Moments after the story hit the wires that Gary Webb had been
found dead of an apparent suicide, the radical left began hinting
that the former San Jose Mercury News reporter who broke
the Nicaraguan Contra-Crack Connection story had met with a more
sinister fate. Alex Walker, of the San Francisco Bay Area
Independent Media Center, got the conspiracy ball rolling with the
help of single quotation marks and a bit of idyllic prose:
They are calling it a ‘suicide.’ What an amazing
‘coincidence’ that this happens just when Our Dear Great Dumb
‘Intelligence Community’ is under scrutiny again. Also note that in
recent years Mr. Webb did some great work exposing corruption in
the administration of California Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. In
other words, Webb had a lot of “bipartisan” enemies…it’s funny
how so many people who have crossed swords with the goddamn CIA,
including a couple of presidents, end up disgraced or
dead.
Elsewhere on the Web we find:
Uh oh, another “suicide”. Investigative journalist Gary
Webb joins artist Mark Lombardi, J.H. Hatfield (author of
“Fortunate Son”), and Danny Casolaro as the fourth ‘suicide’ by a
researcher who had a detailed understanding of the structure and
function of the Bush Crime Family.
Conspiracy theories aside, Gary Webb’s spectacular fall was the
stuff of Greek tragedy, and much like Oedipus and Antigone it was
hubris that brought about his doom. That and an inability to
discern truth from fantasy.
In 1990, Gary Webb was one of a team of Mercury News
reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Loma
Prieta earthquake. (Not bad for a guy who hadn’t finished
journalism school.) Six year’s later Webb was again making
headlines, this time with a three-part series focused on two
Nicaraguans who claimed they sold drugs to LA’s biggest dope dealer
during the 1980s to raise money for the CIA-backed contras. The
series, “Dark Alliances,” began:
For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco 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 US Central Intelligence
Agency.
Webb’s series alleged that the CIA was to blame for introducing
crack cocaine into American cities and, by extension, everything
from gang wars to crack babies. Some Americans, particularly
liberals and minorities, saw Webb’s reportage as confirmation of
their suspicion of a “CIA-driven genocide of black Americans.”
The only problem was that Webb’s facts were either wrong or
completely insupportable. Three months after the series appeared
the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department conducted its own
investigation, but found no evidence of a connection between the
CIA and Southern California drug traffickers. The L.A.
Times also looked into the story, and after reviewing court
documents and conducting more than 100 interviews in San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Washington and Managua, concluded that the “evidence
failed to support any of [Webb’s] allegations.” Soon other
reporters from the Washington Post and the New York
Times found holes in Webb’s story big enough to drive a convoy
of newspaper trucks through. Both the Post and
Times concluded that Webb had no basis for suggesting that
contra drug dealers had targeted black communities, or that the CIA
was in anyway involved in the introduction of crack cocaine into
the U.S.
Ultimately the Mercury News was obliged to run an
embarrassing retraction. “We oversimplified the complex issue of
how the crack epidemic in America grew,” wrote editor Jerry Ceppos.
“I believe that we fell short at every step of our process — in
the writing, editing and production of our work.”
Meanwhile as everyone else was disavowing Webb’s “reporting,”
Sen. John Kerry, chair of a subcommittee investigating the charges,
spoke for those who supported the status quo in Central America
when he said, “There is no question in my mind that people
affiliated with, or on the payroll of the CIA, were involved in
drug trafficking while involved in support of the Contras, but it
is also important to note that we never found any evidence to
suggest that these traffickers ever targeted any one geographic
area or population group.” Most Americans, however, tended to agree
with Kerry’s then opponent in the Massachusetts senate race Gov.
William Weld who said it was “nutty” to think that the CIA would
want to pollute America with cocaine.
As Webb’s story (and career) rapidly fell apart he began to grow
paranoid, suspecting that the CIA had gotten to the Mercury News
management. Shortly after his series was discredited Webb was
transferred to a suburban bureau. Before the year was out he quit
the paper maintaining that he was “not the first reporter to go
after the CIA and lose his job.”
After leaving the Mercury News Webb held various posts
in state government while writing his 1999 book Dark Alliance:
The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.
Miami Herald reporter Glenn Garvin, reviewing the book for
the libertarian magazine Reason, said “journalism doesn’t
get much worse than Dark Alliance.” The book reads more
like a script for an episode of the X-Files than
Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative reporting. Even a ravenous
Michael Moore wouldn’t swallow half the bilge in Webb’s book. One
fairly typical chapter, Garvin says, explains how “then-Vice
President George Bush had flown down to Colombia to strike a
bargain with the Medellin cocaine cartel. The agreement was that
the cartel could fly as much cocaine as it wanted into U.S.
military bases as long as it sold guns to the contras.” In the end,
“Webb’s evidence that the contras were selling cocaine is almost
entirely drawn from the claims of a few Nicaraguan traffickers
facing long jail sentences who were using the CIA-made-me-do-it
defense.”
As the '90s came to an end, Webb again ran into trouble while
working for a California legislative committee. The Los Angeles
Times noted that in 1998, Webb “wrote a report accusing the
California Highway Patrol of unofficially condoning and even
encouraging racial profiling in its drug interdiction program.
Legislative officials released the report in 1999, but cautioned
that it was based mainly on assumptions and anecdotes.”
For a while Gary Webb was a regular on San Francisco’s radical
red speaker circuit, playing the role of journalistic martyr. Then
he was pretty much forgotten. His life continued to unravel as he
and his wife Susan Bell divorced, then, according to the AP, he was
fired from his job in the California Assembly Speaker’s Office for
not showing up for work. Earlier this month movers found a note on
Webb’s apartment door asking them to call 9-1-1. The coroner
concluded that he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the
head.
In his book Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the
Contras, Glenn Garvin writes that during the Carter
Administration some contras almost certainly did sell drugs (and
rob banks and steal cars and kidnap rich kids) and some of that
cash went to finance their war with the Sandinistas. Every rebel
group in the twentieth century, he notes, has behaved similarly.
Yet once the U.S. began funding the contras, not only was drug
trafficking unnecessary, but it was expressly forbidden by contra
leaders as well as Washington. One would like to believe the CIA
knew about every Nicaraguan pilot based on the southern front who
stashed a kilo of coke aboard his prop plane bound for North
America, but as we learned from 9/11, the agency hasn’t always been
as omniscient as some of us would like. Agents make mistakes. If
Gary Webb taught us anything it is that, apparently, so do
Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporters.
