Part 15 of 15: Dark Alliance...A very Difficult Decision...The Damage that has Been Done

Dark Alliance...The CIA,The Contra's and The Crack Cocaine Explosion
By Gary Webb 
27 

"A very difficult decision" 

Ross and all but one of his co-defendants were convicted in the spring of 1996 of conspiring to sell the DEA's cocaine. Considering the facts that were presented, and the evidence that was withheld, there was little else the jurors could do. But in interviews with the Federal Public Defender's Office afterward, several expressed disgust with s the government's case. 

"Ricky was the hardest one for us to decide," said juror Norman Brown, a twenty-nine-year-old data entry operator at the San Diego Zoo. "None of us liked Blandón. A few of the jurors were very upset that he is used by law enforcement." Said another juror, a forty-six-year-old fund-raiser for Scripps Hospital: "Blandón made us all so angry that we would use that kind of sleazeball. We wanted to acquit Ricky Ross just to give the message to the government that we disagreed with the use of Blandón." Ross was sentenced to life without parole, but that was later reduced by a federal appeals court to 20 years to life. 

My story now had an ending, one that seemed to exemplify the hypocrisy of the whole War on Drugs. The crack dealers went to prison while the men who made crack possible—the cocaine importers—walked away whistling. I laid the series out in just those terms, beginning it in the early 1980s with the critical role played by the Nicaraguan "freedom fighters" in founding L.A.'s crack market and ending it in the early 1990s, with the passage of the anti-crack laws that were then packing the prisons with thousands of young black dealers—and with Blandón's sudden transformation into an antidrug warrior. 

In mid-April I finished the first drafts and sent them up to my editors, with no clue as to how they would be received. They were like nothing I had ever written before, and probably unlike anything my editors had ever grappled with either: a tale spanning more than a decade, that attempted to show how two of the defining issues of the 1980s—the Contra war and the crack explosion, seemingly unconnected social phenomena—were actually intertwined, thanks largely to government meddling. 

The four-part series I turned in focused on the relationship between the Contras and the crack king. It mentioned the CIA's role in passing, noting that some of the money had gone to a CIA-run army and that there were federal law enforcement reports suggesting the CIA knew about it. I never believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA conspiracy behind the crack plague. Indeed, the more I learned about the agency, the more certain of that I became. The CIA couldn't even mine a harbor without getting its trench coat stuck in its fly. 

That the Contras' cocaine ended up being turned into crack was a horrible accident of history, I believed, not someone's evil plan. The Contras just happened to pick the worst possible time ever to begin peddling cheap cocaine in black neighborhoods. That, I believed, was the real danger the CIA has always presented—unbridled criminal stupidity, cloaked in a blanket of national security. 

"The fact that a government-connected drug ring was dumping tons of cocaine into the black neighborhoods in L.A.—and to a lesser extent in San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, Houston, Oklahoma City, Alabama and New Orleans—goes a long way towards explaining why crack developed such deep roots in the black community," I wrote. "It's where the seed was planted." 

Looking back, I can barely believe I was permitted to write such a story, but that was the kind of newspaper the Mercury News was at the time. No topic was taboo, or at least if there was one I never discovered it. And I was always looking. 

The reason I'd left a much larger paper in Cleveland to work for the Mercury was because its editors convinced me that they ran one of the few newspapers in the country with that kind of courage. There were no sacred cows, they pledged; and for nine years they had been true to their word. Not one of my stories was ever spiked or significantly watered down; nearly 300 of them had appeared on the Merc's front page, including many that wouldn't have stood a chance in hell of being printed in other mainstream newspapers. 

One of the first pieces I'd turned in—just to see if my new editors could walk the walk—disclosed that some of the biggest and most profitable companies in California were milking a state training program for the soon-to-be-unemployed by claiming they were ready to lay off hundreds of workers with obsolete job skills, having no intention of doing so. Among those unethical corporations, my story noted prominently, was the San Jose Mercury News, which had used public funds to subsidize the purchase of new printing presses. The story ran on the front page. 

So when Dawn called me with the official reaction to "Dark Alliance," I was gratified but not surprised. They loved it, she said happily. They couldn't wait to get it in the newspaper. They thought it was important, groundbreaking reporting. Congratulations. But there was one hitch. "They thought it was too long," she said. It needed to be cut. 

The four main stories ranged between 2,400 words and 3,200 words apiece, and for a major metropolitan daily, that's not a lot of space. For the Mercury, though, it was as if I'd asked for the moon, a raise, a shower in my office, and an executive parking place all at the same time. 

"They're never going to go for four parts," Dawn warned. 

"Yarnold told me I could have as much space as I needed," I reminded her. "I can't do it in less than four parts. I've gotten this thing down as far as I can get it. You're going to start cutting into its spinal cord if you cut it anymore." The problem was that the believability of the story hinged on the weight of the evidence. Every fact that was cut would make the story appear more speculative than it really was. 

For weeks we wrangled back and forth, and then I got the word. David Yarnold, the managing editor, had decreed that it was three parts or nothing. 

Fine, I said. I stitched the second and third parts together into one long part and resubmitted the series. 

"Gee," Dawn said. "This second part is kind of long. We need to cut it." 

This tug-of-war continued throughout the spring of 1996. She would cut paragraphs out, I would put them back in. We tried creating sidebars—small stories that ran alongside the main one—so we could hit the "magic numbers," the maximum length the editors had set for stories. It was still too long. Finally I put my foot down. No more cuts. The editors relented. 

"Okay," Dawn said. "You've made your point. Let's try it again as a fourparter." 

I reassembled all the scattered bits and pieces and resubmitted it. She read it, approved it, and sent it up the editing chain. I got a call a few days later. 

"Well, they liked it and Yarnold agreed that four parts is fine. But they want the first part rewritten," she said. "They think its too feature-y. It should have a harder edge on it, more news. We need to go through and pull out all of the information about the CIA and the Contras and put it in the first day." 

"The reason it's got a feature lead is because the series is a feature," I argued. "It's about the three men who started the L.A. crack market. That's the story I want to tell. If we turn this thing into a Contra cocaine story, everyone is going to say, 'Oh, that's old news.' We agreed on this already, remember?"

"That's what they want," Dawn said. "I'm just telling you what they told me." 

"Well, I'm not writing it that way. I'm tired of this nonsense." 

"Just try it, okay? Give it a quick write-thru. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and we'll go back to the old way. But we've got to give it a try." 

I gritted my teeth. Okay. If they wanted a hard edge on this thing, I'd give them one. I sat down at my computer, and in a few minutes I hammered out the paragraph that, with a few changes, would open the "Dark Alliance" series: 

For the better part of a decade, a 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 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found. This drug network, federal records show, opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the crack capital of the world. The cocaine it brought into the United States fueled the crack explosion in urban America, and the simultaneous rise to power of the murderous gangs of black L.A. 

I hit the transmit button. 

Dawn called the next morning. "This is perfect," she said. "This is exactly what they wanted." 

The rest of the editing went fairly smoothly, and by July 26, 1996, the four-part series was done, edited, and ready to go in the paper, starting August 18. 

Late one night, towards the end of July, the phone rang. "Well, I have-some good news and some bad news," Dawn began. "The bad news is that David Yarnold is no longer the editor on this series. He took a new job with KnightRidder, and he's out of here. The good news is that Paul Van Slambrouck is the new editor and 1 showed him the series today and he really likes it and thinks we've got a great story here." 

"We've got a brand new editor on this?" I cried. "Now? And he just read it for the first time today? You're shitting me. So what does this mean?" 

"Well, unfortunately, it means it's not going to run on the eighteenth. He has some changes he wants to make to it." 

I sat up and started laughing. "Really? What kind of changes?" 

"He thinks its too long. We need to make it three parts." 

I howled. "You can't be serious, Dawn. This is a joke, right?" 

"No. I'm sorry. Maybe you should talk to Paul." 

Van Slambrouck, the Mercury's national editor and a smart, thoughtful journalist, was apologetic. It wasn't the way he wanted to do things either. But he thought the series was terrific and he wanted very much to get it in the paper and hoped I still felt the same way. 

"Dawn said you wanted to make some changes." 

It needed to come down in length, he said, and we needed more CIA stuff in the first day. I was back to square one. 

I sat down and fired off an angry memo to Dawn. Van Slambrouck had asked me to cut sixty-five inches, I complained. He had suggested that I needed to go through the story myself and be "ruthless" and I'd be able to find sixty-five inches to cut, no problem. If there was sixty-five inches of fat left in those stories, I wrote to Dawn, "we both ought to resign because we obviously aren't doing our jobs right." 

An additional problem, I reminded Dawn, was that my family and I were in the midst of moving and were taking our vacation while the new house was being readied. During the next three weeks I rewrote the series on a laptop while on "vacation," first in a beach house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, then in a motel room in Washington, D.C., and finally in the basement of my in-laws' house in Indiana. It was horrible. I had no way of telling what was being cut back at the Mercury, what was being put back in, or what was being rewritten. Five or six different versions were flying around. Don't these people know what they're dealing with here? I wondered. Don't they realize the import of what we're printing? 

I eventually realized that for the most part they did not, which may have been the reason the series got in the paper in the first place. It came in under the radar. Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos would later tell Newsweek that "he read only part of the story" before it appeared in print, an amazing admission if true. 

Perhaps my editors thought I was exaggerating the story's significance, trying to gobble up more space than was really justified? It is a common sight in newsrooms to see reporters hype their stories. I knew reporters who worked their editors like PR agents, or lobbyists pimping a bill. But I had never worked that way. I figured my editors knew how to read as well as anyone. My paycheck was the same every week, no matter which page they put my story on. (Legendary investigative reporter I. F. Stone once said that he read every section of the Washington Post thoroughly because he never knew where he would find a front-page story.) 

But I also knew from my research what kind of backlash would result from a story that dirtied up the CIA, and I stressed it repeatedly to my editors. New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh's 1974 expose of Operation Chaos, a massive illegal CIA domestic spying operation, had brought on attacks in the Washington Post (he had no "hard" proof) and Time ("There is strong likelihood that Hersh's CIA story is considerably exaggerated"), among many others. 

CBS newsman Daniel Schorr was demonized by the CIA and conservative commentators for leaking a copy of a secret Congressional report of CIA abuses to the Village Voice in 1976, after CBS had declined to make it public. Eventually, Schorr was dumped by the network and virtually blackballed. A decade later, a similar fate befell Robert Parry and Brian Barger of the Associated Press after they broke several stories on Contra involvement with drug trafficking and Ollie North's secret resupply operation. In both cases, the mainstream journalistic community uttered barely a peep of protest. 

At 2:00 A.M.—midnight in San Jose—on August 18, 1996,1 was at a party at my best friend's house in Indianapolis. I excused myself, went into a bedroom, plugged in my laptop, and dialed into the Mercury's Web site. A picture of a man smoking crack, superimposed upon the seal of the CIA, drew itself on the screen. After more than a year of work, "Dark Alliance" was finally out. I e-mailed Georg with the news, went back out to the party and got drunk. The next morning I flew back to Sacramento. 

Initially, the silence was deafening. Then we realized why. They had unintentionally run the series the week between the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The national media and the nation's politicians were on vacation; nobody was paying much attention to anything, and particularly not a story in a regional northern California newspaper. 

By August 21, though, some radio stations began calling. What was this CIA story we've been hearing about on the Web? 

That combination—talk radio and the Internet—is what saved "Dark Alliance" from slipping silently below the surface and disappearing without a trace. The Internet wizards at Mercury Center—Mark Hull, Donna Vanish, and Albert Poon—had done a brilliant, eye-popping job on the "Dark Alliance" Web page. It was something right out of the movies: full-color animated maps, oneclick access to uncut source documents, unpublished photos, audio clips from undercover DEA tapes and Danilo Blandón's federal court testimony, a bibliography, a timeline—all in far more depth and detail than we were able to get into the newspaper. 

For investigative reporting, the Web was a dream come true. No longer did the public have to rely on the word of sources, or the reporter's version of what a document meant. The Web made it possible to share your files directly with your readers. If they cared to, they could read and hear exactly what you had read and heard, and make up their own minds about the story. It was raw interactive journalism, perhaps too interactive for some. 

Traditionally, reporters jealously guard their notes and their files. In that sense, journalism has something in common with the cocaine business: You are only as good as your sources. Lousy journalists tend to hide behind unnamed sources, blind quotes, and unrevealed records. 

But as far as I was concerned, my best protection was to allow everyone to see what I'd unearthed. I had it on paper—and most of it was public record. We scanned as many of my documents as possible into the computers at Mercury Center and uploaded them onto the Internet. A reader anywhere in the world could now instantly see our supporting documentation. 

Cleverly, Mercury Center had sent out advance e-mail alerts to various Usenet newsgroups the day before the series appeared, tipping them off to the unveiling of the page. The cyber journalists were as proud of their revolutionary handiwork as I was and wanted to make sure the Net world knew what they'd just pulled off: the first major online expose in newspaper history. 

"The unlimited space of the Web allowed the Mercury News to move forward into a whole new kind of journalism," Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia would later write of "Dark Alliance." "The Mercury News used. . .the Web to let intelligent readers review the source materials and draw their own conclusions. This step, far beyond the traditional role of newspapers, attracted attention and readers from all over the world." 

At the end of that first week I returned to San Diego for Ricky Ross's sentencing. That was where I had my first inkling of the firestorm I'd touched off. Radio stations were blanketing the newspaper with interview requests. Before heading for the courthouse that morning, I'd done radio shows in Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas, and Detroit. 

A haggard-looking L. J. O'Neale, the assistant U.S. attorney, spotted me in the hallway outside the courtroom. 

"Hey there," I said. "You see the story?" 

He scowled and pushed by without saying a word. He'd already fought his way through television camera crews outside the courthouse, and he clearly wasn't pleased with all the attention. Inside the courtroom, reporters jostled for seats. 

Fenster asked for a postponement of sentencing, saying the series had raised significant questions about Blandón and his connections to the CIA. O'Neale protested angrily, accusing Ross of dreaming up the whole CIA plot and feeding it to a gullible journalist who was spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories.

But Judge Huff looked troubled and told O'Neale she wanted some answers from the CIA before she passed sentence on Ross and his co-defendants. And she also wanted the Justice Department to begin deportation proceedings against Blandón immediately. The news made the wires, and the switchboard at the Mercury News lit up. "This place is going crazy!" Dawn reported. "The Web page had something like 500,000 hits on it today!" 

The Mercury News's executive editor, Jerry Ceppos, called and congratulated me. The TV networks were calling the paper. We were getting phone calls from all over the world. "Let's stay on top of this," he said. "Anything you need, you let us know. We want to run with this thing." A few days later, I got a $500 bonus check in the mail and a note from Ceppos: "Remarkable series! Thanks for doing this for us." 

I was on National Public Radio the following Monday and, as always, gave out the Web site address so people could read the series and see our documents. We had 800,000 hits that day. The synergy was amazing. For the first time, people could hear about a story on the radio—even one that appeared several weeks earlier and thousands of miles away—and immediately read it on their computer screens. 

Unlike all the previous stories about the Contras and cocaine, this one couldn't be killed off in the traditional manner, by Big Media ignoring it or relegating it to the news briefs. Millions of people were finding out about "Dark Alliance" anyway—even though not a word had appeared in the so-called national press. That phenomenon was newsworthy by itself. 

"The story has serious legs, moving rapidly through the African American community via e-mail and file downloads, and then into living rooms, offices and churches, and onto streets and into more mainstream black papers and radio broadcasts," HotWired magazine wrote in October 1996. "For the first time, my grandmother asked to go online and read something. I couldn't believe it. She wouldn't look at a computer before," one black government lawyer e-mailed the magazine. "This story is causing a sensation among blacks. It's all they're talking about. They are enraged about it and they can't believe it isn't on every front page in America." 

"Dark Alliance," Hot Wired wrote, "is making digital and media history. The Mercury News is demonstrating for perhaps the first time how the Web and the traditional press can fuse to good effect—and that there's still a chance to break modern media's parochial instincts and return some power to journalists outside of Washington and New York. . .. The story may alter black consciousness about the Net, and further the Web's reputation as a powerful—and serious— information medium." The Associated Press noted that "while no one has been able to track specific numbers of blacks who might have come online because of the Mercury News series, many feel it has been a watershed event." 

A Boston Globe reporter arrived in Los Angeles in early October 1996 and breathlessly reported that the story was "pulsing through L.A.'s black neighborhoods like a shockwave, provoking a stunning, growing level of anger and indignation. Talk-radio stations with predominantly black audiences are deluged with calls on the subject. Demonstrations, candle-lighting ceremonies and town-hall meetings are becoming regular affairs. And people on the street are heatedly discussing the topic." 

If there was one thing scarier to corporate journalism than the series itself, it was the image of a future where Big Media was unable to control the national agenda. Irrespective of what the series said, "Dark Alliance" proved that the stranglehold a relative few East Coast editors and producers had on what became news could be broken. "This story suddenly raises suspicions that the Internet has changed the equation in support of democracy," author Daniel Brandt ruminated in October 1996 on an Internet e-zine. "Unless regional newspapers agree to mild-mannered, regional interest Web sites, all the resources that the elites have invested in monopolizing the Daily Spin could end up spinning down the drain." 

In this case the blend of the Internet and talk radio had made the traditional media irrelevant. The public was marching on without them, and the message got through clearly to California's top politicians. The L.A. City Council unanimously approved a resolution calling for a federal investigation. Both California senators and a half-dozen congressmen wrote letters to CIA director John Deutch and Attorney General Janet Reno demanding an official inquiry. Deutch agreed to conduct one, which infuriated the right-wing Washington Times. Deutch was lambasted on the front page by unnamed critics for "his efforts to curry favor with liberal politicians." And on the editorial page, editor at-large Arnaud dc Borchgrave, a "journalist" with a long history of connections to the intelligence community and the Contras, fumed that "the same old proMarxist CIA bashers are at it again" and quoted unnamed former colleagues at "another paper" describing me as "an 'activist' journalist who would dearly love to see the CIA scuttle itself." 

In his column, de Borchgrave claimed Congress had given the Contras $100 million before the Boland Amendments went into effect, and chided me for being "too young to remember that the CIA had no need for illicit Contra funds in those days." When I appeared on political talk-show host Chris Matthews's live show on CNBC that evening, Matthews eagerly sprung de Borchgrave's crazy timeline on me, demanding to know how I could have written what I did, given the fact that the Contras had plenty of money. After Jack White of Time and I pointed out that he had his "facts" backward, Matthews, during a commercial break, began bellowing at his production assistants, loudly accusing them of attempting to "sabotage" his show. 

Soon after Deutch ordered an internal investigation, Attorney General Janet Reno—at the urging of Justice Department inspector general Michael Bromwich —followed suit. Finally, the national news media dipped a toe into the icy waters. Newsweek devoted an entire page to the story in late September, calling it "a powerful series" that had some black leaders "ready to carpet-bomb Langley." Time that month called it "the hottest topic in black America" and said the Web site "provides a plethora of court documents, recorded interviews and photographs. . .. This is the first time the Internet has electrified African Americans." 

Soon, 60 Minutes called. "Don't talk to anyone else," a producer told me. "We want this story to ourselves." I got an identical call from Dateline NBC. I told both of them I thought it was unethical for a reporter to refuse to talk to the press. The 60 Minutes producer said that was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. Dateline ended up doing the story. 

Over the next few weeks, we got interview requests from Jerry Springer, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Snyder, Jesse Jackson, and Montel Williams. I was on CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and CBS Morning News. The Mercury printed up 5,000 copies of the series and they were gone in a matter of weeks. An employee from the marketing department was assigned full-time to handle press calls. Each evening she e-mailed a list of interview requests, and by early October the list was three pages long and growing. The London Times did a story. Le Monde in Paris wrote something. Newspapers in Germany, Belgium, Spain, Colombia, and Nicaragua called for interviews. 

It's hard to imagine how many radio stations there are in the United States until they start calling. At home, my phone would begin ringing at 6 A.M. and not stop until 10 PM. Talk radio was burning up the airwaves, spreading the story and the Web site address from coast to coast. One day, the hits on the Web page climbed over 1,000,000. People in Japan, Bosnia, Germany, and Denmark sent me e-mail. 

Meanwhile, we continued advancing the story. I teamed up with Pamela Kramer, the Mercury's reporter in Los Angeles, and we wrote several stories about the 1986 police raids on Blandón's house. We came up with the entire Gordon search warrant, which showed that the police had several informants telling them that drug money was going to the Contras. Our sources provided us with the case file number to the supposedly nonexistent investigatory file at the L.A. County Sheriff's Office, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters and her staff marched in and demanded to see it. 

"I told them that the only way they were going to get me out of their office was to give me the file or arrest me," she said. She got the file—in it were the police reports about the search of Ronald Lister's house, his claims of CIA involvement, and the inventory of strange items seized at his house. 

NBC News did a strong follow-up, finally exposing the drug-related entries in Oliver North's notebooks to a national television audience, but it was the only network attempting to advance the story. The Establishment papers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times—the same newspapers that had so confidently reported in the 1980s that there was no truth to these claims of Contra drug trafficking, remained largely silent. 

"Where is the rebuttal? Why hasn't the media rose in revolt against this story?" an exasperated Bernard Kalb, former spokesman for the Reagan State Department, demanded on CNN's Reliable Sources. "It isn't a story that simply got lost. It, in fact, has resonated and echoed and the question is where is the media knocking it down, when that, too, is a journalistic responsibility?" 

Kalb's guest, former Reagan Justice Department spokesman Terry Eastland, clucked that he "would expect to see this kind of story in a magazine like In These Times, not in a mainstream newspaper such as the San Jose Mercury News." No one on Kalb's show bothered to mention that Eastland had a history of trying to cover up the Contra drug link. In May 1986, his office had planted a false story in the New York Times stating that the Justice Department had "cleared" the Contras of any involvement in gun running and drug smuggling, a statement the Justice Department was later forced to recant. 

One question I was frequently asked during radio appearances was whether I thought the national media reaction would be different if the series had appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times. My stock answer was that it hadn't appeared in those newspapers, because they'd decided in 1986 that there was no story here. My feeling was that those newspapers' very familiarity with the story made it more difficult for them to report it. How could they come back ten years later and admit that the Contras had been selling cocaine to Americans, when they'd already assured us it wasn't happening? 

In early October, I was in New York City getting ready for an appearance on the Montel Williams Show, which was doing a two-day special on the "Dark Alliance" series. About 2:00 AM., Jerry Ceppos called. The Washington Post had just moved a story on the wires. It would be in the morning edition and it was highly critical of the series. He asked me to take a look at it and give him my reaction. 

"What did they say was wrong?" I asked. 

"They don't say any of the facts are wrong," Ceppos said. "They just don't agree with our conclusions." 

"And their evidence is what?" 

"A lot of unnamed sources, mainly. It's really a strange piece. I'll send you a fax of it, and we can talk in the morning." 

The story was headlined "The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged Plot." I laughed. What plot? 

The reporters, Walter Pincus and Roberto Suro, wrote that their investigation "does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed Contras—or Nicaraguans in general—played a major role in the emergence of crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States. Instead, the available data from arrest records, hospitals, drug treatment centers and drug user surveys point to the rise of crack as a broad-based phenomenon driven in numerous places by players of different nationalities, races and ethnic groups." 

Ah ha. The old tidal wave theory. Here it comes again. I wondered what "available data" Pincus and Suro had gathered from the 1982–83 era, the dawn of the L.A. crack market, since the DEA and NIDA had admitted a decade earlier that there was no such data. 

The story grudgingly and often backhandedly admitted that the basic facts presented in the series were correct, and it buried key admissions deep inside, such as the fact that "the CIA knew about some of these activities and did little or nothing to stop them." Toward the end Pincus and Suro confirmed that Meneses and Blandón had met with Enrique Bermúdez in Honduras, but without disclosing Bermúdez's relationship with the CIA. CIA agent Adolfo Calero, whom the Post euphemistically described as someone "who worked closely with the CIA," also admitted to the Post reporters that he had met with Meneses. 

Overall, it was a cleverly crafted piece of disinformation that would set the stage for the attacks to follow. It falsely claimed that the series made a "racially charged allegation that the 'CIA's army' of contras deliberately targeted the black community in an effort to expand the market for a cheap form of cocaine." And despite Blandón's testimony that he sold 200 to 300 kilos of cocaine for Meneses in L.A. and that all the profits were sent to the Contras, the Post quoted unnamed "law enforcement officials" as saying "Blandón sold $30,000 to $60,000 worth of cocaine in two transactions." 

The story also dove right through the "window" that O'Neale had opened at the Ross trial. "If the whole of Blandón's testimony is to be believed," Pincus and Suro wrote, "[then there is no connection] between the Contras and African American drug dealers because Blandón said he had stopped sending money to the Contras by the time he met Ross." No mention was made of the DEA reports and the sheriff's department affidavit that said Blandón was selling Contra cocaine through 1986, nor of the fact that Ross had been buying Blandón's cocaine long before he actually met him. "Moreover," the Post declared, "the mere idea that any one person could have played a decisive role in the nationwide crack epidemic is rejected out of hand by academic experts and law enforcement officials." But they identified neither the academic experts nor the law enforcement officials. 

I wrote Ceppos a memo pointing out the holes in the Post's story. "The Pincus piece," I wrote, "is just silly. It's the kind of story you'd expect from someone who spent three weeks working on a story, as opposed to 16 months." The fact that the Post's unnamed "experts" would reject our scenario "out of hand," I wrote, was the whole problem. "None of them—whoever they are—has ever studied this before." 

To his credit, Ceppos fired off a blistering letter to the Post, pointing out the factual errors in the piece and calling Pincus's claims of a "racially charged allegation" a "complete and total mischaracterization." 

"The most difficult issue is whether a casual reading of our series leads to the conclusion that the CIA is directly responsible for the outbreak of the crack epidemic in Los Angeles. 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," Ceppos wrote. "We reported that men selling cocaine in Los Angeles met with people on the CIA payroll. We reported that they received fundraising orders from people on the CIA payroll. We reported that the money raised was sent to a CIA-run operation. But we did not go further and took pains to say that clearly." 

Ceppos posted the letter on the staff bulletin board, along with a memo defending the series. "We strongly support the conclusions the series drew and will until someone proves them wrong. What is even more remarkable is that FOUR experienced Post reporters, re-reporting our series, could not find a single significant factual error. The Post's conclusions are very different—and I believe, flawed—but the major facts aren't. 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." 

The Post held Ceppos's letter for weeks, ordered him to rewrite it, and then refused to print it. 

Shortly afterward I got an e-mail message from a woman in southern California. There was a story in the Mercury's archives that I needed to see, she wrote, and provided a date and a page number. I sent it to our library and got a photocopy of the story in the mail a day later. It had run on February 18, 1967. 

"How I Traveled Abroad on CIA Subsidy" was the headline. The author was Walter Pineus of the Washington Post. 

After disclosures of CIA infiltration of American student associations had exploded that year, Pincus had written a long, smug confessional of how, posing as an American student representative, he'd traveled to several international youth conferences in the late 1950s and early 1960s, secretly gathering information for the CIA and smuggling in anti-Communist propaganda. A CIA recruiter had approached him, he wrote, and he'd agreed to spy not only on the student delegations from other countries but on his American colleagues as well. "I had been briefed in Washington on each of them," Pincus wrote. "None was remotely aware of CIA's interest." 

This just cannot be true, I thought. The Washington Post's veteran national security reporter—a former CIA operative and propagandist? Unwilling to believe this piece of information until I dug it up for myself, I went to the state library and got out the microfilm. The story was there. This was the man who was questioning my ethics for giving Alan Fenster questions to ask a government witness about the Contras and drugs? Jesus. I'd certainly never spied on American citizens. 

Looking into Pincus's background further, I saw that he'd popped up in another situation where the CIA's reputation was under attack. In 1975, he'd been the person the New York Times selected to review ex-CIA officer Philip Agee's best-selling expose about the agency, CIA Diary. In an unfavorable review, Pincus strongly suggested that Agee was in league with the Cuban intelligence services in a joint conspiracy to destroy the CIA. (Pincus's previous association with the CIA was not disclosed by the Times. He was merely identified as a Washington journalist.) 

When the Post found itself under rare criticism by the CIA in 1986 for allegedly printing classified information, Pincus went on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and stated that his newspaper wasn't so irresponsible as to pass along government secrets. The Post often shielded its readers' eyes from such things, Pincus asserted, frequently in consultation with the government. "We've been dealing with it for a long time and I think we have withheld a great deal of information," Pincus said. "It ought to be made clear to people that we, in determining what we're going to do with a lot of stories, go to the Administration and tell them what we have and listen to what their arguments are and we then do make a decision, but we're not making them in the dark." 

Pincus would later play an important role in helping to impede the Iran/Contra investigation, according to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. In his memoirs, Firewall, Walsh wrote that at a critical moment in the Iran-Contra probe, Pincus had published a story claiming Walsh was planning to indict Ronald Reagan, a report that made worldwide news and reduced Nancy Reagan to tears. "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 wrote. "It infuriated the congressional Republicans, even some of the moderate ones." Walsh suspected that Pincus had been fed the story by Boyden Gray, attorney for then president George Bush. 

Gray, Walsh wrote, "had been known to float stories through persons close to the publisher of the Washington Post; Pincus had sometimes been asked to write these stories. I suspected Gray or someone else in the White House had played a role in disseminating the misinformation but I had no proof." The Post, of course, never acknowledged what history has proven: Pincus's big scoop was bogus. 

The L.A. Times and the New York Times struck next. On October 20, 1996, both ran long stories attacking my reporting and the series. They took the same tack the Washington Post had several weeks earlier: admitting that the basic facts were true and then complaining that the facts didn't mean a thing.

Relying again mostly on unnamed sources, these two newspapers of record claimed Blandón and Meneses hadn't had "official positions" with the Contras. Drug money had been sent, but not millions; it was only tens of thousands, according to unnamed sources. And experts scoffed at the notion that one drug ring could have supplied enough cocaine to feed the tidal wave of crack that engulfed America, a ridiculous claim I'd never made. 

The papers found no need to mention the mass of historical evidence that supported the series's findings. Without anything approaching documentation, the papers just flatly declared I was wrong. 

"The crack epidemic in Los Angeles followed no blueprint or master plan. It was not orchestrated by the Contras or the CIA. No one trafficker, even kingpins who sold thousands of kilos and pocketed millions of dollars, ever came close to monopolizing the drug trade," the L.A. Times assured its readers in the lead paragraphs of a three-day series. 

The first part, on the genesis of crack in L.A., was written by Jesse Katz. Though Katz himself, starting in 1994 and continuing through the summer of 1996, had repeatedly referred to Ross as the first and biggest crack dealer in South Central, the master marketer whose activities were "key" to the spread of crack in the city, he now found that Ross was a pygmy who'd had little or nothing to do with the crack explosion. The earlier stories in the Times, stating exactly the opposite, were simply ignored. 

Instead, Katz trotted out a number of other cocaine dealers he'd apparently missed the first time he'd written about the issue: "Tootie" Reese, who'd gone to jail when the crack market exploded and was never accused of selling a single rock of crack; the Bryant family, which, according to earlier Times stories, never sold crack in South Central and was "too small for the department's Major Violators Narcotics Unit in downtown Los Angeles" to bother with. Katz dredged up "Waterhead Bo" Bennett, who didn't start selling crack until 1985, and Elrader Browning, who—again according to the L.A. Times—was in jail from 1982 to 1985, making it exceedingly difficult for him to have played any role in the formation of the L.A. crack market. 

"This is like reading Pravda," I told an L.A. radio station. "History means nothing to these people." Syndicated columnist Norman Solomon described Katz's story as "a show trial recantation." 

The next day, the L.A. Times absolved the CIA of any involvement with Blandón and Meneses. Its authoritative sources: former CIA director Robert Gates, former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro, and current CIA director John Deutch. "Like good little boys and girls, the Times, the Washington Post et al., toddled off to the CIA and asked the agency if it had ever done such a thing. When the CIA said 'no' the papers solemnly printed it—just as though the CIA hadn't previously denied any number of illegal operations in which it was later caught red-handed," columnist Molly Ivins observed. 

Buried deep within the L.A. Times story were admissions by CIA officials that Contra supporters "were involved in drug running, but they bought villas and did not put it into the FDN." And, the story conceded, "the allegation that some elements of the CIA-sponsored Contra army cooperated with drug traffickers has been well documented for years." But the story dismissed the idea that "millions" went to the Contras from the Nicaraguans' drug sales. Unnamed sources said it was around $50,000 or $60,000, which caused former Meneses distributor Rafael Cornejo some mirth. 

"Sixty thousand?" he scoffed. "You can raise that in an afternoon." 

According to another unnamed source the Times quoted, Blandón and Meneses were making only $15,000 a kilo in profits. 

Unmentioned was Blandón's testimony that he'd sold 200 to 300 kilos for Meneses during the time they were sending money to the Contras, and his admission that all of the profits were being sent to the rebels. Using the Times' own profit figures, that would mean between $3 million and $4.5 million went to the Contras just from Blandón's sales. And that didn't include the money Meneses organization—through Cabezas and Renato Pena in San Francisco— was sending. Lost in the debate over whether it was millions or tens of thousands, was the inanity of the idea that a reasonably accurate number could ever be found in a business that deals in cash and eschews written records—it is just as possible that the amounts could have been in the tens of millions. 

"No solid evidence has emerged that either Meneses or Blandón contributed any money to the rebels after 1984," the story declared, ignoring the 1986 sheriff's affidavit and the 1986 DEA reports. The story also quoted another unnamed associate who claimed, apparently with a straight face, that the profit margins in the cocaine business in 1982–84—when coke was selling for $60,000 a kilo—were just too slim to allow million-dollar donations to the FDN. 

What kind of journalist would unquestioningly accept such a statement, I wondered, looking for a byline. And then I saw it in a box inside: Doyle McManus, the chief of the L.A. Times' Washington bureau. That explained it. 

In 1984 McManus had played a central role in spreading the CIA's leak about Barry Seal and the Sandinistas dealing cocaine, just in time for the Reagan administration's request to Congress for additional Contra aid. Oliver North's notebooks contain several references to conversations McManus was having with the White House at the time, shortly before and shortly after the details of the CIA-DEA sting were fed to the press. 

"McManus talking to WH." North wrote on July 12, 1984. "Unhappy with negotiations." 

On July 17, 1984, the CIA leak appeared in the Washington Times, written by Jeremiah O'Leary, a longtime Washington press corps reporter described by investigative reporter Carl Bernstein as having "a valuable personal relationship" with the CIA in the 1960s. O'Leary insisted that "they were more helpful to me than I was to them." 

O'Leary's story in the Washington Times, which had supported the Contras both editorially and financially, gave McManus the excuse he needed to rush the CIA's leak into the L.A. Times. According to North's notebooks, McManus called the White House that morning and informed officials there that the National Security Council would be cited as his official source for the information. 

"McManus, L.A. Times, says NSC to source claims WH. has pictures of Borge loading cocaine in Nica," North wrote. 

The following morning, on the front page of the Times, McManus wrote that "high-ranking members of the Nicaraguan government have been linked to a scheme involving three of Colombia's largest cocaine traffickers, U.S. intelligence sources say." The story declared that Interior Minister Tomas Borge and Defense Minister Humberto Ortega of Nicaragua were "among the officials who the sources said are implicated." 

A day later McManus's coauthor, Ronald J. Ostrow, reported that "U.S. intelligence sources have obtained a photograph of Borge standing next to Pablo Escobar Gaviria, one of the two Colombian nationals being sought, as a plane was being loaded June 25 with duffel bags of cocaine at the airport in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua." Unfortunately for the Times, no such photograph has ever surfaced, and the DEA later admitted that it had no information implicating high-ranking Sandinista officials in drug trafficking. The story was a hoax, and McManus had been a willing participant or a dupe of embarrassing proportions. So strident in defending U.S. officials against such charges, the Times never admitted that it wrongly accused two Nicaraguan government officials of cocaine trafficking—solely on the basis of whispers from U.S. intelligence agents. 

McManus and Ostrow later teamed up to refute allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking in early 1987, just as the issue was threatening to go national. In a front-page story bearing the cautionary deck head "No Supporting Evidence, DEA Says," the Times reported that a Senate committee "is investigating reports that Nicaraguan rebels and their American supporters have helped smuggle cocaine into the United States, but Drug Enforcement Administration officials say their agents have found no evidence to support any of the charges." 

The story went through the litany of accusations—Ilopango, the Frogman case, the Southern Air Transport shipments to Colombia—devoting a sentence or two to each one, and surrounding them with abundant denials from DEA officials and CIA agent Adolfo Calero. The reporters made no attempt at an independent investigation. 

In a prison cell in Boron, California, Contra drug courier Carlos Cabezas read McManus's story and couldn't believe his eyes. He banged out a letter to the reporter on February 27, 1987, stating, "I am going to tell you that there was indeed 'supporting evidence,' hidden by the government." The receipt of drug money by the Contras, he wrote, "is absolutely true, at least in my case." Cabezas told McManus of his trip to Costa Rica with $250,000 and noted that the FBI made no attempt to stop him, even though he was traveling with an FBI informant. 

He also told McManus the FBI had tape-recorded conversations "between the former Ambassador of Nicaragua in Guatemala, Mr. Fernando Sanchez and Troilo Sanchez and myself. Both of these gentlemen are brother [sic] of Mr. Adolfo Calero's top aide Mr. Aristides Sanchez. These conversations were related to drug transactions." 

McManus replied two months later, asking Cabezas to provide him with names and documents to substantiate his "allegations." And, by the way, he asked, "Can you give me any further information about Sandinista drug trafficking?" Cabezas said he sent McManus the documents about the Contras and never heard another thing. 

The unprecedented attacks by three major newspapers alarmed the Mercury's editors. I was called to a meeting with Ceppos and the other editors and told that I should quit trying to advance the story. We needed to start working on a written response to the other newspapers, he said. I vehemently disagreed. "The best way to shut them up is to put the rest of what we know in the paper and keep plowing ahead," I argued. "Let's run a story about Walter Pincus's CIA connections. Let's write about how the L.A. Times has been booting this story since 1987." I told them of my discovery that the L.A. Times' Washington bureau had been sent a copy of the notes found in Ronald Lister's house in 1990 and had thrown them away. Ceppos disagreed. 

"I don't want to get into a war with them," he said. 

Fortunately, both Dawn Garcia and Paul Van Slambrouck agreed that we should continue developing the story. 

"The best way to answer our critics," Van Slambrouck told Ceppos, "is to advance the story. Let's go out and get some more evidence of drug money being sent to the Contras. Let's get more evidence of this drug ring's dealings with the Contras." Ceppos relented, authorizing another reporting trip to Central America. He also assigned L.A. bureau reporter Pamela Kramer and Pete Carey, an investigative reporter, to gather information about the start of the L.A. crack market. He also made another decision: he was changing the logo that the series had used on the Internet and in the reprints. The CIA's seal was coming off. 

"What's the point of doing that?" I asked. "We documented that these traffickers were meeting with CIA agents. If you change the logo, the rest of the media is going to accuse us of backing away from the story." 

But Ceppos wouldn't budge. Thousands of reprints with the CIA-crack smoker logo were gathered up and burned and a CD-ROM version of the series —which had been pressed and was ready for distribution—was also destroyed. The Post and L.A. Times immediately crowed that the Mercury was "retreating" from the series. 

Georg and I flew to Costa Rica and began interviewing police officials, lawyers, prosecutors, and ex-Contras about Meneses activities there, fleshing out his role as a DEA informant and his drug operation's connections to Oliver North's resupply network on the Southern Front. In Managua, we interviewed police and Blandón's suspected money launderer, Orlando Murillo. I flew back and started writing the follow-up stories; Georg continued hunting for other members of the Meneses drug ring. 

He called me in December 1996, barely able to contain his excitement. He'd found Carlos Cabezas, who admitted that he had in fact delivered millions of dollars in drug money to the Contras. Cabezas had names, dates, and amounts, Georg said, and pages from his drug ledgers. He'd identified a CIA agent, Ivan Gómez, as having had direct knowledge of it all. 

"We've got it," Georg cried. "Cabezas is willing to talk on the record." 

A week later, Georg called with more good news. Enrique Miranda, the former Meneses aide who'd "escaped" a year earlier, had been found in Miami and tossed on a plane to Nicaragua. Georg had visited him in prison, and Miranda started talking. Meneses relationship with the CIA and the Contras was deeper than we'd ever realized, Georg said. "We didn't know how right we were," he laughed. "I can't wait to see what the Washington Post does with this." I could have kissed him. 

In January 1997, I sent first drafts of four follow-up stories to Dawn, written as a two-day series. The first part dealt with Meneses DEA connections and his Costa Rican operation, along with the interviews Georg had done with Carlos Cabezas and Enrique Miranda. I wrote a sidebar about the drug-dealing Costa Rican shrimp company North and the Cuban CIA operatives were using to funnel aid to the Contras. 

The second part was a story about the parallel investigations of Contra drug trafficking done in the summer of 1986 by DEA agent Celerino Castillo at Ilopango and L.A. County Sheriff's deputy Tom Gordon, drawing on recently declassified FBI and CIA records at the National Archives and 3,000 pages of once-secret documents about the Blandón raids that had just been released by the L.A. County Sheriff's Office. I also wrote a sidebar on Joe Kelso's attempts to investigate allegations of DEA drug trafficking in Costa Rica. Altogether the drafts ran 16,000 words. 

We'd done it. We had an eyewitness, on the record, who'd delivered the drug money. We had DEA records saying Blandón had sent money to the Contras far longer than we'd previously reported. We had a top CIA official admitting that the agency had reports of drug trafficking at Ilopango. We had evidence Ronald Lister had been meeting with the CIA's former head of covert operations. I expected the editors to be beside themselves with joy. 

I heard absolutely nothing. Aside from Dawn, no one called to tell me they'd read the new stories. No one called with questions. No one even suggested that we begin editing them. They sat. 

In early February Dawn sent me a copy of the story Pete Carey and Pam Kramer had written on the origins of the L.A. crack market. It was, astonishingly, a virtual repeat of the L.A. Times stories. It quoted police and drug experts opining that the Contra drug ring couldn't have supplied enough cocaine to have had a major impact on the crack explosion, because crack had surfaced all over the United States at about the same time. It drew no distinctions between the L.A. crack market in 1982 and the market in 1986. As far as the story was concerned, it had sprung from the ground fully formed. Three men, the story concluded, could not have created a drug epidemic. "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 destructiveness of a tidal wave." 

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. 

Carey, the editors, and I met three times in February to argue about the epidemiology of the L.A. crack market, the amount of money sent to the Contras, and the level of CIA involvement. At the end, Carey informed me that he was canning his crack story. "What I told Ceppos was that we should just continue to work on this and see what the official investigations produced," he said. Kramer said much the same thing. "The problem I had with that story," she told me, "is that no one knows what really happened back in those years because nobody was looking at it." Their crack story never appeared. 

With that settled, I plunged back into the investigation. In March I flew to Florida to interview a former CIA pilot, Ronald Lippert, who'd flown drop missions for the Contras in 1986. I spent two days at Lippert's home near Tampa, poring through his voluminous files and picking his brain. My interviews with the Canadian Lippert, jailed for ten years by Fidel Castro for flying explosives into Cuba for the agency, solved one of the final mysteries of the Southern Front: how CIA operative John Hull—Bill Casey's friend and Oliver North's liaison to the Contras—had escaped from Costa Rica after he was indicted there for drug trafficking in 1989. After being thrown in jail, Hull was let out on bail for health reasons and vanished. 

The DEA office in Costa Rica had gotten Hull out, Lippert said. Lippert had flown the mission himself, in a decoy plane hopscotching from Costa Rica to Haiti and then shuttling Hull into Miami, where Hull hid at the apartment of Cuban CIA operative and suspected drug dealer Dagoberto Nunez, who'd helped North and the CIA in Costa Rica. The DEA officer who'd recruited Lippert for the escape flight, J. J. Perez, was another Cuban anti-Communist, Lippert said. In an interview, Hull confirmed I Lippert's story, as did Anthony Ricevuto, the former DEA inspector who'd investigated Perez's role in Hull's escape. Ricevuto believed Perez set up Hull's escape on his own initiative, without official DEA sanction, but Hull disputed that. "Hell, you don't get DEA pilots and DEA planes to fly you around without orders coming down from above," Hull said. 

A DEA panel recommended Perez's dismissal, Ricevuto said, but the Justice Department provided Perez with an attorney, and much of the case was dismissed on national security grounds. Perez ended up being suspended for one day. 

Perez would not return phone calls, and the files of his disciplinary hearings are scaled as national security secrets. (The United States refused repeated Costa Rican requests to extradite Hull, and the drug charges were eventually dropped. Murder charges that were filed against him shortly after his escape arc still pending, however; Hull denied both accusations.) 

I was ecstatic. 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. The further I dug, the more amazing the story became. 

And then, just like that, it was over. 

Executive editor Jerry Ceppos called me at home on March 25, 1997, to inform me that he'd made "a very difficult decision." Mistakes had been made in the series, he said, and the newspaper was going to print a letter to its readers saying so.

"Is this a fait accompli?" I asked. "Or do I get a chance to say something?" 

"The decision has been made," Ceppos said. "I'll fax you a draft of what we're considering." 

According to Ceppos proposed column, we should have said that Blandón claimed he quit dealing with the Contras in 1983—something that the editors had cut to save space. We had "insufficient proof" to say millions went to the Contras; we should have said it was an estimate. We should have said that we didn't find proof of involvement of "CIA decision-makers," whatever that meant. We should have said Ricky Ross wasn't the only crack supplier in L.A.—but we hadn't said that. And, finally, Ceppos wrote, the experts were unanimous in saying that the Contras had not played a major role in the crack trade and that the series had "oversimplified" how crack had become a problem. Strangely, Ceppos had borrowed his conclusions from Pete Carey's never-published crack story. 

I brought a written response to San Jose with me the next day when I met with Ceppos and the other editors in the ornate conference room near the editors' offices. "That 'experts' would disagree with the findings of original research is one of the perils of doing it, as any researcher can tell you," I wrote. "But just because they have a differing opinion—and when you get down to it, that's all it is—is a pretty shoddy reason to take a swan dive on a story. 

"Do I think there were no mistakes made in the execution of this story? No. There were," I wrote. "But this draft doesn't mention them. If we want to fully air this issue and be honest with our readers, I request that the following 'failures' be included." 

I then described how the editors themselves had requested an increased emphasis on CIA involvement, how cutting the series from four parts to three had damaged it, and how the last-minute assignment of a new editor had weakened it further. Finally, I asked that the paper print my own response to this retraction. I thought it needed to be said that as a reporter, I stood by my story. 

Ceppos flushed as he read my memo. "I don't think we should make this personal," he said uneasily. 

"That's easy for you to say," I replied. "You're not the one who's being hung out to dry here." 

"No one's going to hang you out to dry," insisted Jonathan Krim, the editor who'd been the most strident critic of the series and, in all likelihood, the author of Ceppos's apology. "We all got in this together, and we're all going to get out of this together." 

"How can we honestly say that we don't know millions went to the Contras, or that the CIA didn't know about this, when we've got an eye-witness telling us that he personally gave drug money to a CIA agent? What are we going to do about all that other inconvenient information in the follow-ups? We're going to look awful goddamned stupid running this apology and then printing stories that directly contradict it." 

The other editors looked at the table uncomfortably. 

"We are going to print those other stories, aren't we?" 

Ceppos shook his head slightly. "We're not?" 

I asked incredulously. "Why not?" 

"They're a quarter turn of the screw," he said. "We're not going to print anything else unless it's a major advance." 

I exploded. "You think the fact that the head of this Contra drug ring was working for the DEA is a quarter turn of the screw?" I shouted. "You don't think the fact that the DEA helped an accused CIA drug trafficker escape criminal charges is a major advance? You've got to be kidding me. Are we even going to pursue this story any more?" 

"No," Ceppos said. 

"Let me get this straight," I said. "We're killing the other stories. We're not going to do any more investigation of this topic. And we're going to run this mealymouthed column that pretends we don't know anything else, tuck our tails between our legs, and slink off into the sunset. That's what you've got in mind?" 

"You and I have very different views of this situation," he said quietly. 

"You got that right." 

The result of the stormy meeting was that Ceppos rewrote his column, removing the obvious factual errors but leaving the rest virtually unchanged. 

"No matter how many times the words and phrases are tweaked, the end result is still a sham," I responded in a memo. "You're sitting on information that supports what I wrote and pretending to be unaware of it." 

Again I objected, and again Ceppos recast it, this time as a personal column and, at Dawn's insistence, disclosing that I disagreed with him. He also inserted some statements that acknowledged that the series was largely accurate and that the basic elements of it were solidly documented. And, to my shock, he reversed his earlier decision to kill the follow-up stories. Dawn asked me to prepare a memo on what we still needed to do to get the stories in shape because Ceppos was now leaning toward running at least part of them. 

At a final meeting before the column ran, I predicted that the mainstream press would read the column as a retraction, one that covered everything the series had revealed. "You run this, and all we'll hear is, 'The Mercury News has admitted it isn't true! The Contras weren't dealing cocaine! The CIA had nothing to do with it!' And you know as well as I do, that's not true." 

"Well," shrugged Krim, "you're the one who's always saying that we can't be held responsible for what other people read into things." 

There it is, I thought. The truth. They want the public to think there was nothing here. They want it all to go away. They're tired of fighting the current of mainstream opinion, tired of being journalistic outcasts for standing by a story that, as Jesse Jackson had put it, "threatened the moral authority of the government." 

In nine months, we had gone full circle and crawled into bed with the rest of the apologists who wanted the CIA drug story put back in its grave once and for all. 

"Have you got anything else to say?" Ceppos asked. 

"Yeah. You're taking a dive on a true story, and one day you're going to find that out." 

Ceppos column ran on May 11, 1997, and if there was ever a chance of getting to the bottom of the CIA's involvement with drug traffickers, it died on that day. The New York Times, which hadn't found the original series newsworthy enough to mention, splashed Ceppos apology on its front page. An editorial lauded Ceppos for his courage and declared that he'd set a brave new standard for dealing with "egregious errors." 

Howard Kurtz, the media critic for the Washington Post, called for a comment. "It's nauseating," I told him. I had never been more disgusted with my profession in my life. It wasn't because such outrages were unknown in the newspaper business. They weren't. Shortly before I arrived at the Plain Dealer, the paper printed a front-page retraction of a story that had appeared more than a year earlier, revealing that former Teamsters Union president Jackie Presser was an FBI informant. 

Presser was indeed an informant, as the FBI confirmed years later. But truth had taken a back seat to realpolitik. Court records later revealed that the paper had been pressured into retracting the story by New York mob boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, who'd asked his attorney, Roy Cohn, to intercede with the Newhouse family, which owned the Plain Dealer. 

Whether similar pressures were applied to Ceppos from outside the newspaper is something I do not know, nor do I particularly want to. I would prefer to believe the theory advanced by my editor, Dawn Garcia, who suggested that Ceppos treatment for prostate cancer in the winter of 1996–97 had been a factor. That extended illness, combined with the pressure from other editors, had taken their toll, she believed. 

It's a plausible explanation, because there really were only two ways the newspaper could have gone with "Dark Alliance" at that point—forward or backward. The series had created such a superheated controversy that it had become impossible to simply do nothing. Ceppos, who had stood by the story bravely at key moments, simply may not have had the endurance, at that period of his life, to ride the story out. 

If the Mercury continued pursuing the story and publishing follow-ups, editor Jon Krim worried in a memo, the editors needed to be ready "to deal with the firestorm of criticism that is sure to follow." The other way out was to back out: confess to some "shortcomings," take some quick lumps, and move on, which is the course Ceppos chose. It was certainly the course of least resistance, as the happy reaction of the national media proved. 

Had I done what my editors wanted—kept my mouth shut and gone along with the charade—I would probably still be working at the newspaper. But I had no desire to hang around a place that was so easily cowed by the opinions of others. A reporter's job was to pursue the truth, I still believed, no matter how unpopular that pursuit became. And the truth of the matter, as I saw it, was that my editors were trying to rewrite history. 

When Howard Kurtz asked me what I intended to do next, I told him about the stories the Mercury News was suppressing. 

"We've got four more stories sitting in the can, and I intend to try and get them in the newspaper," I said. "I've been told that we're still going to run them." 

Kurtz called me back a short time later. "I just got off the phone with Jerry Ceppos, and he says you never turned in any stories. He said the only thing you gave him was a memo and some notes." 

"Notes?" I laughed. "I've never given an editor notes in my life. I turned in four stories in January, and I know he's read them because we've discussed them. Maybe you misunderstood." 

Kurtz sounded confused. "They're not notes?" 

"Of course not. They've got beginnings, middles, and ends." 

"Those are stories where I come from," he said. 

The controversy raged for another month, and the issue gradually became what Ceppos reportedly had dreaded: he was being accused of suppressing information. He was covering things up. Talk radio had a field day. In Washington, DJ Joe Madison, who'd been making hay with the story for months, urged the listeners of his 50,000-watt station to call Ceppos and demand that he print the stories he was suppressing. Letters and e-mail from outraged readers began pouring in. 

Ceppos, who'd not spoken to me since his column ran, called me at home in early June. He was killing the follow-ups, he shouted. I was off the story for good. He couldn't trust me anymore because I'd "aligned myself with one side of the issue." 

"Which side is that, Jerry? The side that wants the truth to come out?" 

He wasn't getting into a debate, he told me. I was to report to his office in two days "to discuss your future at the Mercury News." 

It was a very one-sided discussion. Reading from a prepared statement, Ceppos told me that my editors had lost faith in me. I needed closer supervision, which I couldn't get in Sacramento. I needed to regain their faith and their trust, and the only way to do that was to accept a transfer to the main office in San Jose. If I refused, I would be transferred against my will to the West Bureau in Cupertino, the newspaper's version of Siberia—a somnolent training ground for new reporters and a pasture for older ones who'd fallen from favor. It made little sense, because the reporters there had no direct supervision either. Whichever I decided, I had to report in thirty days. 

And, by the way, Ceppos said, Pete Carey was going to take over the Contra drug story, and I was to give him all the cooperation he requested. 

That night I sat down with my wife, Sue, and my children and gave them the news. In one month, I was going to have to start working in Cupertino, 150 miles away. I'd have to drive there on Mondays and come home on Fridays. In the meantime, I'd fight the transfer through the Newspaper Guild. 

My six-year-old daughter looked at me strangely. "Are you still going to sleep here?" 

"No, I won't be able to," I told her. "I have to live in another place during the week. But I'll be home on the weekends." She got up, went into her room, and closed the door. 

As the deadline approached, I became despondent and told my wife I didn't feel comfortable leaving her and the kids alone. Georg had been getting death threats in Nicaragua, I told her. His wife's law office had been burglarized and ransacked twice; the power lines to his house had been cut, and his brother-in law had been threatened by armed thugs. He-was leaving the country, taking his wife to his native Switzerland. 

"It's too dangerous to leave you and the children alone," I told her. "Maybe I should just quit." I didn't want to work there anymore anyway. 

"That's just what they want you to do," she said indignantly. "Don't you dare give in to those cowards. I know it's a lousy situation, but we'll just have to put up with it for a while. The Guild says you'll win the arbitration." 

Winning the arbitration seemed very likely, because the union contract the newspaper had with the Newspaper Guild, which represented much of the staff, expressly prohibited transfering reporters out of the bureaus against their will. But it would take months for a hearing to occur. And then what? I'd get my old job back working for the same editors? It hardly seemed worth the fight. 

On the other hand, going through with it held its own attractions. Every day that I showed up at the Cupertino bureau would be an act of defiance. 

Reluctantly I went, spending July and part of August in the Cupertino bureau under protest. I was assigned such pressing matters as the death of a police horse, clothing collections for Polish flood victims, and summer school computer classes. I went on a byline strike, refusing to put my name on any story written while I was working under protest. 

To the chagrin of my editors, who were under orders to keep me away from any decent assignments, I turned a press release rewrite about a San Jose landfill into a front-page story. It was the last piece I wrote for the Mercury—a page-one story with no one's name on it, which reportedly infuriated Ceppos. 

Occasionally, Pete Carey would call with a question or two. He wasn't having much luck corroborating Carlos Cabezas statements, he told me. He'd been trying to locate the Venezuelan CIA agent Cabezas said he worked with, Ivan Gómez, but couldn't. He'd tried directory assistance in Caracas and complained about how many Ivan Gómezes there were in the phone book. I felt saddened that my two-year investigation had come to this. 

I never heard another word from him about it, and none of the follow-up stories ever ran. On November 19, 1997, the Mercury News agreed to settle my arbitration but, amusingly, required me to sign a confidentiality agreement swearing that I would never disclose its terms. Nineteen years after becoming a reporter, I quit the newspaper business. 

Bob Parry, the AP reporter who first broke the Contra drug story in 1985, sent me a note of condolence. "Like you, I grew up in this business thinking our job really was to tell the public the truth," he wrote. "Maybe that was the mission at one time. Maybe there was that Awakening in the 1970s with Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the CIA scandals, etc. 

"But something very bad happened to the news media in the 1980s. Part of it was the 'public diplomacy' pressures from the outside. But part of it was the smug, snotty, sophomoric crowd that came to dominate the national media from the inside. These characters fell in love with their power to define reality, not their responsibility to uncover the facts. By the 1990s, the media had become the monster. 

"I wish it weren't so. All I ever wanted to do was report and write interesting stories—while getting paid for it. But that really isn't possible anymore and there's no use crying over it. 

"Hang in there," he concluded. "You're not alone."

EPILOGUE 

"The Damage that has been Done" 

A few days after my resignation was announced, the CIA leaked the conclusion of an internal investigation to the L.A. Times and the Mercury News. This exhaustive probe, according to unnamed sources, had absolved the CIA of any wrongdoing. 

Though the reporters had no idea what the report actually said, since it wasn't released, and none of the officials whispering in their ears was willing to have his name used, they dutifully reported that there was no evidence the CIA knew anything about the dealings of Danilo Blandón, Norwin Meneses, or Freeway Ricky Ross. I tried to imagine what the reaction would have been had those same reporters gone to their editors with unnamed sources citing unobtainable reports claiming the CIA was involved in drug trafficking. Journalistic standards can be wonderfully flexible when necessary. 

A month later, with the Washington press corps on a scavenger hunt for a dress stained with President Clinton's semen, the declassified version of the CIA report was officially released. It showed that the CIA had known exactly what Norwin Meneses was doing, and had directly intervened in the Frogman case to prevent the public from learning of the relationship between CIA assets and cocaine traffickers. Naturally, those details went largely unreported. But CIA director George Tenet was quoted extensively, lamenting that "the damage to the CIA's reputation may never be fully reversed. 

"The allegations made have left an indelible impression in many Americans' minds that the CIA was somehow responsible for the scourge of drugs in our inner cities." [Well maybe because it was true DC]

Still, it was hard to avoid that impression after CIA Inspector General Fred P. Hitz appeared before the House Intelligence Committee in March 1998 to update Congress on the progress of his continuing internal investigation. 

"Let me be frank about what we are finding," Hitz testified. "There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity." The lawmakers fidgeted uneasily. "Did any of these allegations involve trafficking in the United States?" asked Congressman Norman Dicks of Washington. "Yes," Hitz answered. Dicks flushed. 

And what, Hitz was asked, had been the CIA's legal responsibility when it learned of this? 

That issue, Hitz replied haltingly, had "a rather odd history. . .the period of 1982 to 1995 was one in which there was no official requirement to report on allegations of drug trafficking with respect to non-employees of the agency, and they were defined to include agents, assets, non-staff employees." There had been a secret agreement to that effect "hammered out" between the CIA and U.S. Attorney General William French Smith in 1982, he testified. 

A murmur coursed through the room as Hitz's admission sunk in. No wonder the U.S. government could blithely insist there was "no evidence" of Contra/CIA drug trafficking. For thirteen years—from the time Blandón and Menses began selling cocaine in L.A. for the Contras—the CIA and Justice had a gentleman's agreement to look the other way. 

In essence, the CIA wouldn't tell and the Justice Department wouldn't ask. According to the CIA's Inspector General, the agreement had its roots in something called Executive Order No. 12333, which Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1981, the same week he authorized the CIA's operations in Nicaragua. Reagan's order served as his Administration's rules on the conduct of U.S. intelligence agencies around the world. 

The new rules were the same as the Carter Administration's old rules, with one glaring exception: there was a difference in how crimes committed by spies were to be reported. There was to be a new procedure. For the first time, the CIA's Inspector General noted, the rules "required the head of an intelligence agency and the Attorney General to agree on crimes reporting procedure." In effect, the CIA now had veto power over anything the Justice Department might propose. 

In early 1982 CIA director William Casey and Attorney General William French Smith inked a formal Memorandum of Understanding that spelled out which spy crimes were to be reported to the Justice Department. It was same as the Carter Administration's policy, but again, with one or two interesting differences. 

First, crimes committed by people "acting for" an intelligence agency no longer needed to be reported to the Justice Department. Only card-carrying CIA officers were covered. Then, in case there were any doubts left, drug offenses were removed from the list of crimes the CIA was required to report. So, for example, if a cocaine dealer "acting for" the CIA was involved in drug trafficking, no one needed to know. 

The two CIA lawyers behind those rule changes insist they did not occur through incompetence or neglect; they were carefully and precisely crafted. Bernard Makowka, the CIA attorney who negotiated the changes, told the CIA Inspector General that "the issue of narcotics violations was thoroughly discussed between [the Department of Justice] and CIA. . .someone at DOJ became uncomfortable at the prospect of the Memorandum of Understanding not including any mention of narcotics." 

Daniel Silver, the CIA attorney who drafted the agreement, said the language "was thoroughly coordinated" with the Justice Department, which wasn't thrilled. "The negotiations over the Memorandum of Understanding involved the competing interests of DOJ and CIA," Silver explained. "DOJ's interest was to establish procedures while CIA's interest was to ensure that [it] protected CIA's national security equities." As is now clear, the CIA interest carried the day. 

So how did ignoring drug crimes by secret agents protect the CIA's national security "equities"? CIA lawyer Makowka explained: "CIA did not want to be involved in law enforcement issues." 

I.F. Magazine editor Robert Parry, who remains one of the few journalists exploring the CIA drug issue, believes the Casey-French agreement smacks of premeditation. It was signed just as the CIA was getting into both the Contra project and the conflict in Afghanistan, he notes, and it opened one very narrow legal loophole that effectively protected narcotics traffickers working on behalf of intelligence agencies. "That could only have been done for one purpose," Parry argues. "They were anticipating what eventually happened. They knew drugs were going to be sold." The CIA denies it. 

The admission that there had been a secret deal between the CIA and the Just Say No Administration to overlook Agency-related drug crimes elicited mostly yawns from the news media. The Washington Post stuck the story deep inside the paper, further back than they had buried the findings of the Kerry Committee's Senate investigation in the 1980s, which officially disclosed the Contras' drug trafficking. The Los Angeles Times printed nothing. 

A notable exception to this trend was the New York Times, which was leaked a few of the conclusions of the CIA's then-classified investigation into Contra drug dealing by Inspector General Fred Hitz. On July 17, 1998, it reported on its front page that the Agency had working relationships with dozens of suspected drug traffickers during the Nicaraguan conflict and that CIA higher-ups knew it. 

"The new study has found that the Agency's decision to keep those paid agents, or to continue dealing with them in some less formal relationship, was made by top officials at headquarters," the Times reported. 

But unlike most New York Times front page exclusives, the CIA story was not slavishly snapped up by the TV networks or national media. Once again, the Los Angeles Times found nothing newsworthy about it and the Washington Post concurred. The release three months later of Hitz's 400-page report—filled with horrifying examples of CIA collusion with assorted dopers, money launderers, and drug pilots—was treated as old news, despite the fact that most of the information had never been reported before. (Incredibly enough, the San Jose Mercury News decided that the report actually exonerated the CIA and proved that no top CIA officials were aware of Contra trafficking.) 

The lack of any visible public outrage to the CIA's confession that it had worked cheek by jowl with more than 50 suspected drug traffickers may have emboldened some of the CIA veterans of that era. A few months later, in December 1998, when former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega appealed for a reduction in his 40-year prison sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering in early 1999, he came armed with an influential witness: Donald Winters, the former chief of CIA operations in Panama. Winters told Noriega's judge that the convicted doper had performed valuable work for the U.S. government in Central America during the 1980s and should be given a break. 

Though federal prosecutors called him "an international drug trafficker and money launderer of unequaled proportions," Winters offered a much kinder description of the ex-strongman's work. "Noriega brokered deals with South American leaders, acted as a liaison to Cuba's Fidel Castro, provided details on guerrilla and terrorist activities, and even gave the former Shah of Iran a safe haven. There were specific instances when the U.S. government worked through General Noriega. These were major, major considerations," Winters insisted. 

The former U.S. Ambassador to Panama, Arthur Davis, testified that Noriega did "a lot of good work, not just for the United States but for the people of Panama." Noriega's judge apparently agreed. In March 1999 his jail sentence was slashed from 40 years to 10 years, making eligible for parole in less than a year. No one explained why, if Noriega had been such a great and valuable friend to the U.S. government, it had been necessary to invade his country and haul him to the United States in chains, killing scores of American soldiers and Panamanian citizens in the process. 

Two weeks later, civil rights lawyers in Oakland and Los Angeles filed a class action suit against the CIA and the Department of Justice, charging that the secret 1982 agreement between CIA director William Casey and Attorney General William French Smith was illegal and led "to policies protecting, rather than stopping, drug trafficking in crack cocaine." Filed on behalf of the residents of a half-dozen inner-city neighborhoods ravaged by crack, the lawsuit argued that the agreement "interfered with law enforcement's efforts to thwart the importation of crack cocaine." As a result, the plaintiffs declared, their neighborhoods gradually became "unlivable. . .dangerous, impoverished, and inadequately supported by social services." Legal experts gave the suit little chance of success. As the Christic Institute found out in 1986 when it brought its historic civil racketeering case against the CIA operatives running the Contra war in Costa Rica, the federal courts can be a brutal arena in which to fight U.S. government policy. 

One of the questions I have been asked many times since this story broke is this: Now that the facts are out there, what can we do? My answer, depressing and cynical as it may be, is always the same. Not much. Not now. And certainly not until the American public and its Congressional representatives regain control of the CIA and shred the curtain of secrecy that keeps us from discovering these crimes of state until it is too late. 

Perhaps when the government officials who presided over these outrages are safely in their crypts, and their apologists and cheerleaders are buried with them, future historians can finally call these men to account for the miseries they caused. Even if that's all that ever happens, it will be fitting and just, because the favorable judgment of history is ultimately what they craved.

Notes on Sources
CAST OF CHARACTERS
here...
https://ia802805.us.archive.org/31/items/GaryWebbDarkAlliance1999/Gary%20Webb%20-%20Dark%20Alliance%20-%201999.pdf