by Nick Schou
Looking back at his own story, Golden now concedes that it appears “a little credulous of the intelligence and contra sources” who denied any complicity with drug trafficking, although most critics of the media reaction to “Dark Alliance” found it more measured than that of the LA Times. “I’m not sure it was the deepest reporting we ever did,” Golden says. “But it was not hard to find big journalistic holes in Webb’s series.”
Although his first reaction to Webb’s story was that it was “interesting,” Golden felt that Webb had “clearly overreached” in his conclusion that Blandon and Meneses, or even the contras in general, had contributed much to the booming drug trade. Despite allegations that contra leaders had lined their own pockets with CIA and State Department funds, the contra troops that Golden had seen in the field in the mid-1980s did not appear to have been especially well-armed or well-provisioned.
Golden also found it hard to stomach the outrage over Webb’s “unproven” claim that the contra war had helped fuel the crack epidemic. “It was by then pretty clear that the contras had tortured or murdered hundreds and probably thousands of Nicaraguans,” Golden says. “Americans didn’t care a whole lot about the fact that their government had paid for that. But because some contra hangers-on had moved a relatively small amount of drugs, people were in an uproar. I thought it was the height of American narcissism.”
While he does not question that elements of the contras were involved in drugs, Golden’s view is that they were almost all minor players who were peripheral to the rebel armies. “Compared to the number of guys who were pulling out fingernails, I don’t think drug-dealing was that high on the list of the bad things they were doing,” he says. “It was interesting that a couple of Nicaraguan exiles had hooked up with this big crack dealer, but the central premise of [Webb’s] story—that the contra war and its funding needs fueled the crack epidemic—there is still to this day nothing solid that makes this case.”
Some years after reporting from Central America, Golden had covered the drug trade in Mexico and Colombia. Webb’s assertion that Ross was the kingpin of crack reminded him of the way the DEA hyped the arrests of major coke traffickers. As was already obvious at that time, one smuggler replaced another, he says. “The idea that one guy was the king of all wholesale crack deals in South Central did not fit with my understanding of how the drug trade worked.”
Golden came to the conclusion that Webb and his defenders did not care much about getting to the truth of the story—they just wanted the story to be true. He recalls debating Webb and other journalists at a 1997 Society of Professional Journalists panel in San Francisco. “I had by then spent ten years of my life writing about the bad things that our government and others had done in Latin America, and I practically got booed out of the room as some kind of apologist,” he says.
Shortly after his New York Times story appeared, protesters from various groups, including the San Francisco-based activist group Global Exchange, picketed outside his office. Golden went downstairs and, without introducing himself, infiltrated the protest. He chatted with the demonstrators as they denounced him as a tool of the CIA. “People had too much time on their hands in those days,” he says. “It was a time when journalism and politics were a little unmoored, as if people didn’t know who the real enemy was . . . I don’t think it was a high-water mark for investigative journalism.”
WEBB HAD HIS defenders, especially in the alternative press. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting published a lengthy, well-reasoned critique of the mainstream media’s attack against “Dark Alliance,” calling it a “Snow Job.” But the most eloquent pundit to jump to Webb’s aid was Alexander Cockburn, who later co-authored a book with investigative reporter Jeffrey St. Clair, White Out: The CIA, Drugs and The Press, a detailed history of agency collusion with drug traffickers and the media’s failure to cover the story. Cockburn says the mainstream media’s attacks against Webb constituted the most “factually inane” feeding frenzy he’s ever witnessed, but that it didn’t particularly surprise him.
“I’ve never taken the view that the mainstream press in the U.S. is to be redeemed,” Cockburn says. “The rhetorical pose is always that the New York Times could be doing a better job and so could the Washington Post and then we would have a responsible press. My view is that the official corporate press is there to do a bad job. That’s its function and nobody should be surprised. The miracle is that the Mercury News was asleep at the wheel and didn’t realize what Webb was doing—and printed his story.
Other alternative journalists were less forgiving of the flaws in “Dark Alliance,” but equally skeptical of the mainstream media’s criticism of the story. “If Gary Webb made mistakes I have no problem with exposing them,” says LA Weekly’s Marc Cooper. “But given the sweep of American journalism over the past fifty years, this is an outstanding case where three of the major newspapers in the country just decided to take out a competitor whose mistakes seem by any measure to be very minor.”
Cooper has special scorn for the LA Times’ Doyle McManus, whom he accuses of routinely authoring stories about Nicaragua that were spun from Reagan Administration lies, and which helped the U.S. government build support for the contras. “The stories that Doyle McManus wrote about Nicaragua in the 1980s—and the stories that [disgraced New York Times reporter] Judy Miller wrote about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq twenty years later—those are high crimes,” Cooper says. “Those are stories where reporters speak to officials based on anonymity and the stories are false; they have no substance.”
McManus says it was his job to quote anonymous sources. “I did not trust official denials,” he says. “I reported denials when officials made them in response to accusations, but that doesn’t mean I trusted them. I believed, and still believe, that people in the U.S. government turned a blind eye to drug dealing by people connected with the contras. I reported those allegations beginning in 1987, and I included them in our 1996 story about ‘Dark Alliance.’ ”
David Corn, Washington Editor of the Nation magazine, reported extensively on the contra-drug connection during the 1980s. When he first read “Dark Alliance,” Corn says he was impressed that Webb had found “street-level” sources on what appeared to be a major U.S. drug ring funding the Nicaraguan contras. But he quickly realized the story didn’t support its dramatic conclusion that the CIA or the contras had sparked the crack-cocaine epidemic. Yet Corn also believes the mainstream media, which had always ignored the contra-drug story, failed just as dramatically in its own response to “Dark Alliance.”
“What they did, particularly the LA Times and Washington Post, was to jump all over ‘Dark Alliance’ without looking at the bigger issue of connections between the CIA-backed contras and drug dealing,” Corn says. The coverage brought Corn back to the afternoon in 1987 when he attended a Capitol Hill press conference where officials unveiled the U.S. Senate’s final Iran contra report.
“One reporter in the room, a freelancer, asked if they had investigated the allegations of contra drug running,” Corn recalls. “And a reporter for the New York Times said, ‘Come on, let’s talk about something serious.’ Those of us who followed this closely, and it was just a small number of reporters, knew there was a story here to which the mainstream press had never paid serious attention. Then when Gary Webb’s story came along, they were happy to jump on that and shoot it down without examining their own failings on that front.”
One of the few people who had followed the contra drug story, Corn says, is Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project and Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archives at George Washington University. Like Corn and others, Kornbluh believes Webb over-reached with his reporting by suggesting that the Blandon-Meneses-Ross network played a significant role in America’s crack epidemic. He also believes the mainstream media was motivated less by the errors in Webb’s work than by the firestorm of controversy they produced, and that the one-sidedness of their reac
tion was journalistically indefensible.
“I thought the reaction particularly of the LA Times, but also of the two other papers was one of the most wasteful expenditures of journalistic resources in the recent history of journalism,” Kornbluh says. “I’ve never seen anything like it in thirty years. If that much energy, particularly by the LA Times, had been expended on the true scandal of contras and drugs, Gary’s reporting would have been significantly expanded.”
Of the three major newspapers that criticized “Dark Alliance,” only the Washington Post later saw fit to question its own coverage. On November 10, 1996, a few weeks after the anti-Webb onslaught had subsided, Washington Post ombudsman Geneva Overholser excoriated Webb for “Dark Alliance’s” shortcomings, but acknowledged the unseemliness of the mainstream media’s feeding frenzy, which she deemed “misplaced.”
“A principal responsibility of the press is to protect the people from government excesses,” Overholser argued. “The Post (among others) showed more energy for protecting the CIA from someone else’s journalistic excesses . . . 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.”
A decade of hindsight, however, has softened the perspective of many of the journalists that attacked Gary Webb in print. Ironically, because his newspaper was the most aggressive in criticizing “Dark Alliance,” Leo Wolinsky of the LA Times says he wishes Webb had worked for him. “The truth is that, with a good editor, it would have been a great story,” Wolinsky says. “I could see that story in the LA Times in draft form; it just needed an editor who would ask the right questions. In some ways Gary got too much blame. He did exactly what you expect from a great investigative reporter.”
NINE
Mea Culpa
DESPITE THE BARRAGE of criticism against “Dark Alliance” in the nation’s largest and most respected newspapers, Gary Webb had every reason to think that his editors would stand by him. Executive editor Jerry Ceppos had defended Webb in interviews with the New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post, and even had written a trenchant letter to the editor about the latter paper’s coverage of his story.
When other reporters at the Mercury News who weren’t happy about the controversy openly groused about Webb, Ceppos posted a memo on an editorial bulletin board asking them to keep their views to themselves. At a staff party at the paper, he had jauntily displayed his courage under fire by donning a military helmet.
Webb wanted to go on the offensive against his critics. He suggested stories about Walter Pincus’ ties to the CIA and how the LA Times had known about the 1986 raids against the Blandon ring—and had even obtained information about the evidence seized in Ronald Lister’s house—but had chosen not to report it. “The best way to shut them up is to put the rest of what we know in the paper and keep plowing ahead,” Webb later said he told Ceppos.
Yet it wasn’t just Webb’s credibility that was being questioned, but that of the Mercury News itself. Ceppos was in no mood to print stories attacking other newspapers. He wanted to print a written response to their criticism, but wasn’t sure Webb was the man to do it. Instead, Ceppos appointed the paper’s most experienced investigative reporter, Pete Carey, and an L.A. bureau reporter, Pamela Kramer, to write follow-up articles. Carey worked on his own from the paper’s headquarters in San Jose, while Kramer and Webb teamed up for field assignments in Southern California. Ceppos also gave Webb permission to return to Central America to gather more evidence to bolster his story.
While Webb was in Costa Rica interviewing new sources, Carey and Kramer were writing follow-up stories about the controversy. “My role was to do the community follow-ups,” says Kramer, who later left the Mercury News to pursue a teaching career. “Clearly the response was stratospherically greater from the public than what the Mercury had prepared for. It ranged from legitimate community interest to people getting CIA signals in their heads. I got a lot of those calls because I was listed in the L.A. directory for the Mercury News.”
Kramer had seen Webb around the office when she worked as an intern at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but had never spoken to him until she accompanied him on several reporting gigs in L.A. The pair interviewed the Sheriff’s deputies who had raided the Blandon drug ring in 1986, and even knocked on the door of Lister’s vacant Mission Viejo house. Kramer recalls that there was tin foil in all the windows.
“I was sent to team report, ostensibly for two reasons,” Kramer says. “One was that I had requested to work with an investigative reporter a year earlier, but also because I was a ‘solid person.’ It was not that Dawn [Garcia] was casting any aspersions on Gary but she was saying because of the controversy that was surrounding him, they wanted a second set of eyes there. It was not that I was being a spy; it was team reporting. And it was cool. It was fun.”
Kramer’s first impression of “Dark Alliance” was that the story made for breathtaking reading but seemed a bit grandiose—at least that’s how she felt when she saw the phrase “crack-cocaine explosion” in the lead paragraph. But more to the point, she felt amazed that nobody had told her the story was in the works, given that she was the paper’s L.A. correspondent. “This was in my backyard and I didn’t know anything about it,” she says. “Nobody said anything about it.”
After one assignment in Los Angeles, Kramer drove Webb to the airport, so he could catch his flight to San Diego. While Webb retrieved his belongings from a locker, Kramer waited for him on the departures level. After ten minutes, Webb hadn’t returned. “I was about to get out of the car and give ten bucks to this guy on a bench and give him a description of Gary,” Kramer says. At that moment, a police officer knocked on her window. “The cop says, ‘Hey, is your name by any chance, Pam? There is a guy downstairs who’s convinced you’ve been kidnapped.’ ” As it turned out, Webb had gone downstairs to the arrivals lane. “He thought the CIA had me,” Kramer says.
Webb flew to Costa Rica, where he and freelancer Georg Hodel interviewed police and prosecutors about Meneses and his connection to contra activities there. Hodel located Carlos Cabezas, a contra pilot who claimed he had delivered millions of dollars in drug funds to the contras. Cabezas, whom DEA reports show was involved with Meneses’ drug ring, claimed that he was taking orders from a CIA agent in Costa Rica named Ivan Gomez. Hodel also tracked down Enrique Miranda, who had testified against Meneses during the latter’s trial in Nicaragua on drug charges. Miranda told Hodel that Meneses had long operated with CIA protection.
Back in California after the trip, Webb began typing up his findings, convinced that they would settle the question of Blandon and Meneses ties to the CIA once and for all. Besides the new information he had unearthed in California, Webb had 3,000 pages of records released by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department about the agency’s 1986 raids on the Blandon-Ross network—documents that further bolstered his assertion that Blandon was still funding the contras with drug money several years after he and Meneses met CIA asset Enrique Bermudez in Honduras.
Webb felt jubilant. “We’d done it,” he later recalled. “I expected the editors to be besides themselves with joy.” Instead, nothing happened. “Aside from Dawn, no one called me to tell me they’d read the new stories,” Webb later wrote. “No one called with questions. No one even suggested that we begin editing them.”
What Webb didn’t know was that Pete Carey, whom Ceppos had assigned to investigate the controversy over “Dark Alliance” while Kramer was busy reporting on the black community’s reaction, had spent weeks trying to advance Webb’s story, and had come up empty handed. Carey’s job was to do nothing short of vindicate “Dark Alliance” from the attacks it had suffered at the hands of the nation’s most powerful newspapers.
In a recent interview, Carey said he got the assignment after approaching Ceppos in October 1996, at the height of the media’s criticism of the story. “I rememb
er walking into Jerry’s office and saying, ‘Boy, we need to do a story on this,’” Carey says. “We are really taking a beating.” Carey convinced Ceppos it was imperative for the paper to acknowledge in print that the Mercury News had been subjected to unprecedented criticism by the nation’s leading newspapers. “We owe it to our readers,” he told Ceppos.
When Ceppos gave Carey the job of investigating Webb’s story, the idea was that if anybody could ferret out the truth, Carey could. After all, Carey had covered Iran contra for Knight Ridder News Service and knew the basic terrain of the story. If he found that Webb was right, Ceppos reasoned, perhaps the newspapers that attacked “Dark Alliance” would admit they had wrongly maligned the Mercury News.
But while Carey says he went into his investigation hoping to advance the story, he quickly determined it would not be easy. The first inkling Carey had that something was wrong was when he looked at Blandon’s trial transcripts. Webb had reported that Blandon’s testimony showed he had been dealing drugs for the contras for “the better part of a decade.” Instead, Carey wasn’t sure what the transcripts showed. “There were important, contradictory statements that didn’t make it into the series,” Carey says. “It was kind of disheartening. I am a firm believer in telling the whole story, in laying out the weaknesses as well as the strengths. There was a lot of ambiguity.”
Ultimately, Carey came to roughly the same conclusion that the Post’s Walter Pincus and other reporters who had examined Blandon’s testimony had reached: by the time Blandon began dealing coke to “Freeway” Ricky Ross, he had broken with Meneses and was no longer sending cash to support the contras. While that was a reasonable conclusion, based on a fair reading of Blandon’s testimony, it ignored the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s 1986 report saying Blandon’s drug proceeds were still being funneled to the contras four years after Blandon started supplying Ross with coke.