Summary: Two recent new articles revisit a sad story from our past. Gary Webb had a distinguished career in journalism, until his series in the San Jose Mercury News about the CIA’s involvement in smuggling drugs into America. What happened afterwards tells us much about America. We’re ignorant because we have the news media we deserve, since we do not appreciate or protect whistleblowers and journalists who tell us unpleasant truths. This leaves them vulnerable to attack by powerful interest groups. It’s a story of America’s decline.
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Contents
- Webb’s allegations about the CIA
- The Empire strikes back
- Conclusions
- For More Information about the CIA
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(1) Webb’s allegations about the CIA
Urban legends that circulate to this day that the CIA created and profited from the crack epidemic that devastated our inner cities in the 1980s.There was an element of truth in these allegations, with their origin in a 1996 series of articles by Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News. They had a core of truth, but were wildly exaggerated. For details see:
(2) The Empire strikes back
Fast, open and thorough investigations could have shown the small CIA involvement in drug smuggling (their dirty work prevents them from working only with nice people). Eventually investigations did so with varying degrees of credibility.
But that’s not our government’s way. One way or another steps were taken to ruin Webb’s career. Perhaps by coincidence, Webb’s accusations against the government received massive investigations by major newspaper, which they never given to investigations of government iniquity.
Two recent articles describe this sad history.
“Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes for ‘Tawdry’ Attacks“, LA Weekly, 30 May 2013 — “Jesse Katz admits that attacking journalist Gary Webb’s CIA-cocaine expose ruined Webb’s life”. Excerpt:
“Dark Alliance” blew the lid off the CIA’s ties to America’s crack market by showing for the first time not just the agency’s role in turning a blind eye to Nicaraguan contras smuggling cocaine to the United States but also vividly illustrating the role of that cocaine in the spread — via marketers like Ross — of crack in America’s inner cities.
The movie will portray Webb as a courageous reporter whose career and life were cut short when the nation’s three most powerful newspapers piled on to attack Webb and his three-part Mercury News series on the CIA’s crack-cocaine connection.
The New York Times, Washington Post and L.A. Times each obscured basic truths of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series. But no newspaper tried harder than the L.A. Times, where editors were said to have been appalled that a distant San Jose daily had published a blockbuster about America’s most powerful spy agency and its possible role in allowing drug dealers to flood South L.A. with crack.
“Seeing the Gray in ‘Dark Alliance’“, Los Angeles Magazine, 6 June 2013 — “Jesse Katz on the life and death and Hollywood resurrection of Gary Webb, the reporter who linked the CIA to the crack epidemic.” Excerpt:
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“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 explained. “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.”
The LA Weekly gives the rest of the story:
Katz seems to be referring to the fact that Times editor Shelby Coffey assigned a staggering 17 reporters to exploit any error in Webb’s reporting, including the most minute. The newspaper’s response to “Dark Alliance” was longer than Webb’s series. It was replete with quotes from anonymous CIA sources who denied the CIA was connected to contra-backing coke peddlers in the ghettos.
Eventually, Webb’s unnerved editors in San Jose withdrew their support for his story.
LA Magazine tells the result:
Much of the Times‘ attack was clever misdirection, but it ruined Webb’s reputation: In particular, the L.A. Times attacked a claim that Webb never made: that the CIA had intentionally addicted African-Americans to crack.
Webb, who eventually could find only part-time work at a small weekly paper, committed suicide {in 2004}.
(3) Conclusions
Charles Pierce at Esquire gives a post-mortem on this sad story.
This whole business stank from jump. For all the whining about the current administration’s knuckling of the press, the Reagan people were the true masters at it. They were able to scare editors and publishers out of stories about what was really going on with the Moral Equivalents Of Our Founding Fathers down in Central America. They scared them into selling out their reporters; Ray Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto over the El Mozote massacre, and Bob Parry over a lot of his Iran-Contra work, much of which itself had to do with Contra drug running.
The Reagan people got the L.A. Times and a lot of the prestige press to do its dirty work on Gary Webb, who got destroyed in the process, but who now gets to be a hero in a movie, so there’s that, I guess. And he gets an apology from one of the journalistic button men who did him in.
(4) For More Information about the CIA
- A must-read book for any American interested in geopolitics, 5 March 2009 — About Legacy of Ashes
- How the Soviet Menace was over-hyped – and what we can learn from this, 13 October 2009
- The CIA’s forecast about the Iranian Revolution – and the revolution prediction tool, 6 January 2010
- The Flynn report, itself a symptom of deep problems in the government establishment, 11 January 2010 — “Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan“
- Iran will have the bomb in 5 years (again), 20 January 2010
- How useful are our intelligence agencies? To what degree are they blinded by prejudice and institutional needs?, 13 April 2010
- About our intelligence agencies: the struggle to find an accurate AND institutionally useful narrative, 14 April 2010
- A major function of our intelligence agencies is to shape the narrative. They do it well, molding history like clay on a wheel, 15 April 2010
- The intelligence community’s meritocracy in action, 24 December 2012
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