Kill the Messenger

by Nick Schou

  When Carey confronted Webb about the contradiction in Blandon’s testimony, he says Webb told him Blandon was lying when he tried to downplay the length of time he dealt drugs for the contras. But “Dark Alliance” had specifically asserted that Blandon had sent “millions” of dollars worth of drug funds to the contras, and Carey could find no proof for that claim. “This thing about millions of dollars—it looked like an error of exaggeration,” Carey says. “How could something like that get inflated? You start with two drug dealers who were completely untrustworthy. I mean, find me a drug dealer who doesn’t claim he’s in the CIA.”

  Carey made scores of phone calls in the course of his investigation, including one to contra leader Adolfo Calero. “It’s nice to finally hear from someone at the Mercury News,” Calero joked. Carey asked Calero about the photograph of him and Meneses together at a meeting in San Francisco. Calero said he didn’t remember meeting Meneses, because he had been to countless contra fundraising meetings. Carey had less luck tracking down Ivan Gomez, the mysterious CIA agent Cabezas had said directed Meneses’ drug pipeline. At one point, Carey heard that Gomez may have moved to Venezuela, but there were dozens of people with the same name living there.

  Although Carey had no way of knowing it, the task was pointless. As the CIA would admit in its 1998 Inspector General report, Ivan Gomez was actually a pseudonym used by a CIA agent assigned to Costa Rica in the 1980s.

  Carey could also find scant evidence to support the notion that Blandon’s supply of coke to Ross had “fueled” L.A.’s crack epidemic, despite the fact that Ross was the city’s most notorious crack dealer. Getting confirmation for that assertion was perhaps Carey’s prime directive from his editor, Jonathan Krim. Carey called thirty cocaine experts, and none of them agreed that Ross had played a critical role in either crack cocaine’s origins or its eventual spread throughout the country.

  “What we were left with was a more nuanced view of what started the crack epidemic,” Carey says. “The three major premises of the story looked a little shaky. It seemed like a reasonable thing to set the record straight while not completely backing away from the story. You still had a fascinating story about these two dealers peddling to Ross, the beginning of the crack epidemic at least in L.A. All this is impressive stuff, gripping narrative, but the rest lacked substantiation. That’s great for a novel, but where’s the evidence?”

  In early February 1997, Dawn Garcia sent Webb a draft of the story Carey had written on the emergence of L.A.’s crack market. The story stated that Blandon, Meneses, and Ross could not have single-handedly started the crack-cocaine explosion. “The details of the trio’s activities—who did what, and when—cannot change the overall story of the crack epidemic, which swept over several U.S. cities in the mid-1980s with the speed and destruction of a tidal wave,” Carey concluded.

  Webb felt betrayed. “It was, astonishingly, a virtual repeat of the LA Times stories,” he later recalled. “I couldn’t believe it. I respected Carey as a reporter—he and I had coauthored a story in 1989 that had won a Pulitzer Prize. But here it seemed he’d taken the official government explanation and swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.”

  Over the next several weeks, Webb met with Carey, Garcia, Krim, and Ceppos, and argued about what the Mercury News should do with the result of Carey’s investigation. In the end, they decided not to print Carey’s story, opting instead for a high profile letter to readers written by Ceppos himself.

  Krim says he was saddened by the results of Carey’s work. “Given the beating we were taking, nothing would have pleased me more than to be able to report back, to our executive editor, to our publisher, and most importantly to our readers, that we could stand by the story,” he says. “I came as close as a non-religious man can come to praying for that outcome. Alas, the results of our re-examination were profoundly disturbing.”

  Although Krim had wished for stronger direct evidence of the links between the CIA and the drug ring, he was generally satisfied that a relationship existed between the agency and some of the drug dealers, and that some of the money was helping contra efforts. “Gary had gotten closer to documenting it than anyone could have been expected to,” he says. “And that’s a damn good story. There were some errors in the piece which were used to bludgeon us, but in my view they did not undermine the basic premise.”

  If any evidence had been produced to undermine the attacks on “Dark Alliance,” Krim insists he would happily have printed it. He bristles at the notion that he or other editors simply buckled under the pressure of media attacks when it backed away from the story. “Nothing pisses me off and offends me more than to read about how Mercury News management was just cowering in the corner, looking for a way out and only too happy to sacrifice Gary Webb to find one,” he says.

  As Ceppos pondered his next move, Webb went back to work, trying to salvage “Dark Alliance.” In March, he flew to Miami and interviewed a former CIA pilot named Ronald Lippert, who had delivered weapons to the contras. Lippert told Webb that he had helped the DEA fly John Hull—the expatriate American contra supporter Martha Honey had investigated in Honduras a decade earlier—out of Costa Rica. In an interview with Webb, Hull confirmed the story.

  “I was ecstatic,” Webb later recalled. “Now we had a story about the DEA aiding and abetting the escape of a CIA agent accused of drug trafficking, with the Justice Department intervening to protect the DEA agent who’d done it,” he wrote. But in January 1997, when Webb shared his discoveries with Garcia, she didn’t respond.

  Garcia says that when she saw the results of Webb’s latest research about Hull’s escape from Costa Rica, she realized his latest work did little to answer the story’s critics. “We [had] talked numerous times, but I was having a hard time getting a clear read what Gary was getting from his reporting,” she says. “When I read the drafts of the four follow-up stories Gary filed, my heart sank. What he came back with was a totally different story. It was mostly about the DEA, which was related and interesting, but it would not answer our critics. All of his editors who read his four stories thought, ‘Oh, no; this is not going to do it.’ It was the beginning of the end.”

  On March 25, Ceppos called Webb at home to announce that he had made a “very difficult decision.” The newspaper was going to print a letter to its readers acknowledging that “errors had been made in Webb’s story.” Ceppos faxed Webb a draft of what he proposed to write. The column stated that the Mercury News should have pointed out that Blandon had claimed he stopped dealing drugs with the contras in 1983, that there was “insufficient proof” that millions of dollars went to support the rebels, that the story lacked direct evidence of CIA knowledge of the drug dealing, and that Blandon, Meneses, and Ross didn’t start the crack epidemic.

  According to Garcia, Ceppos felt like he had been supporting Webb all along, and that Webb had misled him about his research in Central America. “The stories Gary filed weren’t what we asked him to do,” Garcia says. “That was hard. Gary, meanwhile, felt like he was being hung out to dry. I don’t know if Gary thought his stories would silence our critics; he seemed very excited about what he had, but I think deep down he had to know that it was not directly on point, or what the editors asked for. Perhaps he didn’t care; he thought it was good.”

  Webb drove to San Jose to meet with his editors. He was incensed, in part because an earlier draft of his story had included the fact that Blandon claimed he stopped providing drug money to the contras in 1983, but Garcia had agreed with him that Blandon was probably lying—and cut the quote to save space. In his 1998 book, Webb wrote that he agreed there were “mistakes” in the story. “But this draft doesn’t mention them,” he said. “If we want to fully air this issue and be honest with our readers, I request that the following ‘failures’ be included.”

  In his meeting with Ceppos, Webb listed those errors: how it was his editors, chiefly Yarnold, who had requested more emphasis on CIA ties to the Blandon-Meneses drug ring, how cut
ting the series from four parts to three had trashed the kind of nuance they were now claiming was essential, and how the last-minute change in editors from Yarnold to Paul Van Slambrouck had further confused the story. Webb demanded that the Mercury News print his response to the letter to readers they planned to run.

  Ceppos told Webb he didn’t want the situation to become “personal,” but that didn’t stop Webb from going on the radio to denounce what he saw as a cowardly betrayal. “I don’t know why Gary didn’t understand that publicly berating your own paper isn’t going to help you, but maybe he was so mad, he couldn’t help himself,” Garcia says. “Ceppos was quoted as saying what Gary filed was just notes. While it was more than notes, the stories would have needed some very serious editing, even if they were on point. Gary said the paper was refusing to run his stories that would have vindicated him. But if Gary had found anything that would have answered our critics, we surely would have run it.”

  Ceppos’ mea culpa ran on May 11, 1997—and over Webb’s objections, did not include his response. Although it acknowledged significant errors in “Dark Alliance,” it also defended many aspects of Webb’s reporting. “Does the presence of conflicting information invalidate our entire effort?” he asked. “I strongly believe the answer is no, and that this story was right on many important points.”

  Although the column hardly represented a total retraction of the story, that’s how it was it universally received—something Webb had predicted would happen. Mike Mansfield, the CIA’s public affairs director, was positively ecstatic about Ceppos’ column. “It is gratifying to see that a large segment of the media—including the San Jose Mercury News itself—has taken a serious and objective look at how this story was reported,” Mansfield told me in a 1997 interview. The reaction among the papers that had criticized “Dark Alliance” was equally self-congratulatory. All three major newspapers ran front-page stories on the event. “The Mercury News Comes Clean,” stated a patronizing editorial in the New York Times.

  Garcia says that the media’s reaction also included personal attacks against everyone involved in the story, including her and Ceppos. “In one Columbia Journalism Review article in July 1997, the story mentioned my recent divorce and described me as a ‘young Latina,’ as if those pieces of information had bearing on the series,” she says.

  But those barbs were mild compared to the media’s attempts to eviscerate Webb’s credibility. A few weeks after Ceppos published his column, Times reporter Iver Peterson wrote a scathing critique of Webb’s entire career that focused on the lawsuits during his tenure at the Plain Dealer and the complaints of unfairness over his Mercury News story about Tandem Computers, while ignoring his many accomplishments. “The controversy . . . has drawn additional scrutiny to Mr. Webb, whose bare-knuckles reporting style and penchant for self-promotion have drawn criticism not only from his targets, but also from his colleagues,” Peterson wrote.

  At a journalist’s conference several months after that story appeared, Webb’s former colleague at the Plain Dealer, Walt Bogdanich, now a New York Times editor, denounced Peterson’s story in a panel discussion. “That article included virtually none of the good things Gary did,” Bogdanich says. “It didn’t include the success he achieved, or the wrongs that he righted—and they were considerable. It wasn’t fair, and it made him out to be a freak.”

  At the event, Bogdanich bumped into Webb, whom he didn’t realize was there. “He seemed changed,” Bogdanich says. “There didn’t seem to be much laughter with him anymore. He wasn’t the guy I remembered, and understandably so: he was being put through a meat-grinder.” Webb thanked his former colleague for his remarks; the two never spoke again.

  In Nicaragua, the right-wing press celebrated the news that the Mercury News had repudiated Webb’s story. Georg Hodel, the Swiss reporter who had helped Webb research the story, received numerous threats. In June, he was run off the road by a group of armed men. Fearing for his life, he ultimately fled the country. Hodel could not be located for an interview.

  Meanwhile, Webb told reporters that he was “disgusted” by the column. “But what’s even more disgusting is the fact that the establishment press is using this to absolve the CIA of any wrongdoing,” he told me in a 1997 interview. “Gary was furious,” Carey recalls. “He was clearly veering away from the paper. He was like, ‘Go ahead and fire me.’ I don’t think he quite got what was happening until he read Ceppos’ column. That really flipped him out.”

  Webb believed he was being censored—he had written four follow-up stories that advanced his reporting and his editors were refusing to publish them. Joe Madison, the Washington, D.C., talk show host, told his listeners to call the Mercury News and demand they run the stories. The alternative press universally hailed Webb as a scapegoat, attacking Ceppos for caving in to corporate pressure. More paranoid observers on the Internet surmised that Ceppos was taking his orders from the CIA itself.

  French TV journalist Paul Moreira flew to California and interviewed Webb shortly after Ceppos published his mea culpa. Moreira had covered the civil war in Nicaragua in 1989, and was arrested and nearly executed by a contra patrol near Jinotega, Nicaragua. “The contras were ferocious,” Moreira says. “I was amazed by the quality of their equipment. Sandinistas soldiers looked like bums compared to them.”

  When Moreira interviewed Webb, he noticed that his colleagues didn’t seem happy about the media attention. “They didn’t want to him to keep defending himself, obviously,” he says. “I had come to do a story because I could see the core of his work was true. I had seen the evidence, the documents. I felt it was unfair that he would be bashed like that.”

  Another source of contention between Webb and his editors was the fact that several major publishers were offering Webb handsome offers for a book. But Ceppos told Webb he’d have to quit his job if he wanted to write a book. Sue recalls that Webb had one offer from Simon & Schuster that would have paid at least $ 100,000. “That’s what he should have done,” she says. “But Gary still had total loyalty to the paper. I didn’t feel like I could change his mind.”

  Webb’s loyalty to the Mercury News, and his decision to forgo lucrative book deals to remain with the paper, only fueled his defensive and outspoken reaction once his editors backed off his big story. “Gary’s fate after ‘Dark Alliance’ was determined not by his work, but by his actions during the re-examination and after,” says Jonathan Krim. Webb simply didn’t respond to criticism well. “He often responded to concerns not with reasoned argument, but with accusations of us selling him out,” he says. “Under those circumstances, how could editors be expected to trust Gary on any sensitive reporting subject?”

  Garcia says she felt bad for Webb, but also felt he had been his own worst enemy. “As awful as I felt about what Gary was going through, both inside the newsroom and outside, in the end, I felt somewhat betrayed by Gary,” she says. “I had worked hard to help him make this series work. As his editor, I had been his main advocate and also tried to save him from his worst instincts, painstakingly going over all his evidence with him for each point he made in the series, again and again.”

  But in the end, Garcia says she came to believe there was contradictory information Webb had gathered in his reporting that he hadn’t told her about—chiefly the inconsistencies in Blandon’s testimony. “When I asked him about it, he said he didn’t think it was important,” Garcia says. “Had I known everything he knew, I think I could have helped him craft a story that would have been just as important but more nuanced. It would not have drawn the sweeping conclusions it did, conclusions that we could not ultimately support in every way.”

  In early June, Ceppos called Webb with an ultimatum. He’d have to accept a reassignment at the paper’s headquarters in San Jose, where he’d work under closer supervision, or as specified in his employment contract, he could go to a smaller regional bureau in Cupertino. After talking to Sue, Webb took the offer to work in Cupertino, the journalistic equivale
nt of a news graveyard, and a major demotion. Sue recalls the day Webb left as the saddest moment in his life. “That crushed him,” she says. “He was crying when he left that night. He felt like he was being taken away from his family.”

  Webb’s oldest son, Ian, says his father’s transfer to the paper marked the first time he realized his dad was depressed. He had seen how hard his father had worked on “Dark Alliance,” how he had spent weeks and even months away from the family. “Now he was getting slammed for all this stuff that people didn’t want to believe,” Ian says. “That definitely made him depressed. It made everybody depressed. I went from having a dad on a daily basis to seeing him on weekends. It sucked.”

  Webb moved into a furnished apartment in Cupertino, more than 150 miles away from Sue and his three kids. Instead of working on major investigative stories, he was assigned to cover the daily blotter of traffic accidents and lost puppies—the kind of work he’d done two decades earlier as a cub reporter in Kentucky. Webb refused to have his byline run in the paper. His first story was about a police horse that died from constipation. Meanwhile, he continued to fight his transfer through the newspaper’s union guild.

  “It was pretty miserable living in a motel room,” Webb told author Charles Bowden in 1998. “I was getting really depressed. They were stringing me out on this [arbitration] hearing. Finally, I just started calling Sue. I was very angry most of the time. I was waking up in the middle of the night.” In August, Webb began calling in sick after talking to a doctor who diagnosed him with severe depression. “She said you are under a great deal of stress; the environment you are living in isn’t healthy,” Webb told Bowden. “It was a lot worse than I realized until I started going to someone and talking about it . . . I just felt like I’d come to the end of the line.”