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Dark Defiance (A Lengthy Excerpt From Gary Webb's New Book, 'Dark Alliance,'
In 'The Metro,' The Silicon Valley Weekly Newspaper, Recounting
His Investigation Of The CIA-Cocaine-Contra Scandal First Uncovered
For 'The 'The San Jose Mercury News')
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 15:16:48 -0700
To: mapnews@mapinc.org
From: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org (MAPNews)
Subject: MN: Dark Defiance
Sender: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Reply-To: owner-mapnews@mapinc.org
Organization: Media Awareness Project http://www.mapinc.org/lists/
Newshawk: Joel W. Johnson (jwjohnson@mapinc.org)
Source: The Metro, Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper
Contact: Letters@sjmetro.com
Website: http://www.metroactive.com/metro/
Pubdate: 25 June - July 1, 1998
Author: Gary Webb
Editor note: The article is reprinted from the book 'Dark Alliance' by
permission of Gary Webb.
DARK DEFIANCE: WHERE THERE'S SMOKE . . .
In his just-released book, 'Dark Alliance,' deposed Mercury News reporter
Gary Webb tells his side of the story behind the award-winning CIA-crack
connection that tanked his career.
IN DECEMBER I gathered up all my notes and files and wrote a four-page
project memo for my editors, outlining the story as I saw it. I proposed
to tell the tale of how the infant L.A. crack market had been fueled by
tons of cocaine brought in by a Contra drug ring, which helped to spread a
deadly new drug habit "through L.A. and from there to the hinterlands."
"This series will show that the dumping of cocaine on L.A.'s street gangs
was the back end of a covert effort to arm and equip the CIA's raging army
of anti-Communist Contra guerrillas," I wrote. "While there has long been
solid -- if largely ignored -- evidence of a CIA-Contra-cocaine connection,
no one has ever asked the question: 'Where did all the cocaine go once it
got here?' Now we know."
I met with [my editor] Dawn [Garcia] and managing editor David Yarnold in
San Jose, and we spent an hour discussing the progress of the investigation
and the proposed series. Yarnold reread the project memo, shook his head
and grinned.
"This is one hell of a story," he said. "How soon do you think you can
finish it?"
I told him I needed to go to Miami and Nicaragua to do some interviews with
[drug trafficker Norwin} Meneses, some former Contras and the Nicaraguan
police. If that came off, we might be able to have the series ready by
March 1996, in time for the [L.A. drug dealer Ricky] Ross trial, which
would give it a hard news angle. But, I said, I wanted to get some
assurances right up front from both of them.
Because the story had what I called a "high unbelievability factor," I
wanted to use the Mercury's Web site, Mercury Center, to help document the
series. I wanted us to put our evidence up on the Internet so that readers
could see our documents and reports, read the grand jury transcripts,
listen to the undercover DEA tapes, check our sources and make up their own
minds about the validity of the story. After seeing the government's
reaction to the Contra-cocaine stories of the 1980's, I didn't want to be
caught in the old officials-say-there's-no-evidence trap.
The technology now exists for journalists to share our evidence with the
world, I told them, and if there was ever a story that needed to be solidly
backed up, it was this one. Not only would it help out the story, I wrote
in my memo, it would hopefully raise the standards of investigative
reporting by forcing the press to play show and tell, rather than hiding
behind faceless sources and whisperings from "senior administration
officials."
The editors enthusiastically agreed. It would be a good way to showcase
the Mercury's cutting-edge Web site, they said, and it was good timing --
management directives were coming out to incorporate the Web page into our
print stories whenever possible. We were, after all, the newspaper of the
Silicon Valley. This would be a chance to use the Internet in a way that
had never been done before, they agreed. No problem. What else?
The second point I made was something I was sure they were tired of hearing
about. We're going to need space to tell this story, I told them, a lot
more space than the paper usually devotes to its investigative projects.
It was the one issue that drove me crazy about working for the Mercury
News.
After writing for the Plain Dealer for five years and having as much space
as I wanted, I'd found the Mercury's mania for brevity almost unbearable.
My forfeiture series, for example, had been held to two parts, and even
those stories had been chopped up into bite-sized bits. I'd had other
stories held for weeks and even months because I wouldn't give in to
editor's demands to cut them in half.
No one reads long stories, I was told. Our focus groups had shown that
readers wanted our stories to be even shorter than they already were --
"tighter and brighter" was the answer to dwindling readership. Details
were boring. Readers didn't like to having to turn pages to follow jumps.
If you couldn't tell a daily story in 12 inches or less, then maybe it was
too complicated to tell. For a time, we even had a rule: no stories could
be longer than 48 inches. Period. And that was for Sundays.
Daily stories had an absolute max of 36 inches.
"We've got to lay out everything we know," I told Yarnold, "because people
are going to come after us on this, and I don't ever want to be in a
position where I have to say, 'Oh, yeah, we knew that, but we didn't have
the space to put it in the paper.' And I don't think you want to be in
position, either."
You'll get as much space as you need, Yarnold assured me. Don't worry
about it. Just go out and bring this thing home.
IN MID-APRIL I finished the first drafts and sent them up to my editors,
with no clue as to how they would be received. They were like nothing I
had ever written before, and probably unlike anything my editors had ever
grapppled with either: a tale spanning more than a decade, that attempted
to show how two of the defining issues of the 1980s -- the Contra war and
the crack explosion, seemingly unconnected social phenomena -- were
actually intertwined, thanks largely to government meddling.
The four-part series I turned in focused on the relationship between the
Contras and the crack king. It mentioned the CIA's role in passing, noting
that some of the money had gone to a CIA-run army and that there were
federal law enforcement reports suggesting the CIA knew about it. I never
believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA conspiracy behind the
crack plague. Indeed, the more I learned about the agency, the more
certain of that I became. The CIA couldn't even mine a harbor without
getting its trench coat stuck in its fly.
That the Contras' cocaine ended up being turned into crack was a horrible
accident of history, I believed, not someone's evil plan. The Contras just
happened to pick the worst possible time ever to begin peddling cheap
cocaine in black neighborhoods. That, I believed, was the real danger the
CIA has always presented -- unbridled criminal stupidity, cloaked in a
blanket of national security.
"The fact that a government-connected drug ring was dumping tons of cocaine
into the black neighborhoods in L.A. -- and to a lesser extent in San Jose,
Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, Houston, Oklahoma City, Alabama and New
Orleans -- goes a long way toward explaining why crack developed such deep
roots in the black community," I wrote. "It's where the seed was planted."
Looking back, I can barely believe I was permitted to write such a story,
but that was the kind of newspaper the Mercury News was at the time. No
topic was too taboo, or at least if there was one, I never discovered it.
And I was always looking.
The reason I'd left a much larger paper in Cleveland to work for the
Mercury News was because the editors convinced me that they ran one of the
few newspapers in the country with that kind of courage. There were no
sacred cows, they pledged; and for nine years they had been true to their
word. Not one of my stories was ever spiked of significantly watered down;
nearly 300 of them had appeared on the Merc's front page, including many
that wouldn't have stood a chance in hell of being printed in other
mainstream newspapers.
SO WHEN DAWN CALLED me with the official reaction to "Dark Alliance," I was
gratified but not suprised. They loved it, she said happily. They
couldn't wait to get it in the newspaper. They thought it was important,
groundbreaking reporting. Congratulations. But there was one hitch.
"They thought it was too long," she said. It needed to be cut.
The four main stories ranged between 2,400 words and 3,200 words apiece,
and for a major metropolitan daily, that's not a lot of space. For the
Mercury, though, it was as if I'd asked for the moon, a raise, a shower in
my office and an executive parking place all at the same time.
"They're never going to go for four parts," Dawn warned.
"Yarnold told me I could have as much space as I needed," I reminded her.
"I can't do it in less than four parts. I've gotten this thing down as far
as I can get it. You're going to start cutting into its spinal cord if you
cut it any more." The problem was that the believability of the story
hinged on the weight of the evidence. Every fact that was cut would make
the story appear more speculative than it really was.
For weeks we wrangled back and forth, and then I got the word. David
Yarnold, the managing editor, had decreed that it was three parts or
nothing.
Fine, I said. I stitched the second and third parts together into one long
part and resubmitted the series.
"Gee," Dawn said. "This second part is kind of long. We need to cut it."
This tug-of-war continued throughout the spring of 1996. She would cut the
paragraphs out, I would put them back in. We tried creating sidebars --
small stories that ran alongside the main one -- so we could hit the "magic
numbers," the maximum length the editors had set for stories. It was still
too long. Finally I put my foot down. No more cuts. The editors
relented.
"Okay," Dawn said. "You've made your point. Let's try it again as a
four-parter."
I reassembled all the scattered bits and peices and resubmitted it. She
read it, approved it and sent it up the editing chain. I got a call a few
days later.
"Well, they liked it, and Yarnold agreed four parts is fine. But they want
the first part rewritten," she said. "They think it's too feature-y. It
should have a harder edge on it, more news. We need to go through and pull
out all of the information about the CIA and the Contras and put it in the
first day."
"The reason it's got a feature lead is because the series is a feature," I
argued. "It's about the three men who started the L.A. crack market.
That's the story I want to tell. If we turn this thing into a Contra
cocaine story, everyone is going to say, 'Oh, that's old news.' We agreed
on this already, remember?"
"That's what they want," Dawn said. "I'm just telling you what they told me."
"Well I'm not writing it that way. I'm tired of this nonsense."
"Just try it, OK? Give it a quick write-through. And if it doesn't work,
it doesn't work, and we'll go back to the old way. But we've got to give
it a try."
I gritted my teeth. OK. If they wanted a hard edge on this thing, I'd
give them one. I sat down at my computer, and in a few minutes I hammered
out the paragraph that, with a few changes, would open the "Dark Alliance"
series:
"For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine
to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions
in drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army run by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found. This drug
network, federal records show, opened the first pipeline between Colombia's
cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now
known as the crack capital of the world. The cocaine it brought into the
United States fueled the crack explosion in urban America, and the
simultaneous rise in power of the murderous gangs of black L.A."
I hit the transmit button.
Dawn called the next morning. "This is perfect," she said. "This is
exactly what they wanted." The rest of the editing went fairly smoothly,
and by July 26, 1996, the four-part series was done, edited, and ready to
go in the paper, starting Aug. 18.
Late one night, toward the end of July, the phone rang. "Well, I have some
good news and some bad news," Dawn began. "The bad news is that David
Yarnold is no longer the editor on this series. He took a new job with
Knight-Ridder, and he's out of here. The good news is that Paul Van
Slambrouck is the new editor, and I showed him the series today and he
really likes it and thinks we've got a great story here."
"We've got a brand-new editor on this?" I cried. "Now? And he just read it
for the first time today? You're shitting me. So what does this mean?"
"Well, unfortunately, it means it's not going to run on the 18th. He has
some changes he wants to make to it."
I sat up and started laughing. "Really? What kind of changes?"
"He thinks it's too long. We need to make it three parts."
I howled. "You can't be serious, Dawn. This is a joke, right?"
"No, I'm sorry. Maybe you should talk to Paul."
Van Slambrouck, the Mercury's national editor and a smart, thoughtful
journalist, was apologetic. It wasn't the way he wanted to do things,
either. But he thought the series was terrific, and he wanted very much to
get it in the paper and hoped I still felt the same way.
"Dawn said you wanted to make some changes."
It needed to come down in length, he said, and we needed more CIA stuff in
the first day. I was back to square one.
I sat down and fired off an angry memo to Dawn. Van Slambrouck had asked
me to cut 65 inches, I complained. He had suggested that I needed to go
through the story myself and be "ruthless" and I'd be able to find 65
inches to cut, no problem. If there were 65 inches left of fat in these
stories, I wrote to Dawn, "we both ought to resign because we obviously
aren't doing our jobs right."
An additional problem, I reminded Dawn, was that my family and I were in
the midst of moving and were taking our vacation while the new house was
being readied. During the next three weeks I rewrote the series on a
laptop while on "vacation," first in a beach house on the Outer Banks of
North Carolina, then in a motel room in Washington, D.C. and finally in the
basement of my in-laws' house in Indiana. It was horrible. I had no way
of telling what was being cut back at the Mercury, what was being put back
in or what was being rewritten. Five or six different versions were flying
around. Don't these people know what they're dealing with here? I
wondered. Don't they realize the import of what we're printing?
I eventually realized that for the most part they did not, which may have
been the reason the series got in the paper in the first place. It came in
under the radar. Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos would later
tell Newsweek that "he read only part of the story" before it appeared in
print, an amazing admission if true.
Perhaps my editors thought I was exaggerating the story's significance,
trying to gobble up more space than was really justified? It is a common
sight in newsrooms to see reporters hype their stories. I knew reporters
who worked their editors like PR agents, or lobbyists pimping a bill. But
I had never worked that way. I figured my editors know how to read as well
as anyone. My paycheck was the same every week, no matter which page they
put my story on . . . I also know from my research what kind of backlash
would result from a story that dirtied up the CIA, and stressed it
repeatedly to my editors. New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh's 1974
expose of Operation Chaos, a massive illegal CIA domestic spying operation,
had brought on attacks in the Washington Post (he had no "hard" proof) and
Time ("There is a strong likelihood that Hersh's CIA story is considerably
exaggerated"), among many others.
AT 2 AM -- midnight in San Jose -- on Aug. 18 1996, I was at a party at my
best friend's house in Indianapolis. I excused myself, went into a
bedroom, plugged into my laptop, and dialed into the Mercury's Web site. A
picture of a man smoking crack, superimposed upon the seal of the CIA, drew
itself on the screen. After more than a year of work, "Dark Alliance" was
finally out. I emailed [freelance journalist] Georg [Hodel] with the
news, went back out to the party and got drunk. The next morning I flew
back to Sacramento.
Initially, the silence was deafening. Then we realized why. They had
intentionally run the series the week between the Republican and Democratic
national conventions. The national media and the nation's politicians were
on vacation; nobody was paying much attention to anything, and particularly
not a story in a regional Northern California newspaper.
By Aug. 21, though, some radio stations began calling. What was this CIA
story we've been hearing about on the Web?
That combination -- talk radio and the Internet -- is what saved "Dark
Alliance" from slipping silently below the surface and disappearing without
a trace. The Internet wizards at Mercury Center -- Mark Hull, Donna Yanish
and Albert Poon -- had done a brilliant, eye-popping job on the "Dark
Alliance" Web page. It was something right out of the movies: full-color
animanted maps, one click access to uncut source documents, unpublished
photos, audio clips from undercover DEA tapes and [drug trafficker Danilo]
Blandon's federal court testimony, a bibliography, a timeline -- all in far
more depth and detail than we were able to get into the newspaper.
AT THE END of that first week I returned to San Diego for Ricky Ross's
sentencing. That was where I had my first inkling of the firestorm I'd
touched off. Radio stations were blanketing the newspaper with interview
requests. Before heading for the courthouse that morning, I'd done radio
shows in Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas and Detroit.
A haggard-looking L.J. O'Neale, the assistant U.S. attorney, spotted me in
the hallway outside the courtroom.
"Hey there," I said. "You see the story?"
He scowled and pushed by without saying a word. He'd already fought his
way through television camera crews outside the courthouse, and he clearly
wasn't pleased with all the attention. Inside the courtroom, reporters
jostled for seats.
Fenster asked for a postponement of the sentencing, saying the series had
raised significant questions about Blandon and his connections to the CIA.
O'Neale protested angrily, accusing Ross of dreaming up the whole CIA plot
and feeding it to gullible journalist who was spreading the ridiculous
conspiracy theories.
But Judge Huff looked troubled and told O'Neale she wanted some answers
from the CIA before she passed sentencing on Ross and his codefendents.
And she also wanted the Justice Department to begin deportation proceedings
against Blandon immediately. The news made the wires, and the switchboard
at the Mercury News lit up. "This place is going crazy!" Dawn reported.
"The Web page had something like 500,000 hits on it today!"
The Mercury News executive editor, Jerry Ceppos, called and congratulated
me. The TV networks were calling the paper. We were getting phone calls
from all over the world. "Let's stay on top of this," he said. "Anything
you need, you let us know. We want to run with this thing." A few days
later, I got a $500 bonus check in the mail and a note from Ceppos:
"Remarkable series! Thanks for doing this for us."
I was on National Public Radio the following Monday and, as always, gave
out the Web site address so people could read the series and see our
documents. We had 800,000 hits that day. The synergy was amazing. For
the first time, people could hear about a story and on the radio -- even
one that appeared several weeks earlier and thousands of miles away -- and
immediately read it on their computer screens.
Unlike all the previous stories about the Contras and cocaine, this one
couldn't be killed off in the traditional manner, by Big Media ignoring it
or relegating it to the news briefs. Millions of people were finding out
about "Dark Alliance" anyway -- even though not a word had appeared in the
so-called national press. That phenomenon was newsworthy of by itself.
"The story had serious legs, moving rapidly through the African American
community via email and file downloads, and then into living rooms, offices
and churches, and onto streets and into more mainstream black papers and
radio broadcasts," HotWired magazine wrote in October 1996. "For the first
time, my grandmother asked me to go online and read something. I couldn't
believe it. She wouldn't look at a computer before," one black government
lawyer emailed the magazine. "This story is causing a sensation among
blacks. It's all they're talking about. They are enraged about it, and
they can't believe it isn't on every front page in America."
IF THERE WAS ONE THING scarier to corporate journalism than the series
itself, it was the image of a future where Big Media was unable to control
the national agenda. Irrespective of what the series had said, "Dark
Alliance" proved that the stranglehold a relative few East Coast editors
and producers had on what became news could be broken. "This story
suddenly raises suspicions that the Internet has changed the equation in
support of democracy," author Daniel Brandt ruminated in October 1996 on an
Internet e-zine. "Unless regional newspapers agree to mild-mannered,
regional interest Web sites, all the resources that the elites have
invested in monopolizing the Daily Spin could end up spinning down the
drain."
In this case the blend of the Internet and talk radio had made the
tradional media irrelevant. The public was marching on without them, and
the message got through clearly to California's top politicians. The L.A.
City Council unanimously approved a resolution calling for a federal
investigation. Both California senators and a half-dozen congressment
wrote letters to CIA director John Deutch and Attorney General Janet Reno
demanding an official inquiry. Deutch agreed to conduct one, which
infuriated the right-wing Washington Times. Deutch was lambasted on the
front page by unnamed critics for "his efforts to curry favor with liberal
politicians." And on the editorial page, editor-at-large Arnaud de
Borchgrave, a "journalist" with a long history of connections to the
intelligence community and the Contras, fumed that "the same old
pro-Marxist CIA bashers are at it again" and quoted unnamed former
colleagues at "another paper" describing me as "an 'activist' journalist
who would dearly love to see the CIA scuttle itself."
In his column, de Borchgrave claimed Congress had given the Contras $100
million before the Boland Amendments went into effect, and chided me for
being too young to remember that the CIA had no need for illicit Contra
funds in those days. When I appeared on political talk-show host Chris
Matthews' live show on CNBC that evening, Matthews eagerly sprung de
Borchgrave's crazy timeline on me, demanding to know how I could have
written what I did, given the fact that the Contras had plenty of money.
After Jack White of Time and I pointed out that he had his "facts"
backward, Matthews, during a commercial break, began bellowing at his
production assistants, loudly accusing them of attempting to "sabotage" his
show.
Soon after Deutch ordered an internal investigation, Attorney General Janet
Reno -- at the urging of Justice Department Inspector General Michael
Bromwich -- followed suit.
Finally, the national news media dipped a toe into the icy waters.
Newsweek devoted an entire page to the story in late September, calling it
"a powerful series" that had some black leaders "ready to carpet-bomb
Langley." Time that month called it "the hottest topic in black America,"
and said the Web site "provides a plethora of court documents, recorded
interviews and photographs. . . . This is the first time the Internet has
electrified African Americans."
Soon, 60 Minutes called. "Don't talk to anyone else," a producer told me.
"We want this story to ourselves." I got an identical call from Dateline
NBC. I told both of them I thought it was unethical for a reporter to
refuse to talk to the press. The 60 Minutes producer said that was the
most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. Dateline ended up doing the story.
Over the next few weeks, we got interview requests from Jerry Springer,
Geraldo Rivera, Tom Snyder, Jesse Jackson and Montel Williams. I was on
CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and CBS Morning News. The Mercury printed up 5,000
copies of the series, and they were gone in a matter of weeks. An employee
from the marketing department was assigned full-time to handle press calls.
Each evening she emailed a list of interview requests, and by early
October the list was three pages long and growing. The London Times did a
story. Le Monde in Paris wrote something. Newspapers in Germany, Belgium,
Spain, Colombia and Nicaragua called for interviews.
It's hard to imagine how many radio stations there are in the United States
until they start calling. At home, my phone would begin ringing at 6 a.m.
and not stop until 10 p.m. Talk radio was burning up the airwaves,
spreading the story and the Web site address from coast to coast. One day,
the hits on the Web page climbed over 1,000,000. People in Japan, Bosnia,
Germany and Denmark sent me email.
Meanwhile, we continued advancing the story. I teamed up with Pamela
Kramer, the Mercury's reporter in Los Angeles, and we wrote several stories
about the 1986 police raids on Danilo Blandon's house. We came up with the
entire Gordon search warrant, which showed that the police had several
informants telling them that drug money was going to the Contras. Our
sources provided us with the case file number to the supposedly nonexistent
investigatory file at the L.A. County Sheriff's Office, and Congresswoman
Maxine Waters and her staff marched in and demanded to see it.
"I told them that the only way they were going to get me out of their
office was to give me the file or arrest me," she said. She got the file
-- in it were the police reports about the search of [cocaine dealer]
Ronald Lister's house, his claims of CIA involvement, and the inventory of
strange items seized at his house.
NBC News did a strong follow-up, finally exposing the drug-related entries
in Oliver North's notebooks to a national TV audience, but it was the only
network attempting to advance the story. The establishment papers -- the
New York Times, Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times -- the same
newspapers that had so confidently reported in the 1980s that there was no
truth to these claims of Contra drug trafficking, remained largely silent.
"Where is the rebuttal? Why hasn't the media rose in revolt against this
story?" an exasperated Bernard Kalb, former spokesman for the Reagan State
Department, demanded on CNN's Reliable Sources. "It isn't a story that
simply got lost. It, in fact, has resonated and echoed, and the question
is where is the media knocking it down, when that, too, is a journalistic
responsibility?"
Kalb's guest, former Reagan Justice Department spokesman Terry Eastland,
clucked that he "would expect to see this kind of story in a magazine like
In These Times, not in a mainstream newspaper such as the San Jose Mercury
News." No one on Kalb's show bothered to mention that Eastland had a
history of trying to cover up the Contra drug link. In May 1986, his
office had planted a false story in the New York Times stating that the
Justice Department had "cleared" the Contras of any involvement in gun
running and drug smuggling, a statement the Justice Department was later
forced to recant.
One question I was frequently asked during radio appearances was whether I
thought the national media reaction would be different if the series had
appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times. My stock answer was
that it hadn't appeared in those newspapers because they'd decided in 1986
that there was no story here. My feeling was that those newspapers' very
familiarity with the story made it more difficult for them to report it.
How could they come back 10 years later and admit that the Contras had been
selling cocaine to Americans, when they'd already assured us it wasn't
happening?
In early October, I was in New York City getting ready for an appearance on
the Montel Williams Show, which was doing a two-day special on the "Dark
Alliance" series. About 2 a.m. Jerry Ceppos called. The Washington Post
had just moved a story on the wires. It would be in the morning edition,
and it was highly critical of the series. He asked me to take a look at it
and give him my reaction.
"What did they say was wrong?" I asked.
"They don't say any of the facts are wrong," Ceppos said. "They just don't
agree with our conclusions."
"And their evidence is what?"
"A lot of unnamed sources, mainly. It's really a strange piece. I'll send
you a fax of it, and we can talk in the morning."
They story was headlined "The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged
Plot." I laughed. What plot?
The reporters, Walter Pincus and Roberto Suro, wrote that their
investigation "does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed Contras
-- or Nicaraguans in general -- played a major role in the emergence of
crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States. Instead,
the available data from arrest records, hospitals, drug treatment centers
and drug-user surveys point to a rise in crack as a broad-based phenomenon
driven in numerous places by players of different nationalities, races and
ethnic groups."
Ah ha. The old tidal wave theory. Here it comes again. I wondered what
"available data" Pincus and Suro had gathered from the 1982-83 era, the
dawn of the L.A. crack market, since the DEA and NIDA had admitted a decade
earlier that there was no such data.
The story grudgingly and often back-handedly admitted that the basic facts
presented in the series were correct, and it buried key admissions deep
inside, such as the fact that "the CIA knew about some of these activities
and did little or nothing to stop them." Toward the end Pincus and Suro
confirmed that Norwin Meneses and Blandon had met with Enrique Bermudez in
Honduras, but without disclosing Bermudez's relationship with the CIA. CIA
agent Adolfo Calero, whom the Post euphemistically described as someone
"who worked closely with the CIA," also admitted to the Post reporters that
he had met with Meneses.
Overall, it was a cleverly crafted piece of disinformation that would set
the stage for the attacks to follow. It falsely claimed that the series
made a "racially charged allegation that the 'CIA army' of Contras
deliberately targeted the black community in an effort to expand the market
for a cheap form of cocaine." And, despite Blandon's testimony that he
sold 200 to 300 kilos of cocaine for Meneses in L.A. and that all the
profits were sent to the Contras, the Post quoted unnamed "law enforcement
officials" as saying "Blandon sold $30,000 to $60,000 worth of cocaine in
two transactions."
The story also dove right through the "window" that O'Neale had opened at
the Ross trial. "If the whole of Blandon's testimony is to be believed,"
Pincus ad Suro wrote, '[then there is no connection] between the Contras
and African American drug dealers because Blandon said he had stopped
sending money to the Contras by the time he met Ross." No mention was made
of the DEA reports and the sheriff's department affidavit that said Blandon
was selling Contra cocaine through 1986, nor of the fact that Ross had been
buying Blandon's cocaine long before he actually met him. "Moreover," the
Post declared, "the mere idea that any one person could have played a
decisive role in the nationwide crack epidemic is rejected out of hand by
academic experts and law enforcement officials." But they identified
neither the academic experts nor the law enforcement officials.
I wrote Ceppos a memo pointing out the holes in the Post's story. "The
Pincus piece," I wrote, "is just silly. It's the kind of story you'd
expect from someone who spent three weeks working on a story, as opposed to
16 months." The fact that the Post's unnamed "experts" would reject a
scenario "out of hand," I wrote, was the whole problem. "None of them --
whoever they are -- has ever studied this before."
To his credit, Ceppos fired off a blistering letter to the Post, pointing
out the factual errors in the piece and calling Pincus' claims of a
"racially charged allegation" a "complete and total mischaracterization."
"The most difficult issue is whether a casual reading of our series leads
to the conclusion that the CIA is directly responsible for the outbreak of
the crack epidemic in Los Angeles. While there is considerable
circumstantial evidence of CIA involvement with the leaders of this drug
ring, we never reached or reported any definitive conclusion on CIA
involvement," Ceppos wrote. "We reported that men selling cocaine in Los
Angeles met with people on the CIA payroll. We reported that they received
fundraising orders from the people on the CIA payroll. We reported that
the money raised was sent to a CIA-run operation. But we did not go
further and took pains to say that clearly."
Ceppos posted the letter on the staff bulletin board, along with a memo
defending the series. "We strongly support the conclusions the series drew
and will until someone proves them wrong. What is even more remarkable is
that four experienced Post reporters, re-reporting our series, could not
find a single factual error. The Post's conclusions are very different --
and I believe, flawed -- but the major facts aren't. I'm not sure how many
of us could sustain such a microscopic examination of our work, and I
believe Gary Webb deserves recognition for surviving unscathed."
The Post held Ceppos' letter for weeks, ordered him to rewrite it, and then
refused to print it.
Shortly afterward I got an email message from a woman in Southern
California. There was a story in the Mercury's archives that I needed to
see, she wrote, and provided a date and a page number. I sent it to our
library and got a photocopy of the story in the mail a day later. It had
run on Feb. 18, 1967."
"How I Traveled Abroad on CIA Subsidy" was the headline. The author was
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post.
After disclosures of CIA infiltration of American student associations had
exploded that year, Pincus had written a long, smug confessional of how,
posing as an American student representative, he'd traveled to several
international youth conferences in the late 1950's and early 1960's,
secretly gathering information for the CIA and smuggling in anti-Communist
propoganda. A CIA recruiter had approached him, he wrote, and he'd agreed
to spy not only on the student delegations from other countries but on his
American colleagues as well. "I had been briefed in Washington on each of
them," Pincus wrote. "None was remotely aware of CIA's interest."
This just cannot be true, I thought. The Washington Post's veteran
national security reporter -- a former CIA operative and propogandist?
Unwilling to believe this piece of information until I dug it up for
myself, I went to the state library and got out the microfilm. The story
was there. This was the man who was questioning my ethics for giving
[Ross's attorney] Alan Fenster questions to ask a government witness about
the Contras and drugs? Jesus, I'd certainly never spied on American
citizens.
THE L.A. TIMES and New York Times struck next. On Oct. 20, 1996, both ran
long stories attacking my reporting and the series. They took the same
tack the Washington Post had several weeks earlier: admitting that the
basic facts were true and then complaining that the facts didn't mean a
thing.
Relying again mostly on unnamed sources, these two newspapers of record
claimed Blandon and Meneses hadn't had "official positions" with the
Contras. Drug money had been sent, but not millions; it was only tens of
thousands, according to unnamed sources. And experts scoffed at the notion
that one drug ring could have supplied enough cocaine to feed the tidal
wave of crack that engulfed American, a ridiculous claim I'd never made.
The papers found no need to mention the mass of historical evidence that
supported the series' findings. Without anything approaching
documentation, the papers just flatly declared that I was wrong.
"The crack epidemic in Los Angeles followed no blueprint or master plan.
It was not orchestrated by the Contras or the CIA. No one trafficker, even
kingpins who sold thousands of kilos and pocketed millions of dollars, ever
came close to monopolizing the drug trade," the L.A. Times assured its
readers in the lead paragraph of a three-day series.
THE NEXT DAY, the L.A. Times absolved the CIA of any involvement with
Blandon and Meneses. Its authoritative sources: former CIA director Robert
Gates, former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro and current CIA director
John Deutch. "Like good little boys and girls, the Times, the Washington
Post et al., toddled off to the CIA and asked the agency if it had ever
done such a thing. When the CIA said 'no' the papers solemnly printed it
-- just as though the CIA hadn't previously denied any number of illegal
operations in which it was later caugh red-handed," columnist Molly Ivins
observed.
Buried deep within the L.A. Times story were admissions by CIA officials
that Contra supporters "were involved in drug running, but they bought
villas and did not put it into the FDN." And the story conceded, "the
allegation that some elements of the CIA-sponsored Contra army cooperated
with drug traffickers has been well documented for years." But the story
dismissed the idea that "millions" went to the Contras from the
Nicaraguans' drug sales. Unnamed sources said it was around $50,000 or
$60,000, which caused former Meneses distributor Rafael Cornejo some mirth.
"Sixty thousand?" he scoffed. "You can raise that in an afternoon."
According to another unnamed source the Times quoted, Blandon and Meneses
were making only $15,000 a kilo in profits.
Unmentioned was Blandon's testimony that he'd sold 200 to 300 kilos for
Meneses during the time they were sending money to the Contras, and his
admission that all of the profits were being sent to the rebels. Using the
Times' own profit figures, that would mean between $3 million and $4.5
million went to the Contras just from Blandon's sales.
And that didn't include the money Meneses' organization -- through Cabezas
and Renato Pena in San Francisco -- was sending. Lost in the debate over
whether it was millions or tens of thousands, was the inanity of the idea
that a reasonably accurate number could ever be found in a business that
deals in cash and eschews written records -- it is just as possible that
the amounts could have been in the tens of millions.
"No solid evidence has emerged that either Meneses or Blandon contributed
any money to the rebels after 1984," the story declared, ignoring the 1986
sheriff's affidavit and the 1986 DEA reports. The story also quoted
another unnamed associate who claimed, apparently with a straight face,
that the profit margin in the cocaine business in 1982-84 -- when coke was
selling for $60,000 a kilo -- were just too slim to allow million-dollar
donations to the FDN.
THE UNPRECENDENTED attacks by three major newspapers alarmed the Mercury's
editors. I was called to a meeting with Ceppos and the other editors and
told that I should quit trying to advance the story. We needed to start
working on a written response to the other newspapers, he said. I
vehemently disagreed. "The best way to shut them up is to put the rest of
what we know in the paper and keep plowing ahead," I argued. "Let's run a
story about Walter Pincus' CIA connections. Let's write about how the L.A.
Times has been booting this story since 1987." I told them of my discovery
that the L.A. Times Washington bureau had been sent a copy of the notes
found in Ronald Lister's house in 1990 and had thrown them away. Ceppos
disagreed.
"I don't want to go to war with them," he said.
Fortunately, both Dawn Garcia and Paul Van Slambrouck agreed that we should
continue developing the story.
"The best way to answer our critics," Van Slambrouck told Ceppos, "is to
advance the story. Let's go out and get some more evidence of drug money
being sent to the Contras. Let's get more evidence of this drug ring's
dealings with the Contras." Ceppos relented, authorizing another reporting
trip to Central America. He also assigned L.A. bureau reporter Pamela
Kramer and Pete Carey, an investigative reporter, to gather information
about the start of the L.A. crack market. He also made another decision:
He was changing the logo that the series had used on the Internet and in
the reprints. The CIA's seal was coming off.
"What's the point of doing that?" I asked. "We documented that these
traffickers were meeting with CIA agents. If you change the logo, the rest
of the media is going to accuse us of backing away from the story."
But Ceppos wouldn't budge. Thousands of reprints with the CIA-crack smoker
logo were gathered up and burned, and a CD-ROM version of the series --
which had been pressed and ready for distribution -- was also destroyed.
The Post and L.A. Times immediately crowed that the Mercury was retreating
from the series.
Georg and I flew to Costa Rica and began interviewing police officials,
lawyers, prosecutors and ex-Contras about Meneses' activities there,
fleshing out his role as a DEA informant and his drug operation's
connections to Oliver North's re-supply network on the Southern Front. In
Managua, we interviews police and Blandon's suspected money launderer,
Orlando Murillo. I flew back and started writing the follow-up stories;
Georg continued hunting for other members of the Meneses drug ring.
He called me in December 1996, barely able to contain his excitement. He'd
found Carlos Cabezas, who admitted that he had in fact delivered millions
of dollars in drug money to the Contras. Cabezas had names, dates and
amounts, Georg said, and pages from his drug ledgers. He'd identified a
CIA agent, Ivan Gomez, as having had direct knowledge of it all.
"We've got it," Georg cried. "Cabezas is willing to talk on the record."
A week later Georg called me with more good news. Enrique Miranda, the
former Meneses aide who'd escaped a year earlier, had been found in Miami
and tossed on a plane to Nicaragua. Georg had visited him in prison, and
Miranda started talking. Meneses' relationship with the CIA and the
Contras was deeper than we'd ever realized, Georg said. "We didn't know
how right we were," he laughed. "I can't wait to see what the Washington
Post does with this." I could have kissed him.
In January 1997, I sent first drafts of four follow-up stories to Dawn,
written as a two-day series. The first part dealt with Meneses' DEA
connections and his Costa Rican operation, along with the interviews Georg
had done with Carlos Cabezas and Enrique Miranda. I wrote a sidebar about
the drug-dealing Costa Rican shrimp company North and the Cuban CIA
operatives were using to funnel aid to the Contras.
The second part was a story about the parallel investigations of Contra
drug-trafficking done in the summer of 1986 by DEA agent Celering Castillo
at Ilopango and L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy Tom Gordon, drawing on
recently declassified FBI and CIA records at the National Archives and
3.000 pages of once-secret documents about the Blandon raids that had just
been released by the L.A. County Sheriff's Office. I also wrote a sidebar
on Joe Kelso's attempts to investigate allegations of DEA drug trafficking
in Costa Rica. Altogether the drafts ran 16,000 words.
We'd done it. We had an eyewitness, on the record, who'd delivered the
drug money. We had DEA records saying Blandon had sent money to the
Contras far longer than we'd previously reported. We had a top CIA
official admitting the agency had reports of drug trafficking at Ilopango.
We had evidence Ronald Lister had been meeting with the CIA's former head
of covert operations. I expected the editors to be beside themselves with
joy.
I heard absolutely nothing. Aside from Dawn, no one called to tell me
they'd read the new stories. No one called with questions. No one even
suggested that we begin editing them. They sat.
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jerry Ceppos called me at home on March 25, 1997, to
inform me that he'd made "a very difficult decision." Mistakes had been
made in the series, he said, and the newspaper was going to print a letter
to its readers saying so.
"Is this a fait accompli?" I asked. "Or do I get a chance to say something?"
"The decision has been made," Ceppos said. "I'll fax you a draft of what
we're considering."
According to Ceppos' proposed column, we should have said that Blandon
claimed he quit dealing with the Contras in 1983 -- something that the
editors had cut to save space. We had "insufficient proof" to say millions
went to the Contras; we should have said it was an estimate. We should
have said that we didn't find proof of involvement of "CIA
decision-makers," whatever that meant. We should have said Ricky Ross
wasn't the only crack supplier in L.A. -- but we hadn't said that. And,
finally, Ceppos wrote, the experts were unanimous in saying that the
Contras had not played a major role in the crack trade and that the series
had "oversimplified" how crack had become a problem. Strangley, Ceppos had
borrowed his conclusions from Pete Carey's never-published crack story.
I brought a written response to San Jose with me the next day when I met
with Ceppos and the other editors in the ornate conference room near the
editors' offices. "That 'experts' would disagree with the findings of
original research is one of the perils of doing it, as any researcher can
tell you," I wrote. "But just because they have a differing opinion -- and
when you get down to it, that's all it is -- is a pretty shoddy reason to
take a swan dive on a story . . . . How can we honestly say that we don't
know millions went to the Contras, or that the CIA didn't know about this,
when we've got an eyewitness telling us that he personally gave drug money
to a CIA agent? What are we going to do about all that other inconvenient
information in the follow-ups? We're going to look awful god-damned stupid
running this apology and then printing stories that directly contradict
it."
The other editors looked at the table uncomfortably.
"We are going to print those other stories, aren't we?"
Ceppos shook his head slightly.
"We're not" I asked incredulously. "Why not?"
"They're a quarter-turn of the screw," he said. "We're not going to print
anything else unless it's a major advance."
I exploded. "You think the fact that the head of this Contra drug ring was
working for the DEA is a quarter-turn of a screw?" I shouted. "You don't
think the fact that the DEA helped an accused CIA drug trafficker escape
criminal charges is a major advance? You've got to be kidding me. Are we
even going to pursue this story any more?"
"No," Ceppos said.
"Let me get this straight," I said. "We're killing the other stories.
We're not going to do any more investigation of this topic. And we're
going to run this mealy-mouthed column that pretends we don't know anything
else, tuck our tails between our legs and slink off into the sunset.
That's what you've got in mind?"
"You and I have very different views of this situation," he said quietly.
"You got that right."
The result of the stormy meeting was that Ceppos rewrote his column,
removing the obvious factual errors but leaving the rest virtually
unchanged.
"No matter how many times the words and phrases are tweaked, the end result
is still a sham," I responded in a memo. "You're sitting on information
that supports what I wrote and pretending to be unaware of it."
AT A FINAL MEETING before the column ran, I predicted that the mainstream
press would read the column as a retraction, one that covered everything
the series had revealed. "You run this, and all we'll hear is, 'The
Mercury News has admitted it isn't true! The Contras weren't dealing
cocaine! The CIA had nothing to do with it!" And you know as well as I
do, that's not true."
Ceppos' column ran on May 11, 1997, and if there was ever a chance to
getting to the bottom of the CIA's involvement with drug traffickers, it
died on that day. The New York Times, which hadn't found the original
story newsworthy enough to mention, splashed Ceppos's apology on its front
page. An editorial lauded Ceppos for his courage and declared that he'd
set a brave new standard for dealing with "egregious errors."
Howard Kurtz, the media critic for the Washington Post, called for a
comment. "It's nauseating," I told him. I had never been more disgusted
with my profession in my life. It wasn't because outrages were unknown in
the newspaper business. They weren't. Shortly before I arrived at the
Plain-Dealer, the paper printed a front-page retraction of a story that had
appeared more than a year earlier, revealing that former Teamsters Union
president Jackie Presser was an FBI informant.
Presser was indeed an informant, as the FBI confirmed years later. But
truth had taken a back seat to realpolitik. Court records later revealed
that the paper had been pressured into retracting the story by New York mob
boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, who'd asked his attorney, Roy Cohn, to
intercede with the Newhouse family, which owned the Plain Dealer.
Whether similar pressures were applied to Ceppos from outside the newspaper
is something I do not know, not do I particularly want to. I would prefer
to believe the theory advanced by my editor, Dawn Garcia, who suggested
that Ceppos's treatment for prostrate cancer in the winter of 1996-97 had
been a factor. That extended illness, combined with pressure from other
editors, had taken their toll, she believed.
It's a plausible explanation, because there really were only two ways the
newspaper could have gone with "Dark Alliance" at that point -- forward or
backward. The series had created such a superheated controversy that it
had become impossible to simply do nothing. Ceppos, who had stood by the
story bravely at key moments, simply may not have had the endurance, at
that period of his life, to ride the story out.
If the Mercury continued pursuing the story and publishing follow-ups,
editor Jon Krim worried in a memo, the editors needed to be ready "to deal
with the firestorm of criticism that is sure to follow." The other way out
was to back out: confess to some "shortcomings," take some quick lumps and
move on, which is the course Ceppos chose. It was certainly the course of
least resistance, as the happy reaction of the national media proved.
THE CONTROVERSY raged for another month, and the issue gradually became
what Ceppos reportedly had dreaded: he was being accused of suppressing
information. He was convering things up. Talk radio had a field day. In
Washington, DJ Joe Madison, who'd been making hay with the story for
months, urged the listeners of his 50,000-watt station to call Ceppos and
demand that he print the stories he was suppressing. Letters and email
from outraged readers began pouring in.
Ceppos, who'd not spoken to me since his column ran, called me at home in
early June. He was killing the follow-ups, he shouted. I was off the
story for good. He couldn't trust me anymore because I'd "aligned myself
with one side of the issue."
"Which side is that, Jerry? The side that wants the truth to come out?"
He wasn't getting into a debate, he told me. I was to report to his office
in two days "to discuss your future at the Mercury News."
It was a very one-sided discussion. Reading from a prepared statement,
Ceppos told me that my editors had lost faith in me. I needed closer
supervision, which I couldn't get in Sacramento. I needed to regain their
faith and thier trust, and the only way to do that was to accept a transfer
to the main office in San Jose. If I refused, I would be transfered
against my will to the West Bureau in Cupertino, the newspaper's version of
Siberia -- a somnolent training ground for new reporters and a pasture for
older ones who'd fallen from favor. It made little sense, because the
reporters there had no direct supervision, either. Whichever I decided, I
had to report in 30 days.
And by the way, Ceppos said, Pete Carey was going to take over the Contra
drug story, and I was to give him all the cooperation he requested.
That night I sat down with my wife, Sue, and my children and gave them the
news. In one month, I was going to have to start working in Cupertino, 150
miles away. I'd have to drive there on Mondays and come home on Fridays.
In the meantime, I'd fight the transfer through the Newspaper Guild.
My 6-year-old daughter looked at me strangely. "Are you still going to
sleep here?"
"No, I won't be able to," I told her. "I have to live in another place
during the week. But I'll be home on the weekends." She got up, went into
her room, and closed the door.
RELUCTANTLY I WENT, spending July and part of August in the Cupertino
bureau under protest. I was assigned such pressing matters as the death of
a police horse, clothing collections for Polish flood victims and summer
school computer classes. I went on a byline strike, refusing to put my
name on any story written while I was working under protest.
To the chagrin of my editors, who were under orders to keep me away from
any decent assignments, I turned a press release rewrite about a San Jose
landfill into a front-page story. It was the last piece I wrote for the
Mercury -- a page-one story with no one's name on it, which reportedly
infuriated Ceppos.
Occasionally, Pete Carey would call with a question or two. He wasn't
having much luck corroborating Carlos Cabezas' statements, he told me.
He'd been trying to locate the Venezuelan CIA agent Cabezas said he worked
with, Ivan Gomez, but couldn't. He'd tried directory assistance in Caracas
and complained about how many Ivan Gomezes there were in the phone book. I
felt saddened that my two-year investigation had come to this.
I never heard another word from him about it, and none of the follow-up
stories ever ran. On Nov. 19, 1997, the Mercury News agreed to settle my
arbitration but, amusingly, required me to sign a confidentiality agreement
swearing that I would never disclose its terms. Nineteen years after
becoming a reporter, I quit the newspaper business.
Bob Parry, the AP reporter who first broke the Contra drug story in 1985,
sent me a note of condolence. "Like you, I grew up in this business
thinking our job really was to tell the public the truth," he wrote.
"Maybe that was the mission at one time. Maybe there was that Awakening in
the 1970's with Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the CIA scandals, etc.
"But something very bad happened to the news media in the 1980's. Part of
it was the 'public diplomacy' pressures from the outside. But part of it
was the smug, snotty, sophmoric crowd that came to dominate the national
media from the inside. These characters fell in love with their power to
define reality, not their responsibility to uncover the facts. By the
1990's, the media had become the monster.
"I wish it weren't so. All I ever wanted to do was report and write
interesting stories -- while getting paid for it. But that really isn't
possible anymore and there's no use crying over it.
"Hang in there," he concluded. "You're not alone."
to 1998 Daily News index for June 25-July 1