Kill the Messenger (23 page)

S
EVERAL MONTHS AFTER
the CIA and Justice Department released their initial reports on “Dark Alliance,” the CIA's Inspector General released a second volume, a more wide-ranging probe of contra drug trafficking and an accounting of what the agency did—or as more often proved the case—didn't do about it. The report's chief admission: between 1982 and 1995, the CIA did not report drug dealing by its assets, under an agreement signed between the agency and the Justice Department. But the CIA got a jump-start on that policy when it came to the Nicaraguan contras. The agency knew as early as 1981 that one element of the contras “had decided to engage in drug trafficking to the United States to raise funds for its activities.”

The specific group in question was the 15th of September Legion, which at the time was led by Enrique Bermudez,
the contra commander who met with Blandon and Meneses in Honduras and allegedly told them that “the ends justify the means” when it came to raising cash. Without mentioning Blandon or Meneses, the CIA report acknowledged that the agency knew that supporters of Bermudez were funding contra operations with drug money, and the CIA didn't lift a finger to stop it.

The CIA also admitted that Ivan Gomez, the CIA agent Carlos Cabezas told Webb had supervised Meneses' drug pipeline, was actually a pseudonym used by a CIA agent in Costa Rica. But the CIA claimed it could find no evidence that Gomez, who later left the agency because of his ties to drug traffickers, had ever met with Cabezas.

To its credit, the
New York Times
gave the CIA report front-page treatment. Walter Pincus of the
Washington Post
also wrote about the agency's stunning admission, although not on the front page. He concluded, “the report contradicts previous CIA claims that it had little information about drug running and the contras.” But failing to mention that the CIA specifically suspected Bermudez and his supporters of drug trafficking, Pincus added that the report “does not lend any new support to charges of an alliance among the CIA, contra fund-raisers and dealers who introduced crack-cocaine in the 1980s in South Central Los Angeles.”

“Pincus writes off twelve years of official lies by the CIA as mere contradiction,” Webb argued in a letter to the editor of the
Post
. While the report did contradict previous CIA statements about the contras and drugs, Webb added that it also contradicted most of what the
Post
had reported about the issue for the past two decades. “Ordinary citizens
can be jailed for such lawless conduct,” Webb wrote. “That your paper continues to minimize criminal behavior when the CIA engages in it is most peculiar.”

The
LA Times
didn't even bother writing a story about the second CIA Inspector General report. Doyle McManus acknowledges this was a major failure by his newspaper. “The critics are correct that the
LA Times
did not give enough attention to the findings in the CIA's Inspector General's report about the agency's failure to report information about drug dealing to law enforcement agencies,” McManus says. “We dropped the ball on that story.”

Former Kerry Committee prosecutor Jack Blum believes the
LA Times
and other newspapers intentionally downplayed the second CIA report because it vindicated the Kerry Committee investigation, which they had largely ignored at the time. It reminded Blum of the media's tendency to put stories about Kerry's investigation in the Saturday edition, deep inside the paper—or on “Saturday below the fold,” as he said at the time. “I think they were terribly embarrassed when the reports came out,” Blum says. “Those reports vindicated Gary Webb and our committee, so they buried it. The coverage was not spectacular. The adage of ‘Saturday below the fold' was still in vogue.”

The National Security Archives' Peter Kornbluh doesn't think the CIA's Inspector General report vindicated “Dark Alliance.” Although the uproar over Webb's story finally forced the CIA to come clean about its protection of contra drug traffickers, most of the activities in the report had nothing to do with the people in Webb's story. “I can't say it's a vindication,” he says. “It was good that his story forced
those reports to come out, but part of what made that happen was based on misleading information.”

David Corn of the
Nation
magazine says the CIA report only “partially” vindicated Webb. “It didn't vindicate his story,” he says. “It vindicated his interest in the subject and his belief that this was important and that something terribly rotten had happened.” Nonetheless, Corn feels that the reports contained “tremendous admissions” of wrongdoing by the CIA. “While Nancy Reagan was saying ‘Just say No,' the CIA was saying, ‘Just don't look,' ” he says.

Corn is still amazed that the fact that the CIA finally admitted it had worked with and protected from prosecution Nicaraguan contra drug traffickers—and then lied about it for years—wasn't a major scandal. “Here you have the CIA acknowledging they were working with people suspected of drug dealing and it got nary a peep,” he says. “I think in some ways that's journalistic neglect—criminal neglect. In what definition of news is it not a front-page story that the CIA was working with drug dealers?”

ELEVEN

Exile

WEBB'S SEPARATION FROM
his family while working in Cupertino—and his sudden exit from journalism shortly thereafter—precipitated a long slide into depression that would last the rest of his life. But at first, the experience brought him closer to his wife than he had been in years. Sue stood faithfully by her husband, and encouraged him to write a book that would allow him to do what his editors had refused to allow him to accomplish: publish everything he'd unearthed about the CIA, the contras, and drugs.

In the year that had passed since “Dark Alliance” had been appeared, however, the major publishing houses were no longer interested. Webb could scarcely find an editor willing to read his book proposal. After more than twenty
rejections, he signed a deal with Seven Stories Press, an independent publisher that specializes in progressive books, including its annual “Project Censored” compendium of investigative stories overlooked by the mainstream media each year.

Dan Simon, publisher of Seven Stories Press, says the “Dark Alliance” controversy killed Webb's prospects overnight. “The minute those front page stories ran basically trashing this guy nobody would touch him,” Simon says. “Nobody wanted anything to do with Gary Webb.” Unlike Webb's editors at the
Mercury News
, who had mercilessly hacked away his series to fit it in the paper, Simon read Webb's lengthy first draft, and encouraged him to write even more. “I told him this was his opportunity to put everything in there,” he says. “We used to talk at night from 8 to 11
PM
, after he got home from work and we had a great time. It was a lot of fun. He was like a pig in mud.”

Simon saw Webb as a heroic journalist who had been castigated for writing a story that was ultimately vindicated by the CIA itself. Between the book's 1998 hardcover release and its publication the next year as a paperback, the CIA had released its Inspector General report revealing that the agency had lied for years about its protection of Nicaraguan contra drug traffickers. “I can't tell you how intensely excited he was about this,” Simon says. “The lesson to him was not only did everything he had said turn out to be completely vindicated by those reports, but it was clear to him he had actually understated the story. To the end of his days, Gary felt that very clearly the story was much bigger than he had realized.”

Webb wrote the book mostly at night and on the weekends. Shortly after leaving the
Mercury News
, he landed a job as a well-paid investigator for the California Joint Legislative Audit Committee. The position not only matched his previous salary and allowed him to continue to work in Sacramento, but was perfectly suited to his skills: Webb would spend the next several years uncovering government corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude in state government.

While writing his book, Sue says, her husband became distant. With three kids running around the house, and her husband writing all day, Sue found herself increasingly frustrated at the burden that came with trying to be a supportive wife. With even more determination than he'd put into his previous work, Webb had thrown himself into his new project. He was determined not to leave out anything, no matter how remotely significant, that would help clear his name.

All the long hours he spent at the computer, reliving the excruciating experience he'd just undergone at the
Mercury News
, came with a certain emotional toll, however. Webb didn't have any new discoveries to share at the dinner table. More often than not, he was still writing at dinnertime. Meanwhile, Webb had grown increasingly troubled, not paranoid exactly, but uncharacteristically concerned about his family's security. He kept a gun stashed in his bedroom. The telephone would sometimes ring, but nobody was there. In the middle of a conversation, Sue would sometimes hear clicks on the line.

One evening, Sue noticed that her husband seemed especially quiet. When she asked him what was wrong, he told her that he'd met with a source that had said something that
bothered him. “He was told that he'd be killed one day,” she says. The man had darkly suggested that it wouldn't happen anytime soon, perhaps not until five or ten years in the future, and it wouldn't be anything obvious. As an example, the man explained, one day Webb might be driving down a steep slope in the mountains and his brakes would fail. “I was pretty upset about it,” Sue says. “But Gary told me, ‘Oh, you can't go around worrying about that kind of thing. It might happen, it might not, but I'm not going to go through my life worrying about it and looking over my shoulder all the time.' ”

Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras
,
and The Crack Cocaine Explosion
received mixed reviews in the mainstream press, but even critics acknowledged it was a much more nuanced and convincing, if vastly more complicated, work of journalism than his heavily-edited
Mercury News
series.
Washington Post
media critic Howard Kurtz, who had last written about Webb a year earlier when he was transferred to Cupertino—“the
Mercury News
has apparently had enough of reporter Gary Webb”—continued to heap scorn. “ ‘Dark Alliance' is back,” he wrote ominously, adding that Webb had to settle for “a small [publishing] house” after receiving a “torrent of rejections.”

The book received no television coverage, with the exception of C-SPAN, which invited Webb to answer phone calls from viewers, most of whom had little to say about
Dark Alliance
, and a lot to say about whatever they had read in the newspaper that morning. When one caller asked Webb what he thought of a story talking about a then-unknown Saudi dissident named Osama bin Laden, who had just
declared war on the United States, Webb said it appeared bin Laden was angry because the U.S. had put troops on Saudi soil during the Persian Gulf war. “It sounds like just another example of our policies coming back to haunt us,” he said.

The
Mercury News
didn't bother to review the book, the
New York Times
concluded that Webb still hadn't done enough to verify his allegations with CIA insiders, while the
LA Times
dismissed it as “densely researched, passionately argued, [and] acronym-laden.” The
Baltimore Sun
gave a much more favorable review, and even the
Washington Post
grudgingly congratulated Webb for forcing the CIA to shed light on its “sleazy past.”

“That's as close to an apology as Webb ever received” from the papers that had helped end his career, says publisher Dan Simon. But the accolades Webb received for his book from liberal fans didn't provide him with much solace. “Gary went from being a hero of the establishment to being vilified by that club to being a hero of the American left,” he says. “Getting awards didn't matter to Gary. He appreciated it but it didn't comfort him at all, because they weren't his people.”

Mixed reviews didn't keep people from buying the book. According to publisher Dan Simon,
Dark Alliance
wasn't a best seller, but enjoyed strong sales—which continue today, eight years later—thanks to Webb's notoriety. On his book tour, crowds filled bookstores from San Francisco and Los Angeles to New York and Washington, D.C., as Webb traveled around the country giving speeches and signing autographs. With his newfound status as an exiled reporter, progressive audiences hailed
Webb as a hero. Not all audiences were pleased with what he had to say, however. At the Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica, some members in the audience were shocked when Webb began his speech by explaining that he never believed the CIA had conspired to flood America's inner cities with crack cocaine.

One serious-looking African-American woman interrupted his speech to announce that Webb had his facts wrong. “The police invented crack,” she said, her arms folded defiantly. “No, they didn't,” Webb responded, looking down at his notes, struggling to regain his stream of thought. “What happened was this drug ring, which the CIA has now admitted it protected, arrived in South-Central at a particularly bad time, in 1982,” he said. “It hooked up with the gangs right when people in South-Central were learning how to turn powder cocaine into crack.”

“Don't try to tell us that!” the woman responded, her voice rising in frustration. “The police invented that drug.” She then claimed that undercover police informants had broken into her house and fed her intravenous drugs “so they can turn me into another statistic.”