STILL ON TRAIL OF CIA LINKS TO DRUG-RUNNERS
GARY WEBB'S 1996 NEWSPAPER SERIES CAUSED A FUROR - AND A BACKLASH.
HIS NEW BOOK EXPANDS ON HIS TALE OF CONTRAS AND CRACK.
[Philadelphia Inquirer Tuesday, July 07, 1998]
WASHINGTON --
Stories linking the Central Intelligence Agency to international drug trafficking have been swirling about like nasty squalls for over 30 years. Burma, Laos, Cuba, Central America, Afghanistan - wherever covert actions have been launched, stories of illicit narcotics transactions seem to follow.
Academics and journalists examining these reports say they have often run into trouble, even harassment, at the hands of the agency. But mostly their work has been greeted with a combination of indifference and scorn by the press and public in this country.
In 1996, however, a newspaper's account tying the CIA and drug-dealing Nicaraguan contras to the rise of the crack epidemic in South Central Los Angeles generated a startling public outcry, launching the journalist who wrote the stories on a media roller-coaster ride that took him from chatroom hero to newsroom outcast.
Gary Webb, the much-honored San Jose Mercury News reporter who came under withering attack in the national press for his work, ultimately paid for the effort and attendant furor with his job. Now he has written a book, Dark Alliance (Seven Stories Press), greatly expanding on the original newspaper series, and the debate he sparked has been rekindled - on the airwaves, at crowded appearances he is making across the country, in African American neighborhoods and on the Internet.
A standing-room only crowd of over 500 hundred jammed a labor meeting hall in midtown Manhattan for a hastily arranged Webb appearance last month. Twice as many showed up for an appearance at a school in Berkeley. A bookstore off Dupont Circle here saw the crowd spilling out onto the sidewalks for an appearance a few weeks ago. Everywhere he has appeared, his publisher says, the response is the same: Halls are packed; debate is sharp. (Webb will appear in Philadelphia on Aug. 12 at 7 p.m. at Robin's
Bookstore, 108 S. 13th St.)
Did the CIA and its clandestine army of Nicaraguan contras have a hand in spreading crack in this country, directly or indirectly spurring its use in inner-city Los Angeles and beyond? Did the contras use drugs to raise cash for their cause and for their own pockets? Did the CIA, at a minimum, simply look the other way when contra clients engaged in illicit trafficking, rather than disrupt anti-Sandinista operations, which the administration of President Ronald Reagan considered a top priority?
Webb does not present readers with an iron-gray smoking gun in response to such questions. But in Dark Alliance, he has stitched together masses of suggestive detail.
``I get several calls a week from people all over the country, from news media, particularly black radio, asking about it, what's going on, what's happening with Gary Webb's story,'' said Rep. Maxine Waters, the Democratic congresswoman who represents part of South Central Los Angeles and is head of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Waters, who was instrumental in getting Congress to look at Webb's allegations, said the new book provides an ``amount of detail, the naming of persons and places,'' that ``is just profound.''
For his part, Webb said the book represents ``the opportunity to tell the whole story.'' It is not, he said, ``the story of a conspiracy''; it is more the tale of ``an accident of history.''
``If people don't believe it, fine, that's their prerogative,'' Webb continued, during an interview here. ``I'm convinced it's the truth.''
Not everyone is.
Oliver North, former Reagan administration aide and one of the key players in the illicit arms deals of the Iran-contra scandal, has called Webb's reporting ``absolute garbage.'' The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post all ran lengthy stories in the fall of 1996 attacking Webb's Mercury News series and suggesting that the public - particularly the African American community - was unduly suspicious of government, if not downright gullible.
The New York Times, for instance, challenged the Mercury News' conclusion that ``millions in drug profits'' were funneled by West Coast Nicaraguan drug dealers to the CIA-backed contras, and that these drug deals in the early 1980s ``opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles.''
Relying mainly on anonymous government, law enforcement and intelligence sources, the New York Times concluded: ``There is scant proof to support the contention that Nicaraguan rebel officials linked to the CIA played a central role in spreading crack through Los Angeles and other cities.''
In the wake of this bad national press, the San Jose Mercury News eventually published an unusual column by its editor, Jerry Ceppos, apologizing to readers for the stories. Ceppos disparaged the evidence presented in the series as inadequate and contradictory, but he affirmed Webb's overall findings - cocaine sold on the streets of L.A. helped fund the contras in the early 1980s.
In a May 11, 1997, letter to readers, Ceppos said the series ``solidly documented disturbing information,'' but had failed to indicate the vast ``gray areas'' of complex and inconclusive evidence that, he said, characterized the relationship between the contras, the CIA, drugs and inner-city Los Angeles. The paper, he said, simplified the story of the rise of crack; implied - without corroborating evidence - that top CIA officials at least knew of contra drug dealing; and failed to indicate that the
dollar figure placed on drug profits said to be flowing to the contras was an estimate. At the same time, Ceppos indicated that some of this information had been edited out of the series and he also acknowledged that Webb disagreed with his interpretation.
Webb, who was outraged by what he saw as a betrayal by his paper - and said so in public, complaining that the Mercury News was sitting on additional stories - was transferred a year ago, over his objections, from the statehouse bureau to a remote suburban office. (As a measure of how much of a media event the story had become, Webb's transfer was announced on the local news. Local television stations sent camera crews out to cover his first day on the suburban beat.)
Last November, Webb quit. (The Mercury News is owned by Knight Ridder Inc., which also owns The Inquirer and Daily News.)
``It was clear to me it didn't matter what the facts and historical evidence was,'' Webb said. ``They just wanted to run from the story.''
``The whole thing became a Gary Webb story - not the fact of a major, major scandal of the U.S. protecting drug traffickers for geopolitical reasons,'' said Robert Parry, a former Associated Press journalist who, in 1985, wrote the first stories tying the contras to the drug trade.
``Gary Webb made some mistakes, so what? Reporters aren't perfect,'' Parry continued, adding that his own prize-winning stories were attacked by the Reagan administration and contra supporters and inspired deep unease among his own editors.
``This story is not a career maker,'' said Parry, ``it's a career breaker.'' All of which tickles the antennae of some investigative writers.
``When the press gets haughty and goes after a reporter - that's when I get interested,'' said ace investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who has a few scars of his own from past media go-rounds.
``Is there a lot of evidence drugs were run in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia? Absolutely,'' Hersh continued. ``Whenever Central America is involved - just as in Southeast Asia - when you get into those places, there is no question you are going to be tolerating a lot of drug trafficking. Was it more than looking away? In some cases it probably was.''
Not so, says the CIA. In January, following an internal investigation prompted by the public outcry over the Webb stories, the agency's inspector general issued the first of two volumes of findings ``concerning allegations of connections between CIA and the contras in cocaine trafficking to the United States.''
According to the summary section of the report, which is concerned with ``the California story,'' agency investigators found no connection between the CIA and any of the drug dealers featured in Webb's tale of crack in Los Angeles, no financial or political connection between West Coast Nicaraguan drug dealers and the contras, and no effort by the agency to influence U.S. drug investigations or criminal proceedings cited by Webb. The second volume of the report, which takes a broader look at the
contras and drugs, remains classified; an agency spokeswoman said an edited version might be released this summer.
Beyond the summary, however, buried in the first volume's actual findings, is evidence that the CIA did in fact intervene in a notorious 1983 San Francisco drug prosecution known as the Frogman case. The report indicates that agency officials were concerned that prosecution of the case - which involved 50 people and well over 400 pounds of cocaine - could damage agency efforts to support the contras. (Two of the accused dealers claimed contra associations, and nearly $40,000 that was seized was said
to be contra money.)
Fearing at the time that a ``case could be made that [CIA] funds are being diverted by [CIA] assets into the drug trade'' if details of the prosecution became public, CIA officials approached the Justice Department about the case, according to the report. Subsequently, the money was returned to the defendants and no CIA or contra drug link was disclosed at the time.
(Yet another investigation of the CIA-contra drug allegations, this one conducted by the Justice Department, has been completed, but Attorney General Janet Reno has declined to release it, citing unspecified ``law enforcement concerns.'')
In congressional hearings about the internal CIA report this spring, it was disclosed that in 1982, William French Smith, then attorney general, and William Casey, then director of the CIA, formally agreed that CIA ``assets'' - contract operatives and groups - would not be required to report ``narcotics violations'' to the Justice Department.
``This is an extraordinary admission,'' said Parry, the former AP reporter. ``Casey engineered the removal of drug trafficking from the list. The CIA is required to report murder, hijacking, serious crimes, and the one he chose to pull is drug trafficking. Why?''
``This agreement is the most important thing to come out of the investigation,'' said Alfred McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, who has done extensive research on the drug trade in Southeast Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. ``It's extraordinary corroboration that [Central America] became a zone free from external investigation.''
A CIA spokeswoman, speaking only on a background basis and not for attribution, said that the Casey-Smith agreement did not constitute an effort to absolve CIA assets from responsibility for reporting narcotics crimes. Rather, it was an effort to define reporting requirements for those assets as distinct from employees. The spokeswoman did not know if the agreement was still in effect.
``There is a rich history here that is unknown and secret,'' said Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, a public interest group in Washington. ``You begin to get an idea how much was hidden and you have to give [Webb's] Dark Alliance credit for shaking things loose. I predict that when these two [CIA] reports are declassified, we will see how much of a cover-up the Reagan administration accomplished . . . and how much of a distortion of priorities there was. I guarantee
you, it will be amazing to see how much the journalistic community dropped the ball on this one. It's a real tragedy.'' |
