Whiteout

by Alexander Cockburn

  A day later, it was Doyle McManus who tried to undermine Webb’s work on the Contra connection. One hopes that McManus felt some slight tinge of embarrassment at his newspaper’s attack on Webb for unethical behavior in signing a book deal (which, as we have seen, Webb had not in fact done). McManus himself had reported on the Iran/Contra scandal, and simultaneously put out a book on the affair, co-written with Jane Mayer. McManus went the familiar route of larding his story with unattributed quotes from Contras, CIA men and associates of Blandón, all of them naturally enough protesting their innocence. “I wish we had been able to identify them by names of course,” McManus piously told Alicia Shepard of the American Journalism Review. McManus, apparently in some sort of journalistic race to the bottom with his co-assailants Pincus and Golden, contended that Meneses gave the Contras only $20 to $30 at a time, and asserted that Meneses’s and Blandón’s total contribution was far less than $50,000. This conclusion is derived from McManus’s unnamed informants, and has to be set against court testimony, under oath, from numerous named sources cited by Webb. No less an authority than assistant federal prosecutor L. J. O’Neale, who lowballed the dollar figures for reasons noted earlier, had still produced a number of more than $2 million in a single year.

  McManus tried to establish a scenario in which Blandón and Meneses gave very little to the Contras, to whom they were not connected in any official capacity, and in which Meneses’s cocaine never made it to Rick Ross to be transformed into crack. McManus claimed Ross’s crack came from Colombian cocaine and had nothing to do with the Nicaraguans. In McManus’s version, Blandón and Meneses were incompetent stooges. However, amid all this dogged effort to subvert Webb’s chronology, McManus tripped himself up badly. He alleged that Blandón and Meneses had severed their relationship “entirely by 1983.” A few paragraphs later, amid an anecdote designed to establish Meneses as head of a gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight, McManus quoted at length a description of a scene at Meneses’s house in San Francisco in November 1984. The unnamed source is identified as a member of the Blandón cocaine ring. He is describing the reaction of Meneses and Blandón to the news that Jairo Meneses, Meneses’s cousin, and Renato Peña Cabrerra, official spokesman for the FDN’s San Francisco group, had just been busted on cocaine charges. Although McManus had just said that Meneses and Blandón had split two years earlier, he now had them in the midst of a division of cash from a cocaine deal. “Danilo and Norwin had done some business deal. The deal is 40 to 50 kilos. The money was all divvied up. There was cash all over the place. Norwin had steaks on the grill. It was going to be a big party. The phone rings and Margarita shrieks, ‘Jairo’s been arrested!’ Well, everybody cleared out in a heartbeat. They grabbed the money and ran. I don’t think anyone turned off the steaks.”

  It’s hard to imagine an anecdote that could more effectively rebut everything McManus had previously labored to establish.

  McManus’s other objective was to assert the moral purity of the CIA. To this end he interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA officer and staffer at the National Security Council at the time Oliver North was manfully toiling at Reagan’s behest to keep the Contras afloat. Cannistraro told McManus that sometimes CIA station chiefs turn a blind eye to “misdeeds by the foreign collaborators they recruit.” Cannistraro referred to this trait as “falling in love with your agent.” Cannistraro adamantly insisted, however, that there’s “no tendency to turn a blind eye to drug trafficking. It’s too sensitive. It’s not a fine line. It’s not a shaded area where you can turn away from the rules.” (In 1998 the CIA Inspector General finally admited to Congress that in 1982 the Agency had received clearance from the Justice Department not to report drug trafficking by CIA assets.) What McManus failed to confide to his readers was that Cannistraro had a deep personal interest in denying any Agency tolerance for trafficking. He had supervised many of the CIA/Contra operations and was then transferred to the NSC, where he oversaw US aid to the Afghan mujahidin. As we shall see, the mujahidin were heavily engaged in the trafficking of opium and heroin. Perhaps the most piquant bit of effrontery in McManus’s attack was his assertion that even if Meneses had been selling drugs in California and remitting the profits to the Contras, the CIA would have had to turn a blind eye, because the Agency was prohibited from domestic spying!

  Even after his pummeling by the two big West and East Coast papers, Webb felt he still retained the support of his editors. “They urged me to continue digging on the story so that we could stick to the Washington Post,” For the next two months, Webb continued his research. He flushed out more evidence of direct CIA knowledge of Meneses’s operations in Costa Rica and El Salvador. He traced how the DEA made Meneses one of their informer/assets as early as 1985. And he secured more evidence on the controversial money angle, finding that as much as $5 million was channeled back to the Contras from the Blandón/Meneses ring in 1983 alone. Webb turned the stories in to his editor, Dawn Garcia, in January 1997, and the newspaper sat on them. “They didn’t edit them,” Webb recalls. “They told me that they had read them, but they never asked me for any supporting documentation. They never asked any questions about them.”

  Then Webb got a call from a friend, saying that a reporter had requested copies of all of Webb’s clippings. The reporter seemed interested in digging into Webb’s personal background. She particularly asked about an incident in which Webb had fired his .22 at a man who had been trying to steal his prized TR6 and who threatened Webb and his then-pregnant wife. (The man turned out to be a known local crook already convicted of manslaughter.) The reporter pursuing this story was Alicia Shepard of the American Journalism Review. Shepard had formerly worked as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. Her story was another smear on Webb’s journalistic ethics, but this time the smears were coming from a source much closer to home. Shepard recounted how Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner (a paper boasting Chris Matthews as its Washington, D.C. correspondent), had filed a petition with the Society of Professional Journalists to have Webb stripped of the Journalist of the Year Award that had just been bestowed on him. This had elicited a stinging letter from the director of the Society of Professional Journalists, emphasizing how Rosenhause had a private agenda, and how the society stood behind Webb.

  Shepard got several Mercury News staffers to go on record with their criticism of Webb and his stories. Economics writer Scott Thrum, investigative editors Jonathan Krim and Chriss Schmitt, editorial page editor Rob Elder, and the most virulent critic of all, Phil Yost, who is the chief editorial writer for the Mercury News. The criticisms consisted mostly of hand-wringing by nervous colleagues who felt that Webb had compromised the newspaper’s “hard-won credibility.” Yost simply reiterated the charges made by other newspapers. It was a disgusting demonstration of backstabbing. And it showed clearly that the Mercury News was beginning to distance itself from Webb.

  What accounts for the vicious edge to many of these attacks on Webb? One reason for the animosity of the California reporters can be traced back to one of Webb’s earliest investigations for the Mercury News. His story revealed that a number of reporters were moonlighting for the very agencies they were supposed to be covering – for example, how a TV reporter in Sacramento was being paid by the California Highway Patrol for coaching officers on how to deal with the press. He uncovered a curriculum for the TV reporter’s class describing how the CHP should call up editors and complain about unfavorable stories. Webb also exposed reporters at the Sacramento Bee and United Press International, who had received state contracts from the California Lottery Commission. Webb says that after this story appeared, his colleagues regarded him as an outsider.

  Another reason for ostracism by his colleagues could be what Webb describes as racist attitudes among the Mercury News staff toward the editor of his series, Dawn Garcia. “I don’t think she has a lot of friends in that newsroom, because she came in and she was regarded as one of the Hispanic hires, a quota hir
e. That’s unfair. She’s a good newsperson. She took a job from someone that was widely liked in the newsroom.”

  With his stories sitting unpublished on his editor’s desk, some time in early 1997 Webb got a call from Georg Hodel, who had done legwork for him in Nicaragua. Hodel said that he had located four other members of the Meneses/Blandón operation who were willing to talk to Webb. Webb called his editors and said he was going to Nicaragua. They told him they didn’t want him to go until they figured out what to do with his stories. Worried that the drug dealers might disappear, Webb said he’d go anyway, on his own time and money.

  Soon after he returned to Sacramento from Nicaragua, Webb got a call from Jerry Ceppos, who had spent much of the winter months being treated for prostate cancer. Ceppos told Webb that he was going to publish a letter in the Mercury News admitting that “mistakes had been made” in the “Dark Alliance” series. Ceppos originally wanted to run the apologia in the Easter Sunday edition. When Webb saw a draft of the column, he was outraged. “This is idiotic,” Webb recalls telling Ceppos. “Half this stuff isn’t even true. It’s unconscionable to run this.” Ceppos told Webb not to take it personally, that it was just a column and it didn’t mean the paper was trying to hang him out to dry.

  Webb insisted that he thought Ceppos’s column was unethical for a number of reasons, including the fact that though it said there had been shortcomings in the series, it made no reference to the fact that six months of further research had substantiated and advanced most of Webb’s original findings. Ceppos replied that they didn’t “want to get into that kind of detail.”

  Ceppos’s column ran on May 11. It was a retreat on every front, and a shameful day for American journalism. It accused Webb of leaving out contradictory information, of failing to emphasize that the multimillion-dollar figure was an estimate, and of not including the obligatory denials of the CIA. The series, Ceppos said, had oversimplified the origins of the crack epidemic. Ceppos also declared that the series had wrongly implied CIA knowledge of the Contra drug ring.

  Predictably, Ceppos’s appalling betrayal of his own reporter was greeted with exuberance by the New York Times, where Todd Purdum used it to legitimize the New York Times’s original attack and to lash out at Webb as a paranoid. Purdum also alleged that Ceppos’s column had been based on “an exhaustive review” written by a seven-member Mercury News team of reporters and editors. Both the “exhaustive review” and the team had never existed, according to Webb. Though Webb had submitted four stories totaling 14,000 words, Ceppos told Purdum that the reporter had only submitted “notes and ideas.” Purdum also marshalled disobliging blind quotes from Webb’s Mercury News colleagues.

  The Ceppos column was also greeted with glee on the New York Times editorial page, where Ceppos got a patronizing clap on the back for his “courageous gesture.” The editorial again affixed blame on Webb, saying that Ceppos’s action “sets a high standard for cases in which journalists make egregious errors.” Webb had made no such errors. Down at Langley, the CIA was quick to use Ceppos’s letter to assert that the Agency had been absolved. “It’s gratifying to see,” said the Agency’s Mark Mansfield, “that a large segment of the media, including the San Jose Mercury News, has taken an objective look at how this story was constructed and reported.”

  Nor did the Ceppos letter escape notice by Nicaragua’s right wing, with perilous consequences for those who had worked on the story with Webb and who had been interviewed by him. The Nicaraguan press, chiefly La Prensa, which had been funded for years by the CIA, ran stories denouncing Webb and urging people to sue him, as well as Hodel and others associated with the story. The Nicaraguan papers alleged that the Mercury News would not mount a defense against such libel actions.

  It wasn’t long before Georg Hodel became the target of harassment and a possible murder attempt. In mid-June 1997, about a month after Ceppos disowned Webb, Hodel and an attorney for several of the men he and Webb had interviewed were run off the road in Nicaragua and threatened by a group of armed thugs. Hodel and the lawyer escaped and went to a police station to file a complaint. A few days later, a story appeared in one of Nicaragua’s right-wing papers saying that Hodel and his companions had gotten drunk and driven off the road themselves.

  Meanwhile, the Mercury News had told Webb that his follow-up stories were being killed and that he was being reassigned to the paper’s Cupertino bureau, 150 miles from Sacramento. Webb filed a grievance against the paper.

  The New York Times continued its vendetta. In perhaps the lowest of all the attacks, Iver Peterson, one of the newspaper’s more undistinguished reporters, went back over Webb’s investigative pieces before he embarked on the “Dark Alliance” series. Peterson charged that Webb had a history of playing loose with the facts and having “a penchant for self-promotion.” He reached this conclusion after dredging up four libel suits, two of which had been dismissed and two of which had been settled. Webb says no major corrections were ever required. (The Times refused to print Webb’s letter correcting the record, which is reproduced below.) Peterson also quoted from the targets of Webb’s investigations, who, predictably, were not appreciative of the reporter. Back in his Ohio days as a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Webb had exposed Ohio Supreme Court Judge Frank D. Celebrezze as being in receipt of political contributions from organizations tied to the mob. Celebrezze had sued. There was a settlement and no retraction. Peterson dutifully cited Celebrezze’s eager comment that Webb “lied about me and whatever happens to him I think he deserves.” It was as if some reporter had used Richard Nixon as a reliable source on the quality of reporting by the New York Times.

  However, the coverup and counterattacks had not yet ended. There was the delicate matter of how to deal with the CIA’s own internal probe. It’s a neat trick to get great coverage for a report you haven’t published and that no journalist has actually seen. You need accomplices. The CIA once again used its friends in the press to issue a self-serving news release on its internal investigation of charges that the Agency had connived in Contra drug smuggling into Los Angeles in the early 1980s.

  In this particular piece of news management, the CIA outdid itself. In the past, it has relied on its journalistic allies to put the best face on probes that, albeit heavily censored, displayed the Agency in an unpleasing light. But in late December 1997, the CIA elicited friendly coverage, even though the report by the CIA’s own Inspector General remained unpublished and under heavy security wraps.

  It will be recalled that a month after Webb’s story first appeared, the CIA’s director John Deutch announced that the Agency’s Inspector General, Frederick Hitz, was launching “the most comprehensive analysis ever done” of CIA activities in this sphere. The gambit of the internal probe was initially confined to the allegations made by Webb, but was then widened to take in any references to drug connections in the CIA’s files. Also launched in the fall of 1996 was a Justice Department review of Webb’s charges. Deutch initially pledged that the CIA report would be finished and released to the public by the end of December 1996. Sixteen months went by.

  Then on December 18, 1997 came stories in the Los Angeles Times and the San Jose Mercury News under headlines such as “CIA Clears Itself in Crack Investigation.” CNN picked up the Mercury News’s story immediately, telling viewers that the very paper that had made the initial charges against the CIA was now reporting that “an investigation” had absolved the Agency.

  But where was the CIA report that had prompted the stories in the LA Times and Mercury News? Unavailable. Reason? It depended who one called. The stories in the LA Times and Mercury News about the mysterious report were filed on Wednesday, December 17 and appeared in print the next day. Then on Thursday, the Justice Department announced its view that public release of the CIA report would damage current criminal investigations. When called, the CIA’s press department stated that the CIA now wanted to wait until mid-January, when the second part of the Inspector General’s report
was supposedly to be finished. Later that Thursday, the Justice Department stated that it would edit the CIA’s and its own probes to purge them of any compromising material.

  In other words, one was being asked to believe that after sixteen months the CIA and Justice Department had somehow, entirely by accident, contrived a news “event” that exonerated the CIA in major headlines, without providing any evidence to support such a conclusion. Imagine the fury that would have been unleashed if Webb had written a news story thus shorn of any documentary substantiation.

  Friday, December 19 brought stories in the New York Times by Tim Weiner and in the Washington Post by Walter Pincus, who had started the press onslaught on Webb in the fall of 1996. Weiner’s story ran under the headline, “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.” Weiner quoted no named sources and relied entirely on our old friend, “a government official who would not allow his name to be used.” Pincus quoted three anonymous officials who claimed that the CIA report shows “no direct or indirect link” between the CIA and cocaine traffickers.

  Just how thorough was the CIA’s much-touted probe of itself? All indications are that the investigation was far from fierce. The Inspector General had no subpoena power. The CIA’s former chief officer in Central America, Dewey Clarridge, now retired and working for General Dynamics, told the Los Angeles Times that the CIA “sent me questions that were a bunch of bullshit.” He refused to be interviewed by the CIA’s investigators. Clarridge, it should be noted, was a central figure in CIA operations with the Contras, whom he conjured into being from an initial recruitment of Argentinian military torturers, and whose assassination schemes he boasts of having recommended. Other people interviewed by the CIA claim to have been bullied by the Agency’s investigators whenever they showed signs of supporting Webb. And what about the author of the stories, Gary Webb? He was never interviewed.