Drugs, CIA, media - U.S. Central Intelligence Agency - Editorial

Progressive, The, August, 1997 by Matthew Rothschild

When the San Jose Mercury News apologized for Gary Webb's three-part series on the CIA contras, and crack cocaine, it earned a pat on the head and a doggie biscuit. "Courageous gesture," said The New York Times. "Commendable," said The Washington Post.

These were the same papers, along with the Los Angeles Times, that did all they could to undermine the series when it first appeared. "We're going to take away that guy's Pulitzer," one L.A. Times reporter said, according to an article by Peter Kornbluh in CJR (formerly Columbia Journalism Review). Kornbluh quoted another staffer saying he was "assigned to the `get Gary Webb team.'"

Well, they got their man. Webb has been pulled off his beat and exiled to a small suburban bureau 150 miles from his home. "I said things they didn't like," Webb told me. He said publicly that he found the paper's apology "nauseating," and he disputed the statement by Jerry Ceppos, the paper's executive editor, that Webb supplied only notes for follow-up stories, not the stories themselves.

Webb is not blameless in this episode. He may have overreached with some of his claims. For instance, as Ceppos noted, Webb did not know for a fact that "millions in profits" went to the contras. That was an estimate. And Webb appears to have exaggerated the extent to which the CIA connection played a pivotal role in the crack epidemic in the United States.

But the story did demonstrate, for the first time, that individuals connected with the CIA and the contras were selling illegal drugs in the United States. That's a huge story, and it deserved follow-up, not deep-sixing.

"The Washington news media has conducted its own cover-up," Robert Parry told me. And that cover-up goes back over a decade." Parry should know. He, along with Brian Barger, broke the story of the CIA and drugs in 1985 when they were working for the Associated Press.

But because of media hostility, their story didn't make much of a splash. "We faced relentless attacks by the Reagan Administration, and the Washington press corps aggressively did not want the truth," says Parry.

Parry now runs the Media Consortium, an investigative-reporting outfit, which has just launched a new magazine called I.F. In its premiere issue, Parry writes about the media's bungling of the story. Even though the media had a voluminous report from Senator John Kerry on the CIA's dirty drug hands, even though they had entries from Oliver North's diaries referring to drug trafficking by the contras, they barely went near the story, Parry notes.

"Ironically, it was not until Webb's series in 1996 that the major newspapers acknowledged, in a backhanded way, that their dismissal of the contra-drug allegations in the 1980s had been wrong," he writes. They did this by saying Webb's story was old news. Parry substantiates this claim by quoting from an October 4, 1996, article in the Los Angeles Times, which stated: "The allegation that some elements of the CIA-sponsored contra army cooperated with drug traffickers has been well-documented for years."

Webb is not the only journalist who has been under attack. George Hodel worked on the San Jose Mercury News from Nicaragua. "Just as Webb has been under personal attack in the United States, I have faced efforts from former contras to tear down my reputation in Nicaragua," Hodel wrote in a recent dispatch for the Media Consortium. "Ex-contras also have harassed Nicaraguan reporters who have tried to follow up the contra-cocaine evidence. In one paid advertisement, Oscar Danilo Blandon, a drug trafficker who has admitted donating some cocaine profits to the contras in the early 1980s, called me a `pseudo-journalist' and accused me of having some unspecified links to an `international communist organization.'" Blandon was a central figure in the Mercury News series.

Adolfo Calero, the former contra chief who was also mentioned in the series, took matters further, Hodel said. In a Nicaraguan newspaper, Calero referred to leftist Nicaraguan journalists as "deer" and sympathetic foreign reporters as "antelopes." Hodel is Swiss. "The deer are going to be finished off," Calero wrote. "In this case, the antelopes too."

To subscribe to I.F. or to contact the Media Consortium, write Robert Parry at 2200 Wilson Blvd., Suite 102-231, Arlington, VA 22201.

As a result of the Mercury News apology, I'm afraid many Americans will conclude that the CIA has no connection with the illegal drug trade. This is far from the truth. That's why we assigned Alfred W. McCoy to set the record straight. He's the author of The Politics of Heroin: The CIA's Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. His historical account will give you a picture you didn't find in The Washington Post, The New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times.