Kill the Messenger

by Nick Schou

  But just as Webb had highlighted the portions of Blandon’s testimony that tended to show his illicit contra fundraising had lasted the “better part of a decade,” the Post article focused exclusively on statements Blandon made that tended to minimize how much cash actually went to the rebels. In using Blandon’s testimony to undermine Webb’s story, Pincus and Suro also did exactly what Webb got in trouble for doing—basing broad conclusions on the testimony of a drug dealer. And in quoting anonymous law enforcement officials about the amount of cash that funded the rebels, the Post neglected to account for the 1986 L.A. County Sheriff’s Department records cited by Webb, which clearly stated that Blandon was still dealing large amounts of cocaine that year and still sending the profits to the contras through a chain of banks in Florida.

  Pincus and Suro also questioned Webb’s ethics, citing his intervention in Ross’criminal trial. They interviewed Ceppos, and quoted him saying that while he “did not know” Webb had fed questions to Alan Fenster, Ross’attorney, he didn’t see any ethical problems with such tactics. At first Ceppos was glad the Post was jumping on the story, but such questions provided the first inkling that the coverage wasn’t going to be positive. It’s possible Pincus and Suro got their tip on Webb’s courtroom behavior from Post media critic Howard Kurtz, who a few days earlier, wrote the paper’s first story questioning Webb’s perceived one-sidedness by noting that, “[fr]rom the beginning, Webb appeared conscious of making news.” Specifically, Kurtz reported, Webb had written Ross a letter asserting that, “in terms of generating public interest,” it was best to publish the series “as near as possible to a newsworthy event—in this case, your sentencing.” By being the first reporter to question not just “Dark Alliance” but Webb’s professional conduct and objectivity, Kurtz set the abrasive tone for future criticism.

  “My initial impression of [Webb] was of a passionate journalist who worked hard and deeply believed in what he was doing,” Kurtz said in a recent interview. “ ‘Dark Alliance’ clearly tapped into some strong sentiments in the black community, elements of which wanted to believe what Webb was implying but could not prove. I think Webb did overreach with the series, even as he insisted he wasn’t explicitly saying what the conspiracy theorists believed he was. But the Mercury News editors were also responsible in the way they packaged the series and for not asking tougher questions and engaging in more rigorous editing. The newspaper would later acknowledge its failure, but Webb never really did.”

  At first, Webb’s editors staunchly defended their star reporter. A few days after the Post article appeared, Ceppos sent an angry letter to the editor of the Post taking issue with the story’s headline claiming “Dark Alliance” had alleged that the CIA had engaged in a “plot” with the drug dealers mentioned in the story. “While there is considerable circumstantial evidence of CIA involvement with the leaders of this drug ring, we never reached or reported any definitive conclusion on CIA involvement,” he argued. “We reported that men selling cocaine in Los Angeles met with people on the CIA payroll. We reported that the money raised was sent to a CIA-run operation. But we did not go further.”

  Ceppos also tacked his letter to the Post to a bulletin board in the Mercury News, and attached another memo addressed to his staff that defended the series. “I’m not sure how many of us could sustain such a microscopic examination of our work and I believe Gary Webb deserves recognition for surviving unscathed,” Ceppos wrote. But the Post refused to run Ceppos letter. “I couldn’t believe it,” Garcia says. “After running multiple critiques of ‘Dark Alliance,’ some of them on the front page, why would the Post not run his letter?”

  Meanwhile, Webb received a tip from a reader that he should check the Mercury News archives from February 18, 1967. Webb went to the paper’s library and found a reprint of a Post story written by Pincus: “How I Traveled Abroad on CIA Subsidy.” In it, Pincus said a CIA recruiter approached him while he was a college student. The spook asked Pincus to spy on student groups at several international youth conferences in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Webb later wrote that he could hardly believe his eyes. The reporter who had been assigned to debunk his story—and who had the nerve to question his courtroom ethics—had collaborated with the CIA in spying operations? Webb could hardly contain his anger. “I’d certainly never spied on American citizens,” he fumed.

  Webb began researching Pincus and discovered that in 1975, he had written an unfavorable review of CIA Diary, a tell-all expose about the agency by ex-agent Philip Agee. Pincus had also covered the Iran contra affair, and had penned a story claiming that Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was planning to indict Ronald Reagan, who at that point had just left office. In his memoirs, Firewall, Walsh claimed Pincus had been leaked that information in an attempt to discredit his investigation. “Of all the sideswipes that we suffered during this period, the false report that we were considering indicting the nation’s still-admired former president hurt us the most,” Walsh said.

  In a recent interview, Pincus didn’t deny his past relationship with the CIA, but claimed the only thing the agency did for him was pay his travel expenses to a 1959 youth conference in Vienna. “But I got to know a lot of people—some were friends,” Pincus says. “I knew [former CIA director] George Tenet when he worked for John Heinz as a staffer on the [senate] intelligence committee, just as I knew [Clinton Defense Secretary] Les Aspin when he was a young staffer for Bob McNamara. We were all young people in D.C. and went to a lot of dinners together.”

  While he acknowledges that his investigation confirmed that Blandon and Meneses had met with CIA asset Enrique Bermudez in Honduras, Pincus says such a meeting proves nothing. “It’s a big leap to say that therefore the CIA, through one of its people, was arranging for drug deals to make money,” he says. Pincus wouldn’t have bothered responding to “Dark Alliance,” he adds, but had no choice after the Congressional Black Caucus, led by Congresswoman Maxine Waters, began to make “a lot of noise” about the story. “A lot of people do intelligence stories that we don’t report, because they are wrong,” he says. “The thing that got me was the allegation that the CIA was responsible for bringing crack cocaine into South Central L.A.. That’s off the wall.”

  NEXT TO JOIN the fray was the Los Angeles Times. On October 20, 1996, the paper published the first installment of an exhaustive three-day series that in its sheer length dwarfed “Dark Alliance.” The first two days dealt directly with Webb’s allegations while the final installment devoted countless speculative paragraphs to the question of whether African Americans were disproportionately likely to believe in conspiracy theories, something that did little to mend the paper’s reputation for ignoring or belittling the concerns of the city’s black population.

  The LA Times also had to contend with the fact that Webb had apparently scooped them on a story that had unfolded in the paper’s own backyard. Editor Shelby Coffee III assigned more than two-dozen reporters to the story. The feeling among some disgruntled LA Times staffers was that their assignment wasn’t to investigate “Dark Alliance,” but debunk it. One of them told New Times LA that he had been selected to join the “Get Gary Webb Team,” while another stated that a common remark among editors was, “We’re going to take away this guy’s Pulitzer.”

  Leo Wolinsky, then metro editor of the LA Times, helped to manage the paper’s response. Now the paper’s managing editor, Wolinsky says he’ll never forget when he first read “Dark Alliance.” “I remember having a knot in my stomach about it,” he says. “It was a huge story—that the CIA started the crack binge in South Central L.A. That is an amazing allegation, and here in our area, it was like a smack in the face. It appeared convincing; it didn’t appear to be garbage. You can’t ignore a story like that in your backyard.”

  Leading the paper’s response was Doyle McManus, the paper’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief, who had covered the Iran contra scandal and had written several articles about the contras’ alleged involvement with drug tr
afficking. McManus interviewed several CIA officials, including former CIA director Robert Gates, CIA agent Vincent Cannistraro, and current agency director John Deutch. Not surprisingly, all of them strongly denied that the agency had anything to do with drug smuggling. Like Pincus and Suro, McManus also failed to mention the 1986 Sheriff’s department and DEA records Webb had cited in his story that flatly stated Blandon was still funding the contras. “No solid evidence has emerged that either Meneses or Blandon contributed any money to the rebels after 1984,” he surmised.

  In a recent interview, McManus said his first reaction upon reading “Dark Alliance” was that it demanded further reporting. “Some parts sounded poorly sourced, but other parts looked quite convincing, and all of it merited a serious follow-up on our part,” he says. “We had an obligation to do our own reporting and to tell our readers whatever we found. After further research, reporting, and interviews, I reached the conclusion that most of the elements of the story that had appeared new and significant on first reading were either not new, not significant, or not supported by real evidence.”

  The most bizarre aspect of the paper’s coverage was a story by LA Times reporter Jesse Katz, the same reporter who two years earlier had written that “Freeway” Ricky Ross was the biggest crack dealer in the history of Los Angeles. In 1994, Katz had estimated that at its peak, Ross’ “coast-to-coast conglomerate” was selling a half-million crack rocks per day. “If there was an eye to the storm, if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack’s decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles’ streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was “Freeway” Rick,” Katz had written. “Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices, and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived.”

  After Webb had revealed the source of much of that cocaine to be a Nicaraguan contra sympathizer who had funneled some of his profits to the CIA-backed rebels, Katz had a new take on Ross and his relative importance to the crack plague. “The story of crack’s genesis and evolution . . . is filled with a cast of interchangeable characters, from ruthless billionaires to strung-out curb dealers, none of whom is central to the drama,” Katz wrote.

  Now a reporter with Los Angeles Magazine, Katz says he was working at the LA Times bureau in Houston when he received a telephone call telling him to fly back to Los Angeles to help write a response to “Dark Alliance.” It wasn’t a task he particularly relished. “Is that something I wanted to do?” he asks. “No, it wasn’t high on my list. There is something a little unseemly about having a major media institution dissect the work of another reporter.”

  Katz had met Webb while covering “Freeway” Ricky Ross’ trial in San Diego, but had left the courtroom shortly after it began to work on another assignment. His only story about the trial was a brief article mentioning that Ross’ lawyers planned to introduce evidence that the CIA had been involved in supplying him with drugs. At first, Katz says he felt that Webb had scooped him. “Gary had great journalistic instincts and terrific sense of dedication and doggedness, and I admired his willingness to dig, obviously to his own peril,” Katz says. “But as I got sucked into this reviewing of his work and reviewing of my work and the whole crack epidemic, I began to feel there were parts of his series that were not as intellectually honest as they could have been or should have been.”

  When asked to explain the incongruity between his own reporting on Ross’ relative importance in the city’s crack trade before and after “Dark Alliance,” Katz is somewhat at a loss for words. “I’m not sure I can answer that in a wholly satisfying way,” he says. Referring to his 1994 story, Katz says he might have bought into the “mythology” surrounding Ross. “At the time, knowing people in the gang world and the drug enforcement world, he was the name that came up the most often and had a mythical quality,” he says.

  While Katz says his later story was an attempt to point out that the crack plague would have happened with or without Ross, he stands by his original assertion that Ross was L.A.’s first true crack kingpin. “He was at the front end of the crack wave,” Katz says. “He was the first crack millionaire. He got rich doing this pretty much before everyone else in South Central got in on it.”

  Katz adds that his involvement with the mainstream media’s critique of “Dark Alliance” has left many observers with the mistaken impression that he’s an apologist for the CIA. “I don’t put anything past the CIA, or think the CIA is going to tell the truth about what it does,” he says. “They could be involved in any sort of thing. I know the LA Times wrote stories where the CIA was saying they didn’t do anything. That wasn’t my end of the coverage.”

  Just as happened with the original Post story, Webb’s editors also defended him against the LA Times when the paper directly attacked not just the story, but Webb himself, in print. “One story that went over the wire from the LA Times included a paragraph that stated as fact that Gary and Ricky Ross had a movie deal together,” says Garcia. “That was not true. What was true is that a movie agent had written up a movie deal contract, offered it to Ricky Ross and Gary—and Gary said no. That was sloppy reporting on the part of the LA Times. Just because Gary’s name was printed on a contract did not mean he signed a contract for a movie deal. I called the LA Times city desk and told them they had an error in the story; it took a lot of convincing before they agreed to write a correction.”

  Garcia also got a telephone call from a reporter who asked if she could comment on the fact that Webb had shot at a man while he was a reporter at the Kentucky Post. Garcia was stunned, but calmly refused to comment until she checked with Webb. “Gary, did you shoot someone in [Kentucky] years ago?” she asked. “He said, yes, he did.” Garcia held her breath while Webb explained how he confronted a thief trying to steal his car, and that the police hadn’t pressed charges because he had acted in self-defense. To Garcia, the phone call suggested the media was digging for any piece of dirt on Gary, no matter how trivial or tangential, that would justify their attack of “Dark Alliance.”

  THE LAST OF the three major newspapers to pile on Webb’s story was the New York Times. On October 21, 1996, the paper published a 1,536-word story, “Pivotal Figures of Newspaper Series May Be Only Bit Players” that, like the bulk of the reporting that preceded it, was based primarily on quotes from unnamed intelligence and law-enforcement officials. Reporter Tim Golden wrote that while both Blandon and Meneses “may indeed have provided modest support for the rebels, including perhaps some weapons, there is no evidence that either man was a rebel official or had anything to do with the CIA.”

  Adolfo Calero and other former contra leaders told Golden that Meneses and Blandon had indeed met with CIA asset Enrique Bermudez in Honduras. But Golden noted that Webb had erroneously reported that Bermudez, a CIA operative, was an “agent,” a mischaracterization apparently aimed at insinuating CIA complicity in his meeting with the two drug dealers. Golden also questioned Webb’s assertion that Meneses served as chief of “intelligence and security” for the contras in California. Edward Navarro, a San Francisco contra organizer, recalled that Meneses showed up at some local contra meetings, but stood “quietly in the back.” He claimed the only “security” operation the group undertook was to remove “the sign on their office door after protests by left-wing San Franciscans.”

  Golden found no evidence to indicate that the “relatively small amounts of cocaine” Blandon and Meneses “sometimes claimed to have brokered on behalf of the insurgents had a remotely significant role in the explosion of crack that began around the same time.” His article acknowledged that “Freeway” Rick was “one of the biggest crack dealers in Los Angeles” but added, “several experts on the drug trade said that although Mr. Ross was indeed a crack kingpin, he was one of many.”

  Golden also wrote another—and much longer—story that ran in the New York Times that day, “Though Evidence is Thin, Tale of CIA and Drugs has a Life of its Own.”
Datelined from Compton, it began with Beverly Carr, a forty-eight-year-old African-American caterer who said she had always believed the CIA was behind the crack epidemic. “Everybody my age or older has always known that something like this was going on,” she said. “Who down here in Watts or Compton has planes or boats to get these drugs up here? They’re targeting the young black men. It’s just ruining a whole generation.”

  Golden also questioned Webb’s courtroom tactic of feeding questions to Ross’ attorney, Alan Fenster. While Ceppos defended Webb on that score, he also identified—for the first time in print—what he considered a significant shortcoming in the story. “Were there things I would have done differently in retrospect?” Ceppos asked. “Yes. The principal thing I would have is one paragraph very high saying what we didn’t find. We got to the door of the CIA. We did not get inside the CIA.”

  Unlike the LA Times, which had dozens of reporters assigned to the paper’s examination of “Dark Alliance,” Golden worked alone from the paper’s San Francisco bureau, drawing on his personal knowledge of some of the terrain that Webb had covered in his story. Unlike McManus and Pincus, Golden hadn’t reported on the Nicaraguan civil war mainly from a desk in Washington, but had been based in Central America and dealt extensively with the rebel leaders in Honduras and Costa Rica.

  As a correspondent for the Miami Herald, Golden had written the first story exposing the contra’s use of the Salvadoran air force base at Ilopango as a re-supply center. Other stories probed corruption among contra officials, primarily on Eden Pastora’s so-called Southern Front, and allegations of human rights violations by various contra factions. He shared in a Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Herald for its coverage of events leading up to the Iran contra scandal. Despite assertions to the contrary by some of Webb’s more venomous defenders, Golden can hardly be considered a CIA dupe. Now an investigative reporter for the New York Times, his recent work has exposed abuses by U.S. soldiers and intelligence operatives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.