Kill the Messenger (18 page)

Garcia also got a telephone call from a reporter who asked if she could comment on the fact that Webb had shot at a man while he was a reporter at the
Kentucky Post
. Garcia was stunned, but calmly refused to comment until she checked with Webb. “Gary, did you shoot someone in [Kentucky] years ago?” she asked. “He said, yes, he did.” Garcia held her breath while Webb explained how he confronted a thief trying to steal his car, and that the police hadn't pressed charges because he had acted in self-defense. To Garcia, the phone call suggested the media was digging for any piece of dirt on Gary, no matter how trivial or tangential, that would justify their attack of “Dark Alliance.”

T
HE LAST OF
the three major newspapers to pile on Webb's story was the
New York Times
. On October 21, 1996, the paper published a 1,536-word story, “Pivotal Figures of Newspaper Series May Be Only Bit Players” that, like the bulk of the reporting that preceded it, was based primarily on quotes from unnamed intelligence and law-enforcement officials. Reporter Tim Golden wrote that while both Blandon and Meneses “may indeed have provided modest support for the rebels, including perhaps some weapons, there is no evidence that either man was a rebel official or had anything to do with the CIA.”

Adolfo Calero and other former contra leaders told
Golden that Meneses and Blandon had indeed met with CIA asset Enrique Bermudez in Honduras. But Golden noted that Webb had erroneously reported that Bermudez, a CIA operative, was an “agent,” a mischaracterization apparently aimed at insinuating CIA complicity in his meeting with the two drug dealers. Golden also questioned Webb's assertion that Meneses served as chief of “intelligence and security” for the contras in California. Edward Navarro, a San Francisco contra organizer, recalled that Meneses showed up at some local contra meetings, but stood “quietly in the back.” He claimed the only “security” operation the group undertook was to remove “the sign on their office door after protests by left-wing San Franciscans.”

Golden found no evidence to indicate that the “relatively small amounts of cocaine” Blandon and Meneses “sometimes claimed to have brokered on behalf of the insurgents had a remotely significant role in the explosion of crack that began around the same time.” His article acknowledged that “Freeway” Rick was “one of the biggest crack dealers in Los Angeles” but added, “several experts on the drug trade said that although Mr. Ross was indeed a crack kingpin, he was one of many.”

Golden also wrote another—and much longer—story that ran in the
New York Times
that day, “Though Evidence is Thin, Tale of CIA and Drugs has a Life of its Own.” Datelined from Compton, it began with Beverly Carr, a forty-eight-year-old African-American caterer who said she had always believed the CIA was behind the crack epidemic. “Everybody my age or older has always known that something like this was going on,” she said. “Who down here
in Watts or Compton has planes or boats to get these drugs up here? They're targeting the young black men. It's just ruining a whole generation.”

Golden also questioned Webb's courtroom tactic of feeding questions to Ross' attorney, Alan Fenster. While Ceppos defended Webb on that score, he also identified—for the first time in print—what he considered a significant shortcoming in the story. “Were there things I would have done differently in retrospect?” Ceppos asked. “Yes. The principal thing I would have is one paragraph very high saying what we didn't find. We got to the door of the CIA. We did not get inside the CIA.”

Unlike the
LA Times
, which had dozens of reporters assigned to the paper's examination of “Dark Alliance,” Golden worked alone from the paper's San Francisco bureau, drawing on his personal knowledge of some of the terrain that Webb had covered in his story. Unlike McManus and Pincus, Golden hadn't reported on the Nicaraguan civil war mainly from a desk in Washington, but had been based in Central America and dealt extensively with the rebel leaders in Honduras and Costa Rica.

As a correspondent for the
Miami Herald
, Golden had written the first story exposing the contra's use of the Salvadoran air force base at Ilopango as a re-supply center. Other stories probed corruption among contra officials, primarily on Eden Pastora's so-called Southern Front, and allegations of human rights violations by various contra factions. He shared in a Pulitzer Prize awarded to the
Herald
for its coverage of events leading up to the Iran contra scandal. Despite assertions to the contrary by some of Webb's more venomous defenders,
Golden can hardly be considered a CIA dupe. Now an investigative reporter for the
New York Times
, his recent work has exposed abuses by U.S. soldiers and intelligence operatives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Looking back at his own story, Golden now concedes that it appears “a little credulous of the intelligence and contra sources” who denied any complicity with drug trafficking, although most critics of the media reaction to “Dark Alliance” found it more measured than that of the
LA Times
. “I'm not sure it was the deepest reporting we ever did,” Golden says. “But it was not hard to find big journalistic holes in Webb's series.”

Although his first reaction to Webb's story was that it was “interesting,” Golden felt that Webb had “clearly overreached” in his conclusion that Blandon and Meneses, or even the contras in general, had contributed much to the booming drug trade. Despite allegations that contra leaders had lined their own pockets with CIA and State Department funds, the contra troops that Golden had seen in the field in the mid-1980s did not appear to have been especially well-armed or well-provisioned.

Golden also found it hard to stomach the outrage over Webb's “unproven” claim that the contra war had helped fuel the crack epidemic. “It was by then pretty clear that the contras had tortured or murdered hundreds and probably thousands of Nicaraguans,” Golden says. “Americans didn't care a whole lot about the fact that their government had paid for that. But because some contra hangers-on had moved a relatively small amount of drugs, people were in an uproar. I thought it was the height of American narcissism.”

While he does not question that elements of the contras
were involved in drugs, Golden's view is that they were almost all minor players who were peripheral to the rebel armies. “Compared to the number of guys who were pulling out fingernails, I don't think drug-dealing was that high on the list of the bad things they were doing,” he says. “It was interesting that a couple of Nicaraguan exiles had hooked up with this big crack dealer, but the central premise of [Webb's] story—that the contra war and its funding needs fueled the crack epidemic—there is still to this day nothing solid that makes this case.”

Some years after reporting from Central America, Golden had covered the drug trade in Mexico and Colombia. Webb's assertion that Ross was the kingpin of crack reminded him of the way the DEA hyped the arrests of major coke traffickers. As was already obvious at that time, one smuggler replaced another, he says. “The idea that one guy was the king of all wholesale crack deals in South Central did not fit with my understanding of how the drug trade worked.”

Golden came to the conclusion that Webb and his defenders did not care much about getting to the truth of the story—they just wanted the story to be true. He recalls debating Webb and other journalists at a 1997 Society of Professional Journalists panel in San Francisco. “I had by then spent ten years of my life writing about the bad things that our government and others had done in Latin America, and I practically got booed out of the room as some kind of apologist,” he says.

Shortly after his
New York Times
story appeared, protesters from various groups, including the San Francisco-based activist group Global Exchange, picketed outside his office.
Golden went downstairs and, without introducing himself, infiltrated the protest. He chatted with the demonstrators as they denounced him as a tool of the CIA. “People had too much time on their hands in those days,” he says. “It was a time when journalism and politics were a little unmoored, as if people didn't know who the real enemy was . . . I don't think it was a high-water mark for investigative journalism.”

W
EBB HAD HIS
defenders, especially in the alternative press. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting published a lengthy, well-reasoned critique of the mainstream media's attack against “Dark Alliance,” calling it a “Snow Job.” But the most eloquent pundit to jump to Webb's aid was Alexander Cockburn, who later co-authored a book with investigative reporter Jeffrey St. Clair,
White Out: The CIA, Drugs and The Press
, a detailed history of agency collusion with drug traffickers and the media's failure to cover the story. Cockburn says the mainstream media's attacks against Webb constituted the most “factually inane” feeding frenzy he's ever witnessed, but that it didn't particularly surprise him.

“I've never taken the view that the mainstream press in the U.S. is to be redeemed,” Cockburn says. “The rhetorical pose is always that the
New York Times
could be doing a better job and so could the
Washington Post
and then we would have a responsible press. My view is that the official corporate press is there to do a bad job. That's its function and nobody should be surprised. The miracle is that the
Mercury News
was asleep at the wheel and didn't realize what Webb was doing—and printed his story.

Other alternative journalists were less forgiving of the flaws in “Dark Alliance,” but equally skeptical of the mainstream media's criticism of the story. “If Gary Webb made mistakes I have no problem with exposing them,” says
LA Weekly
's Marc Cooper. “But given the sweep of American journalism over the past fifty years, this is an outstanding case where three of the major newspapers in the country just decided to take out a competitor whose mistakes seem by any measure to be very minor.”

Cooper has special scorn for the
LA Times
' Doyle McManus, whom he accuses of routinely authoring stories about Nicaragua that were spun from Reagan Administration lies, and which helped the U.S. government build support for the contras. “The stories that Doyle McManus wrote about Nicaragua in the 1980s—and the stories that [disgraced
New York Times
reporter] Judy Miller wrote about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq twenty years later—those are high crimes,” Cooper says. “Those are stories where reporters speak to officials based on anonymity and the stories are false; they have no substance.”

McManus says it was his job to quote anonymous sources. “I did not trust official denials,” he says. “I reported denials when officials made them in response to accusations, but that doesn't mean I trusted them. I believed, and still believe, that people in the U.S. government turned a blind eye to drug dealing by people connected with the contras. I reported those allegations beginning in 1987, and I included them in our 1996 story about ‘Dark Alliance.' ”

David Corn, Washington Editor of the
Nation
magazine, reported extensively on the contra-drug connection during
the 1980s. When he first read “Dark Alliance,” Corn says he was impressed that Webb had found “street-level” sources on what appeared to be a major U.S. drug ring funding the Nicaraguan contras. But he quickly realized the story didn't support its dramatic conclusion that the CIA or the contras had sparked the crack-cocaine epidemic. Yet Corn also believes the mainstream media, which had always ignored the contra-drug story, failed just as dramatically in its own response to “Dark Alliance.”

“What they did, particularly the
LA Times
and
Washington Post
, was to jump all over ‘Dark Alliance' without looking at the bigger issue of connections between the CIA-backed contras and drug dealing,” Corn says. The coverage brought Corn back to the afternoon in 1987 when he attended a Capitol Hill press conference where officials unveiled the U.S. Senate's final Iran contra report.

“One reporter in the room, a freelancer, asked if they had investigated the allegations of contra drug running,” Corn recalls. “And a reporter for the
New York Times
said, ‘Come on, let's talk about something serious.' Those of us who followed this closely, and it was just a small number of reporters, knew there was a story here to which the mainstream press had never paid serious attention. Then when Gary Webb's story came along, they were happy to jump on that and shoot it down without examining their own failings on that front.”

One of the few people who had followed the contra drug story, Corn says, is Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project and Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archives at George Washington
University. Like Corn and others, Kornbluh believes Webb over-reached with his reporting by suggesting that the Blandon-Meneses-Ross network played a significant role in America's crack epidemic. He also believes the mainstream media was motivated less by the errors in Webb's work than by the firestorm of controversy they produced, and that the one-sidedness of their reaction was journalistically indefensible.

“I thought the reaction particularly of the
LA Times
, but also of the two other papers was one of the most wasteful expenditures of journalistic resources in the recent history of journalism,” Kornbluh says. “I've never seen anything like it in thirty years. If that much energy, particularly by the
LA Times
, had been expended on the true scandal of contras and drugs, Gary's reporting would have been significantly expanded.”