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by stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Jul 31, 2014 3:15 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 28, 2014 9:02 am
The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up
September 26, 2014
Exclusive: With Hollywood set to release a movie about the Contra-cocaine scandal and the destruction of journalist Gary Webb, an internal CIA report has surfaced showing how the spy agency manipulated the mainstream media’s coverage to disparage Webb and contain the scandal, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
In 1996 – as major U.S. news outlets disparaged the Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine story and destroyed the career of investigative reporter Gary Webb for reviving it – the CIA marveled at the success of its public-relations team guiding the mainstream media’s hostility toward both the story and Webb, according to a newly released internal report.
Entitled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” the six-page report describes the CIA’s damage control after Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series was published in the San Jose Mercury-News in August 1996. Webb had resurrected disclosures from the 1980s about the CIA-backed Contras collaborating with cocaine traffickers as the Reagan administration worked to conceal the crimes.
Journalist Gary Webb holding a copy of his Contra-cocaine article in the San Jose Mercury-News.
Journalist Gary Webb holding a copy of his Contra-cocaine article in the San Jose Mercury-News.
Although the CIA’s inspector general later corroborated the truth about the Contra-cocaine connection and the Reagan administration’s cover-up, the mainstream media’s counterattack in defense of the CIA in late summer and fall of 1996 proved so effective that the subsequent CIA confession made little dent in the conventional wisdom regarding either the Contra-cocaine scandal or Gary Webb.
In fall 1998, when the CIA inspector general’s extraordinary findings were released, the major U.S. news media largely ignored them, leaving Webb a “disgraced” journalist who – unable to find a decent-paying job in his profession – committed suicide in 2004, a dark tale that will be revisited in a new movie, “Kill the Messenger,” starring Jeremy Renner and scheduled to reach theaters on Oct. 10.
The “Managing a Nightmare” report offers something of the CIA’s back story for how the spy agency’s PR team exploited relationships with mainstream journalists who then essentially did the CIA’s work for it, mounting a devastating counterattack against Webb that marginalized him and painted the Contra-cocaine trafficking story as some baseless conspiracy theory.
Crucial to that success, the report credits “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists and an effective response by the Director of Central Intelligence’s Public Affairs Staff [that] helped prevent this story from becoming an unmitigated disaster.
“This success has to be viewed in relative terms. In the world of public relations, as in war, avoiding a rout in the face of hostile multitudes can be considered a success. … By anyone’s definition, the emergence of this story posed a genuine public relations crisis for the Agency.” [As approved for release by the CIA last July 29, the report’s author was redacted as classified, however, Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept identified the writer as former Directorate of Intelligence staffer Nicholas Dujmovic.]
According to the CIA report, the public affairs staff convinced some journalists who followed up Webb’s exposé by calling the CIA that “this series represented no real news, in that similar charges were made in the 1980s and were investigated by the Congress and were found to be without substance. Reporters were encouraged to read the ‘Dark Alliance’ series closely and with a critical eye to what allegations could actually be backed with evidence. Early in the life of this story, one major news affiliate, after speaking with a CIA media spokesman, decided not to run the story.”
Of course, the CIA’s assertion that the Contra-cocaine charges had been disproved in the 1980s was false. In fact, after Brian Barger and I wrote the first article about the Contra-cocaine scandal for the Associated Press in December 1985, a Senate investigation headed by Sen. John Kerry confirmed that many of the Contra forces were linked to cocaine traffickers and that the Reagan administration had even contracted with drug-connected airlines to fly supplies to the Contras who were fighting Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
However, in the late 1980s, the Reagan administration and the CIA had considerable success steering the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major news outlets away from the politically devastating reality that President Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras were tied up with cocaine traffickers. Kerry’s groundbreaking report – when issued in 1989 – was largely ignored or mocked by the mainstream media.
That earlier media response left the CIA’s PR office free to cite the established “group think” – rather than the truth — when beating back Webb’s resurfacing of the scandal in 1996.
A ‘Firestorm’ of Attacks
The initial attacks on Webb’s series came from the right-wing media, such as the Washington Times and the Weekly Standard, but the CIA’s report identified the key turning point as coming when the Washington Post pummeled Webb in two influential articles.
The CIA’s PR experts quickly exploited that opening. The CIA’s internal report said: “Public Affairs made sure that reporters and news directors calling for information – as well as former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media – received copies of these more balanced stories. Because of the Post’s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a ‘firestorm of reaction’ against the San Jose Mercury-News.”
The CIA’s report then noted the happy news that Webb’s editors at the Mercury-News began scurrying for cover, “conceding the paper might have done some things differently.” The retreat soon became a rout with some mainstream journalists essentially begging the CIA for forgiveness for ever doubting its innocence.
“One reporter of a major regional newspaper told [CIA] Public Affairs that, because it had reprinted the Mercury-News stories in their entirety, his paper now had ‘egg on its face,’ in light of what other newspapers were saying,” the CIA’s report noted, as its PR team kept track of the successful counterattack.
“By the end of September [1996], the number of observed stories in the print media that indicated skepticism of the Mercury-News series surpassed that of the negative coverage, which had already peaked,” the report said. “The observed number of skeptical treatments of the alleged CIA connection grew until it more than tripled the coverage that gave credibility to that connection. The growth in balanced reporting was largely due to the criticisms of the San Jose Mercury-News by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and especially The Los Angeles Times.”
The overall tone of the CIA’s internal assessment is one of almost amazement at how its PR team could, with a deft touch, help convince mainstream U.S. journalists to trash a fellow reporter on a story that put the CIA in a negative light.
“What CIA media spokesmen can do, as this case demonstrates, is to work with journalists who are already disposed toward writing a balanced story,” the report said. “What gives this limited influence a ‘multiplier effect’ is something that surprised me about the media: that the journalistic profession has the will and the ability to hold its own members to certain standards.”
The report then praises the neoconservative American Journalism Review for largely sealing Webb’s fate with a harsh critique entitled “The Web That Gary Spun,” with AJR’s editor adding that the Mercury-News “deserved all the heat leveled at it for ‘Dark Alliance.’”
The report also cites with some pleasure the judgment of the Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz who reacted to Webb’s observation that the war was a business to some Contra leaders with the snide comment: “Oliver Stone, check your voice mail.”
Neither Kurtz nor the CIA writer apparently was aware of the disclosure — among Iran-Contra documents — of a March 17, 1986 message about the Contra leadership from White House aide Oliver North’s emissary to the Contras, Robert Owen, who complained to North: “Few of the so-called leaders of the movement . . . really care about the boys in the field. … THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.” [Emphasis in original.]
Misguided Group Think
Yet, faced with this mainstream “group think” – as misguided as it was – Webb’s Mercury-News editors surrendered to the pressure, apologizing for the series, shutting down the newspaper’s continuing investigation into the Contra-cocaine scandal and forcing Webb to resign in disgrace.
But Webb’s painful experience provided an important gift to American history, at least for those who aren’t enamored of superficial “conventional wisdom.” CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz ultimately produced a fairly honest and comprehensive report that not only confirmed many of the longstanding allegations about Contra-cocaine trafficking but revealed that the CIA and the Reagan administration knew much more about the criminal activity than any of us outsiders did.
Hitz completed his investigation in mid-1998 and the second volume of his two-volume investigation was published on Oct. 8, 1998. In the report, Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s.
According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its Contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The earliest Contra force, called the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN) or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen “to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre,” according to a June 1981 draft of a CIA field report.
According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981. ADREN’s leaders included Enrique Bermúdez and other early Contras who would later direct the major Contra army, the CIA-organized FDN. Throughout the war, Bermúdez remained the top Contra military commander.
The CIA corroborated the allegations about ADREN’s cocaine trafficking, but insisted that Bermúdez had opposed the drug shipments to the United States that went ahead nonetheless. The truth about Bermúdez’s supposed objections to drug trafficking, however, was less clear.
According to Hitz’s Volume One, Bermúdez enlisted Norwin Meneses, a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler and a key figure in Webb’s series, to raise money and buy supplies for the Contras. Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan trafficker named Danilo Blandón, who told Hitz’s investigators that he and Meneses flew to Honduras to meet with Bermúdez in 1982. At the time, Meneses’s criminal activities were well-known in the Nicaraguan exile community. But Bermúdez told these cocaine smugglers that “the ends justify the means” in raising money for the Contras.
After the Bermúdez meeting, Contra soldiers helped Meneses and Blandón get past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking suspicions. After their release, Blandón and Meneses traveled on to Bolivia to complete a cocaine transaction.
There were other indications of Bermúdez’s drug-smuggling tolerance. In February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade accused Bermúdez of participation in narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz’s report. After the Contra war ended, Bermúdez returned to Managua, Nicaragua, where he was shot to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved. [For more details on Hitz’s report and the Contra-cocaine scandal, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
Shrinking Fig Leaf
By the time that Hitz’s Volume Two was published in fall 1998, the CIA’s defense against Webb’s series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the Contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the Contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra crimes from the Justice Department, Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical division.
Besides tracing the evidence of Contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long Contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the Contra-drug problem but didn’t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. . . . [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the Contra program.” One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the Contras hid evidence of Contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA’s analysts.
Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that “only a handful of Contras might have been involved in drug trafficking.” That false assessment was passed on to Congress and to major news organizations — serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his “Dark Alliance” series in 1996.
Although Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it went almost unnoticed by major U.S. news outlets. By fall 1998, the U.S. mainstream media was obsessed with President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. So, few readers of major U.S. newspapers saw much about the CIA’s inspector general admitting that America’s premier spy agency had collaborated with and protected cocaine traffickers.
On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz’s Volume Two was posted on the CIA’s Web site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the Contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood. Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times, which had assigned a huge team of 17 reporters to tear down Webb’s work, never published a story on the release of Hitz’s Volume Two.
In 2000, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee grudgingly acknowledged that the stories about Reagan’s CIA protecting Contra drug traffickers were true. The committee released a report citing classified testimony from CIA Inspector General Britt Snider (Hitz’s successor) admitting that the spy agency had turned a blind eye to evidence of Contra-drug smuggling and generally treated drug smuggling through Central America as a low priority.
“In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working,” Snider said, adding that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in “a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.”
The House committee still downplayed the significance of the Contra-cocaine scandal, but the panel acknowledged, deep inside its report, that in some cases, “CIA employees did nothing to verify or disprove drug trafficking information, even when they had the opportunity to do so. In some of these, receipt of a drug allegation appeared to provoke no specific response, and business went on as usual.”
Like the release of Hitz’s report in 1998, the admissions by Snider and the House committee drew virtually no media attention in 2000 — except for a few articles on the Internet, including one at Consortiumnews.com.
Killing the Messenger
Because of this abuse of power by the Big Three newspapers — choosing to conceal their own journalistic negligence on the Contra-cocaine scandal and to protect the Reagan administration’s image — Webb’s reputation was never rehabilitated.
After his original “Dark Alliance” series was published in 1996, Webb had been inundated with attractive book offers from major publishing houses, but once the vilification began, the interest evaporated. Webb’s agent contacted an independent publishing house, Seven Stories Press, which had a reputation for publishing books that had been censored, and it took on the project.
After Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion was published in 1998, I joined Webb in a few speaking appearances on the West Coast, including one packed book talk at the Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica, California. For a time, Webb was treated as a celebrity on the American Left, but that gradually faded.
In our interactions during these joint appearances, I found Webb to be a regular guy who seemed to be holding up fairly well under the terrible pressure. He had landed an investigative job with a California state legislative committee. He also felt some measure of vindication when CIA Inspector General Hitz’s reports came out.
However, Webb never could overcome the pain caused by his betrayal at the hands of his journalistic colleagues, his peers. In the years that followed, Webb was unable to find decent-paying work in his profession — the conventional wisdom remained that he had somehow been exposed as a journalistic fraud. His state job ended; his marriage fell apart; he struggled to pay bills; and he was faced with a forced move out of a just-sold house near Sacramento, California, and in with his mother.
On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; laid out a certificate for his cremation; and taped a note on the door telling movers — who were coming the next morning — to instead call 911. Webb then took out his father’s pistol and shot himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more.
Even with Webb’s death, the big newspapers that had played key roles in his destruction couldn’t bring themselves to show Webb any mercy. After Webb’s body was found, I received a call from a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who knew that I was one of Webb’s few journalistic colleagues who had defended him and his work.
I told the reporter that American history owed a great debt to Gary Webb because he had forced out important facts about Reagan-era crimes. But I added that the Los Angeles Times would be hard-pressed to write an honest obituary because the newspaper had not published a single word on the contents of Hitz’s final report, which had largely vindicated Webb.
To my disappointment but not my surprise, I was correct. The Los Angeles Times ran a mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of either my defense of Webb or the CIA’s admissions in 1998. The obituary – more fitting for a deceased mob boss than a fellow journalist – was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post.
In effect, Webb’s suicide enabled senior editors at the Big Three newspapers to breathe a little easier — one of the few people who understood the ugly story of the Reagan administration’s cover-up of the Contra-cocaine scandal and the U.S. media’s complicity was now silenced.
No Accountability
To this day, none of the journalists or media critics who participated in the destruction of Gary Webb has paid a price for their actions. None has faced the sort of humiliation that Webb had to endure. None had to experience that special pain of standing up for what is best in the profession of journalism — taking on a difficult story that seeks to hold powerful people accountable for serious crimes — and then being vilified by your own colleagues, the people that you expected to understand and appreciate what you had done.
In May 2013, one of the Los Angeles Times reporters who had joined in the orchestrated destruction of Webb’s career acknowledged that the newspaper’s assault was a “tawdry exercise” amounting to “overkill,” which later contributed to Webb’s suicide. This limited apology by former Los Angeles Times reporter Jesse Katz was made during a radio interview and came as filming was about to start on “Kill the Messenger,” based on a book by the same name by Nick Schou.
On KPCC-FM 89.3′s AirTalk With Larry Mantle, Katz was pressed by callers to address his role in the destruction of Webb. Katz offered what could be viewed as a limited apology.
“As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope,” Katz said. “And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”
Katz added, “We really didn’t do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of a tawdry exercise. … And it ruined that reporter’s career.”
Now, with the imminent release of a major Hollywood movie about Webb’s ordeal, the next question is whether the major newspapers will finally admit their longstanding complicity in the Contra-cocaine cover-up or whether they will simply join the CIA’s press office in another counterattack.
MANAGING A NIGHTMARE: HOW THE CIA WATCHED OVER THE DESTRUCTION OF GARY WEBB
BY RYAN DEVEREAUX @rdevro THURSDAY AT 1:20 PM
Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.
The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.
These days, Webb is being cast in a more sympathetic light. He’s portrayed heroically in a major motion picture set to premiere nationwide next month. And documents newly released by the CIA provide fresh context to the “Dark Alliance” saga — information that paints an ugly portrait of the mainstream media at the time.
On September 18, the agency released a trove of documents spanning three decades of secret government operations. Culled from the agency’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, the materials include a previously unreleased six-page article titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.” Looking back on the weeks immediately following the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the document offers a unique window into the CIA’s internal reaction to what it called “a genuine public relations crisis” while revealing just how little the agency ultimately had to do to swiftly extinguish the public outcry. Thanks in part to what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists,” the CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter.
(Dujmovic’s name was redacted in the released version of the CIA document, but was included in a footnote in a 2010 article in the Journal of Intelligence. Dujmovic confirmed his authorship to The Intercept.)
Kill the Messenger Jeremy Renner
Actor Jeremy Renner stars as investigative journalist Gary Webb in the upcoming film “Kill the Messenger.”
Webb’s troubles began in August 1996, when his employer, the San Jose Mercury News, published a groundbreaking, three-part investigation he had worked on for more than a year. Carrying the full title “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion,” Webb’s series reported that in addition to waging a proxy war for the U.S. government against Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government in the 1980s, elements of the CIA-backed Contra rebels were also involved in trafficking cocaine to the U.S. in order to fund their counter-revolutionary campaign. The secret flow of drugs and money, Webb reported, had a direct link to the subsequent explosion of crack cocaine abuse that had devastated California’s most vulnerable African American neighborhoods.
Derided by some as conspiracy theory and heralded by others as investigative reporting at its finest, Webb’s series spread through extensive talk radio coverage and global availability via the internet, which at the time was still a novel way to promote national news.
Though “Dark Alliance” would eventually morph into a personal crisis for Webb, it was initially a PR disaster for the CIA. In “Managing a Nightmare,” Dujmovic minced no words in describing the potentially devastating effect of the series on the agency’s image:
The charges could hardly be worse. A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in America’s cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of CIA–reminiscent of the 1970s–abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.
Dujmovic acknowledged that Webb “did not state outright that CIA ran the drug trade or even knew about it.” In fact, the agency’s central complaint, according to the document, was over the graphics that accompanied the series, which suggested a link between the CIA and the crack scare, and Webb’s description of the Contras as “the CIA’s army” (despite the fact that the Contras were quite literally an armed, militant group not-so-secretly supported by the U.S., at war with the government of Nicaragua).
Dujmovic complained that Webb’s series “appeared with no warning,” remarking that, for all his journalistic credentials, “he apparently could not come up with a widely available and well-known telephone number for CIA Public Affairs.” This was probably because Webb “was uninterested in anything the Agency might have to say that would diminish the impact of his series,” he wrote. (Webb later said that he did contact the CIA but that the agency would not return his calls; efforts to obtain CIA comment were not mentioned in the “Dark Alliance” series).
Dujmovic also pointed out that much of what was reported in “Dark Alliance” was not new. Indeed, in 1985, more than a decade before the series was published, Associated Press journalists Robert Parry and Brian Barger found that Contra groups had “engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua.” In a move that foreshadowed Webb’s experience, the Reagan White House launched “a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign to besmirch the professionalism of Parry and Barger and to discredit all reporting on the contras and drugs,” according to a 1997 article by Peter Kornbluh for the Columbia Journalism Review. “Whether the campaign was the cause or not, coverage was minimal.”
Neverthess, a special senate subcommittee, chaired by then-senator John Kerry, investigated the AP’s findings and, in 1989, released a 1,166-page report on covert U.S. operations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (summary here). It found “considerable evidence” that the Contras were linked to running drugs and guns — and that the U.S. government knew about it.
Nicaragua Contras 1983
1983, Anti-Sandinista Contra forces move down the San Juan River which separates Nicaragua from Costa Rica.
From the subcommittee report:
On the basis of this evidence, it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.
The chief of the CIA’s Central America Task Force was also quoted as saying, “With respect to (drug trafficking) by the Resistance Forces…it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people.”
Despite such damning assessments, the subcommittee report received scant attention from the country’s major newspapers. Seven years later, Webb would be the one to pick up the story. His articles distinguished themselves from the AP’s reporting in part by connecting an issue that seemed distant to many U.S. readers — drug trafficking in Central America — to a deeply-felt domestic story, the impact of crack cocaine in California’s urban, African American communities.
“Dark Alliance” focused on the lives of three men involved in shipping cocaine to the U.S.: Ricky “Freeway” Ross, a legendary L.A. drug dealer; Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes, considered by the U.S. government to be Nicaragua’s biggest cocaine dealer living in the United States; and Meneses Cantarero, a powerful Nicaraguan player who had allegedly recruited Blandón to sell drugs in support of the counter-revolution. The series examined the relationship between the men, their impact on the drug market in California and elsewhere, and the disproportionate sentencing of African Americans under crack cocaine laws.
And while its content was not all new, the series marked the beginning of something that was: an in-depth investigation published outside the traditional mainstream media outlets and successfully promoted on the internet. More than a decade before Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, Webb showcased the power and reach of online journalism. Key documents were hosted on the San Jose Mercury News website, with hyperlinks, wiretap recordings and follow-up stories. The series was widely discussed on African American talk radio stations; on some days attracting more than one million readers to the newspaper’s website. As Webb later remarked, “you don’t have be The New York Times or The Washington Post to bust a national story anymore.”
But newspapers like the Times and the Post seemed to spend far more time trying to poke holes in the series than in following up on the underreported scandal at its heart, the involvement of U.S.-backed proxy forces in international drug trafficking. The Los Angeles Times was especially aggressive. Scooped in its own backyard, the California paper assigned no fewer than 17 reporters to pick apart Webb’s reporting. While employees denied an outright effort to attack the Mercury News, one of the 17 referred to it as the “get Gary Webb team.” Another said at the time, “We’re going to take away that guy’s Pulitzer,” according to Kornbluh’s CJR piece. Within two months of the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the L.A. Times devoted more words to dismantling its competitor’s breakout hit than comprised the series itself.
The CIA watched these developments closely, collaborating where it could with outlets who wanted to challenge Webb’s reporting. Media inquiries had started almost immediately following the publication of “Dark Alliance,” and Dujmovic in “Managing a Nightmare” cites the CIA’s success in discouraging “one major news affiliate” from covering the story. He also boasts that the agency effectively departed from its own longstanding policies in order to discredit the series. “For example, in order to help a journalist working on a story that would undermine the Mercury News allegations, Public Affairs was able to deny any affiliation of a particular individual — which is a rare exception to the general policy that CIA does not comment on any individual’s alleged CIA ties.”
The document chronicles the shift in public opinion as it moved in favor of the CIA, a trend that began about a month and a half after the series was published. “That third week in September was a turning point in media coverage of this story,” Dujmovic wrote, citing “[r]espected columnists, including prominent blacks,” along with the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, The Weekly Standard and the Washington Post. The agency supplied the press, “as well as former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media,” with “these more balanced stories,” Dujmovic wrote. The Washington Post proved particularly useful. “Because of the Post‘s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a ‘firestorm of reaction’ against the San Jose Mercury News.” Over the month that followed, critical media coverage of the series (“balanced reporting”) far outnumbered supportive stories, a trend the CIA credited to the Post, The New York Times, “and especially the Los Angeles Times.” Webb’s editors began to distance themselves from their reporter.
By the end of October, two months after “Dark Alliance” was published, “the tone of the entire CIA-drug story had changed,” Dujmovic was pleased to report. “Most press coverage included, as a routine matter, the now-widespread criticism of the Mercury News allegations.”
“This success has to be in relative terms,” Dujmovic wrote, summing up the episode. “In the world of public relations, as in war, avoiding a rout in the face of hostile multitudes can be considered a success.”
Artwork that accompanied the original Dark Alliance series published in the San Jose Mercury News.
There’s no question that “Dark Alliance” included flaws, which the CIA was able to exploit.
In his CJR piece, Kornbluh said the series was “problematically sourced” and criticized it for “repeatedly promised evidence that, on close reading, it did not deliver.” It failed to definitively connect the story’s key players to the CIA, he noted, and there were inconsistencies in Webb’s timeline of events.
But Kornbluh also uncovered problems with the retaliatory reports described as “balanced” by the CIA. In the case of the L.A. Times, he wrote, the paper “stumbled into some of the same problems of hyperbole, selectivity, and credibility that it was attempting to expose” while ignoring declassified evidence (also neglected by the New York Times and the Washington Post) that lent credibility to Webb’s thesis. “Clearly, there was room to advance the contra/drug/CIA story rather than simply denounce it,” Kornbluh wrote.
The Mercury News was partially responsible “for the sometimes distorted public furor the stories generated,” Kornbluh said, but also achieved “something that neither the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, nor The New York Times had been willing or able to do — revisit a significant story that had been inexplicably abandoned by the mainstream press, report a new dimension to it, and thus put it back on the national agenda where it belongs.”
In October, the story of Gary Webb will reach a national moviegoing audience, likely reviving old questions about his reporting and the outrage it ignited. Director Michael Cuesta’s film, Kill the Messenger, stars Jeremy Renner as the hard-charging investigative reporter and borrows its title from a 2006 biography written by award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou, who worked as a consultant on the script.
Discussing the newly disclosed “Managing a Nightmare” document, Schou says it squares with what he found while doing his own reporting. Rather than some dastardly, covert plot to destroy (or, as some went so far as to suggest, murder) Webb, Schou posits that the journalist was ultimately undone by the petty jealousies of the modern media world. The CIA “didn’t really need to lift a finger to try to ruin Gary Webb’s credibility,” Schou told The Intercept. “They just sat there and watched these journalists go after Gary like a bunch of piranhas.”
“They must have been delighted over at Langley, the way this all unfolded,” Schou added.
At least one journalist who helped lead the campaign to discredit Webb, feels remorse for what he did. As Schou reported for L.A. Weekly, in a 2013 radio interview L.A. Times reporter Jesse Katz recalled the episode, saying, “As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope. And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”
Schou, too, readily concedes there were problems with Webb’s reporting, but maintains that the most important components of his investigation stood up to scrutiny, only to be buried under the attacks from the nation’s biggest papers.
“I think it’s fair to take a look at the story objectively and say that it could have been better edited, it could have been packaged better, it would have been less inflammatory. And sure, maybe Gary could have, like, actually put in the story somewhere ‘I called the CIA X-amount of times and they didn’t respond.’ That wasn’t in there,” he said. “But these are all kind of minor things compared to the bigger picture, which is that he documented for the first time in the history of U.S. media how CIA complicity with Central American drug traffickers had actually impacted the sale of drugs north of the border in a very detailed, accurate story. And that’s, I think, the take-away here.”
As for Webb’s tragic death, Schou is certain it was a direct consequence of the smear campaign against him.
“As much as it’s true that he suffered from a clinical depression for years and years — and even before ‘Dark Alliance’ to a certain extent — it’s impossible to view what happened to him without understanding the death of his career as a result of this story,” he explained. “It was really the central defining event of his career and of his life.”
“Once you take away a journalist’s credibility, that’s all they have,” Schou says. “He was never able to recover from that.”
Kill the Messenger, a thriller based on Webb’s story, will be released October 10.
In “Managing a Nightmare,” Dujmovic attributed the initial outcry over the “Dark Alliance” series to “societal shortcomings” that are not present in the spy agency.
“As a personal post-script, I would submit that ultimately the CIA-drug story says a lot more about American society on the eve of the millennium that [sic] it does about either the CIA or the media,” he wrote. “We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times–when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community.”
Webb obviously saw things differently. He reflected on his fall from grace in the 2002 book, Into the Buzzsaw. Prior to “Dark Alliance,” Webb said, “I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests.”
“And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job,” Webb wrote. “The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.”
by MinM » Mon Sep 29, 2014 4:51 pm
@lisapease · I was really looking forward to the film about Gary Webb, "Kill the Messenger," until I found the CIA-friendly Peter Landesman was involved.
@lisapease · Given that Landesman completely whitewashed the evid. of CIA involvement in the JFK case in Parkland, what will he do to Gary Webb?
@lisapease · And how does a guy whose film absolutely BOMBS (Parkland cost 6 mil, made 600k) get more films to do? Strong backing.
@lisapease · I met Gary Webb in LA. CIA guy tried to meet Gary Webb, but Gary asked me to screen him first. Guy bs'd me for 4 hours, then (1 of 2)
(2 of 2) showed up on a UFO special claiming to have been abducted, naked, by aliens, something he neglected to tell me in those 4 hours!
by Spiro C. Thiery » Thu Oct 02, 2014 4:04 pm
The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux is No Gary Webb
Posted on October 2, 2014 by Tarzie
Were it not something of a flop in the readership department, The Intercept might well be the U.S. ruling class’s highest achievement in propaganda. As the offspring of the Snowden whistleblowing event, it is forever identified with resistance to state authority, cultivating a readership almost fetishistically eager to believe that something fearless and adversarial is always underway. As such it can blatantly peddle doctrinal trash to an extent running dogs with less glamorously rebellious brands can only dream of.
Ryan Devereaux’s recent piece on investigative journalist Gary Webb isn’t trash but it too often comes close. His post is intended to tie in with an upcoming film, Kill The Messenger, about the mainstream media campaign that ruined Webb after he’d published “Dark Alliance”, a three-part series that connected the CIA-backed Contras to the crack epidemic that devastated black communities in the 80s. Superficially, the piece is simply a review of the history covered by the film, using a recently released CIA document about the affair as its hook. But Devereaux inexplicably seizes the opportunity to resuscitate long-discredited planks from the original campaign against Webb and to sanitize the CIA’s role in his ruin.
Devereaux’s piece strongly suggests that Webb’s downfall owed at least in part to his own deficiencies; that the CIA’s role in the campaign against Webb was mostly passive; and that media compliance with the CIA’s designs was largely a happy coincidence, animated less by direct state interference or the media’s institutionalized service to power, than by petty jealousy and professional rivalry. In other words, Devereaux has produced the closest thing to a hit piece/whitewash that one can credibly write about a martyred journalist whose reporting has been entirely vindicated and with whose legacy one wishes to burnish one’s own brand.
Devereaux states thatWebb’s series reported that in addition to waging a proxy war for the U.S. government against Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government in the 1980s, elements of the CIA-backed Contra rebels were also involved in trafficking cocaine to the U.S. in order to fund their counter-revolutionary campaign. The secret flow of drugs and money, Webb reported, had a direct link to the subsequent explosion of crack cocaine abuse that had devastated California’s most vulnerable African American neighborhoods.
This is largely correct except for its weird understatement of the crack epidemic, which devastated urban black communities from coast to coast. In fact, three times in the piece Devereaux restricts the epidemic to California, and elsewhere refers to the decade-long crisis diminishingly as the “crack scare.” Devereaux’s summary also neglects Webb’s claim that the Contra-connected drug wholesalers in his series were protected from prosecution and never went to prison, but were hired as informants by federal prosecutors.
More crucially, Devereaux’s account omits Webb’s vindication by the CIA’s and Justice Department’s own investigations. Volume One of the CIA’s report, published in January of ’98, largely confirmed everything Webb had claimed about the Bay Area drug traffickers — Danilo Blandón and Juan Norwin Meneses — their connection to the Nicaraguan Contra movement, and their ability to freely operate without the threat of law enforcement. Volume Two of the report, published in the following October, described how the Reagan-Bush administration had, in fact, protected more than 50 Contras and other drug traffickers, and by so doing thwarted federal investigations into drug crimes. A report by the Justice Department published in July ’98 contained similar findings. (source)
Here’s what Webb said about these reports:…the classified documents that were released showed just how badly I had fucked up. The CIA’s knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I’d ever imagined. The drug ring was even bigger than I had portrayed. The involvement between the CIA agents running the Contras and the drug traffickers was closer than I had written. And agents and officials of the DEA had protected the traffickers from arrest…(source)
Webb’s claims about the relationship between the drug traffickers in his piece and the crack epidemic were also entirely solid. Freeway Rick Ross, the main customer of Webb’s Contra-connected drug wholesalers was, and still is, widely credited with creating the crack cocaine crisis. Two years before the publication of Dark Alliance, the Los Angeles Times reported that Ross “did more than anyone else to democratize [crack], boosting volume, slashing prices, and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived…his coast-to-coast conglomerate was selling more than $500,000 a day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars.”
In parallel with government reports vindicating Webb’s story, journalists and media critics exhaustively pulled apart each talking point in the campaign against him and none of them holds up.
The first to do this was Pete Carey, an investigative reporter and a colleague of Webb’s at the San Jose Mercury News. After the shit hit the fan, the paper had him check Webb’s reporting against the charges of his critics. Carey’s report backed up Webb’s work and added new information to the story. (source).
In 1997, media critic Normon Solomon did an excellent, point by point analysis of the smear campaign for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, connecting it to the historic ties between the media and the CIA. The title of his piece, Snow Job: The Establishment’s Papers Do Damage Control for the CIA, encapsulates his findings.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair analyzed the affair exhaustively in their book White Out (excerpted here), stating that “the attack on Gary Webb and his series in the San Jose Mercury News remains one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in living memory.”
That Webb’s report stopped being “controversial” years ago seems to have slipped past Devereaux in the same way the scale of the crack crisis has. He keeps the merits of Webb’s reporting a somewhat open question through most of his post, despite his agreement with common consensus that the media campaign against Webb was in bad faith.
But Devereaux largely ignores the extent to which the campaign against Webb was built entirely from lies, straw men, denials by anonymous officials, and outright character assassination. Rather, the impression one gets from Devereaux’s selection of quotes and details is that Webb’s detractors had misplaced priorities; that instead of poking holes in Webb’s story, they should have been following up on his claims.
A mea culpa Devereaux includes from Jesse Katz, who was part of the LA Times 17-member “Get Gary Webb” team, perfectly encapsulates this general thrust:we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope. And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”
As mea culpas go, this could hardly be more dishonest and self-serving. It is beyond my scope here to pull apart the widely reviled hatchet job The LA Times did on Webb. But let’s look a little closer at Katz.
I quoted the LA Times above on Rick Ross’s peerless contribution to the crack epidemic. But just two years after the paper had called Ross the “criminal mastermind” of the epidemic, and credited him with “spreading disease on a scale never before conceived” a member of the “Get Gary Webb team” wrote this:“the explosion of cheap smokable cocaine in the 1980s was a uniquely egalitarian phenomenon, one that lent itself more to makeshift mom and pop operations than to the sinister hand of a government-sanctioned plot…How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ricky Ross.” (source)
The reporter in both cases was – incredibly – Jesse Katz. Saying one thing in 1994 and then saying the opposite two years later is not putting something “under a microscope.” It’s not “overkill.” It is, quite simply, lying, and quoting his half-assed, misleading mea culpa without reference to his infamous reversal is in the same neighborhood.
In fact, the most damning thing said about the media’s assault on Webb in Devereaux’s piece comes from a 17-year-old article Peter Kornbluh wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review:“[the L.A. Times] stumbled into some of the same problems of hyperbole, selectivity, and credibility that it was attempting to expose” while ignoring declassified evidence (also neglected by the New York Times and the Washington Post) that lent credibility to Webb’s thesis. “Clearly, there was room to advance the contra/drug/CIA story rather than simply denounce it,” Kornbluh wrote.
In other words, some of Webb’s zealous detractors were as bad as Webb! But one really can’t say this enough: there was nothing seriously wrong with Webb’s reporting. His series wasn’t perfect — no journalism is — but it was no more imperfect than any other investigative work. In fact, it’s considerably better, and by pioneering the posting of source documents online, Webb was arguably more ethical than his peers, in that he enabled readers to review the evidence for themselves in a way others had not.
Nonetheless Devereux states flatly, without argument, that “there’s no question that ‘Dark Alliance’ included flaws, which the CIA was able to exploit” implying, inanely, that with a bit more diligence, Webb might have somehow prevented or mitigated a baseless campaign manufactured out of whole cloth. As if the entire problem wasn’t that he had told his readers — most troublingly, his black readers — something people in high places felt they shouldn’t know. But having insulated himself and his readers from Webb’s near-complete rehabilitation, Devereaux trots out disparaging, unsubstantiated declarations about Webb’s journalism from three of the four people he quotes in the piece. It’s like it’s 1996 all over again, and indeed, only one of the three is speaking in the present.
First up is the CIA’s Nicholas Dujmovic, who speaks by way of “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story”, a recently released six-page article he wrote for CIA’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence. “Nightmare” is a highly biased chronological account of how the media reception to “Dark Alliance” moved progressively more in favor of the CIA and against Webb, and of the role the CIA’s Public Affairs department played in that transition.
Devereaux says this document provides “fresh context to the ‘Dark Alliance’ saga” but, in fact, it imparts little that’s surprising or new to anyone familiar with the history, apart from a uniquely dishonest and skewed perspective. “Nightmare” frames the unprecedented campaign to discredit Webb as a quest for “more balanced reporting”, animated by the “journalistic profession’s…will and ability to hold its own members to certain standards.”
If Deveraux finds anything suspect in the CIA’s release of this undated, unredacted document only weeks away from the release of a film about Webb, he keeps it to himself, and this generosity pervades his face-value assessment of the document overall.
He reports that Dujmovic “pointed out that much of what was reported in ‘Dark Alliance’ was not new”, which is undoubtedly a reference to this passage:…CIA media spokesmen would remind reporters that this series represented no real news, in that similar charges were made in the 1980s and were investigated by the Congress and were found to be without substance.
The assertion here, that the Contra-cocaine charges had been disproved in the 1980s is, as Devereaux knows, undeniably false, which makes this passage interesting and newsworthy because one, it discloses to the knowledgable reader that the CIA was spreading a lie via its media contacts and two, it continues to propagate the lie to any readers of Dujmovic’s article, allegedly intended for internal consumption. But Devereaux remarks upon this passage only to resuscitate the “no news” plank from the original media campaign, neglecting to notice its multi-layered mendacity and the questions it raises about the document’s intended audience.
Devereaux quotes The Agency man at much greater length on Webb’s failings as a reporter:Dujmovic complained that Webb’s series “appeared with no warning,” remarking that, for all his journalistic credentials, “he apparently could not come up with a widely available and well-known telephone number for CIA Public Affairs.” This was probably because Webb “was uninterested in anything the Agency might have to say that would diminish the impact of his series,” he wrote.
Devereaux parenthetically adds that “Webb later said that he did contact the CIA but that the agency would not return his calls”, helpfully noting that “efforts to obtain CIA comment were not mentioned in the ‘Dark Alliance’ series.”
Anyone familiar with the original campaign should be feeling deja vu, since this silly objection was raised again and again at the time, and Devereaux quotes not one but two people recapitulating it.
It borders on slimy — no, it is slimy — to twice touch on Webb’ s alleged negligence in this regard without reference to Webb’s account of government stonewalling in “Dark Alliance”:
None of the government agencies known to have been involved with [Nicaraguan drug traffickers] Meneses and Blandon over the years would provide the Mercury News with any information about them.
A Freedom of Information Act request filed with the CIA was denied on national security grounds. FOIA requests filed with the DEA were denied on privacy grounds. Requests filed months ago with the FBI, the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have produced nothing so far.
This seems sufficient grounds for taking Webb at his word that he had made calls that were not returned, but, honestly, who the fuck cares? I’ll let Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair explain:…suppose the CIA had returned Webb’s calls? What would a spokesperson have said, other than that Webb’s allegations were outrageous and untrue? The CIA is a government entity pledged to secrecy about its activities. On scores of occasions, it has remained deceptive when under subpoena before a government committee. Why should the Agency be expected to answer frankly a bothersome question from a reporter? Yet it became a fetish for Webb’s assailants to repeat, time after time, that the CIA denied his charges and that he had never given this denial as the Agency’s point of view. ( source )
The complaint is a non-starter, an attempt to discredit based on an arbitrary technicality that says literally nothing about Webb’s series or his competence as a journalist. But trust The Intercept — the offspring of a whistleblowing event mediated by journalists who boast of routine consultations with government officials — to resurrect this chestnut as if it isn’t trivial and as if its likely origin in the CIA’s Public Affairs department is entirely beside the point.
After his generous allotment to the CIA’s viewpoint, Deveraux moves on to Peter Kornbluh’s 1997 analysis of the Webb affair in the Columbia Journalism Review:In his CJR piece, Kornbluh said the series was “problematically sourced” and criticized it for “repeatedly promised evidence that, on close reading, it did not deliver.” It failed to definitively connect the story’s key players to the CIA, he noted, and there were inconsistencies in Webb’s timeline of events.
Devereaux has not tasked himself with providing any of the arguments for these claims in Kornbluh’s piece, which is a masterly example of the pointedly even-handed, ‘both sides are wrong’, analysis that are as much a part of defamation campaigns as outright hatchet jobs.
As paraphrased in The Intercept, Kornbluh simply endorses various elements of the disinformation campaign that were put to bed long ago. But since Devereaux brought it up, let’s take a closer look. As to the allegedly problematic sourcing and undelivered evidence, Kornbluh didn’t like that two of the figures of Webb’s series are “identified without supporting evidence as FDN officials.” Apparently their words and deeds in service to this august army aren’t enough. Perhaps Webb was to also have linked photos of their Contra membership cards.
Kornbluh was also vexed that Adolfo Calero, the political leader of the FDN – which Kornbluh admits is literally a CIA army — is identified as a “longtime CIA operative” without proof. That the CIA entrusted Calero with leading its army seems evidence enough. In any event, it is now known that Calero was a CIA informant in Nicaragua as early as 1963, so however Webb got his information, it was entirely correct. Would Kornbluh have even demanded evidence had Webb not posted so much other evidence online? Probably not.
Kornbluh also splits hairs over the identification of Enrique Bermúdez as a “CIA agent”, even though as a Contra military leader, this goes without saying. Do we need to see paystubs before connecting those dots? Are the ramifications of Webb’s story altered at all by parsing the difference between a CIA “operative” and a CIA “agent?”
As for “Webb’s timeline of events,” this broken record was played in one form or another again and again throughout the campaign. Webb responded to it at the time, as have multiple critics. Kornbluh finds inconsistencies where none exist, and then asserts, based on a legalistic technicality, that the Contra operation could not have been responsible for the crack explosion in US cities.
Since these matters were settled years ago — mostly by the CIA’s own report — one wonders why Devereaux is dredging them up. But at last he puts aside his 17-year-old documents and talks to an actual person, Nick Schou, who wrote the book on which Kill the Messenger is based. Of course Schou must also share his misgivings about Webb:I think it’s fair to take a look at ["Dark Alliance"] objectively and say that it could have been better edited, it could have been packaged better, it would have been less inflammatory. And sure, maybe Gary could have, like, actually put in the story somewhere ‘I called the CIA X-amount of times and they didn’t respond.’ That wasn’t in there,” he said.
Let’s note that Devereaux is, for the third time, passing on a string of complaints about “Dark Alliance” almost entirely without reference to anything specific nor any evidence of merit. Schou’s seem particularly empty, as if to simply signify membership in the responsible journalist’s club. What does “packaged better” mean and why does it matter? The wish for a “less inflammatory” piece seems particularly odd and wrong. “Dark Alliance” is extremely straightforward and written in the plainest English. It is the claims Webb made that inflamed readers — particularly black readers — and rightfully so.
At least Schou understands how trivial his misgivings are:these are all kind of minor things compared to the bigger picture, which is that he documented for the first time in the history of U.S. media how CIA complicity with Central American drug traffickers had actually impacted the sale of drugs north of the border in a very detailed, accurate story. And that’s, I think, the take-away here.
and that, right there — three quarters of the way into Devereaux’s piece — is the closest we get to giving Webb his due, as well as the single occurrence of the word “accurate.”
Elsewhere, Schou amplifies the other troublesome theme tainting Devereaux’s post: the ostensible passivity of the CIA in the whole affair.
Rather than some dastardly, covert plot to destroy (or, as some went so far as to suggest, murder) Webb, Schou posits that the journalist was ultimately undone by the petty jealousies of the modern media world. The CIA “didn’t really need to lift a finger to try to ruin Gary Webb’s credibility,” Schou told The Intercept. “They just sat there and watched these journalists go after Gary like a bunch of piranhas.”
“They must have been delighted over at Langley, the way this all unfolded,” Schou added.
I want to like this Schou guy — he did, after all, write a sympathetic book — but this is just nonsense. I’d let it pass were the central idea here — that the CIA played a small supporting role in Webb’s destruction — not echoed throughout the piece. Devereaux writes that Dujmovic’s document “paints an ugly portrait of the mainstream media at the time”, but it apparently says very little about the CIA, which seemingly just watches:
“How the CIA Watched Over The Destruction of Gary Webb”
“The CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster…”
“The CIA watched these developments closely…”
“They just sat there and watched these journalists…”
Of course, no Intercept offering is complete without online coaching from Intercept staff, so here’s Glenn Greenwald echoing Devereaux on Twitter:Most interesting part of new docs: CIA realized they needn’t do anything against Gary Webb; US media did it for them
Intercept staffer Liliana Segura said essentially the same thing:Main take away: press devoured Webb so CIA didn’t need to.
Devereaux opens the possibility of a more active role when he quotes Dujmovic’s reference to a “ground base of already productive relations with journalists.” But his overwhelming emphasis on the media doing the heavy-lifting under the approving gaze of the CIA greatly diminishes it’s significance.
There is a useful point that could be made here, which is that between ambition, competition and a reflexive tilt toward power, mainstream journalists execute the propaganda aspect of our media system without much outside interference. But this self-directing quality is being grossly overstated here, and posits a false dichotomy between a CIA that “launched a dastardly, covert plot to destroy (or, as some went so far as to suggest, murder) Webb” and an Agency that simply watches and waits for the phone to ring. Among other things, the vision created here understates the damage the CIA can do when it takes a reporter’s call. However, that’s not all the CIA and its associates did.
Two of the papers most crucial to the assault on Webb were The New York Times and The Washington Post. Before going into specifics about what the CIA did besides “watching”, it’s important to get the lay of the land where the CIA and these papers are concerned. Norman Solomon wrote that “The New York Times and Washington Post have…connections to the CIA that go back nearly to the agency’s founding.” Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein wrote that “the agency’s relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials”, and that over the years the paper has provided Times cover to CIA employees.
As to the Washingon Post, Bernstein quoted a CIA official as saying of the Post’s late owner and publisher, “It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from.” In 1988″ Solomon writes, “Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, (Phil’s widow), gave a speech at the CIA’s Langley, Va. headquarters. “We live in a dirty and dangerous world,” Graham told agency leaders. “There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”
Solomon also reports that the two papers had expressed editorial support for funding the Contras.
In White Out, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair describe a 1991 CIA memo claiming that The Agency maintains “relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and TV network” and show that among the journalists taking early, influential swings at Webb were some that had exceptionally close ties: Ron Kessler of CNN, which an Agency memo credited with turning “some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success’ stories”; the right-wing commentator Arnaud de Borchgrave, who “boasted of intimate relations with French, British and US intelligence agencies”; and The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, whom the Washington Times reported as being known to The Agency as ‘the CIA’s house reporter.’
Cockburn and St. Clair write of the extensive influence of L. J. O’Neale, the Justice Department prosecutor who was Danilo Blandón’s patron and Rick Ross’s prosecutor. Cockburn and St. Clair describe a transcript from a deposition at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department that shows O’Neale “reveling in his top-secret security clearance with the CIA”; attempting to phone the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz; speaking to ‘CIA house reporter’, Walter Pincus; and criticizing Gary Webb, who, according to the transcript, O’Neale felt “had become an active part of Ricky Ross’s defense team.”
Now consider the calls O’Neale made to Kurtz and Pincus alongside Dujmovic’s remarks about the reporters’ paper.
The Washington Post ran two articles by leading journalists that criticized the assumptions and connections made by the original series. Public Affairs made sure that journalists and news directors calling for information and [officials representing the Agency] received copies of these more balanced stories.
Because of the Post’s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, creating what the Associated Press called a “firestorm of reaction” against the San Jose Mercury News.
White Out also describes how in December 1997, the CIA announced publication of the long-delayed report it had promised a month after “Dark Alliance” appeared. Stories appeared in major newspapers as well as Webb’s own to the effect that the CIA had absolved itself. News of these stories traveled widely via CNN and other outlets. There was one problem, though. None of these newspapers or any other media outlet had been furnished with the report, because shortly after the CIA announced its self-exoneration, publication was delayed again. Nonetheless, along came additional stories by the New York Times’ Tim Weiner and CIA’s man at the Washington Post, Walter Pincus, quoting anonymous officials claiming the investigation revealed no link between the CIA and cocaine traffickers. We now know the CIA report did nothing of the sort, but that was only revealed later, after the heat was off.
Clearly the CIA and its close associates did a bit more than watch. Rather, the record suggests that by way of publicity stunts and friends inside the media, they directly shaped the narrative at some of the most influential outlets, and this narrative then propagated through other outlets, facilitated by the CIA’s PR people responding to inquiries, friends at other outlets and the herd instinct.
This process, of course, doesn’t explain everything. Schou is not wrong entirely to cite the “petty jealousies of the modern media world” as having a role in the affair. Certainly there was some of that in play at the LA Times, which Webb’s smaller paper had bested on its own turf. But journalists do not spend every day of their lives embarked on campaigns to destroy each other. They require incentives, leadership and talking points, and the CIA and its media confederates happily oblige. There can be no question that had Webb written a series that was equal in every respect, technically, to “Dark Alliance” but did not take on a resourceful, powerful enemy whose very business is deception, manipulation and destruction on behalf of elites, it would have come and gone uneventfully, just as everything Webb had written before “Dark Alliance” had.
The Intercept muddies the water here on this obvious point, promoting a vision of the media that is, in an odd way, somewhat starry-eyed in its elision of CIA penetration at the highest levels. In other words, Devereaux’s article, whether on purpose or by accident, is disinformative, and its resurrection of old complaints about Webb makes it particularly so. It is really rather shameful that Greenwald’s blog is clearly attempting to align itself historically with Webb and “Dark Alliance”, when in this particular case, it has more in common with the forces that destroyed him.
by RocketMan » Mon Oct 13, 2014 3:09 pm
by conniption » Tue Oct 14, 2014 4:42 am
democracy now
October 06, 2014
Inside the Dark Alliance: Gary Webb on the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
With the opening of the new Hollywood film "Kill the Messenger" this week, we look back at Democracy Now! interviews with Gary Webb, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter the film is based on.
link
by 8bitagent » Wed Oct 15, 2014 1:38 am
by stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:15 pm
Kill the Messenger’: Rare Truth-telling
October 16, 2014
Exclusive: Much of modern American filmmaking is escapist and vapid, but not “Kill the Messenger,” the new movie recounting the brave Contra-cocaine reporting by Gary Webb and his subsequent destruction at the hands of the mainstream media, writes James DiEugenio.
By James DiEugenio
I only met Gary Webb once – in December 1996 at the late, great activist bookstore, The Midnight Special, in Santa Monica, California. I was writing at Probe Magazine then and had covered Webb’s groundbreaking San Jose Mercury News three-part series, titled “Dark Alliance.”
This fascinating, compelling series outlined a malevolent network which helped fund the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contra forces with profits from the cocaine trade in California. The Nicaraguan supplier was a man named Norwin Meneses, who associated with top-level Contra leader Adolfo Calero.
Meneses’s agent, Danilo Blandon, distributed the cocaine in Los Angeles to a former high school tennis player named Ricky Ross. The Blandon/Meneses brand of cocaine was high grade but cheap, so Ross became a millionaire. He was nicknamed “Freeway Rick,” because he made so much money selling drugs that he purchased properties along the Harbor Freeway, including motels and theaters.
Webb’s story did not actually say the CIA was directly involved with this network. It said the Agency knew about it and turned a blind eye because the overriding objective had been to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua – even if that meant letting the CIA’s clients and their associates import large amounts of cocaine into California and elsewhere in the United States.
The end result was to financially bolster the Contras, while thousands of Americans who could not afford powder cocaine now found themselves addicted to low-cost but high-grade crack. This took the old political adage – “the ends justify the means” – to mind-boggling new heights. In fact, under oath, Blandon testified that Contra military leader Enrique Bermudez used precisely that phrase, “the ends justify the means.”
Webb’s series ran from Aug. 18-20, 1996. And, for several weeks, the story advanced unopposed through talk radio, cable TV and the Internet, which was then still in its formative stages. Webb’s compelling story gained further traction because the Mercury News had created a state-of-the-art, interactive web site which linked to scores of documents and hundreds of pages of supplemental materials.
A Web Revolution
Aided by this web revolution, “Dark Alliance” progressed to the point that Webb’s radio and TV schedule was being printed daily by the Mercury News. And all this was going on outside and around the gatekeeping protective architecture of the MSM, the mainstream media, i.e., the major newspapers (Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times), magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News) and the big-three TV networks (CBS, NBC, ABC).
Webb’s story, in essence, pitted the nascent alternative media, anchored in the Internet and other lower-cost media outlets against the old-line, powerful corporate media. The public seemed to sense that the MSM was never going to report on this immensely important story that resonated with average Americans, many of whom had witnessed the devastation across the country – and especially in black communities – caused by the spread of crack.
After all, the major media had been ignoring or disparaging the Contra-cocaine story since it first bubbled to the surface in 1985 when it was reported by Robert Parry and Brian Barger of the Associated Press. During the Iran/Contra hearings in 1987, a protester disrupted the testimony by ex-White House aide Oliver North by yelling, “ask about the cocaine,” but no one did (at least not in open session).
The plea was ignored even though, during those same hearings, Rep. Les Aspin pointed out that the numbers in the Contra accounts did not check out. (Boston Globe, June 27, 1988) The available funds officially accrued were not sufficient to cover the reported weapons purchases. And it was not a small shortfall. For the fiscal year 1984-85, it was around $7 million. (Cocaine Politics, by Peter Scott and Jonathan Marshall, pgs. 210-11).
The MSM’s contempt for the Contra-cocaine story continued into the late 1980s when the major newspapers downplayed or disparaged a congressional investigation led by Sen. John Kerry that uncovered more evidence of ties between the Contras, cocaine traffickers and the Reagan administration, both Reagan’s CIA and the State Department.
“It is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking,” Kerry’s investigation concluded, “and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.” Kerry’s report added, “In each case, one or another agency of the U. S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.” (Introduction to the Kerry Committee Report.)
Just-Say-No Hypocrisy
But the notion that President Ronald Reagan’s just-say-no-to-drugs crowd was saying yes to cocaine traffickers as long as they chipped in money to the Contra coffers was something deemed unthinkable by the MSM. How could such a charge be true about these rebels whom Reagan had compared to America’s Founding Fathers? It was deemed the journalistically “responsible thing” in the 1980s to simply report the Reagan administration’s denials and ignore the mounting evidence.
But the MSM’s initial silence in 1996 after Webb revived the Contra-cocaine scandal was only the quiet before a very nasty storm. The MSM was going to write about the subject, but the big newspapers had no intention of furthering Webb’s good work or even acknowledging that this scandal deserved much greater attention than the MSM had given it in the 1980s.
To do so would have amounted to a self-indictment. After all, if the major newspapers had performed their journalistic responsibilities in the 1980s, much of the devastation and violence caused by the crack epidemic might have been averted. American lives could have been saved; American prisons might not have filled up with low-level drug dealers and users; American communities and families might not have been blighted and impoverished; the costly “war on drugs” might have been revealed as a failure much earlier than it eventually was.
Indeed, one of the reasons that Webb’s series seemed so new and shocking to the public in 1996 was because the MSM had largely ignored it. In the case of the Kerry investigation, the failure to fully air the committee’s public hearings and highlight its disclosures was especially disgraceful. After all, Kerry’s hearings and the Senate report were official U.S. government proceedings.
In 1996, by documenting some of the human consequences of the Contra drug trafficking – and by circumventing the media gatekeepers – Webb had issued his own indictment: that the U.S. government had, in effect, sanctioned the drug trade in America and that the major U.S. news media had failed to alert the public about this grave national security crime. Another implication of the series was that the MSM was in bed with the CIA.
More Voices
But the MSM’s behavior was actually even worse than that. Because of the sensation over Webb’s series, other ignored voices joined the fray with further exposures of Contra drug running. For example, former DEA agent Celerino Castillo, former CIA agent Bradley Ayers and former Los Angeles police officer Mike Ruppert all began to speak out about CIA-sanctioned drug running.
The high point may have been Ruppert’s confrontation with CIA Director John Deutch at a large gathering at a Los Angeles high school. It was clear that a populist tidal wave was building. Therefore, a dam had to be built before this flood of public outrage engulfed such important institutions as Ronald Reagan’s Legacy, the National Security State and the Corporate Media.
Granted, it would have taken some professional courage and real integrity for the editors and bureau chiefs of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to put their journalistic duties ahead of their instincts for self-preservation. They would have had to face up to their earlier failures and make amends to millions of readers who had been betrayed. Thus, it was much easier – and safer, career-wise – to put Webb’s series under a microscope and claim to find fault with it, to make Webb “the story,” not the reality of the Reagan administration’s malfeasance and the MSM’s misfeasance.
Although the initial assaults on Webb’s series were mounted by the right-wing news media, including the Washington Times, the MSM soon prepared its own withering counterattack against Webb. It began on Oct. 4, 1996, with a front-page story, with sidebars, in the Washington Post. The lead article was written by Walter Pincus and Roberto Suro, entitled “The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged Plot.”
A relentless offensive followed designed to crush the populist uprising in its infancy. In short order, the New York Times joined in. Then came the Los Angeles Times with the most deliberate and vicious attack. Editor Shelby Coffey commissioned the equivalent of a journalistic SWAT team. No less than 17 reporters prepared a three-day series that was actually longer than Webb’s original “Dark Alliance” series. Internally, it was known as the “Get Gary Webb Team.” (LA Weekly, 9/29/14)
As the team worked, its common chorus was: “We’re going to take away this guy’s Pulitzer.” The hit team was headed by Doyle McManus and Leo Wolinsky. (A few months later, Coffey promoted Wolinsky to assistant managing editor.)
One of the most absurd assertions made by the L.A. Times was to dismiss the Blandon/Ross network as a relatively minor player in the crack trade and claim that it only managed to give $50,000 to the Contras. Yet, two years earlier, the Times had described Ross as the “king of crack” with his network selling half a million crack rocks per day, essentially a one-man Wal-Mart for crack retailing. However, when the need was to minimize Ross’s role and thus how much help his operation could have given the Contras, the reality was reshaped.
L.A. Times’ Cover-up
Further, it appears that the Times later cooperated in a cover-up with Sheriff Sherman Block about an important lead in the “Dark Alliance” series. Through the Times, Block announced that, unlike what Webb had reported, a shady and mysterious local character, one Ronald Lister, was not associated with the Contras or any drug running.
But an alternative publication, Orange County Weekly, investigated Lister and came up with something completely different, concluding that Lister – a security consultant, former policeman and partner of Blandon’s – had given Blandon weapons, which he sold to Ross, and helped the drug ring launder money and avoid law enforcement discovery. While Lister was doing all this, he was holding what he called “business meetings” with Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson and “retired” CIA agents locally. (LA Weekly, May 30, 2013)
But was there more to all this than just a vendetta against a reporter from a smaller northern California newspaper unearthing a huge scandal on the Los Angeles Times’ home turf? While professional jealousy clearly played a role in the cruelty inflicted on Webb, the intensity of the counterattack also reflected the symbiotic relationship between the U.S. national security apparatus and Washington-based national security reporters who are dependent on official background briefings to receive pre-approved information that news organizations need, especially during foreign crises when access to on-the-ground events is limited.
Perception Management
A recently released CIA document on how the counterattack against Webb was promoted is revealing in this regard. Entitled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” the six-page internal report. described the CIA’s damage control in the wake of the publication of Webb’s story.
The report showed how the spy agency’s PR team exploited relationships with mainstream journalists who then essentially did the CIA’s work for it, mounting a devastating counterattack against Webb that marginalized him and painted the Contra-cocaine trafficking story as some baseless conspiracy theory.
Crucial to that success, the report credits “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists and an effective response by the Director of Central Intelligence’s Public Affairs Staff [that] helped prevent this story from becoming an unmitigated disaster.”
The Agency convinced friendly journalists to characterize Webb’s series as presenting “no real news, in that similar charges were made in the 1980’s and were investigated by the Congress and were found to be without substance.” That, of course, was a lie. In fact, Kerry’s investigation confirmed many of the Contra-cocaine allegations first reported by Parry and Barger for the Associated Press.
According to the CIA’s “Managing a Nightmare” report, journalists were advised to read Webb’s series critically and the CIA considered the initial attack by the Washington Post the key moment in blunting Webb’s story. The CIA distributed the negative stories to other members of the press.
From there, other papers refused to pick up Webb’s articles, but they often carried the articles attacking him. The CIA’s report noted that the tide of the public relations battle had fully turned by October and soon became a rout. Even the American Journalism Review, which – like similar publications – is supposed to stand up for honest journalists under fire, instead joined the all-out charge against Webb.
The Agency crowed how easy it was to work with journalists to first blunt and then turn around this negative national security story. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up.”]
Webb wanted to reply to these attacks as he pressed ahead with his investigation. In fact, at that Midnight Special talk, he said his paper would soon publish new work backing up his original series. But panic was sweeping the Knight-Ridder corporation which then owned the Mercury News.
So, the newspaper’s executive editor Jerry Ceppos sounded retreat and abandoned Webb and his investigation. Not only did Ceppos not publish the new work, he began to dismantle the prodigiously successful web site. Then, in May 1997, he printed a letter that amounted to a public apology for publishing the story in the first place. He said the series fell short of the paper’s standards and failed to handle the “gray areas” with sufficient care.
Understandably, Webb was upset with this decision. When he aired his disagreement, Ceppos dispatched him to the newspaper’s back-water Cupertino office, separating Webb from his home and family during the week because of the long commute.
Out of Journalism
The writing was on the wall. Webb took a severance package from the paper in November 1997, effectively forced out “in disgrace.” For betraying Webb, Ceppos received an “Ethics in Journalism Award” in 1997 from the Society of Professional Journalists. He was also got a promotion from Knight-Ridder.
Though Webb’s journalistic career had gone down in flames, he had forced the U.S. government to conduct more thorough investigations of the Contra-cocaine scandal by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich and CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz. Both reports, especially the latter, confirmed the gist of what Webb had written and, indeed, provided shocking new details, revealing a pervasive relationship between the Contras and major cocaine traffickers, including the Medellin cartel and other powerful drug smuggling operations.
The reports acknowledged that the CIA had cast a blind eye on the drug-running activities by the Contras for the entire decade of the 1980s and had even intervened to block potentially damaging investigations. The New York Times and Washington Post gave short shrift to these damaging findings and the Los Angeles Times all but ignored them. There was not a word from Jerry Ceppos about Webb’s (too late) vindication. Gary Webb had become a non-person in his profession. [For details on these findings, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga.”]
Ceppos also sandbagged Webb’s best opportunity to enrich himself and his family over his important work. At the peak of the controversy over “Dark Alliance,” Webb was getting lucrative offers for a book deal. His wife told Webb biographer Nick Schou that publishing giant Simon and Schuster made an initial offer to Webb of a $100,000 advance for a book. Webb’s wife urged him to take it.
But Ceppos told Webb that he could not work on a book about his series while still being employed at the Mercury News. Misguided loyalty kept Webb at the paper as he shunned the offer. He ultimately did write a book, also titled Dark Alliance, for a small publisher, Seven Stories Press. Without the muscle of a large publishing house – and with the MSM-enforced conventional wisdom about the Contra-cocaine issue being a “conspiracy theory” – the book did not get much media play.
A Downward Spiral
Forced out of the only profession he really wanted to be part of, Webb became an investigator for the California legislature. But when there was a power shift in Sacramento, he was without a job. He could not find a new reporter’s position anywhere on any major newspaper. In fact, he could not even get an interview.
Because of his finances, and due to a divorce from his wife, she had garnished his wages. The only job he could get was with a weekly alternative journal called the Sacramento News and Review. And that position did not pay nearly enough for him to keep up his expenses, which included a $2,000 mortgage.
Webb had asked to move back in with his former wife, but she said she would feel uncomfortable with the situation. He also asked a former girlfriend the same. She first agreed but then changed her mind. The only alternative left was to move in with his mother. His one solace in life at this time was his motorcycle rides. But then someone stole his motorcycle.
Faced with a forced move out of his house, Webb arranged for his cremation and typed out letters to his former wife and his three children. Although the letters have never been made public, his wife said he declared that he never regretted any news article that he wrote. He then used his father’s gun to take his own life. The first shot only wounded him, so he fired again. He was 49 years old.
After Webb’s death, Sen. John Kerry wrote the Sacramento News and Review that “Because of Webb’s work the CIA launched an Inspector General investigation that named dozens of troubling connections to drug runners. That wouldn’t have happened if Gary Webb hadn’t been willing to stand up and risk it all.” (LA Weekly, May 30, 2013)
Salvaging the Story
And the story might have ended there, except for one of the reporters who had decided not to deride Gary Webb’s work, but to build on it. Nick Schou of the Orange County Weekly had met Webb and took a liking to him. Upon hearing the news of Webb’s death, Schou felt a personal loss. So he decided to write a biography of his former friend and colleague, called Kill the Messenger, originally published in 2006.
The book is not just a chronicle of the furious and mindless attack that destroyed both Webb and any hope of getting to the bottom of the Contra/crack scandal. It was also an attempt at a biography of the man whom the mainstream media had caricatured as an amateurish, hotheaded, gonzo-type journalist. Schou’s book followed Webb’s career in depth and included many comments from fellow journalists who had worked with him and recalled Webb as a dedicated, hard-working, intelligent reporter who took himself and his job seriously and hated government officials who duped the public and/or broke the law.
Coming alive in Schou’s book was a three-dimensional Gary Webb who fit the classic adage about what journalism should be, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. From the beginning of his career, in college at Northern Kentucky, Webb went on to win dozens of reporting awards, including an H. L. Mencken Award and a Pulitzer Prize for being part of the Mercury News team coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
For instance, when Walt Bogdanich of the Cleveland Plain Dealer met Webb who was working at the Kentucky Post, Bogdanich was quickly impressed and told Schou, “I made it my job to try to get him to come to the Plain Dealer.”
In Cleveland, fellow reporter Steve Luttner told Schou, “I’ve never seen a more dogged reporter in thirty years.” Another reporter, Tom Suddes said, “He had an in-your-face spirit of journalism. He felt we weren’t there to nurture people, we were there to raise hell.”
Mary Anne Sharkey, who worked closely with Webb at the Plain Dealer, told Schou: “Gary was one of the most meticulous and dogged investigators. I’d come into the office, and he’d been there all night, reading documents.”
Bert Robinson at the San Jose Mercury News worked with Webb at the Sacramento office covering the state government. Robinson amplified on Sharkey’s comments about Webb’s ability to work with documents: “It seemed like a gift. He could pick up a 200-page report and skim through it and focus on one sentence on page 63 that suggested some huge outrage. … It was amazing to watch. He was a hell of a reporter.”
Unsmearing Webb
Schou’s book also straightened out another smear about Gary Webb. When the “Dark Alliance” series began stirring up populist anger, the New York Times set up a hit team to go after Webb’s earlier reporting. One of the angles was to check on Webb’s past stories to see if he had ever caused his newspaper to defend itself in a legal action, which did happen on two occasions. And that is what the Times reported in order to create the image of an irresponsible reporter.
But Schou went back and interviewed the newspaper executives involved. The reason the papers settled the lawsuits was not because of any inaccuracy in Webb’s reporting, but because of some hyperbole in the headlines, which Webb did not write. Webb did not want his employers to pay out anything. He wanted to continue the legal process because he felt he could back up everything he wrote in each story.
According to Schou, another investigative journalist, Peter Landesman showed an interest in adapting his book, Kill the Messenger, for the screen shortly after it was published in 2006. Landesman was a writer for New York Times magazine who specialized in writing very long and expensive stories that often made the cover of the weekend journal. Some of the stories, like one he did in 2004 about an international sex trade in young girls, drew some controversy. This may have been his impetus for approaching Schou about adapting the Webb book into a screenplay.
But the script spent years languishing around Hollywood until actor Jeremy Renner got involved. Renner had a major breakthrough role in The Hurt Locker in 2009, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. This helped launch him into some big-budget films like The Avengers, Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocol, The Bourne Legacy and American Hustle.
Renner’s Intervention
It was on the strength of that kind of roll that he turned actor/producer and decided to make Kill the Messenger. As he told interviewer Elizabeth Thorp, he was immediately drawn to the David and Goliath aspect of the story. And once he was in, he was all in:
“It was going to be a big hill to climb to get it made. It’s not a movie that people were screaming to make. Having me as a part of it helped. I wanted to get it made, not just sit around and wait for someone else to make that happen.” He added that he was instrumental in acquiring the cast, the director, other producers and the rest of the production team.
What’s amazing is that this is Renner’s first film as a producer. Yet, it’s hard to detect where he made a false step anywhere. From the editing, to the direction, to the casting, everything about this film is extremely well chosen. And we sense that from the start.
The opening credit montage, largely in black and white stills, juxtaposes various presidents’ pledges to fight a war on drugs: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan. Halfway through, it then breaks into another montage concerning America’s necessity to fight communism in Central America. Brian Kates edits this all very snappily, with a martial rhythm and appropriately loud and threatening music behind it. It is a gripping and pointed way to begin: a sort of visual topic sentence indicating the hypocrisy about to be exposed.
From that memorable opening, the promise is that we are in good hands, with people who understand the material and the forces involved. And we are. One reason I have detailed so much of the story behind Webb’s work and Schou’s biography is this: although the film is only 110 minutes long, what is remarkable is not how much was cut, but how much made it onto the screen.
It begins with the drug asset forfeiture story Webb worked on for the Mercury News. As Webb wrote in his book Dark Alliance, he was doing a story on how the police would file charges, burst into a home, seize property, and then drop the charges later, leaving the defendant much poorer. That story had created a lot of buzz.
A woman named Coral Baca called Webb. She had read his story and was impressed by his honesty, since it had been done to her boyfriend, one Rafael Cornejo. But, she said, there was more to it than that. The government had enlisted a former drug trader turned informant, Blandon, to testify against Cornejo.
Or, as Baca told Webb, “One of the government’s witnesses is a guy who used to work for the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it. … Four tons! And if that’s what he’s admitted to, you can imagine how much it really was.” She promised Webb some official records, so Webb showed up in court to see who Blandon was. And this is what got him interested in the story. All of this is faithfully depicted in the film.
Telling the Story
Approximately the first half of the picture pieces together Webb’s search for the story. It’s an interesting and skillfully handled piece of filmmaking, even for those already familiar with the tale. Besides the inherent drama of the subject, director Michael Cuesta makes it all move very quickly and adroitly through several different locales from Washington D.C., to a prison in Nicaragua, to South Central Los Angeles.
Renner has also gotten some fairly famous actors to take parts that are rather small, but well-delineated: Andy Garcia as Meneses; Oliver Platt as Ceppos; Ray Liotta as a kind of Jack Terrell, CIA soldier of fortune type; and Michael Sheen as a composite of Kerry investigators, based on Jonathan Winer, Ron Rosenblith and Jack Blum, with a mix of journalist Robert Parry who warned Webb about the career risks from the Contra-cocaine story before “Dark Alliance” was published.
Since the movie is done from Webb’s point of view, a mass audience will, for the first time, see what Webb saw, and how he saw it – and how the major media caricatured his work by exaggerating what he actually had written (he never said the CIA plotted to bring crack into the Los Angeles ghetto).
The beauty of Webb’s storytelling is that he showed that, almost through a kind of strange serendipity, a cast of oddball characters who would never have met anywhere else, all coalesced in the background of this CIA-sponsored war in Central America. For instance, Ricky Ross didn’t even knew who Blandon really was. It was Webb’s ability to put names and histories on these faces, and to show not just why they did what they did, but how they did it, that’s what made his series so extraordinary.
And this is the thrill the audience gets as it watches this first half: a gifted reporter wearing out the proverbial shoe leather, as the story of a lifetime first falls into his lap and then assembles itself before him. Director Cuesta lays it all out for us, sometimes using a moving camera in close, sometimes with vast panoramic shots in the jungle of Nicaragua, always keeping up a headlong tempo.
Renner as Webb
To match that directorial tempo, there is Renner as Webb. Renner is not the subtlest actor, but his energy and commitment are perfectly in tune in drawing a man who goes through three stages. The first is one of curiosity and growing interest, as a large, sinister tableaux takes shape. Then, the experience of piecing together the dots on a board from Nicaragua to San Francisco begins to enthrall him. (We actually see Renner arrange those dots in the film on a wall map.)
And finally, when he is thrown overboard by his newspaper, we see a man’s slow deterioration as he loses all that is dear to him in pursuit of a journalistic Holy Grail, which the powers-that-be don’t want him to have. Renner is convincing in all three stages of a difficult role.
Landesman’s script dexterously handles the various story lines of a complex subject without ever being confusing or laying on too much information. The sequence where the major newspapers decide to turn on Webb and the Mercury News is forcefully and concisely written. There is a realism to the MSM’s self-protective decision-making.
For example, we see the Washington Post interacting with the CIA’s Public Affairs Office, which, of course, we now know actually happened. We then cut to a conference room at the Los Angeles Times building, where the “Get Gary Webb Team” is getting chastised for letting a regional newspaper from Northern California steal the story of a generation out from under their noses.
There are other directorial touches showing a quiet, creative imagination at work. Towards the end of his life, one way Webb escaped his frustration was on his motorcycle. Near the end of the film, Cuesta does not shoot these from a distance or from the side with a car camera, Easy Rider style. Both of those would denote a freedom in the landscape. He shoots them head on with a static camera, with the very loud noise of the engine cranked up on the soundtrack. This conveys the tension building in a man as he drives headlong into a buzz-saw.
Some Fiction
There are some Hollywood-style fictional flourishes, of course, but they are not too distracting and make necessary points, such as the scene with the Liotta/Terrell CIA asset waking Webb as he sleeps in a small motel room after his banishment to Cupertino by Ceppos. Webb has brought his files there with him to work on his book.
In the middle of the night, without any noise being made, Liotta is suddenly in the room. The scene is shot as if through a gauze, shadowy and dreamlike. It unfolds slowly, weirdly, inchoately, as if Webb is now in a supernatural netherworld. And it achieves its intended effect, even if it diverges from the realism of many other parts of the movie.
There are other cases of dramatic license. In addition to the pseudonym for the Kerry staffer, there is also one for the late Georg Hodel, a Swiss journalist who was helping Webb on the follow-up stories to his original series, the stories Ceppos failed to run. Although Hodel’s life was threatened in Nicaragua, it was never as blatant as at the end of a rifle as is shown in the movie. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hung Out to Dry.”]
Webb did wound a man trying to steal his car. But it was not during this crisis period in his life, it was many years before he got to California. In the film, a fictional female character is used as Webb’s direct supervisor (who was actually Dawn Garcia.)
But these are all excusable since they are used to compress the story and to heighten the action and drama. The scene where Webb thinks he sees a man attempting to steal his car is another attempt by Cuesta to get inside Webb’s head: to show how the pressures of defending his story began to take a real toll on him.
I cannot conclude this review without mentioning the simple, moving and symbolic ending. It is one that will stay with me for awhile. Webb and his family appear at a journalism awards banquet at which Webb receives a prize from the California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for his “Dark Alliance” series. The state SPJ had announced the award before the cumulative MSM attacks pushed the Mercury News into its cowardly retreat.
What happened next was that the national SPJ pressured the state chapter to revoke the award to add to Webb’s personal humiliation, but the California SPJ refused to do so. That became the context for the national SPJ granting the “Ethics in Journalism” award to Mercury News executive editor Ceppos for his role in destroying Webb’s career. Since national SPJ could not coerce the state chapter to reverse itself, the special award was given to Ceppos to demonstrate the organization’s extraordinary disdain for Webb and his Contra-cocaine story.
In the movie, the award ceremony is first portrayed as what could have been, with Ceppos and other Mercury News executives celebrating Webb’s courageous reporting. But that dream sequence is replaced with a harsher reality in which Webb walks to the lectern as most of the journalists in attendance sit on their hands.
The End
Webb’s acceptance speech is rather inelegant and leaves Ceppos wincing. Webb explains that he never realized why his pre-Contra-cocaine stories were so well received — because he hadn’t written anything that really mattered. When he steps down from the podium, Webb drops his letter of resignation in front of Ceppos and the editor who handled the series.
Webb and his family go outside. Realizing this is probably the end of his newspaper career — which it was — Webb apologizes to his wife for any pain his ordeal has caused her. Then, in a beautiful, metaphorical stroke, Cuesta has Renner ascend an open air escalator in the atrium of the building. The film ends with on-screen titles saying that Webb never got another newspaper position and later took his own life.
Over the credits, we watch a home movie with the real Gary Webb playing with his children in the kitchen of his house. That ending contains the kind of subtlety, restraint and quiet power that, in this age of Scorsese and Tarantino, has been missing from American cinema for too long.
In December 1996, after seeing Webb at his Midnight Special appearance with fellow journalist Robert Parry, I noted Webb’s still confident attitude in both his story and the corporate structure above him. Having studied the assassinations of the 1960s, I didn’t quite comprehend it. For like those assassinations, the link between CIA and drug running was a radioactive subject. It was on the short list of bête noires of the MSM.
I had seen what happened to people who had tried to get to the bottom of those kinds of stories in the past, e.g., New Orleans DA Jim Garrison and House Select Committee on Assassinations Chief Counsel Richard Sprague. As I walked out, I told the friend I had come with, “I don’t think he understands what is happening to him.” He didn’t. Which is why he took the story on in the first place.
Because of Jeremy Renner and the “Kill the Messenger” movie, Gary Webb has been redeemed.
Many cinema observers, including me, have complained of late about the declining quality of American film – and the genre’s divorce from both fact and the socio-political realities of American life. Renner has worked the near-miracle. He has made a film that is not just technically and aesthetically excellent, but one that tells the truth about the ugly side of the modern American political system. It is a side that was covered up and enabled by the cronyism of the MSM.
The movie also shows the personal tragedy of what that system did to a reporter who wanted to root out the ugliness. See this film as soon as you can. And tell your friends about it. It’s the best and most important American picture I’ve seen in a long time.
by RocketMan » Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:32 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Oct 27, 2014 6:02 pm
RocketMan » Mon Oct 27, 2014 3:32 pm wrote:What the hell is that Landesman's agenda? Maybe, just maybe he just has JFK-related myopia which isn't really that rare... And he's open to alternative scenarios in other cases, which is just your basic compartmentalization/cognitive dissonance shit? The jury's still out on that guy, that's for sure!
by streeb » Mon Oct 27, 2014 10:27 pm
While there’s nothing terribly wrong with Kill the Messenger, there’s still something not right about it.
It does manage to honour its subject, Gary Webb. Played here as a likable but driven scruff by Jeremy Renner, Webb was the investigative journalist whose multipart series “Dark Alliance” connected the dots between the CIA-backed Contra war in Nicaragua and the crack epidemic in the States—an extremely dirty business given the tacit sanction of the U.S. government. Kill the Messenger doesn’t whitewash the response from the Agency, seen here threatening Webb’s family right to his face.
The CIA also smeared the reporter through its assets at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and especially the Los Angeles Times, all of them conveniently pissed, in the film’s view, at being scooped by the podunk San Jose Mercury News. Webb’s jumpy editors (Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Oliver Platt, the latter being particularly good) threw him under the bus, his career and life were ruined, and he eventually put a gun in his mouth.
With several episodes of Homeland under his belt, director Michael Cuesta knows how to craft a lean and efficient thriller with an effectively paranoid edge—so what’s the problem here? Gary Webb isn’t a threat to anyone these days, least of all the CIA, whose historic drug-running activities are met with such widespread indifference that they’re mined for yuks in the newest series of Archer. Too little, too late, in other words.
The movie also does precisely what Webb is warned about by a Beltway operative (Michael Sheen) burned by his proximity to the scandal. “They’ll turn you into the story,” he cautions. He also remarks, “Some truths are too big to tell.”
Given that he was responsible for last year’s insulting JFK flick, Parkland—a film based entirely on the moth-eaten Warren Commission cover-up—it’s a premise that screenwriter Peter Landesman has evidently taken to heart. It compromises Kill the Messenger’s credibility, to say the least.
by thatsmystory » Wed Nov 05, 2014 3:02 am
by Nordic » Sat Mar 21, 2015 5:15 am
by JackRiddler » Mon Mar 23, 2015 1:23 pm
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