Pubdate: Sun, 05 Oct 2014
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2014 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: David Carr

RESURRECTING A DISGRACED REPORTER

'Kill the Messenger' Recalls a Reporter Wrongly Disgraced

If someone told you today that there was strong evidence that the 
Central Intelligence Agency once turned a blind eye to accusations of 
drug dealing by operatives it worked with, it might ring some 
distant, skeptical bell. Did that really happen?

That really happened. As part of their insurgency against the 
Sandinista government in Nicaragua, some of the C.I.A.-backed contras 
made money through drug smuggling, transgressions noted in a 
little-noticed 1988 Senate subcommittee report.

Gary Webb, a journalist at The San Jose Mercury News, thought it was 
a far-fetched story to begin with, but in 1995 and 1996, he dug in 
and produced a deeply reported and deeply flawed three-part series 
called "Dark Alliance."

That groundbreaking series was among the first to blow up on the 
nascent web, and he was initially celebrated, then investigated and 
finally discredited. Pushed out of journalism in disgrace, he 
committed suicide in 2004. "Kill the Messenger," a movie starring 
Jeremy Renner due Oct. 10, examines how much of the story he told was 
true and what happened after he wrote it. "Kill the Messenger" 
decidedly remains in Mr. Webb's corner, perhaps because most of the 
rest of the world was against him while he was alive. Rival 
newspapers blew holes in his story, government officials derided him 
as a nut case and his own newspaper, after initially basking in the 
scoop, threw him under a bus. Mr. Webb was open to attack in part 
because of the lurid presentation of the story and his willingness to 
draw causality based on very thin sourcing and evidence. He wrote 
past what he knew, but the movie suggests that he told a truth others 
were unwilling to. Sometimes, when David takes on Goliath, David is 
the one who ends up getting defeated.

"There were flaws in his writing and flaws in his life," Mr. Renner, 
who plays Webb in the film, said in a phone interview. "But that 
doesn't mean he was wrong, and it certainly doesn't mean he deserved 
what he got."

The film argues that the same reflexes in the newspaper business that 
hold others to account can become just as merciless when the guns are 
pointed inside the corral. Big news organization like The Los Angeles 
Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post tore the arms and 
legs off his work. Despite suggestions that their zeal was driven by 
professional jealousy, some of the journalists who re-reported the 
story said they had little choice, given the deep flaws. Tim Golden 
in The New York Times and others wrote that Mr. Webb overestimated 
his subjects' ties to the contras as well as the amount of drugs sold 
and money that actually went to finance the war in Nicaragua.

But Mr. Webb had many supporters who suggested that he was right in 
the main. In retrospect, his broader suggestion that the C.I.A. knew 
or should have known that some of its allies were accused of being in 
the drug business remains unchallenged. The government's casting of a 
blind eye while also fighting a war on drugs remains a shadowy part 
of American history. Continue reading the main story

Mr. Webb eventually wrote his own book, "Dark Alliance: The C.I.A., 
The Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion," and Nick Schou, a 
journalist who covered significant parts of Webb's downfall, wrote 
"Kill the Messenger: How the C.I.A.'s Crack Cocaine Controversy 
Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb." Both books deeply inform the movie, 
making the argument that journalism more or less ate itself while the 
government mostly skipped away with its secret doings intact.

Mr. Webb was a talented investigative reporter who concentrated on 
local corruption when he worked at The Cleveland Plain Dealer and 
then The San Jose Mercury News. When he was first approached about 
C.I.A. duplicity, he was deeply skeptical. But when the tipster, the 
girlfriend of a drug dealer on trial, said her boyfriend had ties to 
the C.I.A., she had enough evidence to convince him to read that 1988 
report from a special Senate subcommittee documenting instances in 
which drug dealing by crucial allies, including some in Nicaragua, 
was tolerated in the name of national security. Major news outlets 
gave scant attention to the report.

Mr. Webb was not the first journalist to come across what seemed more 
like an airport thriller novel. Way back in December 1985, The 
Associated Press reported that three contra groups had "engaged in 
cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against 
Nicaragua." In 1986, The San Francisco Examiner ran a large expose 
covering similar terrain. Again, major news outlets mostly gave the 
issue a pass.

It was only when Mr. Webb, writing 10 years later, tried to tie 
cocaine imports from people connected to the contras to the domestic 
crisis of crack cocaine in large cities, particularly Los Angeles, 
that the story took off. Mr. Webb zeroed in on "Freeway" Ricky Ross, 
a gang-affiliated drug boss in Los Angeles, who flooded streets with 
crack. He then drew a line from Mr. Ross to the C.I.A.-backed 
contras, writing, "The cash Ross paid for the cocaine, court records 
show, was then used to buy weapons and equipment for a guerrilla army 
named the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense," or the FDN, one of 
several contra groups.

The headline, graphic and summary language of "Dark Alliance" was 
lurid and overheated, showing a photo of a crack-pipe smoker embedded 
in the seal of the C.I.A. The three-part series would, the summary 
promised, reveal, among other things, how "a drug network 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."

But if the series was oversold, it certainly delivered on the promise 
of what the web could do for journalism. A pioneering effort in 
transparency, the report was accompanied by a digital library of 
source documents, a timeline of events and a list of characters, 
among other web-only features that have now become commonplace. It 
was, by most accounts, the first newspaper series to go viral before 
there were even words to describe the phenomenon.

At first, major news outlets shrugged. But leaders of the drug-ridden 
communities did not, drawing a line that Mr. Webb had not by 
suggesting that the C.I.A. had deliberately set out to addict urban 
black populations.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, led protests by 
the Congressional Black Caucus, and the comedian Dick Gregory was 
arrested after trying to put crime tape at the entrance to the C.I.A. 
headquarters.

But Mr. Webb's victory lap was short lived, as other news 
organizations responded with significant stories, and his editors at 
The Mercury News backed away slowly, then all at once. The paper 
walked back the findings in a 1997 letter to readers signed by the 
executive editor at the time, Jerry Ceppos. "I feel that we did not 
have proof that top C.I.A. officials knew of the relationship" 
between members of a drug ring and contra leaders paid by the C.I.A., 
he wrote, adding that the series "erroneously implied" that the 
connection between Mr. Ross and Nicaraguan traffickers "was the 
pivotal force in the crack epidemic in the United States."

In a phone call, Mr. Ceppos said good news organizations should hold 
themselves accountable to the same degree they do others. "We 
re-reported the series, and I don't know of too many publications 
that have done that," he said. "We couldn't support some of the 
statements that had been made. It was our re-reporting that 
influenced me the most."

He added that he had no regrets about that open letter to Mercury readers.

"I would do exactly the same thing 18 years later that I did then, 
and that is to say that I think we overreached," he said.

Peter Landesman, an investigative journalist who wrote the 
screenplay, was struck by the reflex to go after Mr. Webb.

"Planeloads of weapons were sent south from the U.S., and everyone 
knows that those planes didn't come back empty, but the C.I.A. made 
sure that they never knew for sure what was in those planes," he 
said. "But instead of going after that, they went after Webb, who 
didn't really know what he had gotten into or where he was. The most 
surprising thing in doing the work to write this movie is how easy it 
was to destroy Gary Webb."

Even at the time, some thought the backlash against Mr. Webb was misplaced.

Geneva Overholser, then the ombudsman of The Washington Post, wrote 
that the newspaper "showed more passion for sniffing out the flaws in 
San Jose's answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves."

Mr. Golden, who had an extensive background covering the C.I.A. and 
Central America, said the hand that struck Mr. Webb was mostly his own.

"Webb made some big allegations that he didn't back up, and then the 
story just exploded, especially in California," he said in an email. 
"You can find some fault with the follow-up stories, but mostly what 
they did was to show what Webb got wrong."

The director of "Kill the Messenger," Michael Cuesta, has also 
directed several episodes of "Homeland" and knows the C.I.A. has many 
faces. He said he worked to shrink a sprawling story with global 
dimensions by showing how it landed on one man.

"There were many things that went wrong," he added, "the packaging of 
the story, how it was received and grew, the fact that he was not 
backed up by his editors. But I was struck by the fact that 
journalism, which had been the source of his purpose, his bliss, 
turned on him. It's tragic."

While Mr. Webb died alone, after two self-inflicted gunshots, he 
lived long enough to know that he did not make the whole thing up.

In 1998, Frederick P. Hitz, the C.I.A. inspector general, testified 
before the House Intelligence Committee that after looking into the 
matter at length, he believed the C.I.A. was a bystander - or worse - 
in the war on drugs.

"Let me be frank about what we are finding," he said. "There are 
instances where C.I.A. 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, or take action to resolve the allegations."

However dark or extensive, the alliance Mr. Webb wrote about was a real one.

Mikaela Lefrak contributed reporting.
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