is justifiably upset that none of this info was made available to them prior to indictment or before/during trial,” North griped. “Clarridge was totally unaware that CIA had responded to a Justice query on the case with the terse comment that they ‘had no interest in the case.’ Elliott [Abrams] was also somewhat chagrined to learn that some at State had been urging rigorous prosecution and sentencing.” Bueso Rosa was advised to “keep his mouth shut and everything would be worked out,” North wrote.
The general later agreed to drop the subpoenas and pleaded guilty with the understanding that he would be sentenced to a minimum security facility at Eglin Air Force base in Florida, North wrote, “for a short period (days or weeks) and then walk free.” Justice Department official Mark Richard, who met with North to discuss the case, said he was told that Bueso Rosa “was going to go in from one entrance and out the other entrance, you know, out the rear.” An all-star collection of U.S. government officials, including Colonel Nestor Pino, Bill Bode, and the former head of the DIA, appeared as character witnesses or sent glowing letters to Bueso Rosa’s judge, urging him to go easy on the admitted racketeer. But since Bueso Rosa’s coconspirators had been hit with sentences of up to thirty years, it was impossible to let the ringleader off scot-free. He was given a five-year sentence and assigned to a federal prison in Tallahassee, a much harsher environment than the “country club” camp at Eglin he’d been promised.
In North’s view, that only made things worse. “Our major concern—Gorman, North, Clarridge—is that when Bueso Rosa finds out what is really happening to him, he will break his longstanding silence about the Nie[araguan] Resistance and other sensitive operations,” North wrote to Poindexter. “Gorman, North, Clarridge, Revell [an FBI official], [Steven] Trott and [Elliott] Abrams will cabal quietly in the morning to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence. Objective is to keep Bueso from feeling like he was lied to in legal process and start spilling the beans. Will advise.”
The next day, North told Poindexter there had been “a good meeting this morning with all concerned.” The Justice Department had graciously agreed to transfer Bueso Rosa to Eglin, work out a deal to reduce his sentence, and buttonhole the federal judge to “explain...our equities in this matter. Revell/Trott both believe this will result in approval of the petition for probationary release and deportation to Honduras. Discretely briefing Bueso and his attorney on this whole process should alleviate concerns...that Bueso will start singing songs that nobody wants to hear,” North advised. “Bottom line: all now seems headed in the right direction.” But Colonel Pino and the Defense Intelligence Agency got a little too happy. A few days before Bueso Rosa was to report to prison, State Department official McNeil got a call from an upset Justice Department official, informing him that the DIA had scheduled a luncheon honoring the would-be assassin in the Pentagon’s Executive Dining Room. McNeil, outraged by the news, called a meeting between State, the Justice Department, the DIA, and the CIA to get the invitation squelched. The ceremony was eventually canceled, but McNeil said he was warned by a superior that he was “looking for trouble” if he kept sticking his nose into the Bueso Rosa affair. “It was very nasty business,” McNeil, a former U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, would later testify. He told Congress he suspected something sinister was behind the frantic machinations of North and company to get the Honduran out of the United States.
“I must tell you this is circumstantial, but it seems to me that the circumstantial evidence is such that one has to wonder if there is not a narcotics angle,” McNeil testified. “What was so embarrassing that at least eight senior officers of the U.S. government would think it necessary to get this man off?” In a deposition, Justice Department official Steve Trott claimed he didn’t know why he went through such contortions for Bueso Rosa, other than that North had told him about the possible release of “sensitive” information.
And what information was that? “I never got into the substance of what it was,” Trott claimed. Whatever it was, Bueso Rosa held his tongue, and after doing three years at Eglin he was shipped back to Honduras. In a 1995 interview with the Baltimore Sun, he gave a chilling insight into the kinds of secrets he possessed: he disclosed that the CIA had equipped and trained the Honduran army’s official death squad, the 316 Battalion, which was blamed for the torture, disappearance, and murders of hundreds of Hondurans in the 1980s.
According to court records, similar promises of leniency were made to Scott Weekly to keep him quiet about his involvement with Bode, Pino, and the “Enterprise.” As in Bueso Rosa’s case, the efforts looks particularly unseemly, given the fact that, at the time they were undertaken, Weekly was under federal investigation in connection with Danilo Blandón’s cocaine ring—something that was known at the highest levels of the CIA, the Justice Department, and the DIA.
On December 21, 1986, just two days after Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was appointed to investigate the burgeoning Iran-Contra scandal, Weekly got a call at his home in San Diego and was asked to meet with federal agents at a room in the downtown Holiday Inn, overlooking the harbor. Weekly had just returned from his latest POW hunt with Bo Gritz, allegedly on behalf of the NSC, but he discovered that the agents—accompanied by Oklahoma City federal prosecutor Steve Korotash—didn’t want to discuss that. They wanted to know about the C-4 he’d placed on the airliners before he departed for the Far East.
When Weekly explained that the C-4 had been safely detonated in the Nevada desert, he said the prosecutor offered him a deal: if he kept quiet and pleaded guilty to illegally transporting the C-4 to Las Vegas, he would be released on unsupervised probation, and the case would be closed. “One of the points specifically that we agreed on was that this investigation would start and stop with me, and that it would not affect other or involve other personnel,” Weekly later testified. Prosecutor Korotash denied making any such promises.
The next morning Weekly and Korotash flew to Oklahoma City, where the prosecutor “began hurriedly telling me all the answers I was to give to the officials...and emphatically told [me] if things got out of hand he would answer for me or direct my answers.” Weekly said Korotash advised him to “lie low and keep mum.”
Weekly went before a federal judge that afternoon and, without ever having spoken to a defense lawyer, tersely pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of explosives. Under Korotash’s gentle questioning, he admitted to shipping plastic explosives on two commercial airliners to Las Vegas but was never asked why. Korotash helpfully pointed out that the passengers were never in danger and asked that Weekly be released from custody without having to post bail. Federal judge Ralph G. Thompson said it was “not routine that people be released on bail in cases of this kind,” but he acquiesced. The hearing was over in a matter of minutes and Weekly was soon on his way home with the whole episode safely behind him. Or so he thought.
Then Bo Gritz began shooting his mouth off about the CIA and drugs.
Following his last POW foray, the superpatriot had come home radicalized. He and Weekly had trekked into the mountains of northern Burma to visit an opium warlord named Khun Sa, who commanded a tribal army estimated at 40,000 men. Gritz has said their primary mission from Colonel Harvey at the NSC was to check out a tip Vice President George Bush had received, suggesting that the warlord knew something about missing American servicemen in Laos. (As with Gritz’s earlier missions, the U.S. government denies any involvement. However, no one has explained why Gritz and Weekly were meeting and speaking with an NSC official.)
After a three-day hike into the jungles, Gritz said, they found Khun Sa and discovered he knew nothing about American POWs. What he did know about, Gritz claimed, was a CIA-run heroin trafficking network that had been operating in the region for more than a decade, helping to finance a secret CIA army of anti-Communist guerillas in Laos. Gritz said Khun Sa, who controlled much of the raw opium trade in the Golden Triangle, opened up his ledger books and provided him with the names of the CIA officials allegedly involved and dates of their meetings with him.
Gritz and Weekly returned to the United States in mid-December 1986 with videotapes of their talks with the opium king, and Gritz said he immediately turned them over to Colonel Harvey of the NSC. Gritz said Harvey told him to “erase and forget” what he’d learned from the opium trafficker because the information would “hurt the government.” Instead, Gritz put on his medals and his fatigues and went public, charging that U.S. government officials had been dealing heroin and that the Reagan administration was trying to cover that fact up. He pointed to Scott Weekly’s recent arrest and conviction on the explosives charges as “proof” of a high-level conspiracy to silence and discredit them because of their awkward discoveries.
While the national press largely ignored the flamboyant veteran’s strange tale, it received some wire service and radio coverage, particularly in Oklahoma City. Weekly’s prosecutor, Steve Korotash, was driving to the supermarket one Saturday morning when he heard Gritz come over his car radio “claiming that I was retaliating against Scott Weekly because of some information Gritz had gotten from Khun Sa,” Korotash said. “I didn’t know who the fuck Khun Sa was. I didn’t have a clue.” Korotash said he laughed off Gritz’s charges as “idiotic.”
But others didn’t find Gritz quite so amusing. A month later, federal agents raided his house in Sandy Valley, Nevada, hauling away boxes of paperwork. Simultaneously, Weekly began receiving pressure from prosecutors to implicate Gritz in the illegal transportation of the C-4 to Nevada, he said. Weekly refused to cooperate, arguing that he’d made a deal not to finger anyone. “Weekly was protecting the hell out of Bo Gritz,” former U.S. attorney Price confirmed in an interview. “I mean, that’s what really pissed us off.”
When Weekly’s sentencing on the explosives case rolled around in April 1987, Korotash filed a confidential memorandum with the court, saying Weekly had refused to take a polygraph test and failed to cooperate with the government. A letter from the U.S. Customs Service commending Weekly for his help in other investigations was withdrawn at the last minute. Judge Wayne Alley told Weekly that it appeared he was “simply trying to protect the names of others.... That’s your privilege but it comes at a cost.” Alley sentenced Weekly to five years in federal prison, requiring him to serve a year before he could be eligible for parole, and fined him $2,000. “I got my brains fucked out,” Weekly would later complain.
A month later, in May 1987, Gritz was indicted by a federal grand jury in Nevada for misusing a passport during his travels to Southeast Asia. Gritz admitted that he had used a phony passport but claimed the government had given it to him. Pointing out that Oliver North had committed the same “crime” during his overseas travels and had never been indicted for it, Gritz told UPI that the charges were “intended to silence his accusations that the CIA and Defense Department are involved in opium trafficking.” Gritz and his attorney vowed to turn his trial into an exposé of government drug dealing, but things never got that far. The charges were dismissed by a federal judge before trial.
After spending 14 months in prison, Scott Weekly was ordered released after a hearing revealed that he had indeed been working for the U.S. government at the time of his offenses, and had also been working as a U.S. Customs informant for many years. He was placed on probation, with the unusual caveat that he report any future contact “with any officer or employee of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency or any other intelligence agency of the United States.”
While the Justice Department pounced on Gritz and Weekly for what seem to be trivial violations of federal law, it showed no such zeal when it came to pursuing Danilo Blandón and the South Central L.A. drug gang. That investigation, though it involved massive amounts of cocaine and millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains, couldn’t seem to generate any interest in the halls of Justice.