This really disturbed me when I saw it on the wire this evening: Gary Webb, a journalist who had investigated links between the CIA-created Contras and the crack cocaine trade, has been found dead.

But what disturbed me even more me is how the coverage so far mentions work discrediting 'Dark Alliance' but none of it mentions a 1998 Esquire Magazine article that, to my mind, did a pretty good job of defending Webb and his work.

Here's the coverage to date:

CTV.ca  from the Associated Press: U.S. journalist who criticized CIA found dead

Sacramento Bee staff article (via Jim Romenesko's column at Poynter.org): Gary-Webb, prize-winning investigative reporter

Editor and Publisher: Gary Webb, Author of Controversial CIA/Crack Series, Dead of Apparent Suicide

L.A. Times (reg. required): Gary Webb, 49: Wrote series linking CIA, Drugs

This excerpt from the Times piece sums up the mainstream criticism of his 1996 series Dark Alliance, which claimed the some people affiliated with the Nicaraguan Contras -- a CIA-created group that was trying to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua -- had sold cocaine for distribution in black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and had triggered the crack epidemic.

Three months after the series was published, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said it conducted an exhaustive investigation but found no evidence of a connection between the CIA and Southern California drug traffickers.

Major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post, wrote reports discrediting elements of Webb's reporting. The Los Angeles Times report looked into Webb's charges "that a CIA-related drug ring sent 'millions' of dollars to the Contras; that it launched an epidemic of cocaine use in South-Central Los Angeles and America's other inner cities; and that the agency either approved the scheme or deliberately turned a blind eye."

"But the available evidence, based on an extensive review of court documents and more than 100 interviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington and Managua, fails to support any of those allegations," The Times reported.

Here's an excerpt from a September 1998 Esquire article entitled The Pariah (not available on the Web, but retrievable from KeepMedia):

After a year of research, in August 1996, Webb published a three-day, fifteen-thousand-word series in the Mercury News called "Dark Alliance." It is a story almost impossible to recapitulate in detail but simple in outline: Drug dealers working with the contras brought tons of cocaine into California in the 1980s and sold a lot of it to one dealer, a legend called Freeway Ricky Ross, who had connections with the L.A. street gangs and through this happenstance helped launch the national love of crack. That's it: a thesis that mixes the realpolitik of the-ends-justify-the-means with dollops of shit-happens.

The series set off a firestorm in black communities, where many suspected they had been deliberately targeted with the dope as an act of genocide (there is no evidence of that), and provoked repudiations of the story by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. The knockdowns of Webb's story questioned the importance of Nicaraguan dealers like Blandon, the significance of Ricky Ross, how much money, if any, reached the contras, and how crucial any of this was to the crack explosion in the eighties, and brushed aside any evidence of CIA involvement. But while raising questions about Webb's work, none of these papers or any other paper in the country undertook a serious investigation of Webb's evidence. A Los Angeles Times staff member who was present at a meeting called to plan the Times's response has told me that one motive for the paper's harsh appraisal was simply pride: The Times wasn't going to let an out-of-town paper win a Pulitzer in its backyard.

Here is an excerpt from a Jan.-Feb. 1997 American Journalism Review article entitled The Webb that Gary Spun:

 The questions and concerns over Webb's story are myriad. Is what he wrote true? Was his reporting responsible? Did he selectively use information that backed up his thesis while ignoring evidence contradicting it? Was the series edited with enough care? Why didn't the executive editor read the entire series before it was published? Was any consideration given to the effect that the series might have on the African American community, where many have long believed the crack plague is part of a government conspiracy?

After the Mercury News series ran, it was quickly spun in the retelling. Black talk show hosts and listeners, the black media and the alternative press touted the story as proof that the CIA allowed the U.S.-backed contras to deal drugs in America and use the profits to buy weapons, blithely ignoring the damage to the black community. This particular sentence played a significant role in such interpretations: Cocaine "was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA's army brought it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain basement prices."

There are those -- among them some journalists, CIA watchers, conspiracy theorists and black leaders -- who argue that, regardless of the series' flaws, Webb has performed a public service by focusing attention on whether the CIA helped set off the crack cocaine epidemic. "Even though we can criticize the San Jose Mercury News story, the net effect is that it has generated major coverage of a scandal that really was never fully investigated and fully covered before," said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the private National Security Archive, in a radio interview.

While the core of Webb's stories may be true, he has been chastised for overselling the story by writing it in a way that would lead reasonable readers to conclude that the CIA was involved in the drug trafficking, referring repeatedly to the "CIA's army." And the series' major premise--that the trio highlighted in his series alone triggered the crack epidemic--has been contradicted by major newspapers.

For his part, Webb told a group of journalism students at the University of California at Berkeley in November that "anybody that read this story would be a fool if they came away with the conclusion that we said the CIA ran this operation. We were very specific in saying who did what."

The series ran Aug. 18-20, 1996, but got almost no attention in the MSM. The cauldron for it was the alternative media.

From AJR:

Lori Leibovich, assistant editor of the online magazine Salon, asked Webb a month after his series ran why it wasn't picked up by the mainstream media. "By now, journalists have read the series, and they're figuring out how to tell this story in 12 inches because that's what most newspapers have the space to do these days," Webb replied. "Secondly, a lot of newspapers--and TV particularly--they're just chickenshit."

However, the guns were soon turned on Webb's series by the Washington Post, the N.Y. Times and, of course the L.A. Times.

AJR again:

While the big three attacked Webb's premise, they did concede he had advanced the story beyond what had been reported on the subject in the mid-1980s, when the suggestion of CIA involvement in drug smuggling was a prominent issue that warranted a Senate investigation. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the investigating subcommittee, said in 1989 that, despite suspicions, the panel couldn't prove the agency had allowed coke smuggling to help the contras.

"Webb had a good story about two drug dealers loosely connected to the contras in the early 1980s--an item to add to the list of evidence linking contras and cocaine trafficking," wrote David Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, who has written extensively about the CIA. "But the paper went too far, claiming without solid proof that 'millions' flowed from these mid-level dealers to the contras--it may have been $50,000--and in tying these traffickers to the rise of crack, a phenomenon bigger than a mere two pushers."

From Esquire:

A common chord ran through the responses of all three papers: It never really happened, and if it did happen, it was on a small scale, and anyway it was old news, because both the Kerry report and a few wire stories in the eighties had touched on the contra-cocaine connection. What is missing from the press responses, despite their length, is a sense that anyone spent as much energy investigating Webb's case as attempting to refute it. The "Dark Alliance" series was passionate, not clinical. The headlines were tabloid, not restrained. But whatever sins were committed in the presentation of the series, they cannot honestly be used to dismiss its content. It is puzzling that The New York Times felt it could discredit the story by quoting anonymous intelligence officials (a tack it hardly followed in publishing the Pentagon Papers). In contrast, what is striking in Webb's series is the copious citation of documents. (In the Mercury News's Web-site version ... are the hyperlinked facsimiles of documents that tug one into the dark world of drugs and agents.) But when Jerry Ceppos, the executive editor of the Mercury News, wrote a letter in response to the Post's knockdown, the paper refused to print it because a defense of Webb's work would have resulted in spreading yet more "misinformation."

More from Esquire:

One day in October 1996, a month after he retired, Hector Berrellez (note: a decorated veteran of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) picked up a newspaper and read this big story about a guy named Gary Webb. Hector had lived in shadows, and talking to reporters had not been his style. "As I read, I thought, This shit is true," he says now. He hadn't a doubt about what Webb was saying. He saw the reporter as doomed. Webb had hit a sensitive area, and for it he would be attacked and disbelieved. Hector knew all about the Big Dog and the Big Boy rules.

Months later ...

ON SUNDAY, MAY 11, 1997, GARY WEBB WAS hanging wallpaper in his kitchen when the San Jose Mercury News published a column by executive editor Jerry Ceppos that was widely read as a repudiation of Webb's series. It was an odd composition that retracted nothing but apologized for everything. Ceppos wrote, "Although the members of the drug ring met with contra leaders paid by the CIA and Webb believes the relationship with the ClA was a tight one, I feel we did not have proof that top ClA officials knew of the relationship." Fair enough, except that Webb never wrote that top CIA officials knew of the contra-cocaine connection. The national press wrote front-page stories saying that the San Jose Mercury News was backing off its notorious series about crack. The world had been restored to its proper order. Webb fell silent. He had to deal with his own nature. He is not good at being politic. "I'm just fucking stubborn," he say's, "and that's all there was to it, because I knew this was a good story and I knew it wasn't over yet, and I really had no idea of what else to do. What else was I going to do?"

I gotta get some sleep, but here's the closing lines from the Esquire piece:

And I wonder how Webb deals with it, with all the hard work done, with all the facts and documents devoured, and with all this diligent toil resulting in his personal ruin, depriving him of the only kind of work he has ever wanted in his life.

And I remember what he said earlier that day while he sat in his study, leaning toward me, his right hand gripping his left wrist: "The trail is littered with bodies. You go down the last ten years, and there is a skeleton here and a skeleton there of somebody that found out about it and wrote about it. I thought that this is the truth, and what can they do to you if you tell the truth? What can they do to you if you write the truth?"

Addendum

From the CIA's FAQ page:

The CIA has been accused of conducting assassinations and engaging in drug trafficking.  What are the facts?

The CIA does neither.  Executive Order 12333 of 1981 explicitly prohibits the Central Intelligence Agency from engaging, either directly or indirectly, in assassinations.  Internal safeguards and the congressional oversight process assure compliance.

Regarding recent allegations of CIA involvement in drug trafficking, the CIA Inspector General* found no evidence to substantiate the charges that the CIA or its employees conspired with or assisted Contra-related organizations or individuals in drug trafficking to raise funds for the Contras or for any other purpose.   In fact, the CIA plays a crucial role in combating drug trafficking by providing intelligence information to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the State Department.

* See:  Overview of Report of Investigation Concerning Allegations of Connections Between CIA and The Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States

Report of Investigation—Volume I: The California Story

Report of Investigation—Volume II: The Contra Story

Great, we can all go back to sleep then! :)

Oh, one last thing from the Esquire piece:

Following the release of "Dark Alliance," Senator John Kerry told The Washington Post, "There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, on the payroll of, and carrying the credentials of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking while involved in support of the contras." Why has the massive Kerry report been ignored to this day?

Kerry had led a U.S. Senate investigation into the Contras and cocaine in the late 1980s, but what does he know?

Oh what the heck. Here's link to copvcia.com's material on the CIA and drugs too.

Now good night!!