Kill the Messenger

by Nick Schou

  But the reaction by the committee to his allegation that the CIA had turned a blind eye to contra drug smuggling struck Blum as at best naïve and at worst, a complete charade. “I was telling a story that nobody in the room wanted to hear,” he says. “The committee was acting stunned about my remarks. It showed the pathetic nature of oversight of the Senate intelligence committee. Everybody runs around shocked that this stuff is happening, but it’s been happening for years.”

  As the anger built in black communities, particularly in South Central Los Angeles, CIA Director John Deutch flew to Los Angeles to appear at a town hall meeting in an auditorium at South Central L.A.’s Locke High School—the first time in American history that a journalist had forced the director of the world’s most powerful spy agency to perform in-person, street-level damage control. More than five hundred people packed the audience. The booing began even before Deutch promised the crowd he’d “get to the bottom” of Webb’s allegations, and grew even louder when he asserted his certainty that the CIA had no connection with the city’s crack trade.

  In a sworn declaration responding to “Dark Alliance,” the CIA already had announced that it had reviewed its files and found no evidence the CIA had any ties to Ross, Blandon, Meneses, Lister, or the latter’s supposed CIA contact, Scott Weekly. Perhaps forgetting that the agency had already acknowledged occasionally working with known drug traffickers in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, and Central America, Deutch went even further. “As of today, we have no evidence of a conspiracy led by the CIA to engage and encourage drug trafficking in Nicaragua or elsewhere in Latin America, during this or any other period,” he declared.

  Deutch’s demonstrably false assertion only further enraged his audience. According to Jim Crogan and Kevin Uhrich of LA Weekly, the CIA director’s foray to South Central “went about as well as the agency’s adventures in Vietnam, or Latin America, or Iran.” One man interrupted Deutch, calling his appearance “nothing but a public-relations” stunt. “After all that illegal stuff we know you CIA people have done around the world, you tell us now that you’re honestly going to investigate yourselves about drug dealing?” he shouted. “You gotta be crazy if you think we’re going to believe that.”

  Also in the crowd was Michael Ruppert, a bespectacled, sincere-seeming, middle-aged white man. Halfway through Deutch’s speech, Ruppert stood up and accused the CIA director of lying. A former narcotics officer with the Los Angeles police, Ruppert later claimed he knew the agency was involved in the coke trade, and could prove it. Deustch listened politely as Ruppert detailed various cases he had unearthed as a police detective where the agency had colluded with drug dealers. Ruppert had left the department for personal reasons after accusing his department of colluding with drug traffickers, including his estranged girlfriend, whom Ruppert believed was a CIA agent.

  Ruppert saw “Dark Alliance” as personal and professional vindication. In the aftermath of the controversy, he attached himself to Webb’s story. Ruppert also insinuated himself into a grassroots effort to establish a Citizen’s Truth Commission on CIA involvement in drug dealing. The inquiry ultimately fell apart because of a power struggle between left-wing revolutionary groups like the Crack the CIA Coalition and liberal organizations like the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

  “I didn’t think the commission was a particularly good idea,” says Sanho Tree, an IPS drug policy expert who had been brought to the project by former freelance journalist Martha Honey. “The issue had already gotten out of control thanks to the nutters on the extremes. The story had become radioactive,” says Tree. “I would talk to activists in South Central who were thoroughly indoctrinated by Ruppert. They told me that not a rock of crack cocaine was sold in L.A. without the CIA’s permission. I told them people in Langley didn’t know where South Central was, and they were trying to fund an illegal war, not trying to start the crack-cocaine epidemic.”

  Besides Ruppert, countless people of all political stripes came forward in the wake of “Dark Alliance” to use Webb’s story to bolster their long-held suspicion that the CIA was secretly pulling the strings of world events. “Dark Alliance” had the uncanny effect of uniting conspiracy theorists on both ends of the political spectrum. In a way never seen before or since, it created an alliance of wild-eyed, would-be revolutionaries on the left who believed the CIA had deliberately started the crack epidemic to commit genocide against black people, and right-wing followers of Lyndon LaRouche, who saw the story as further proof that George Bush, Sr. and the Queen of England belong to a secret cabal that controls the planet.

  “Ruppert and the LaRouchians were responsible more than anyone for Webb’s downfall,” says Tree, adding that the Citizen Truth Commission ultimately focused less on arguing over how much further Webb should have gone with “Dark Alliance” than in examining the inequities of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, Ruppert used the story as a launching pad for his online newsletter, From the Wilderness, which he has used to publicize various conspiracy theories.

  Reached by telephone at the From the Wilderness office in Ashland, Oregon, Ruppert claimed someone had just smashed every computer terminal in his office. “It was an organized job,” he said. He speculated that the vandalism either involved his efforts to expose government wrongdoing or a disgruntled former employee with ties to a local drug ring. He recently published a book about 9/11, Crossing the Rubicon, copies of which he brought to Webb’s funeral. He credits “Dark Alliance” with not only jump-starting his publishing career but saving his life.

  “I was going to commit suicide the week those stories broke,” he says. “I had been trying for eighteen years at that point to expose CIA drug trafficking. I was living in this ramshackle place in Sylmar when I turned on the radio and heard about this major story in the San Jose Mercury News tying the CIA to cocaine shipments, and I ran out to get the paper. It kept me going. Somebody else had shown up and done the same work, and now there was credible evidence.”

  Ruppert chafes at those who call him a conspiracy theorist. “I come from a CIA family,” he says. “The CIA tried to recruit me twice, when I was at UCLA and again through [my girlfriend] when I was at the LAPD.” He claims IPS betrayed the groundswell of public demands for justice that arose in the wake of Webb’s reporting. “They ignored me completely,” he says. “I considered IPS to be a gatekeeping organization that was there to do damage control, and that’s exactly what they did.”

  While Ruppert’s sincerity as a whistleblower is something only he can address, his outburst at Locke High School and later, his self-promoting defense of Webb, didn’t exactly help build credibility for “Dark Alliance.”

  FEW PEOPLE WERE more passionate about “Dark Alliance” than Joe Madison, “The Black Eagle,” a radio talk-show host based in Washington, D.C., who now broadcasts on XM satellite radio. In a recent interview, Madison acknowledged that many African Americans, including some of his friends, took Webb’s story further than the facts allowed, and that Webb had often chastised him when he inadvertently mischaracterized elements of the story. He says he became obsessed with “Dark Alliance” because it was the first time a mainstream American newspaper had taken a serious look at U.S. government complicity in the crack plague.

  “In the black community, we always had suspicions,” Madison says. “The old adage was that we don’t grow cocaine. How could so much of it get into the country without the government knowing about it? It appeared that the black community had been targeted, and that this story was a major breakthrough.”

  Madison wasn’t just a talk show host. A veteran civil rights organizer, he saw the controversy over “Dark Alliance” as an opportunity to rally America’s black leadership in a quest for social justice. He called every black leader he knew—Maxine Waters, Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, and Dick Gregory, a comedian turned social activist who in 1968 had run unsuccessfully for president as a write-in candidate for the Freedom and Peace Party.

  When Madison reached him, Gregory was
at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. He agreed to fly back to D.C. to join Madison in what turned out to be a two-man protest at CIA headquarters. “Dick and I went to CIA headquarters and began picketing,” Madison recalls. “We pulled out a roll of yellow police tape that said ‘This is a Crime Scene.’ We had a copy of ‘Dark Alliance’ and demanded to see the director of the CIA to have him explain things. Needless to say we didn’t get a meeting with him.”

  When Madison and Gregory tried to stretch the police tape across the gate at the entrance to the CIA, federal marshals arrested them for trespassing. “Most people thought we were out of our minds because you don’t mess with the CIA,” he says. Madison was released after two days, but Gregory continued to be held at a federal holding cell in Alexandria, Virginia. Madison showed up at a meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus, where he announced that Gregory was still behind bars.

  “All hell broke loose,” he says. “The next day, they released Dick, and we really began our campaign.” Madison talked about the story every day for the next six months on his radio show, interviewing Webb and any guest who he could find who claimed to know something about CIA complicity in drug trafficking. As it happened, Oliver North hosted his own show at the same radio station where Madison worked at the time. When North agreed to debate Madison on C-SPAN, Madison used his time to read passages from North’s Iran contra-era diaries that discussed his knowledge, lack of concern and possible complicity in covering up drug dealing by Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and various contra supporters.

  Back in Los Angeles, Congresswoman Waters and several members of her staff arrived unannounced at the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. She demanded access to the agency’s files from its October 1986 raids against Blandon and his henchmen. At first, a records officer insisted that no such raids had taken place, but Waters refused to leave empty handed. After receiving a box full of police reports, evidence lists and search warrant affidavits, Waters held an October 7 press conference announcing that she had uncovered further evidence of CIA complicity in the drug ring.

  Waters was referring to the Sheriff Department’s file she obtained on its search of Ronald Lister’s home. A few weeks before Waters held her press conference, Webb had published a follow-up story about Lister. Several of the sheriff’s deputies involved in the raids were later arrested and charged with corruption for stealing money from drug dealers. During their 1990 trial, defense attorney Harlan Braun wrote a memo referring to Lister, and said his clients had evidence the CIA was involved in drug trafficking. Braun added that the evidence seized by the deputies mysteriously disappeared from an evidence locker within forty-eight hours.

  Among the documents, Braun had claimed, were lists of CIA operatives in Iran, detailed inventories of weapons, ammunition, military hardware, and sophisticated surveillance gear, a diagram of money laundering routes, films of military operations in Central America, and technical manuals. Officers also discovered blown-up pictures of Lister posing with contra rebels at a jungle camp. To Waters, Lister’s claim that he worked for the CIA—and the evidence apparently seized at his house in 1986—was nothing short of a smoking gun proving CIA involvement in L.A.’s crack epidemic.

  In just a few months, “Dark Alliance” had evolved from a front-page story in a regional newspaper to a racially charged national controversy. Webb fielded interview requests from 60 Minutes, Dateline, Jerry Springer, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Snyder, and Jesse Jackson. Montel Williams did a two-day special and personally interviewed Ricky Ross inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in San Diego. Whenever his hosts asked Webb what role the CIA had in selling drugs, he gave the same response: that was the one thing he hadn’t been able to determine.

  Not all the coverage was positive. Chris Matthews, the blowhard host of MSNBC’s Hardball, blasted away at Webb for suggesting the contras resorted to selling drugs when they were flush with money from the Reagan administration. But when both Webb and another guest, Jack White of Time magazine, pointed out that the Boland Amendment, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1984, had prohibited the CIA from funding the contras, Matthews, uncharacteristically, was at a loss for words. During a break, he angrily berated his staff during a commercial break for “sabotaging” his show.

  Yet the nation’s major newspapers—the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times—still hadn’t printed a word about Webb’s story. The exception was a brief account in the LA Times about a protest in downtown Los Angeles. Conservative pundits like Bernard Kalb were dumbfounded. “Where’s the rebuttal?” he asked a panel of reporters on CNN’s Reliable Sources. “Why hasn’t the media rose in revolt against this story?”

  Kalb needn’t have worried. The big papers were aware they had to come up with a response to “Dark Alliance.” They had assigned their most experienced reporters—veteran journalists including correspondents with close contacts at the CIA—and tasked them with investigating Webb’s allegations. When the big papers did weigh in, their combined response would represent one of the most withering deconstructions of an investigative news story—and perhaps the most unrelenting attack against a reporter’s credibility—in the recent annals of American journalism.

  Last family photo of Gary, November 10, 2004. Gary, brother Kurt, Sue, mother Anita, nephew Phoenix, son Ian, son Eric, niece Renee, and daughter Christine

  Gary with daughter Christine, 2003

  Gary, 8 years old

  Kurt and Gary (holding dog), 6 years old

  Gary with mother Anita, father Bill, and Kurt, Thanksgiving 1970

  Gary with kids, 2000

  Gary and Sue in Mexico, summer 2001

  Gary, Cleveland Plain Dealer, mid-80s

  Family photo: Anita with Eric, Sue, Gary, Kurt with Ian, 1990

  Gary, Kentucky Post, 1980

  Gary, Kentucky Post, Feb 1983

  Wedding picture, February 10, 1979, maid of honor Kellie Kilrain, best man Greg Wolf

  Gary, Sue, Ian, Eric, and Christine at Kurt and Diana’s wedding, 1995

  Gary, Kentucky Post, 1980

  EIGHT

  Feeding Frenzy

  IT WAS ALREADY mid-afternoon when Jerry Ceppos arrived at the headquarters of the San Jose Mercury News on Sunday, October 3, 1996. As he did every day, Ceppos examined the incoming wire reports to see what stories the nation’s big newspapers would break the following morning. A few minutes later, Ceppos calmly strode out of his office, clutching an advance copy of the Washington Post’s front-page run list.

  “Jerry came over to me and told me they were going to do a knockdown on Webb’s story,” says a former Mercury News staffer who was sitting at his desk nearby. “ ‘What are you going to do about it,’ I asked, and he said, ‘If you have any great ideas, let me know.’ ”

  At that moment, Webb was sitting inside an NBC green room at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, preparing for a guest appearance on The Montel Williams Show. Ceppos called Webb at the studio, and told him that the Post was going to run a story the next morning that was highly critical of “Dark Alliance.” Webb asked what errors the Post had uncovered in his story. “They don’t say the facts are wrong,” Webb later quoted Ceppos. “They just don’t agree with our conclusions.” When Webb asked what evidence the Post had cited in reaching that particular conclusion, Ceppos responded, “A lot of unnamed sources, mainly. It’s really a strange piece.”

  Dawn Garcia says the Post article took her completely by surprise. “What I had hoped would happen after ‘Dark Alliance’was published is that other media would pick this up and run with it and continue the work we had started,” she says. Both she and Webb thought that, once they jumped on the story, the nation’s big newspapers, which had far greater resources to pursue the story, would inevitably advance it. “We had no inkling that we would become the story,” she says.

  Written by Walter Pincus and Roberto Suro, with the help of Douglas Farah, a correspondent in Nicaragua, the story, “The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged Plot,
” cited numerous and mostly unnamed sources who claimed that Webb was wrong. “A Washington Post investigation into Ross, Blandon, Meneses, and the U.S. cocaine market in the 1980s found that the available information does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed contras—or Nicaraguans in general—played a major role in the emergence of crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States,” the Post reported.

  According to Pincus and Suro, while Nicaraguans “took part” in drug trafficking during the 1980s, “most of the cocaine trade” involved Colombian and Mexican smugglers, and domestic dealers whose ranks included Jamaicans, Dominicans, Haitians, and “Americans of varying backgrounds.” The statement ignored the fact that while “Dark Alliance” had mostly focused on two Nicaraguans—Blandon and Meneses—the pair’s drug ring included Colombian suppliers, Nicaraguan middlemen, and African-American crack dealers—even a white ex-Orange County cop.

  Citing unnamed “law enforcement officials,” Pincus and Suro claimed that Blandon had sent only $30,000 to $60,000 in drug profits to the contras, and had only moved five tons of cocaine during his decade-long career. At one point in his testimony, Blandon had stated that he stopped funding the contras when President Reagan had been elected. If so, that would mean Blandon had started keeping his drug profits either before he and Meneses met CIA asset Enrique Bermudez in 1982 or 1983—or only about a year after that meeting, when Reagan won re-election. Either way, the Post concluded, Blandon hadn’t been sending coke money to the contras as long as Webb had alleged in “Dark Alliance.”