Kill the Messenger (14 page)

Mercury News
investigative reporter Pete Carey recalls being impressed with the research Webb had compiled, which seemed to pull the curtain back from a decade-long cover-up of CIA-tied drug dealing. But he says he also noticed a major hole in the story. Too much of “Dark Alliance,” Carey says, centered on what he considered unreliable testimony by convicted felons. Even the “federal law enforcement records” Webb referred to in his lead paragraph were mostly transcripts of testimony by crooks. “It concerned me because I saw the main sources on it were these two drug dealers,” Carey says. “I wondered how far you could trust them. The fact that a drug dealer says something on a witness stand doesn't make it true.”

In his 1998 book, Webb recalled how
Mercury News
executive editor Jerry Ceppos called to offer his personal congratulations. “Let's stay on top of this,” Ceppos said. “Anything you need, let us know. We want to run with this thing.” A few days later, Webb received a $50 bonus check and a note from Ceppos. “Remarkable series,” it read. “Thanks for doing this for us.”

Among the general public and Webb's fellow journalists, however, there was no immediate reaction. After a year of
researching, writing, editing, and endless delays caused by his editors' desire to shorten the story's length and play up its newsworthiness, “Dark Alliance” had finally been published in the journalistic equivalent of a black hole, when most of America's national political establishment and the reporters who cover it are on vacation, fleeing Washington D.C.'s brutal late-August humidity.

The story also appeared in the week between the Democratic and Republican political conventions, so the few reporters who weren't at the beach were in Chicago covering the Democrats. The news that a regional newspaper in northern California had just published an article linking the CIA and the Nicaraguan contras to the street gangs of Los Angeles and America's crack epidemic had barely registered with the nation's political or media establishment. That didn't stop millions of people from reading it, however. “Dark Alliance” happened to be the first major investigative story published simultaneously in print and online.

“At first, nothing happened,” Dawn Garcia, Webb's editor, recalls. “Then everything got pretty exciting and chaotic. Hundreds of phone calls started coming in to the newsroom from other media and from readers. It got so crazy I had to borrow somebody from the paper's marketing department to help answer all the calls from the media, supporters, and critics. It was starting to explode in a way that seemed good at the time.”

T
HANKS TO THE
Internet, still in its infancy at the time, “Dark Alliance” spread like wildfire. The Mercury Center, which
previously had enjoyed just thousands of hits per day, suddenly was logging half a million daily readers from computers all over the world. Talk radio began picking up the story, and before long, the exposé was being highlighted in nightly news segments across the country. Although the nation's major newspapers were still ignoring “Dark Alliance,” more and more people were reading it—a development that quickly made the series itself newsworthy. Some of the earliest commentary focused less on Webb's allegations than the fact that they had introduced many African Americans to the Internet.

The notion that the U.S. government had been somehow responsible for bringing crack cocaine to the inner city was nothing new—it had been a street rumor for years. In 1990, the
New York Times
surveyed more than 1,000 black residents of the Big Apple about their belief in “conspiracy theories.” While only 10 percent of blacks said they believed the AIDS virus “was deliberately created in a laboratory to infect black people,” a quarter of those surveyed believed the U.S. government “deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people.” Only 4 percent of whites agreed.

“Dark Alliance” seemed to confirm what the African-American community had always felt about the U.S. government's complicity with drug smugglers and the racial hypocrisy of the war on drugs. The ferocity of the crack-cocaine problem in black neighborhoods meant there was hardly an African American in the country who didn't know someone either addicted to crack cocaine, selling it, in prison because of the drug, or dead from the gang warfare
and criminal violence that accompanied its trade. Although the intensity of the response among black readers was unprecedented, both Webb and his editors must have suspected at least some of the anger it would unleash.

After all, the story's fall guy was Ross, the black street dealer, who had been supplied by wealthy Nicaraguans with powerful connections, and who had been ultimately taken down by the U.S. government and his former mentor Blandon, now a paid DEA informant. The outrage among the story's black readership may also have been bolstered by a link on the “Dark Alliance” Web site to a sound file of Blandon talking about how he liked like selling to “niggers” because they always paid in cash.

After the controversy began, Webb drew criticism for aligning himself with Los Angeles Congresswoman Maxine Waters and other black leaders who used his story to claim the CIA was directly responsible for addicting countless African Americans to crack. Although Webb didn't share all their suspicions, he saw their interest in the story as a tool that would help force the CIA to admit that they had turned a blind eye to Nicaraguan contra drug dealers, including Meneses and Blandon.

Webb had no ally more powerful or motivated than Waters herself. “They came in with the drugs,” Waters said at one 1996 press conference. “They came in with the guns. They made the money. And boy, what did they leave in the wake? A trail of devastation, addictions, killings, crack babies. It's awful. It's unconscionable. And I'm committed—if I have to spend the rest of my life getting to the bottom of it, I intend to do that.”

Maxine Waters did not respond to interview requests. Many of Webb's friends and family members weren't too happy about what they viewed as political opportunism by her and other public figures. “Gary didn't say the CIA was selling drugs, which is what everyone seemed to think,” says Webb's high school friend Greg Wolf. “He said they might have turned a blind eye to it. People were trying to quote him to prove whatever point they wanted, that white people were trying to exterminate black people.” Anita Webb felt that this ultimately helped the media discredit her son. “I don't think it's good that people grabbed on to this story and made it a black issue,” she says. “The black community said the CIA was trying to do away with blacks, and Gary never said that.”

Tom Suddes, Webb's former colleague at the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, who had covered urban unrest for the paper, takes a more sympathetic view of the way African Americans reacted to “Dark Alliance.” “The level of despair in the black neighborhoods was so incredible,” he says. “They thought nobody was ever going to listen to them about the destruction of their own communities. To have a big mainstream paper talking about this—black males being assassinated by each other, a whole people going through this holocaust? Thank god, finally someone is paying attention. It wasn't paranoia or conspiracy theories—it was the destruction of a whole generation of people.”

In Los Angeles, angry residents and members of the left-wing Crack the CIA Coalition held candlelight vigils and staged marches to city hall. L.A.'s city council passed a resolution demanding a federal investigation, and both California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer called for Congressional hearings. On Capitol Hill, Waters held a press conference
promising she would lead that effort. Cynthia McKinney, the outspoken U.S. representative from Georgia, publicly exclaimed on the floor of Congress that the initials CIA actually stood for “Central Intoxication Agency.” Others quipped that the pseudonym stood for “Crack in America.” Webb liked the riff. In an online forum to his story posted on the
Mercury News
Web site, he appropriated the line—a sarcastic miscue that wouldn't go unnoticed by the
LA Times
, which later used it to suggest Webb had gone off the deep end.

The hearings, conducted by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, took place in October and November 1996. They produced mostly predictable results. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz swore his agency would conduct an internal review that would unflinchingly answer Webb's allegations. Referring to the photograph of himself and Meneses at a party in San Francisco that had decorated “Dark Alliance,” Contra leader Adolfo Calero testified that he attended countless fundraising parties in the 1980s and couldn't be expected to know everyone's background. Pastora—the famed “Comandante Zero”—was more forthcoming. He acknowledged receiving a few trucks and tens of thousands of dollars from Blandon, and added that Blandon had even allowed him the use of his villa in Costa Rica. Yet both leaders downplayed Meneses and Blandon's standing as contra fundraisers and strongly denied ever knowingly working with drug dealers.

Jack Blum, the former Kerry Committee prosecutor, was in some ways the star witness of the hearing. He testified that his investigation had never uncovered any direct CIA involvement with drug traffickers. “If you ask the question, did the CIA sell drugs in the black neighborhoods of Los
Angeles to finance the contra war, then the answer is a catagorical no,” he testified. But Blum quickly added that the agency had known about contra drug trafficking and had done nothing to stop it. “When people who are engaged in an operation say, ‘We're going to look the other way—we're not going to do anything,' interfere in the law enforcement process to protect people who are running the operation, and in that process of interference permit drugs to flow in, you have an extraordinary problem,” he said.

Blum now says the hearing was more intense than anything he experienced during his fourteen-year career working in the U.S. Senate. “We had a roomful of angry African Americans hanging on my every word,” he says, adding that most of the audience wasn't happy that he didn't defend “Dark Alliance.” The story, Blum believes, missed the mark. There had been a cover-up of CIA ties to drug traffickers during the 1980s, but Webb hadn't proved this activity enabled the crack-cocaine epidemic.

But the reaction by the committee to his allegation that the CIA had turned a blind eye to contra drug smuggling struck Blum as at best naïve and at worst, a complete charade. “I was telling a story that nobody in the room wanted to hear,” he says. “The committee was acting stunned about my remarks. It showed the pathetic nature of oversight of the Senate intelligence committee. Everybody runs around shocked that this stuff is happening, but it's been happening for years.”

As the anger built in black communities, particularly in South Central Los Angeles, CIA Director John Deutch flew to Los Angeles to appear at a town hall meeting in an auditorium at South Central L.A.'s Locke High School—the first time in
American history that a journalist had forced the director of the world's most powerful spy agency to perform in-person, street-level damage control. More than five hundred people packed the audience. The booing began even before Deutch promised the crowd he'd “get to the bottom” of Webb's allegations, and grew even louder when he asserted his certainty that the CIA had no connection with the city's crack trade.

In a sworn declaration responding to “Dark Alliance,” the CIA already had announced that it had reviewed its files and found no evidence the CIA had any ties to Ross, Blandon, Meneses, Lister, or the latter's supposed CIA contact, Scott Weekly. Perhaps forgetting that the agency had already acknowledged occasionally working with known drug traffickers in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, and Central America, Deutch went even further. “As of today, we have no evidence of a conspiracy led by the CIA to engage and encourage drug trafficking in Nicaragua or elsewhere in Latin America, during this or any other period,” he declared.

Deutch's demonstrably false assertion only further enraged his audience. According to Jim Crogan and Kevin Uhrich of
LA Weekly
, the CIA director's foray to South Central “went about as well as the agency's adventures in Vietnam, or Latin America, or Iran.” One man interrupted Deutch, calling his appearance “nothing but a public-relations” stunt. “After all that illegal stuff we know you CIA people have done around the world, you tell us now that you're honestly going to investigate yourselves about drug dealing?” he shouted. “You gotta be crazy if you think we're going to believe that.”

Also in the crowd was Michael Ruppert, a bespectacled,
sincere-seeming, middle-aged white man. Halfway through Deutch's speech, Ruppert stood up and accused the CIA director of lying. A former narcotics officer with the Los Angeles police, Ruppert later claimed he knew the agency was involved in the coke trade, and could prove it. Deustch listened politely as Ruppert detailed various cases he had unearthed as a police detective where the agency had colluded with drug dealers. Ruppert had left the department for personal reasons after accusing his department of colluding with drug traffickers, including his estranged girlfriend, whom Ruppert believed was a CIA agent.

Ruppert saw “Dark Alliance” as personal and professional vindication. In the aftermath of the controversy, he attached himself to Webb's story. Ruppert also insinuated himself into a grassroots effort to establish a Citizen's Truth Commission on CIA involvement in drug dealing. The inquiry ultimately fell apart because of a power struggle between left-wing revolutionary groups like the Crack the CIA Coalition and liberal organizations like the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).