Source: Anderson Valley Advertiser (CA)
Contact:  Anderson Valley Advertiser
Pubdate: 14 Oct 1998
Fax: 707-895-3355
Author: Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn

NEW YORK TIMES IN EPIC CLIMB-DOWN: CIA: WE KNEW ALL ALONG

The New York Times has taken the first step in what should by rights be one
of the steepest climb-downs in journalistic history. We allude to a story
by the Slut of Langley, James Risen, which appeared on page five of the
NYT, on October 10. The story, headed "CIA Said to Ignore Charges of Contra
Drug Dealing in `80s," must have been an unappetizing one for Risen to
write, since it forced him to eat rib-sticking amounts of crow.

The CIA, Risen wrote, "repeatedly ignored or failed to investigate
allegations of drug trafficking by the anti-Sandinista rebels in the
1980s." Risen went on to report that according to the long-awaited second
volume of CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz's investigation the CIA " had
concealed both from Congress and other government agencies its knowledge
that the Contras had from the very beginning decided to smuggle drugs to
support its operations."

Probably out of embarrassment Risen postponed till his fourteenth paragraph
the information from Hitz's explosive report that should rightly have been
the lead to a story that should rightly have been on the front page: "In
September, 1982, as a small group of rebels was being formed from former
soldiers in the National Guard of the deposed Nicaraguan dictator,
Anastasio Somoza Debayle, a CIA informant reported that the leadership of
the fledgling group had decided to smuggle drugs to the United States to
support its operation."

Thus does Risen put the lie to all past reports on this topic in the New
York Times and his own previous story in the Los Angeles Times parroting
CIA and Justice Department press releases to the effect that vigorous
internal investigations had entirely exonerated the Agency. In that single
paragraph just quoted we have four momentous confessions by the CIA's own
Inspector General. One: the Contras were involved in drug running from the
very start, just as Gary Webb had described it in his San Jose Mercury News
series. Two: the CIA knew the Contras were smuggling drugs into the US in
order to raise money. Three: this was a decision not made by profiteers on
the fringe of the Contras, but by the leadership. Four: the CIA, even
before it got a waiver from the Justice Department, was concealing its
knowledge from the Congress and from other US government agencies such as
the DEA and the FBI. Remember also that the Contra leadership was
hand-picked by the CIA, both in the form of its civilian head, Adolfo
Calero, and of its military director, Enrique Bermudez.

The fact that the New York Times chose to run this story on the Saturday of
a three-day holiday, on and inside page suggests considerable embarrassment
on the part of a newspaper that has had a long history of attacks on those
who have charged CIA complicity in Contra drug smuggling, from Senator John
Kerry, to Gary Webb, to our book Whiteout, The CIA, Drugs , and the Press.

>From 1986 to 1988 Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts probed allegations
about Contra drug running and CIA complicity in same, and issued a
1000-page report. Even while the hearings were under way, the New York
Times belittled his investigation in a three-part series by its reporter
Kenneth Schneider, who attacked Kerry for relying on the testimony of
Contra pilots, many of them in prison. Some months after this series was
published, Schneider was asked by the weekly paper In These Times why he
had taken that approach. Schneider replied that the charges were so
explosive that they could "shatter the Republic. I think it's so damaging,
the implications are so extraordinary, that for us to run the story, it hd
better be based on the most solid evidence we could amass."

So now, over a decade later, the "explosive" and the "extraordinary"
charges are confirmed by the CIA's own Inspector General and the story ends
up on an inside page on Saturday.

The New York Times's vilification of Gary Webb was obsessive and even in
the midst of his October 10 climb-down Risen cannot resist another stab at
the man. Two weeks earlier the NYT Book Review featured an article on
Whiteout and Webb's book Dark Alliance. The author was James Adams, a
Washington-based hack who used to eke out a twilit existence as
correspondent for the Murdoch-owned London Sunday Times before transferring
from that lowly billet to the ignominious function of relaying Agency
handouts and news droppings from Congressional Intelligence committees for
UPI.

Adams leveled two charges against Whiteout, to the effect that there was no
evidence that any Contras were running drugs, and that our book could not
be taken seriously because we had not solicited a confession of guilt from
the Agency. In fact, as long ago as 1985, reporters accumulated and
published evidence of Contra drug running. Among these reporters were Bob
Parry and Brian Barger of the Associated Press, and Leslie Cockburn, in
documentaries for CBS. So far as Agency confessions are concerned,
Whiteout, completed in late June and published at the start of September,
contained precisely the main thrust of the Inspector General's conclusions
in the second volume, now discussed by Risen. Hitz anticipated this written
in his verbal testimony to Congress in May, when he acknowledged the
Agency's knowledge of Contra/drug links and also disclosed that in 1982 CIA
director William Casey had gotten a waiver from Reagan's attorney general,
William French Smith, allowing the CIA to keep secret from other government
agencies its knowledge of drug trafficking by its assets, contractors and
other Contra figures.

Unlike the Washington Post, the New York Times never reported Hitz's
sensational March, 1998, testimony, and in his October 10 story Risen
disingenuously does not mention the 1982 waiver Hitz disclosed at that
time. The omission has the effect of implying that the Agency was somehow
acting in a "rogue" capacity, whereas the 1982 waiver shows clearly that
the Reagan presidency was four-square behind the whole strategy of
concealment of what the Agency was up to. As we wrote on the opening page
of Whiteout: "Whether it was Truman meddling in China, which created
Burmese opium kings; or the Kennedy brothers' obsession with killing Fidel
Castro; or Nixon's command for `more assassinations' in Vietnam, the CIA
has always been the obedient executor of the will of the US government,
starting with the White House."

For readers of the New York Times in its home port, the Newspaper's
climb-down was not nearly as drastic as in the edition distributed through
the rest of the country. The edition available in New York City did not
have the fourteenth paragraph (quoted above) nor indeed five other
concluding paragraphs. Why? A Times editor simply chopped them off to allow
space for a large Bloomingdale's ad for a rug sale, thus confirming the
truth of A. J. Leibling's observation years ago that the news diet of New
Yorkers depends entirely on a bunch of dry goods merchants. The full story
was also available on the New York Times's web site, but not on the
Lexis-Nexis database where it ends at paragraph 13, plus a bland and
uninformative final three-line resume of the missing material. Lexis-Nexis
is where most people looking for the Risen Story will go. 
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Checked-by: Mike Gogulski