Jeremy Renner Ready To ‘Kill The Messenger’ In Film About CIA-Smeared Journo Gary Webb

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11. Taking a Dive on Contra Crack ----- How the Mercury News caved in to the media establishment

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http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/taking-a-dive-on-contra-crack/




Mar 01 2005
Taking a Dive on Contra Crack
How the Mercury News caved in to the media establishment
By Gary Webb

Gary Webb left the Mercury News shortly after being exiled to the paper’s Cupertino bureau. Unable to get another job at a major newspaper, he died on December 10, 2004, an apparent suicide. This article is excerpted from his 1998 book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.
Extra! March/April 2005


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expired link--repaired

FAIR COMPLETE COVERAGE

http://web.archive.org/web/20121025005853/http://www.fair.org/issues-news/contra-crack.html




Contra-Crack
See also FAIR's resources on Covert Operations, Drugs and Latin America.

Extra! articles:

Snow Job: The Establishment's Papers Do Damage Control for the CIA, by Norman Solomon (1-2/97)
Exposed: The Contra-Crack Connection (10/96)
Time Suppresses Contra Drug Story (11-12/91)
Censored News: Oliver North & Co. Banned from Costa Rica (10-11/89)
Nicaragua's Drug Connection Exposed as Hoax (7-8/88)
Media Censor CIA Ties With Medellin Drug Cartel (3-4/88)
Washington's Worst Kept Secret: The Contra Drug Connection (6/87)

CounterSpin broadcasts:

Jeff Cohen on Gary Webb (12/17/04)
Jeffrey St. Clair on the CIA (7/31/98)
Contra/Crack Special (Part II) (1/3/97)
Contra/Crack Special (Part I) (12/27/96)
The CIA's complicity with drug lords (10/25/96)
Crack and the CIA (9/13/96)

Links:

The Consortium's Contra Crack Series
We The People CIA-drugs web site
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, by Gary Webb
Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom, by Robert Parry
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http://web.archive.org/web/20110704003934/http://www.fair.org/extra/8707/contra-secret.html

EXTRA! June 1987
Washington's Worst Kept Secret: The Contra Drug Connection

Since 1985 reports linking contra arms suppliers to cocaine smuggling have run in progressive publications and a few mainstream outlets. But CBS West 57th's well-documented segment on the CIA-contra-drug connection (April 6) was the first serious network probe.

The segment featured interviews with CIA contract employees who flew weapons shipments to the contras in Honduras and back-loaded cocaine and marijuana. Mike Tolliver, convicted drug smuggler and part-time CIA pilot, told of flying 25,000 pounds of pot to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida.

The Contragate plot thickened in Newsday (April 17) with an expose on Manzer al-Kassar, a Syrian drug smuggler who ran guns for Lt. Col. Oliver Norths's supply network, Achille Lauro hijacker Abu Abass, and for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Newsday piece was picked up a few big dailies, but not by the New York Times, Washington Post or the three networks. At the Times, former editor Abe Rosenthal ruminated on the op-ed page(March 15) about how it's time for America to step up the war against drug abuse: "The cheapest and most efficient method of stopping foreign drugs flowing into the country is at the source, not at our borders," says Rosenthal.

Hard to do when the CIA has been supporting dope peddlers for decades. Abe's former colleague, C.L. Sulzberger, knew it. Sulzberger became indignant when poet Allen Ginsberg accused the CIA of smuggling heroin during the Vietnam War. April 11, 1978, Sulzberger wrote: "I fear I owe you an apology. I have been reading a succession of pieced about CIA involvement in the dope trade in Southeast Asia and I remember when you first suggested I look into this I though you were full of beans. Indeed you were right."

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http://web.archive.org/web/20120717192128/http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1190
Extra! March/April 1988

Media Censor CIA Ties With Medellin Drug Cartel



A key money-launderer for the Medellin cocaine cartel told Congress in February that he worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, but this information was not reported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the three major networks, even though all covered the hearings.

In testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, Ramon Milian Rodriguez acknowledged that he laundered more than $3 million for the CIA after his indictment on drug charges in 1983. New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino failed to mention this in her coverage of Rodriguez's testimony, which was broadcast live on CNN (2/11/88).

Sciolino's page 6 article ("Accountant Says Noriega Laundered Billions," 2-12-88) did not contain the letters CIA or the words "Central Intelligence Agency," even though Rodriguez had described his participation in CIA anti-Castro operations. He said he was trained in money laundering by men whose names he never learned, and later he delivered cash to the families of Watergate burglars. This did not interest The Times, which focused primarily on Rodriguez's account of Noriega's dealings with the Medellin cartel.

As chief accountant for the Colombian drug cartel, Rodriguez laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in cocaine profits through US banks in Panama. Although Sciolino noted that the cartel had $11 billion in assets in the US in 1983, she did not mention Rodriguez's testimony about meeting secretly with people who worked for US banks but were not on the official employment roll. Rodriguez named Citicorp and the Bank of America as two banks he dealt with this way.

Buried in the middle of Sciolino's article was Rodriguez's admission that he transferred money to the Nicaraguan contras through a Costa Rican "shrimp processing" Warehouse. This company was among the hundreds of dummy corporations Rodriguez claimed he set up to funnel the cartel's cocaine profits. But The Times and most other media (the Boston Globe is an exception) neglected to mention that Rodriguez's shrimp processing firm, Frigorificos de Puntarenas, received $237,000 from the State Department's Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Organization (NHAO). During the hearings Senator John Kerry (D-MA) noted the company's receipt of NHAO funds. NHAO was supposed to deliver $27 million in so-called humanitarian assistance to the contras in 1985, but a subsequent congressional audit could not account for $17 million of the money. (Sciolino did not return five phone calls from Extra!)

While the contra drug link was tucked away on page 6, the same edition of The Times featured a front page above-the-fold article by James LeMoyne ("Military Officers in Honduras are Linked to the Drug Trade," 2-12-88) which quoted unnamed "American officials" claiming that the Medellin drug cartel "has close ties with Fidel Castro . . . and to some Sandinista officials in Nicaragua." No evidence to support this allegation was provided by LeMoyne who wrote: "American officials said they fear that Honduran Army officers profiting from drugs might be willing to make a deal to end or limit Honduran support for the American-backed contras in Nicaragua." Make a deal with whom? Why would Honduran military officers cease aiding the contra when their support for the contras virtually assured that US drug enforcement agents would keep their distance? If anything, the Senate hearings on narco-terrorism indicate that the contras have been the meal ticket for drug traffickers.

The Washington Post (2/12/88) included this politically delicate aspect of Rodriguez's testimony in its headline: "Drug Money Alleged to Go to Contras." But Joe Pichirallo's page 30 article tiptoed around CIA involvement with Rodriguez. The Post also failed to mention Rodriguez's assertion that he worked with US banks, and it did not include his statement about laundering moneyfor the CIA after his drug indictment. This omission was egregious in view of the fact that Senator Kerry questioned Rodriguez in detail about an accounting sheet which a federal prosecutor submitted as evidence at his trail:

Senator Kerry: What does your accounting show with respect to the CIA?

Ramon Rodriguez: It shows that I received a shipment of three million and change sometime in the middle of the month.


At the end of the hearing the Post's Pichirallo asked chief counsel Jack Blum why the CIA would use Rodriguez to funnel money after he'd been indicted. Blum responded that such a time would be ideal, since US government investigators cannot approach a defendant after he has been indicted. Extra! later asked Pichirallo why Rodriguez's testimony about moving dirty money for the CIA was excluded from the Post, but he was not forthcoming: "It is my policy never to discuss anything I do."

To its credit Newsday (2/12/88) reported the CIA's money shipment through Rodriguez and the cartel's $10 million gift to the contras, the elementary facts of the story which were not printed in the "newspaper of record."


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http://web.archive.org/web/20110704003926/http://www.fair.org/extra/8807/nicaragua-drug.html

EXTRA!, July/August 1988
Nicaragua's Drug Connection Exposed as Hoax

On July 28 the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, chaired by Congressman William Hughes (D-NJ), held the first of a series of hearings into whether Reagan administration officials condoned drug smuggling and other criminal activities to further its Central America policy. Among other things, the panel sought to determine if top leaders of the Colombian cocaine cartel escaped arrest because the much ballyhooed "war on drugs" took a back seat to a covert operation designed to discredit the Nicaraguan government-this at a time when the administration was seeking additional aid to the contras.

CBS Evening News (7-28-88), the only major network to cover the proceedings, reported on the testimony of DEA agent Ernest Jacobsen, who said that White House officials undermined a DEA probe of the Colombian cocaine kingpins by blowing an undercover informant's cover when they leaked information in an attempt to link Nicaragua to the drug trade.

The case against the cartel had been engineered by Barry Seal, a convicted drug dealer turned informant who worked closely with Vice President George Bush's anti-drug task force in Washington.

But the 1984 investigation got derailed when Seal told his handlers that cocaine was being trans-shipped through Nicaragua with the permission of high-level government officials. In an effort to frame the Sandinistas, the CIA installed a hidden camera in Seal's C-130 cargo plane(the same plane, incidentally, that later crashed in Nicaragua leading to the capture of Eugene Hasenfus in October 1986). Seal took a blurry snapshot which purported to show himself with a high-level Nicaraguan official named Federico Vaughn, and a Colombian drug czar unloading bags ofcocaine at an airstrip in Nicaragua.

CBS obtained pages from Col. Oliver North's diary revealing that the former National Security Council aid communicatedfrequently with the CIA about the sting operation in the weeksbefore the photo was leaked to the press despite objections fromthe DEA. The Nicaragua drug story first appeared in the WashingtonTimes (7-17-84) and was immediately given big play by all the majorpapers, wire services and TV networks. President Reagan displayed Seal's photo in a nationally televised speech in March 1986.

But the media showed much less interest when subcommittee chairman Hughes recently disclosed he had new evidence that the entire Sandinista connection was a US intelligence fabrication. Particularly suspicious is the role of Federico Vaughn, the supposed Sandinista official, who appears to have been a US spy all along. An AP dispatch (Omaha World-Herald, 7-29-88) disclosed that subcommittee staffers called Vaughn's phone number in Managua and spoke to a "domestic employee" who said the house had been "continuously rented" by a US embassy official since 1981.

The unnamed embassy official, according to Hughes, was among the group of US officials recently expelled by the Nicaraguan governement after a violent political demonstrations in July. No word of the Hughes hearings appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times. Instead the Times ran a brief item in its Sunday national edition (7-31-88) quoting President Reagan's weekly radio broadcast about how Sandinista officials are still involved in drug trafficking.



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http://web.archive.org/web/20120509201530/http://www.fair.org/extra/8910/north-banned.html

EXTRA! October/November 1989
Censored News: Oliver North & Co. Banned from Costa Rica

Few individuals fascinate the US media like Ollie North. Few subjects grab more media attention than drugs. Few democracies win more media praise than Costa Rica. Put these three into a single scandal and it spells Front Page News, right? Wrong. What it spells is C-E-N-S-O-R-S-H-I-P.

In July, North and other major contragate figures were barred from Costa Rica. The order was issued by none other than Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. President Arias was acting on recommendations from a Costa Rican congressional commission investigating drug trafficking.

The commission concluded that the contra re-supply network in Costa Rica which North coordinated from the White House doubled as a drug smuggling operation.

The narcotics commission started probing the contra network centered around the northern Costa Rican ranch of US-born John Hull because of "the quantity and frequency of the shipment of drugsthat passed through the zone." North's personal notebook mentioned" the necessity of giving Mr. Hull protection." (San Juan Star,Puerto Rico, 7/22/89).

Investigators held North responsible for Gen. Manuel Noriega's participation in the contra supply network, which opened thedoor to at least seven pilots who trafficked in drugs whilesupplying arms to the contras. "These requests for contra help were initiated by Colonel North to General Noriega," the commission reported. "They opened a gate so their henchmen could utilize [Costa Rican] territory for trafficking in arms and drugs." (Tico Times, Costa Rica, 7/28/89).

Barred from Costa Rica along with North were Maj. Gen. Richard Secord, former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, former US Ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis Tambs, and former CIA station chief in Costa Rica, Joseph Fernandez. This winter Costa Rica's congress will vote on the permanent implementation of the bannings. In an interview with Extra!, Costa Rican Minister of Information, Jorge Urbina, stated: "I can assure you that the recommendations will pass nearly unanimously."

The Costa Rican government inquiry confirmed information aboutcontra/drug links developed by independent journalists, lawyers,and a US Senate subcommittee. Ollie North's notebooks contain dozens of references to contra-related drug trafficking, includinga July 12, 1985 entry: "$14 million to finance [arms] came from drugs." When high-ranking officials of the "Just Say No"administration are banned-due to drug links-from the country US editorial writers hail as Central America's leading democracy, one might have expected major coverage. One would have been wrong. Although a lengthy Associated Press wire report (7/22/89) carried the story into virtually every newsroom in the US, major media largely ignored the story or, like the Washington Post and Miami Herald, relegated it to "in Brief" sections. The New York Time sand the three major TV networks failed to mention it at all.

During a period when drug coverage reached hysterical proportions, when Oliver North made news by lecturing campus audiences on the evils of drugs and pledging to do anti-drug work in serving out his criminal sentence of 1500 hours of community service, most media could not find space to mention the Costa Rica bannings. Even when President Bush, 17 other heads of state, and many dozens of US reporters journeyed to Costa Rica in October to celebrate "100 years of democracy," the story failed to attractinterest.

It wasn't for lack of knowledge; FAIR provided information about developments in the case to many national media (who'd already received the original AP story). FAIR's Steve Rendall later contacted the three TV networks, New York Times, and Washington Post to ask why the story had been buried or ignored. Journalists offered no real answers.

Typical was the response from Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, who stated, "Just because a congressional commission in Costa Rica says something, doesn't mean it's true." Ironically, through all the years that wildly false statements by US officials on Central America have received prominent uncritical coverage, these same media have responded to FAIR's complaints thusly: "When leaders of a democracy make statements, it's news and we have tocover it. We aren't ruling on whether it's true or not."

If, as a media consumer, you would like your own explanations as to why the following national media have buried the story, you could contact their foreign desks. You might also ask your local media. (Final action on the bannings by Costa Rica's congress is expected in February.)



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http://web.archive.org/web/20110704003917/http://www.fair.org/extra/9111/time-contra.html
Extra!, November/December 1991
Time Suppresses Contra Drug Story

As Time magazine's resident expert on narcotics trafficking, Elaine Shannon was a predictable choice for the New York Time Book Review (7/28/91) to critique the book, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. Predictably, she slammed the book, whose central thesis is that the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan contras "trafficked extensively in cocaine while the CIA, National Security Council, and Justice Department ignored the evidence."

In her review, the Time magazine correspondent poked fun at Scott and Marshall for believing that media timidity had helped the CIA's alliance with drug dealers: "[The authors] believe that the 'establishment media' have not pursued the story strenuously enough because their practitioners are 'reluctant to find themselves at odds with the government."

A farfetched notion on the part of conspiracy-minded authors? Consider how Time handled the contra/cocaine story. In the fall of 1987, Time assigned a staff reporter to assemble any evidence that the Oliver North network supplying guns to the contras was also bringing cocaine into the U.S. The reporter found serious evidence, and wrote it up. As the former Time reporter explained to Extra!, after the article was written and rewritten, finally, a senior editor told the reporter to give up on the story. "The senior editor leveled with me," the reporter told Extra! "His words were: Time is institutionally behind the contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you'd have no trouble getting it in the magazine.'"



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http://web.archive.org/web/20110704003909/http://www.fair.org/extra/9610/contra.html

EXTRA!Update, October 1996
Exposed: The Contra-Crack Connection

The wave of crack addiction that crippled inner-city neighborhoods across the country in the '80s had its roots in the CIA's efforts to fund the secret contra war against Nicaragua, according to an investigative report by the San Jose Mercury News' Gary Webb (8/18-20/96).

The story of the year? Not according to the New York Times, which has so far ignored the Mercury News' well-documented revelations. The major TV networks gave it no coverage. A few dailies prominently reprinted Webb's work (like the Seattle Times, 8/22/96), or ran an Associated Press account summarizing his findings (e.g., Chicago Tribune, 8/21/96). But there is little sign that the expose has prompted much digging from other reporters--or much outrage on the nation's editorial pages.

Webb's evidence is as persuasive as his conclusions are disturbing. (You can read the stories themselves at http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs/start.htm.) Exhibit A is Oscar Danilo Blandon, a cocaine trafficker and federal informant who told a federal courtroom that " whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going to the contra revolution." Blandon's claim is backed up by an L.A. Sheriff's Department affidavit, a federal parole report, an FBI memo and other official documents.

Webb connects Blandon and Norwin Meneses, his boss in the operation, to top contra leaders like Enrique Bermudez and Adolfo Calero "There is a saying that the ends justify the means," Blandon testified. "And that's what Mr. Bermudez told us in Honduras, OK?"

Law enforcement agents told the Mercury News (8/18/96) that the CIA squelched investigations against the Meneses/Blandon operation in the name of "national security." Federal prosecutors who used the trafficker as an informant obtained a court order preventing defense attorneys from inquiring about Blandon's ties to the CIA.

But even more startling are the revelations about Blandon's distributor, "Freeway" Ricky Donnell Ross. Ross was no minor drug pusher, but the main supplier of crack for the Crips and Bloods gangs in L.A. "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," the L.A. Times reported two years ago (12/20/94).

Ross became the dominant supplier in L.A.--and much of the country--because of his ability to undersell other dealers. "Whathe had, and they didn't," Webb reported (8/19/96), "was Danilo Blandon, a friend with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of high-grade cocaine."

Would there have been an explosion of crack addiction in urban ghettos if the CIA's war against Nicaragua hadn't provided Ross with an"inexhaustible supply" of cocaine? Would it have assumed the same epidemic proportions? In the wake of the Mercury News series, these are open questions--questions that reporters at every major news outlet ought to be trying to answer.

But most major news outlets seem prepared to let the new evidence get thrown away with yesterday's newspapers--the same approach they have taken to past revelations of the contras' involvement in cocaine trafficking. The contra/cocaine connection was exposed by the Associated Press' Robert Parry and Brian Barger as early as 1985 (12/20/85); further substantiation appeared in such disparate outlets as the San Francisco Examiner (3/16/86,6/23/86), In These Times (12/10/86) and CBS's West 57th (4/6/87,7/11/87). The New York Times, the most powerful paper in the U.S.and one that can be counted on to protect what it sees as the establishment, did worse than ignore these reports: It went out of its way to discredit them, with a series of articles that appeared in July 1987 (7/13/87, 7/16/87, 7/20/87). The message of these articles was direct, and dishonest: "Investigators, including reporters from major news outlets, have tried without success to find proof of . . . allegations that military supplies may have been paid for with profits from drug smuggling," the Times' Keith Schneider reported on July 20, 1987.

The "reporters from major news outlets" couldn't have been trying very hard: The Reagan State Department itself acknowledged a year earlier that at least one contra leader had received money and warplanes from a Columbian drug trafficker. But in a 1987 interview, the Times' Schneider revealed that he had more on his mind than journalism when he wrote two of the dismissive stories.

"This story can shatter a republic," Schneider told In These Times (8/5/87). "I think it is so damaging, the implications are so extraordinary, that for us to run the story, it had better be based on the most solid evidence we can amass." Gary Webb's Mercury News reporting has provided solid evidence that the contras were not just involved with the cocaine trade, they were major players in it. But the New York Times still seems to be more worried about shattering republicsthan reporting the truth.

If you'd like to ask the New York Times why it hasn't followed up on the latest contra/cocaine evidence, the address is 229 W.43rd St., New York, NY 10036 (phone: [phone]; fax:[phone]; online: http://www.nytimes.com).

Postscript: Since the publication of this Extra!Update report, the NewYork Times has briefly mentioned the Mercury Newsfindings. The Los Angeles Times and the WashingtonPost have published long articles critical of the Mercury Newsseries. The Mercury has refuted some of the other papers' allegations on their website.



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Extra! January/February 1997

Snow Job
The Establishment's Papers Do Damage Control for the CIA

By Norman Solomon

The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary.

--George Orwell, 1984



For several weeks after a series last August in the San Jose Mercury News (8/18-20/96) linked the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras with the importation of cocaine into poor black areas of Los Angeles, major news outlets did scant reporting on the story. But in early autumn, near silence gave way to a roar from the country's three most influential urban dailies--the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times--which is still reverberating in the national media's echo chamber.

The first New York Times article on the subject (9/21/96) foreshadowed much that was to follow. Headlined "Inquiry Is Ordered Into Reports of Contra Cocaine Sales in U.S.," the news story focused on assurances from Central Intelligence Agency director John Deutch and unnamed "former senior CIA officials" that the Mercury News assertions were groundless. "I regard these allegations with the utmost seriousness," Deutch said. "They go to the heart and integrity of the CIA enterprise."

Not only did Deutch contend that "the agency never had any relationship" with Nicaraguan drug traffickers Oscar Danilo Blandon and Norvin Meneses--the Times also reported the reassuring news that "former senior CIA officials involved in the contra operations said this week that they had never heard of" Blandon or Meneses. None of the article's dozen paragraphs included any suggestion that the CIA might be a dubious touchstone for veracity. The notion that the CIA's internal probe held a key to unlocking the story's mysteries was to be oft-repeated.

Yet the uproar over the Mercury News series, written by reporter Gary Webb, continued to grow. Denials from the CIA carried little weight with much of the public, particularly African-Americans outraged by the series. Protests mounted in cities from Los Angeles to Washington, and members of the Black Congressional Caucus demanded federal investigations.

October brought a fierce counterattack from the Washington Post, the New York Times and L.A. Times, all of which published lengthy news articles blasting the Mercury News series. In the process, a number of recurrent debunking themes quickly gained the status of media truisms.

"Last month," Newsweek reported in November (11/11/96), "the Merc started getting trashed -- by its peers. In turn, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and New York Times poked holes in the story, exhaustively and mercilessly."

In his role as the Post's in-house media critic, Howard Kurtz took numerous swipes at Webb that grew increasingly dismissive; one item(10/28/96), headed "A Webb of Conspiracy," ended with the smug one-liner, "Oliver Stone, check your voice mail." Liberal columnist Mary McGrory, based at the Post, echoed what she was hearing all around her in an Oct. 27 piece:
"The San Jose story has been discredited by major publications, including the Post."

By November, a clear orthodoxy had taken hold. Certain de rigueur phrases began appearing in news articles: "Many of the series' conclusions have been widely challenged" (Washington Post, 11/6/96); "media critics and other newspapers have questioned the Mercury News' findings" (AP in New York Times, 11/7/96).

Under the headline "CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy," the New York Times (11/16/96) indicated that reputable media outlets--and reputable spooks--had rejected the Mercury News series: "Agency officials said they had no evidence of any such plot. Other news organizations were not able to confirm the plot. Still, the rumor mill continued to grind, seemingly unstoppable."

The next day, Times columnist Maureen Dowd took the company line: "Mr. Deutch and investigators for several major newspapers have found no evidence to support the conspiracy theory that grew out of a series in the San Jose Mercury News suggesting a CIA role in the spread of crack in America's inner cities."

Suspect Sources

But what exactly in the San Jose Mercury News stories was refuted by these "major newspapers"? To a notable degree, the establishment papers relied for their debunking of the Mercury News on the CIA's own obligatory denials. As journalist Marc Cooper pointed out in the weekly New Times Los Angeles (10/31/96), "Regarding the all-important question of how much responsibility the CIA had, we are being asked to take the word of sources who in a more objective account would be considered suspects."

In the New York Times' full-page magnum opus on the controversy (10/21/96), reporter Tim Golden drew extensively on interviews with nameless sources such as "government officials with access to intelligence reports," not to mention "more than two dozen current and former [contra] rebels, CIA officials and narcotics agents, as well as other law-enforcement officials and experts on the drug trade."

The Times seemed eager to take at face value the statements at CIA headquarters that the agency didn't know Blandon from Adam: "Although he claimed to have supplied several thousand pounds of cocaine to one of the biggest crack dealers in Southern California, officials said the CIA had no record of Mr. Blandon before he appeared as a central figure in the series in the Mercury News." As in the earlier Times report(9/21/96) featuring the same CIA disclaimers, there was not the slightest hint that such denials might be self-serving.

The Los Angeles Times was on the same track in its lengthy three-day series. "CIA officials insist they knew nothing about Meneses' and Blandon's tainted contributions to [Adolfo] Calero or other contra leaders," the newspaper reported (10/21/96). One of the officials quoted in support of the claim that the CIA had drug-free hands was Vincent Cannistraro--identified by the newspaper only as a "former CIA official."

In fact--though the L.A. Times could spare none of the article's several thousand words to let readers know--Cannistraro was in charge of the CIA's contra activities during the early 1980s. After moving to the National Security Council in 1984, he became a supervisor of covert aid to Afghanistan's mujahedeen guerrillas, whose involvement in the opium trade made Afghanistan and Pakistan two of the world's main suppliers of heroin
(The Nation, 11/14/88).

If the L.A. Times had been willing to share such relevant details, it would have provided readers with a much better basis for evaluating Cannistraro's testimonial to CIA integrity: "There's no tendency to turn a blind eye to drug trafficking. It's too sensitive. It's not a fine line. It's not a shaded area where you can turn away from the rules."

The L.A. Times was following in the footsteps of less august media outlets that used a deceptively identified Cannistraro to attack the Mercury News series. The right-wing Washington Times (9/12/96) quoted him as saying that the series "doesn't have any elements of authenticity."

And former Washington Times reporter Michael Hedges wrote a Scripps-Howard News Service article (Memphis Commercial Appeal, 9/29/96) that called Cannistraro a "retired CIA counterterrorism and Latin America expert" and quoted him as declaring: "I have personal knowledge that the CIA knew nothing about these guys [Blandon and Meneses]. These charges are completely illogical."

Besides self-serving denials, journalistic critics of the Mercury News offered little to rebut the paper's specific pieces of evidence--including Blandon's own testimony and law enforcement documents and comments (8/18/96)--indicating that Meneses and Blandon may have been protected by federal agents.

Whose Army?

Judging the Mercury News series invalid, the preeminent denouncers frequently berated the newspaper for failing to prove what Webb never claimed. The Washington Post, for instance, devoted paragraph after paragraph of its Oct. 4 barrage 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.

Many critics took issue with Webb's references to the contras as "the CIA's army." The Washington Post's Kurtz, for example, complained (10/2/96) that "Webb's repeated use of the phrase 'the CIA's army'...clearly suggests that the agency was involved." In fact, referring to the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) as the CIA's army is solid journalism, highlighting a relationship that is fundamentally relevant to the story. The army was formed at the instigation of the CIA, its leaders were selected by and received salaries from the agency, and CIA officers controlled day-to-day battlefield strategies. One former contra leader, Edgar Chamorro, has said that the FDN's leaders were "nothing more than the executioners of the CIA's orders" (Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention, Peter Kornbluh; see also Extra! interview with Chamorro, 10-11/87).

Yet the newsroom culture of denial grew so strong that one Washington Post article, by Marc Fisher (11/7/96), seemed to dispute that the CIA and the contras had any ties at all: "On WRC, [talkshow host] Joe Madison droned on as he has for weeks about the supposed CIA-contra connection."

In its big blast at the Mercury News series, the New York Times (10/21/96) tried a semantic maneuver to distance the CIA's army from the CIA. The newspaper acknowledged that Meneses and Blandon "traveled once to Honduras to see the FDN's military commander, Enrique Bermudez." But the Times quickly added: "Although Mr. Bermudez, like other contra leaders, was often paid by the CIA, he was not a CIA agent."

It was classic sleight-of-hand at the keyboard, as columnist Murray Kempton pointed out (Newsday, 10/23/96): "The maintenance of such distinctions without any essential difference is one of the more cunning of the infinite devices the agency employs on obfuscation. The CIA identifies highly placed foreign hirelings not as 'agents' but as 'assets.'" Just such obfuscation helped many journalists to assert that the Mercury News series had been debunked and that the CIA was unfairly implicated.

Dubious Debunkings

The most potentially damaging charge made by the establishment papers is that Webb greatly exaggerated the amount of crack profits going to the contras, which he reported as being "millions" of dollars. "According to law enforcement officials, Blandon sold $30,000 to $60,000 worth of cocaine in two transactions and delivered the money to Meneses for shipment to the contras," the Washington Post reported (10/4/96). "Meneses was indeed a financial contributor to the contras," the L.A. Times reported (10/21/96), "but his donations to the rebel cause amounted to no more than $50,000, according to two men who knew him at the time." These estimates quickly became enshrined as journalistic fact. They were even given credence by an editorial in The Nation (11/18/96): Blandon and Meneses' contributions to the contra cause "may have been $50,000," David Corn wrote.

Yet the Mercury News' higher estimates are better sourced than the debunkers' low numbers. In contrast to the Mercury News--which had drawn on sworn grand jury and court testimony to calculate that millions of crack dollars flowed to the contras--the Post and L.A. Times attributed their much smaller estimates to unnamed sources, variously described as "law enforcement officials" (Washington Post, 10/4/96), "a contra supporter and a business partner who sold drugs with Blandon" (L.A. Times, 10/20/96) and "associates in drug trafficking in Los Angeles" (L.A. Times, 10/21/96).

Nor do the claims by the Washington Post (10/4/96) and New York Times (10/21/96) stand up that the funneling of crack money to the contras ended early in the 1980s. Pete Carey, a reporter assigned by the Mercury News to do a reassessment of the paper's own reporting (10/13/96), presented fuller documentation: "A 1986 Los Angeles County sheriff's affidavit for searches of the homes and business of Blandon and members of his drug ring shows that the contra connection lasted into the mid-1980s. In the 1986 affidavit, three confidential informants said that Blandon was still sending money to the contras."

The establishment papers' orthodoxy also insists that "Freeway" Ricky Ross, the contact who distributed Blandon's cocaine in the form of crack, was not a key player in the drug's proliferation. The Washington Post declared that Ross' activities were incidental to the spread of crack; using identical language in a pair of news articles (10/4/96, 10/12/96), the Post insisted that available data "point to the rise of crack as a broad-based phenomenon driven in numerous places by players of different nationalities." The New York Times (10/21/96) concluded rather cryptically that "several experts on the drug trade said that although Mr. Ross was indeed a crack kingpin, he was one of many."

But two years ago--before the public learned that much of his cocaine was supplied by smugglers connected to the contras--the same man was the subject of a 2,400-word Los Angeles Times news article (12/20/94) that portrayed him as central to the spread of crack cocaine. "If there was an eye to the storm," the article began, "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." The headline? "Deposed King of Crack; Now Free After 5 Years in Prison, This Master Marketer Was Key to the Drug's Spread in L.A."

The article reported that as far as crack went, "Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived." He became "South-Central's first millionaire crack lord," the newspaper reported. "While most other dealers toiled at the bottom rungs of the market, his coast-to-coast conglomerate was selling more than 500,000 rocks a day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars."

In a remarkable display of subservience to prevailing orthodoxy, the same reporter who wrote those words, Jesse Katz, went on to write a front-page article for the L.A. Times(10/20/96) that reads like a show-trial recantation. Ross now was one of many "interchangeable characters," who was "dwarfed" by other dealers. "How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ross," Katz reported. The L.A. Times reporter did not explain how his reporting on Ross two years earlier could have been so inaccurate.

Evidence Ignored

While the Mercury News series could arguably be faulted for occasional overstatement, the elite media's attacks on the series were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the contra-cocaine story--involving a decade-long suppression of evidence (Extra!, 6/87, 3-4/88). The Washington Post was typical. "When Brian Barger and I wrote the first story about contra-cocaine smuggling for the Associated Press in December 1985 (12/20/85)," Robert Parry recalls, "the Post waited a week, added some fresh denials and then stuck the story near the back of the national news section."

In 1987, the House Narcotics Committee, chaired by Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y.), investigated contra-drug allegations and found a "need for further congressional investigation." The Washington Post (7/22/87)distorted reality with the headline "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling"--and then refused to publish Rangel's letter correcting the record (Extra!, 10-11/87).

Later that year, Time magazine staff writer Laurence Zuckerman was assigned to work with an investigative reporter on contra-cocaine allegations. They found serious evidence of the link, but the story Zuckerman wrote was obstructed by higher-ups (Extra! , 11-12/91). A senior editor acknowledged to Zuckerman: "Time is institutionally behind the contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you'd have no trouble getting it in the magazine."

Two years later, the Senate subcommittee chaired by John Kerry released a scathing condemnation of U.S. government complicity with drug trafficking by the contras. "When this important report was issued in April 1989, the Post [4/14/89] buried the information in a scant 700-word article on page A20," Parry remembers (The Consortium, 10/28/96). "And most of that story, by Michael Isikoff, was devoted to Republican criticisms of Kerry, rather than to the serious evidence of contra wrongdoing. Other establishment publications took the cue that it was safe to mock Kerry. Newsweek [8/5/91] dubbed him a 'randy conspiracy buff.'"

In July 1989, White House operative Oliver North, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica Lewis Tambs, CIA station chief Joseph Fernandez and other contragate figures were barred from Costa Rica--on orders of that country's president, Oscar Arias, who acted on recommendations from a Costa Rican congressional commission investigating drug trafficking. The commission concluded that the contra resupply network in Costa Rica, which North coordinated from the White House, doubled as a drug smuggling operation.

A big story? Not at all. Although AP sent out a dispatch (7/22/89), the New York Times and the three major TV networks failed to mention it; the Washington Post ran the news as a short back page item. When FAIR's Steve Rendall called the Post to find out why, reporter Walter Pincus--who later co-wrote the Post's 1996 attack on the San Jose Mercury News-made no apologies. "Just because a congressional commission in Costa Rica says something, doesn't mean it's true," Pincus said (Extra!, 10-11/89).

In late 1996, one of the basic pretensions threading through much of the coverage by the Washington Post, New York Times and L.A. Times was the notion that contra participation in drug trafficking is old news--a particularly ironic claim coming from newspapers that went out of their way to ignore or disparage key information during the 1980s. The Post's ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, was on target (11/10/96) when she re-raised the question of the U.S. government's relationship to drug smuggling and noted that the three newspapers "showed more passion for sniffing out the flaws in San Jose's answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves."

Citing "strong previous evidence that the CIA at least chose to overlook contra involvement in the drug trade," Overholser found "misdirected zeal" in the Post's response to the Mercury News series: "Would that we had welcomed the surge of public interest as an occasion to return to a subject the Post and the public had given short shrift. Alas, dismissing someone else's story as old news comes more naturally."

A more pointed observation came from Robert Parry: The irony of the Post's big Oct. 4 story "was that the newspaper was finally accepting the reality of contra cocaine trafficking, albeit in a backhanded way." The Post "had long pooh-poohed earlier allegations that the contras were implicated in drug shipments."

A Dirty, Dangerous World

What explains these elite media outlets' shameful record of suppressing evidence that the CIA's contra army was involved in the drug trade--and attacking those who dared to report the story? In the case of the New York Times and the Washington Post, part of the explanation is that the papers had lent their editorial prestige to the contra cause. By the late 1980s, both papers had endorsed military aid to the contras--though sometimes grudgingly. In February 1988, a pair of pro-contra aid Post editorials (2/3/88, 2/5/88) bracketed a crucial vote in Congress; the pre-vote editorial observed approvingly that "a carrot-and-stick combination has moved the Sandinistas." There was no discernible concern that the military "stick" was being used to take the lives of civilian peasants in the Nicaraguan countryside.

At all three papers, the attitudes of owners and top management set the tone and impose the constraints within which journalists work. Dennis McDougal, a former L.A. Times staffer, described the paper's editor, Shelby Coffey III, this way (New Times Los Angeles, 9/19/96): "He is the dictionary definition of someone who wants to protect the status quo. He weighs whether or not an investigative piece will have repercussions among the ruling elite, and if it will, the chances of seeing it in print in the L.A. Times decrease accordingly."

The New York Times and Washington Post have an even closer relationship to the nation's elites, with connections to the CIA that go back nearly to the agency's founding. In a piece on the CIA and news media written for Rolling Stone two decades ago (10/20/77), Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein wrote that "the agency's relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about 10 CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper's late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy--set by Sulzberger--to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible."

Bernstein's former employer, the Washington Post, was also useful to the CIA; Bernstein quoted a CIA official as saying of the Post's late owner and publisher, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from."

Descendants of these publishers still run their respective papers, and the attitude that they have an obligation to provide covert help to the CIA persists to the present era. In 1988, Post owner Katharine Graham, Phil's widow, gave a speech at the CIA's Langley, Va. headquarters. "We live in a dirty and dangerous world," Graham told agency leaders (Regardie's Magazine,1/90). "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

Readers, in turn, can decide how much faith to put in news outlets whose owners embrace such a philosophy.

Research Assistance: Steve Rendall