Source: The Progressive, August 1997,
Contact: www.progressive.org

Drugs, CIA, Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

	To subscribe to I.F. or to contact the Media Consortium, write Robert
Parry at 2200 Wilson Blvd., Suite 102231, Arlington, VA 22201.

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