Try calling Gary Webb these days at the San Jose Mercury News, and you're in for a surprise. After suffering close to a year's worth of ridicule from his mainstream colleagues for his three-part series "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion" (Aug. 18-20, 1996), Webb's paper in early June pulled him from the story he'd been investigating for two years, and transferred him to its bureau in Cupertino, California. There, a recorded voice answers your call with the greeting: "You have reached the San Jose Mercury News West Bureau editorial office and the home of the Community Focus Calendar, birth announcements and Lend-a-Hand Volunteer Column. No one is available to take your call right now." We wonder why Oliver North's career hasn't taken so ignominious a turn.
That's because Webb's series broke one of the ten commandments of respectable journalism: he accumulated a ton of evidence from which he drew the reasonable if unflattering conclusion that the U.S. Government routinely engages in activities of a kind that it would condemn, were an enemy government to engage in them. In doing so, his series challenged the official history of U.S. interventions in Central America since the overthrow of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza by the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1979. Far more important, Webb's series offered an alternative history for some of the drug-related "blowback" from the U.S.-sponsored Contra war, a sponsorship that in Webb's words "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 [and that] helped spark a crack explosion in urban America..." (San Jose Mercury News, Aug. 18, 1996).
We were able to catch up with Webb in June for an interview. He explained to us that his "union contract with the Mercury News gives the paper full control over [his] writing outside the paper," and that since he believes the paper "will look for any excuse to fire [him,]" he is "not doing outside writing while at the paper." But, he graciously added, he "would be happy to answer some questions."
(Note that when Webb uses the words "we" and "our," he's referring both to himself and to his colleague Georg Hodel, a Managua-based reporter who in Webb's own words "made a major contribution to this investigation, especially in regards to the Central American aspects of it.")
CMW: Today, what do you believe were the most important findings of the investigation that culminated in your series, "Dark Alliance?"
Gary Webb: The most important thing our research found was that the crack market in South Central L.A.-the nation's first and biggest-was begun and supplied for almost a decade by a drug ring connected to the Nicaraguan Contras, and that these traffickers were in direct contact with CIA agents before and after they started selling cocaine in L.A.
CMW: Do you believe that your series had any serious flaws?
Webb: There were no major flaws in the reporting or the writing. To my knowledge, there isn't a single significant factual error in the entire series, as Jerry Ceppos acknowledged last October in a memo to the staff. Some aspects of the story were not explained as fully as I would have liked, but that wasn't my choice. Because of space limitations imposed by my editors, what was in the paper was the most I was allowed to write. Still, what appeared was accurate. My editors deemed the stories detailed enough for their liking and found them fully substantiated-otherwise, they wouldn't have printed them in the first place.
The biggest problem with the series, as I see it now, is that it wasn't long enough. We didn't provide enough background on the earlier investigations of Contra cocaine trafficking, the earlier efforts by other investigative reporters to expose this drug pipeline. Nor did we explain the CIA's history of involvement-both benign and malign-with drug traffickers. That would have helped the public understand that this seemingly bizarre relationship really wasn't so bizarre after all. As we have discovered since, the series didn't go far enough in the area of U.S. government knowledge of these traffickers and their activities. (See excerpts from Kerry subcommittee report, page 6.)
CMW: On May 11, San Jose Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos took the unprecedented step of publishing a column under his own byline that charged "Dark Alliance" with failing to meet the newspaper's "standards" of good journalism. Later on, Ceppos noted that "reporter Gary Webb, who wrote the series, disagrees with my conclusions." What, exactly, are your strongest objections to Ceppos' charges?
Webb: My main objection to Ceppos' column is that even if you accept his complaints as valid, which I don't, they don't change the thrust of what I wrote. In fact, if you read his column carefully, he acknowledges that the story was right and that there was solid evidence to support the main finding: that the Contras were selling dope to the gangs. He cites no factual errors. No one was misquoted. Nothing was invented, plagiarized, fabricated or misinterpreted. The documents we cited exist, and we posted them on the Internet so everyone could see them and judge the context for themselves.
What he ends up objecting to are mostly "suggestions" and "inferences," omissions and some unspecified "imprecise language." When one is reduced to criticizing a story for what people might have inferred from it-rather than for what it actually stated-it's a good indication of the level of desperation involved.
CMW: In his May 11 column, Ceppos detailed a number of specific charges as to why he thought your "series was less clear-cut than the way it was presented."
First, Ceppos complained that the series failed to note the fact that the Nicaraguan expatriate Danilo Blandon had testified in the trial of "Freeway" Ricky Ross that in 1982, he, Blandon, stopped sending cocaine profits to the Contras.
Webb: The charge is not only insignificant; the allegedly "important evidence" that was cut out is almost certainly false. Yes, Blandon testified under oath that he stopped selling cocaine for the Contras in 1982. He also testified under oath-at the same trialhe stopped selling the cocaine in 1983. Two years earlier he'd told a federal grand jury, again under oath, that he stopped in 1983. The day before the trial, the U.S. Attorney who put Blandon on the witness stand said in court that he stopped in 1984.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the L.A. County Sheriff's Office and the Bell Police Department all had information from participants in the drug operation that Blandon was selling coke for the Contras as late as August 1986. More importantly, Blandon told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he gave drug money to Contra commander Eden Pastora in 1985, along with a couple pickup trucks and the key to his house in San Jose, Costa Rica. Blandon's 1983 claim was reported in the original text of the series, as well as some of the contradictory evidence. Those paragraphs were cut to save space, as Ceppos acknowledges. To me it is quite telling that the prime example of "important evidence" that wasn't in the series was a falsehood that was cut by my editors.
CMW: Ceppos' second charge is that the series failed to stress that its numbers for the "millions in profits" that it reported were sent to the Contras were at best estimates, not hard data.
Webb: Guilty as charged. We should have made it clearer what the "millions" language was based upon. I myself thought it was fairly obvious that the number was an estimate, since there was no specific figure attached to it. But maybe that's just me. I also think this is a sin newspapers commit every day, in far more callous fashion. How many times have you read a story reporting "$X million worth of drugs seized"? And how many times have those stories disclosed that the number, an extrapolation based on an unknown formula, was plucked from a police press release and no independent attempt was made to verify its accuracy before passing it along to readers as a fact? I'll answer that: Never. My estimate, on the other hand, was based on court testimony, court records, and interviews with cocaine dealers.
CMW: Ceppos states that "Another clear implication of our series was that the Blandon-Ross drug connection played the critical role in the crack explosion in urban America"-an implication that Ceppos now calls an "oversimplification."
Webb: Baloney. The series never said this drug ring played "the critical role" in the nationwide crack epidemic. The reason is that there never was a "nationwide" crack "epidemic," as those terms are generally understood. It was an invention of the media. Widespread crack use began in L.A. in 1982-83, in Miami in 1984, and in much of the rest of the country between 1986 to 1989. When the national media finally woke up to the story in the spring and summer of 1986, crack markets were popping up all over the place.
But since neither the press, the Congress nor the DEA could admit that they'd been snoozing for four years, crack was declared to be a sudden tidal wave that had come out of nowhere and spread instantaneously from coast-to-coast-appearing like Athena, full-grown from the brow of Zeus. The fact that supposedly knowledgeable people still believe this nonsense is not surprising; the Washington Post trotted out this scenario to "prove" that one drug ring couldn't have had the impact that we, allegedly, had attributed to it.
What I wrote was that this Contra drug ring played a critical role in the spread of crack from South Central L.A. to other black neighborhoods nationwide, since the dope was being sold mainly to the L.A. gangs. As far as Ceppos' "oversimplification" charge goes, if you want to find the root of a crack market, you find the market's source of cocaine powder. If there's no powder, there's no crack. Simple as that.
CMW: Finally, to quote Ceppos' exact words: "Finally, though we [i.e., the series] never said the CIA knew of, or was involved in, this Contra funding effort, we strongly implied CIA knowledge....I feel that we did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship."
Webb: This is an admission to something that has never been denied, at least not by me. The series did much more than "strongly imply" CIA knowledge of these traffickers and their activities. I quoted people, by name, who came right out and said it. We quoted from an FBI cable to that effect. We pointed out that a CIA agent gave these traffickers their fundraising orders and produced a picture of the head of the drug ring meeting with another CIA agent during the time these drugs were being sold. But the series never suggested "high level" CIA knowledge, as Ceppos disingenuously claims.
CMW: You told the New York Times (May 13, 1997) that your newspaper "has been sitting on a series of follow-up stories," but has yet to publish them.
Webb: Yeah. I was told directly by Ceppos that the paper would not print the follow ups, but would assign someone else to follow up on some angles. We'll see.
CMW: University of Wisconsin professor Alfred McCoy always cautions that "it's important not to run down the track like the blind dog facing the hare of intentionality: Did the CIA know? Can we actually track it to Langley? That's a false issue," he contends. "The real issue is the consequences of these operations." Well, what were the real consequences?
Webb: This drug ring certainly increased the flow of drugs to South Central Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, San Jose, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Houston and San Diego. And, as I wrote, the money the street gangs made from selling this ring's product allowed the gangs to expand and arm themselves with high-powered weapons. The consequences of that are mind-boggling.
CMW: When your series began to receive national attention last September, CMW was struck by how vehemently the mainstream media turned against it, after a very brief honeymoon.
Webb: Jesse Jackson said my series was dangerous because it challenged the moral authority of the government. Preserving the myths of the drug war-in which the media has played a central and often shameful role-was more important to most news outlets than preserving the myths of the Contra war, I think. Finally, this series caught the CIA right as it was struggling to justify its continued existence. And as we have seen, the CIA has many important defenders.
CMW: What have the media's broadly negative reactions to the series taught you?
Webb: The media, with few exceptions, show less and less interest in helping people understand their world all the time. Foreign news is almost non-existent in most daily papers. Stories keep getting shorter. Context and perspective disappear entirely so that it appears to most readers that events happen in a vacuum. But we sure get exhaustive coverage of sex scandals, celebrity crime and phony outrages like outing the fatcats who slept in the Lincoln bedroom.
CMW: Has the flak that you've had to suffer because of your series turned you into a pariah among your colleagues?
Webb: No. Not really. My friends are still friends. And I've never been much of a joiner. I belong to no journalism organizations, subscribe to no professional journals and, until this year, hadn't been to a journalism convention in a long time. Frankly, talking and reading about journalism never interested me half as much as doing it.
CMW: Your predicament calls to mind the case of Raymond Bonner, who the New York Times yanked from Central America in the early 1980s because of the backlash that it was suffering over Bonner's reports on the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, then a terror state that was heavily supported by the U.S. Government. Where has the backlash against your series left your work today?
Webb: I think that's something that remains to be seen. History has a way of sorting out these little disputes.
Gary Webb tells us that the writing of "Dark Alliance" would not have been possible without the investigations of his partner in Nicaragua, Georg Hodel, and Hodel's wife, attorney Carmen Maria. But, Webb reports, both Georg and Carmen have been receiving death threats fairly regularly since Jerry Ceppos' column first appeared in the Mercury News in mid-May. Supporters of the "Dark Alliance" investigation, as well as of freedom of speech around the world, are trying to scrape together enough money to get Georg and Carmen safely out of Nicaragua. A fund for this purpose has been established in Washington by Dick Gregory and Joe Madison. Proceeds will be used not only to protect Georg and Carmen, but to continue their investigation. For more information, write the C3 Research Fund at P.O. Box 14185, Washington, D.C. 20044.
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