Still Killing the Messenger

In 1996, in the wake of the explosive “Dark Alliance” series for the San Jose Mercury News (8/18-20/96), the Washington Post was one of the major newspapers to attack investigative journalist Gary Webb (Extra!, 1-2/97).

Eighteen years later, they were still at it.

The October 10 release of the biopic Kill the Messenger brought renewed focus on Webb’s story, which documented how CIA-linked drug traffickers were supplying US drug dealers with cheap cocaine that helped fuel the crack epidemic in the 1980s.

For the Washington Post, the release of the movie about Gary Webb was just a new opportunity to smear his reputation.

That task fell to Jeff Leen, an assistant managing editor at the paper. “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof,” he wrote in a Sunday Outlook feature (10/17/14). By that standard, Leen argued, Webb failed: “The Hollywood version of his story—a truth-teller persecuted by the cowardly and craven mainstream media—is pure fiction.”

But Leen’s attempted takedown fell apart with his very first claim:

Webb’s story made the extraordinary claim that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in America.

That is not true. Webb’s report showed that a major crack dealer in California was working with suppliers linked to the CIA-backed Contras, who were waging a terrorist campaign in Nicaragua in the hopes of removing the left-wing Sandinista government. Some of the money from the drug trade went to supporting the Contras.

Extra! (1-2/97) debunked corporate media’s efforts to kill the messenger in real time.

The idea that Webb reported that the CIA itself was directly dealing drugs, and that it was “responsible for the crack epidemic” in this country, is a misrepresentation designed to undermine Webb. And it’s not even a new one. As Norman Solomon wrote for Extra! (1-2/97) the original Webb hit pieces put words into Webb’s mouth and then “debunked” those claims. The Post

devoted paragraph after paragraph…to illuminating what Webb had already acknowledged in his articles–that while he proves Contra links to major cocaine importation, he can’t identify specific CIA officials who knew of or condoned the trafficking.

As Webb himself put it in a talk he gave in 1996 that aired on CounterSpin (1/3/97), the series “doesn’t say that the CIA masterminded the influx of crack cocaine into America. What it says is that this Nicaraguan cocaine ring brought tons of cocaine into California.”

But Leen deceptively asserted that Webb only admitted this error much later, writing that “in his book he took pains to distance himself from the crack claim.”

Leen wasn’t the only one. A column in USA Today by Susan Paterno (10/28/14) argued that Webb “pushed the story’s thesis far beyond what the facts could support.” But since she summarizes the series as “accusing the CIA of selling cocaine in South Los Angeles,” it does not appear that she knows what its thesis was.

Over a year before, when there was some news about the casting for the film, Mercury News columnist Scott Herhold (2/10/13)—who worked as an editor during the “Dark Alliance” controversy—wrote that Webb was “a journalist of outsized talent,” but was “fundamentally a man of passion, not of fairness.” And he shared his qualms about the series: “I’ve never fully understood why the CIA would want to start a crack cocaine epidemic.” Since that wasn’t what Webb wrote, it’s hard to fully understand his question.

Instead of holding Webb accountable for claims he didn’t make, let’s assume that Webb’s reporting set out to prove what the first installment of his series actually said was its thesis:

that a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the US Central Intelligence Agency.

Gary Webb said his series “doesn’t say that the CIA masterminded the influx of crack cocaine into America.”

It’s hard to say how Webb was wrong about any of that. Leen pointed to a 1998 CIA inspector general report that he says cleared the agency. But Leen’s reading of the CIA’s self-investigation was remarkably narrow; not only did the report confirm the core of Webb’s series, some argue it actually showed that the scandal was even bigger than Webb thought.

As Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair of CounterPunch (10/17/14) wrote, the CIA report “proved on close reading to buttress Webb’s accusations.” In one passage, a cable very explicitly instructed field officers in Costa Rica to look the other way when word of a Contra-linked drug deal surfaced. And one of the more remarkable stories in “Dark Alliance”—about the CIA intervening with the Justice Department to retrieve cash for one of the Contra-affiliated drug dealers—was confirmed by the CIA report.

That report wasn’t the only thing the Post editor baldly mischaracterized. At one point, Leen argued that even some of Webb’s admirers agree he was wrong—bringing in journalist Nick Schou, who wrote the book Kill the Messenger, which the movie was in part based on, to back up his claim that the series had major flaws.

Leen cites an LA Times op-ed (8/18/06), but it’s an extraordinarily deceptive summation of Schou’s argument—which was that the CIA had in fact “covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade,” and that its own investigation “confirmed key chunks of Webb’s allegations.” Asked to respond to being included in Leen’s Webb attack, Schou told NarcoNews (10/20/14) that Leen’s

worthless and whiny op-ed perfectly captures the craven mentality of cowardice of most of Webb’s critics at the three major papers…. The fact remains that Webb’s story nonetheless forced the CIA to admit that the true flaw of “Dark Alliance” was hardly one of hyperbole but the exact opposite-–the story radically understated the scandal.

But for one of Webb’s most important critics, longtime Washington Post intelligence reporter Walter Pincus, the issue was not how much cocaine was being trafficked by the CIA’s proteges, but whether such trafficking really amounts to a story to begin with. As he explained to the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim (10/10/14), the proper way to react to charges that CIA assets were running drugs was with a blithe shrug:

Pincus said that Webb’s core story about the Contras and cocaine didn’t resonate not because it didn’t have any truth to it, but because it was obviously true. “This is a problem that came up–it’s probably a question of how long you cover these things,” he said. “It came up during the Vietnam War, where the US was dealing with the Hmong tribes in Laos and some of the people that were flying airplanes that the agency was using were also [running] drugs.”

Webb’s mistake, then, was not in connecting the CIA to drugs, but in being so naive as to think that connection was a big deal. The sophisticated thing to do when you hear about such issues is to ignore them, as Pincus and the most of the media had done for years.

Sidebar:

No Comment

One of the most common criticisms of Webb’s original series was that it “didn’t even have a comment from the CIA” (San Jose Mercury News, 2/13/14)—a sign that he wasn’t really interested in hearing the Agency’s side. The notion that a “no comment” from the agency would have made “Dark Alliance” more credible to its critics is absurd on its face. But it’s not true that Webb did not seek out responses from the government agencies he reported on. It’s right there in the first installment of the series:

None of the government agencies known to have been involved with [drug traffickers Norwin] Meneses and [José] Blandón over the years would provide the Mercury News with any information about them.

A Freedom of Information Act request filed with the CIA was denied on national security grounds. FOIA requests filed with the DEA were denied on privacy grounds. Requests filed months ago with the FBI, the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have produced nothing so far.

None of the DEA officials known to have worked with the two men would talk to a reporter. Questions submitted to the DEA’s public affairs office in Washington were never answered, despite repeated requests.

–P.H.