by Nick Schou
Webb was aware that his story would be controversial. From his conversations with Bob Parry and Martha Honey, he knew what had happened to other reporters who had written about the CIA’s involvement with drugs. But as he scrolled down the computer screen, eagerly reading his story to see how it had finally turned out, he wasn’t worried about the future.
The story looked solid after all—and it had the most impressive online graphics of any work of journalism ever published. There were links to his documents and sound files of Blandon testifying in court. “Dark Alliance” had finally been put to ink. Webb felt a huge rush of relief. He emailed his colleague, Goerg Hodel, still down in Nicaragua, to let him know the story was online. Then he turned off his computer, went back out to the party, and got drunk.
SEVEN
Crack in America
WHEN THE AUGUST 18, 1996, edition of the San Jose Mercury News arrived on doorsteps throughout Northern California, readers were greeted with the dark silhouette of a man smoking a crack pipe superimposed on the official seal of the CIA. In red and black lettering—the ominous, official style of type associated with top secret files—was the series’ logo: “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion.” Beneath were the words, “Day One: How a cocaine-for-weapons trade supported U.S. policy and undermined black America,” and an even larger headline, “Crack Plague’s Roots Are in Nicaraguan War.” Readers were thus introduced to the most explosive journalistic exposé since the end of the Cold War.
As implied by the headlines and logo—neither of which were created by Webb, but copy desk editors at the Mercury News—“Dark Alliance” promised to provide disturbing revelations about the CIA’s involvement in America’s crack-cocaine explosion. The first sentence left no doubt the story didn’t just involve drug dealers, but the Langley, Virginia-based spook house: “For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.”
The following two sentences were even more sweeping. “This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world,” the article stated. “The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.”
Along with the image combining the CIA seal with the crack addict and the lead sentence’s claim that “millions in drug profits” from “tons of cocaine” had gone to the CIA-backed contras, those two sentences contained assertions that would later come to haunt Webb. The idea that Blandon and Meneses had together formed the first coke pipeline to urban America, thus sparking the crack “explosion” in inner cities across the country, was something that Webb and his editors surely believed, but which “Dark Alliance” neither explicitly stated nor proved.
What the story did prove was that two Nicaraguan contra sympathizers had supplied “Freeway” Ricky Ross, L.A.’s most notorious crack dealer, with enough cheap cocaine to keep him in business for years, and that at least some of the profits helped the CIA fight communism in Central America. The first installment of the three-part series told how Blandon and Meneses had met at a contra base in Honduras with CIA asset Enrique Bermudez, whom Webb misidentified as a “CIA agent,” before dealing coke to “Freeway” Ricky Ross—“a dope dealer of mythic proportions in the L.A. drug world” who “turned the cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the country.”
A sidebar to the story detailed how the drug ring had its own “little arsenal”—a steady supply of Uzis and other automatic weapons courtesy of Blandon’s partner, Ronald Lister, the ex-Orange County cop who told Sheriff’s Deputies raiding his home that he worked for the CIA. “We had our own little arsenal,” Ross observed. “Once [Blandon] tried to sell [my partner] a grenade launcher. I said, ‘Man, what [the fuck] do we need with a grenade launcher?’ ”
In late 1986, Webb reported, FBI agents investigating the Iran-contra scandal interviewed Lister’s former real estate agent, who said Lister paid cash for a $340,000 house in Mission Viejo. When the realtor asked Lister where the money came from, Lister had replied that he was involved in “CIA-approved” security work in Central America. Further evidence of Lister’s “security” work came from Christopher Moore, who traveled to El Salvador in 1982 with Lister. Moore said that Lister was trying to provide security to a Salvadoran Air Force Base. “Lister always said he worked for the CIA,” Moore stated. “I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.”
As if to explain why Lister would be pitching security work to a Salvadoran air base, Webb revealed that Blandon’s partner Meneses was a friend of Marcos Aguado, a contra pilot who also worked for the Salvadoran Air Force. While flying weapons to the contras in Honduras, Aguado was stationed at the Ilopango Air Force Base. A covert area of the airport run by the Salvadoran military doubled as a major contra supply center. Ilopango was more than just a part of the contra weapons pipeline, however. According to Celerino Castillo, an ex-DEA agent then stationed in El Salvador, the base was also a locus of contra drug smuggling.
Castillo was a decorated Vietnam veteran and firm believer in the drug war. But when he tried to report his discoveries to his superiors, the DEA responded by opening an internal investigation of him, forcing him to resign his job. “Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they [DEA officials] were covering it up,” Castillo told Webb. “You can’t get any simpler than that. It was a cover-up.”
The second installment of “Dark Alliance” told the story of Blandon’s unlikely evolution from Ross’ supplier to government informant and witness against “Freeway” Ricky Ross. The story also profiled Ross’ equally unprobable rise from rural Texas to king of crack cocaine, and how his career ended shortly after his release from prison in Texas in 1994, when Blandon had asked for his help arranging a major drug deal. When Ross picked up the drugs, DEA agents arrested him. The final, and least controversial, installment of the of Webb’s three-day series offered a dramatic critique of federal drug sentencing guidelines, and how stiffer penalties for crack as opposed to powder cocaine users and dealers had filled the nation’s prisons with young inner city residents, the overwhelming majority of whom were African Americans.
At its best, “Dark Alliance” was a vivid, convincing account of how three drug dealers had wreaked havoc on America’s inner cities and how their activities were closely tied to the CIA’s war in Central America. But that narrative relied primarily on occasionally conflicting statements by convicted drug dealers. Webb supported their claims by citing law enforcement records suggesting that Blandon, Meneses, and Lister were involved with the CIA and were laundering millions of dollars of drug proceeds to support the agency’s war in Nicaragua.
Yet nowhere in “Dark Alliance” was there any direct proof that the CIA had either participated in the drug trafficking Webb had uncovered or that the agency had even known about it. The lack of proof of CIA complicity and Webb’s reliance on relatively few sources—combined with the story’s sensational claim that three men inadvertently ignited the crack explosion—would provide ample ammunition for the “debunking” of “Dark Alliance” and the ultimate undoing of Gary Webb.
The initial reaction to “Dark Alliance” among Webb’s colleagues was decidedly mixed. “When it came out, there was a sense of pride in the newspaper,” says a former Mercury News reporter who requested anonymity. “It definitely caused a stir. My view was that, in a sense, it was an old story that had been ignored by the major newspapers. I had problems with some of the reporting, but thought it was basically right.”
“Most people who read it initially thought it was very good,” says Mercury News assistant editor Bert Robinson. “But it was clear he had not
tried very hard to get responses from the people he was criticizing. He hadn’t really gone to the government—the CIA or anybody who was being shown up in this thing—to address the content of his reporting. Gary just thought that once you had the story, the people who were going to take the brunt of your reporting were just going to bullshit you, so it wasn’t even worth bothering.”
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.”
THANKS 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 conferencepromising 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.