Whiteout

by Alexander Cockburn

  O’Neale’s claim, reiterated by Pincus and Suro, is that Blandón mainly engaged in sending cocaine profits to the Contras in late 1981 and 1982, before hooking up with Rick Ross. Furthermore, the amount of cocaine sold by Blandón was a mere fraction of the national market for the drug, and thus could not have played a decisive role in sparking a crack plague in Los Angeles. In other words, according to the O’Neale line in the Post, Blandón had sold only a relatively insignificant amount of cocaine in 1981 and 1982 (later the magical figure $50,000 worth became holy writ among Webb’s critics). His association with Ross had begun after Blandón had given up his charitable dispensations to the Contras, and thus was a purely criminal enterprise with no political ramifications. Therefore, even by implication, there could be no connection between the CIA and the rise of crack.

  O’Neale had reversed the position he had taken in the days when he was prosecuting Blandón and calling him “the largest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States.” Now he was claiming that Blandón’s total sales of cocaine amounted to only 5 tons, and thus he could not be held accountable for the rise of crack. This specific argument was seized gratefully by Pincus and Suro. “Law enforcement estimates,” Pincus and Suro wrote, “say Blandón handled a total of only about five tons of cocaine during a decade-long career.”

  Imagine if the Washington Post had been dealing with a claim by Mayor Marion Barry that during his mayoral terms “only” about 10,000 pounds of crack had been handled by traffickers in the blocks surrounding his office!

  Webb was attacked for claiming, in the opening lines of his series, that “millions” had been funneled back to the Contras. In his statements to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department investigators, O’Neale said, “… Blandón dealt with a total of 40 kilos of cocaine from January to December 1982. The profits of the sales were used to purchase weapons and equipment for the Contras.” O’Neale was trying to narrow the window of “political” cocaine sales. However, during that time Blandón was selling cocaine worth over $2 million – in only a fraction of the period that Webb identified as the time the cocaine profits were being remitted to Honduras.

  The degree of enmity directed toward Webb can be gauged not only by O’Neale’s diligent briefings of Webb’s antagonists, but also by the raid on the office of Gary Webb’s literary agent, Jody Hotchkiss of the Sterling Lord Agency, by agents of the Department of Justice and the DEA. The government men came brandishing subpoenas for copies of all correspondence between the Sterling Lord Agency, Rick Ross, Ross’s lawyer Alan Fenster, and Webb. The DEA justified the search on the grounds that it wanted to see if Ross had any assets it could seize to pay his hefty fines. But Webb reckons “they were really looking for some sort of business deal between me and Ross. They wanted to discredit me as a reporter by saying he’s making deals with drug dealers.” The raid produced no evidence of any such deal, because there was none.

  Cheek by jowl with Pincus and Suro on the Washington Post’s front page that October 4 was Fletcher’s essay on the sociology of black paranoia. Blacks, Fletcher claimed, cling to beliefs regardless of “the shortage of factual substantiation” and of “denials by government officials.” Fletcher duly stated some pieties about the “bitter” history of American blacks. Then he bundled together some supposed conspiracies (that the government deliberately infected blacks with the AIDS virus, that Church’s fried chicken and Snapple drinks had been laced with chemicals designed to sterilize black men) and implied that allegations about the CIA and cocaine trafficking were of the same order. It is true, Fletcher conceded, that blacks had reasons to be paranoid. “Many southern police departments,” he wrote delicately, “were suspected of having ties to the Ku Klux Klan.” He mentioned in passing the FBI snooping on Martin Luther King Jr. and the sting operation on Washington, D.C.’s Mayor Marion Barry. He also touched on the syphilis experiments conducted by the government on blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama. “The history of victimization of black people allows myths – and, at times, outright paranoia – to flourish.” In other words, the black folk get it coming and going. Terrible things happen to them, and then they’re patronized in the Washington Post for imagining that such terrible things might happen again. “Even if a major investigation is done,” Fletcher concluded, “it is unlikely to quell the certainty among many African Americans that the government played a role in bringing the crack epidemic to black communities.”

  A few days later, a Post editorial followed through on this notion of black irrationality and the lack of substance in Webb’s thesis. The writer observed that “The Mercury [had] borrowed heavily from a certain view of CIA rogue conduct that was widespread ten years ago.” The “biggest shock,” the editorial went on, “wasn’t the story but the credibility the story seems to have generated when it reached some parts of the black community.” This amazing sentence was an accurate rendition of what really bothered the Washington Post, which was not charges that the CIA had been complicit in drug running, but that black people might be suspicious of the government’s intentions toward them. The Post’s editorial said solemnly that “[i]f the CIA did associate with drug pushers its aim was not to infect Americans but to advance the CIA’s foreign project and purposes.”

  In the weeks that followed, Post columnists piled on the heat. Mary McGrory, the doyenne of liberal punditry, said that the Post had successfully “discredited” the Mercury News. Richard Cohen, always edgy on the topic of black America, denounced Rep. Maxine Waters for demanding an investigation after the Washington Post had concluded that Webb’s charges were “baseless.” “When it comes to sheer gullibility – or is it mere political opportunism? – Waters is in a class of her own.”

  One story in that October 4 onslaught in the Post differed markedly from its companion pieces. That was the profile of Meneses by Douglas Farah, which actually advanced Webb’s story. Farah, the Post’s man in Central America, filed a dispatch from Managua giving a detailed account of Meneses’s career as a drug trafficker, going back to 1974. Farah described how Meneses had “worked for the Contras for five years, fundraising, training and sending people down to Honduras.” He confirmed Meneses’s encounter with Enrique Bermúdez and added a detail – the gift of a crossbow by Meneses to the colonel. Then Farah produced a stunner, lurking in the twelfth paragraph of his story. Citing “knowledgeable sources,” he reported that the DEA had hired Meneses in 1988 to try to set up Sandinista political and military leaders in drug stings. Farah named the DEA agent involved as Federico Villareal. The DEA did not dispute this version of events. In other words, Farah had Meneses performing a political mission for the US government, side by side with the story by his colleagues Pincus and Suro claiming Meneses had no such connections.

  Shortly after the Post’s offensives on October 2 and October 4, the Mercury News’s editor, Jerry Ceppos, sent a detailed letter to the Post aggressively defending Webb and rebutting the criticisms. “The Post has every right to reach different conclusions from those of the Mercury News,” Ceppos wrote. “But I’m disappointed in the ‘what’s the big deal’ tone running through the Post’s critique. If the CIA knew about illegal activities being conducted by its associates, federal law and basic morality required that it notify domestic authorities. It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of story that a newspaper should shine a light on.”

  The Post refused to print Ceppos’s letter. Ceppos called Stephen Rosenfeld, the deputy editor of the editorial page, who suggested that Ceppos revise his letter and resubmit it. Ceppos promptly did this, and again the Post refused to print his response. Rosenfeld said Ceppos’s letter was “misinformation.” Ceppos later wrote in the Mercury News: “I was stunned when the Washington Post rejected my request to reply to its long critique of ‘Dark Alliance.’ The Post at first encouraged me, asking me to rewrite the article and then to agree to other changes. I did. Then, a few days ago, I received a one-paragraph fax saying that the Post is ‘not able to publish’ my response. Among other reason
s, the Post said [that] other papers ‘essentially’ confirmed the Post’s criticism of our series. I’ve insisted for years that newspapers don’t practice ‘groupthink.’ I’m still sure that most don’t. But the Post’s argument certainly gives ammunition to the most virulent critics of American journalism. The Post also said I had backed down ‘elsewhere’ from positions I took in the piece I wrote for the Post. But I didn’t. I shouted to anyone who would listen (and wrote that, in another letter to the Post). It was too late. On the day that the Post faxed me, the Los Angeles Times incorrectly had written that reporter Gary Webb, who wrote the ‘Dark Alliance’ series, and I had backed down on several key points. Fiction became fact. As if I had no tongue, and no typewriter, I suddenly had lost access to the newspaper that first bitterly criticized our series.”

  The Post’s sordid procedures in savaging Webb were examined by its ombudsman, Geneva Overholzer, on November 10. Ultimately she found her own paper guilty of “misdirected zeal,” but first she took the opportunity to stick a few more knives into poor Webb. “The San Jose series was seriously flawed. It was reported by a seemingly hot-headed fellow willing to have people leap to conclusions his reporting couldn’t back up – principally that the CIA was knowingly involved in the introduction of drugs into the United States.” That said, Overholzer then turned her sights on the Post’s editors, saying that the Post showed more energy for protecting the CIA than for protecting the people from government excesses. “Post editors and reporters knew there was strong evidence that the CIA at least chose to overlook Contra involvement in the drug trade. Yet when those revelations came out in the 1980s they had caused ‘little stir,’ as the Post delicately noted. Would that we had welcomed the surge of public interest as an occasion to return to a subject the Post and the public had given short shrift. Alas, dismissing someone else’s story as old news comes more naturally.”

  Despite Ceppos’s anger at the Washington Post, the unrelenting attacks from organizations that he held in great professional esteem were beginning to take their toll. It is also quite possible that he was feeling pressure from within the Knight-Ridder empire. To judge from the bleating tone of his pieces about the Webb series in the Mercury News – the November 4 article, for example – Ceppos may not have had quite the necessary backbone to hold up under pressure.

  Ceppos assigned another Mercury News investigative reporter, Pete Carey, to review Webb’s reporting against the charges of the media critics. On October 12 the Mercury News published Carey’s findings, which backed up Webb’s work and actually added new information, particularly regarding the 1986 search warrant against Blandón and his arms-dealing associate, Ronald Lister. But though Webb’s reporting was vindicated, the assignment to Carey was an omen of the paper’s increasing defensiveness.

  Another omen was Ceppos’s reaction to charges that Webb had a vested interest in the story because he had a book offer and film offers. The Los Angeles Times reported, inaccurately, that Webb had signed a deal. “This story really pissed off Ceppos,” Webb recalls. “He said it made the paper look bad.” Webb told Ceppos he didn’t have any deals. Ceppos then told Webb, “I don’t want you to sign any deals and if you sign any book deals or movie deals you can’t work on this story for us anymore.”

  “That’s kind of asking a lot,” Webb says he answered. “This is what most reporters dream of.”

  “Well, you’ll have to make up your mind,” Ceppos said. “You can either do a book deal or you can work on it for us.”

  Webb went home to talk over the ultimatum with his wife, Sue, a respiratory therapist. She told him, “Screw them. Do the book. Do the movie and let the Mercury News worry about itself.”

  “I owe it to the paper,” Webb answered. “They’re being sniped at.” So he called up Hotchkiss at Sterling Lord and told him, “Forget the books. Forget the movie deals. They want me to do more stories. Then I’ll do the book.”

  Sue had better instincts about the Mercury News than her husband. Having told Webb to give up the deals and write the stories for the paper, Ceppos thus did his reporter out of book and movie advances, then failed to run the stories and finally tried to ruin his career.

  The next assault was a double-barreled one from either side of the continent, on Sunday, October 17, in the New York Times, staff reporter Tim Golden was given an entire page on which to flail away at Webb. In the Los Angeles Times, an army of fourteen reporters and three editors put out a three-part series, intended to finish off Webb forever.

  Golden’s piece, entitled “The Tale of CIA and Drugs Has Life of Its Own,” was remarkable, among other reasons, for the pullulating anonymity of its sources. Golden claimed to have interviewed “more than two dozen current and former rebels, CIA officers and narcotics agents.” From these informants, Golden had concluded that there was “scant” proof to support the paper’s contention that Nicaraguan rebel officials linked to the CIA played a central role in spreading crack through Los Angeles and other cities. One conspicuous common link between all the officials quoted by Golden as being critical of Webb is that they remained anonymous. Only Adolfo Calero permitted himself to be identified. Golden’s editors at the New York Times allowed him to offer scores of blind quotes without any identification. The Mercury News never offered Webb that indulgence, nor did he request it.

  In truth, Golden’s story had no substance whatsoever. He got his final word on the story from that well-known Uncle Tom to the thumb-sucking crowd, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a black professor from the Harvard University Medical School. Poussaint, who is always being wheeled out in these situations, ascribed the reaction of black America to the Mercury News story as another case of black paranoia. This tendresse for the CIA’s reputation was nothing new for the New York Times. In 1987, its reporter Keith Schneider weighed in with a three-part series dismissing allegations of Contra drug trafficking. A month later Schneider explained to In These Times magazine why he took that approach. He said such a story could “shatter the Republic. I think it is so damaging, the implications are so extraordinary, that for us to run the story, it had better be based on the most solid evidence we could amass.” In other words, it would have to be approved by the Agency.

  Of all the attacks on Webb, the Los Angeles Times series was the most elaborate and the most disingenuous. For two months the dominant newspaper in Southern California had been derided for missing the big story on its own doorstep. The only way it could salvage its reputation was to claim that there’d been no big story to miss. This is the path it took. It would have been extraordinary if the Times had the decency to clap the Mercury News on the back and praise it for good work, particularly given the disposition of its editor-in-chief at the time, Shelby Coffee III. Coffee came to Los Angeles from the Washington Post, where he had been editor of the Style section. He was regarded there as a smooth courtier in the retinue of Katharine Graham and not in any way as a boat rocker. It would have gone against every instinct for Coffee to have endorsed a story so displeasing to liberal elites. “He is the dictionary definition of someone who wants to protect the status quo,” said Dennis McDougal, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, in an interview with New Times, “He weighs whether or not an investigative piece will have repercussions among the ruling elites and if it will, the chances of seeing it in print in the LA Times decrease accordingly.”

  The mood of the group doing the series, under the leadership of Doyle McManus, could scarcely be described as one of objective dispassion. They referred to themselves as the “Get Gary Webb Team,” as Peter Kornbluh reported in the Columbia Journalism Review, and bragged in the office about denying Webb his Pulitzer.

  The most important task for the hit squad was to deal with its own backyard. They assigned Webb’s old nemesis Jesse Katz the task of undermining Webb’s assertion that the Blandón/Ross cocaine ring helped spark the crack epidemic in Los Angeles. Katz duly turned in an article claiming that “the explosion of cheap smokable cocaine in the 1980s was a uniquely egalitarian
phenomenon, one that lent itself more to makeshift mom and pop operations than to the sinister hand of a government-sanctioned plot.” Katz went on to minimize the role of Rick Ross: “How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ricky Ross.” Katz then asserted that gangs had little or nothing to do with the crack trade, stating flatly that crack sales did not “fill the coffers of the Bloods and the Crips.” He also disputed the idea that crack use had spread across the country from Los Angeles.

  This was a substantial turnaround from what the Los Angeles Times and Katz had previously reported, before the task of demolishing the Mercury News became paramount. The drumbeat of the newspaper during the mid- and late 1980s was that the Los Angeles Police Department had to crush the gangs. In a 1987 news story, the Times described the gangs as “the foot soldiers of the Colombian cartels.” On August 4, 1989, another news story sympathetically relayed a Justice Department report: “Los Angeles street gangs now dominate the rock cocaine trade in Los Angeles and elsewhere, due in part to their steady recourse to murderous violence to enforce territorial dealing supremacy, to deter cheating and to punish rival gang members. The LAPD has identified 47 cities, from Seattle to Kansas City, to Baltimore, where Los Angeles street gang traffickers have appeared.”

  As for Ross, on December 20, 1994 the Los Angeles Times had published a 2,400-word investigative report by Katz entitled “Deposed King of Crack Now Freed After Five Years in Prison. This Master Marketer Was Key to the Drug’s Spread in LA.” Katz pulled out all the stops in his lead. “If there was an eye to the storm, if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack’s decade-long reign, if there was an outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles’ streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick.” Katz reported that “Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices, and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived.” Katz called Ross “South Central’s first multi-millionaire crack lord” and said “his coast-to-coast conglomerate was selling more than $500,000 a day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars.”