Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy

A Special Report: Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy

By Robert Parry

Created Dec 11 2007 - 7:43am

Three years ago, I walked into my home in Arlington, Virginia, and checked

my phone messages. One was from a Los Angeles Times reporter who was looking

for a comment from me about Gary Webb's suicide on the night of Dec. 9,

2004. It was the first I had heard of the news.

After I recovered from the shock, I called the reporter back to get more

details. I also told him he would have a hard time writing a decent obituary

on Webb because the L.A. Times had never acknowledged that Webb was

substantially correct in his reporting about the Nicaraguan contras' role in

smuggling cocaine into the United States in the 1980s.

Though Los Angeles had been hit hard by the "crack epidemic" and the L.A.

Times had devoted front-page space to trash Webb's contra-cocaine reporting

in 1996, the newspaper never ran a story detailing the CIA inspector

general's

1998 findings, which confirmed much of what Webb had alleged - and more.

The CIA inspector general found that not only had the contras helped the

cocaine cartels get their goods into the United States, but that the CIA and

the Reagan administration had helped cover up the evidence.

However, to have written that story in 1998, the L.A. Times editors would

have had to admit they had wronged Webb two years earlier when they bought

into the ongoing government cover stories about the innocence of the Reagan

administration and the CIA.

It was much easier for the L.A. Times to ignore the findings of the CIA's

own inspector general and to maintain the fiction that Webb was just a

reckless reporter who had gotten the contra-cocaine story all wrong.

That decision by the L.A. Times - when combined with the abusive treatment

Webb received from other major news outlets and his betrayal by his own

editors at the San Jose Mercury News - had sent Webb's life into a downward

spiral that ended with him shooting himself with his father's handgun.

On Dec. 10, 2004, I told the L.A. Times reporter that since his newspaper

had never reported on the CIA's admissions, he could not put Webb's death in

any honest context. So, I was not surprised the next day when the L.A. Times

published a nasty obituary that treated Webb as if he had been a common

criminal rather than a fellow journalist.

The Washington Post republished the graceless L.A. Times obit - and it

quickly hardened into the official judgment on Gary Webb.

Yet, today, when trying to understand how the United States ended up with a

national press corps that so eagerly passed on government propaganda about

Iraq's WMD and other lies, it is worth recalling the story of Gary Webb and

the contra-cocaine scandal.

Dark Alliance

Webb's death in 2004 had its roots in his fateful decision eight years

earlier to write a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that

challenged a potent conventional wisdom shared by the elite U.S. news

organizations - that one of the most shocking scandals of the 1980s just

couldn't be true.

Webb's "Dark Alliance" series, published in August 1996, revived the

decade-old allegations that the Reagan administration in the 1980s had

tolerated and protected cocaine smuggling by its client army of Nicaraguan

rebels known as the contras.

Though substantial evidence of the contra crimes had surfaced in the

mid-1980s (initially in an article that Brian Barger and I wrote for the

Associated Press in December 1985 and later at hearings conducted by Sen.

John Kerry), the major news outlets had bent to pressure from the Reagan

administration and refused to take the disclosures seriously.

Reflecting the dominant attitude toward Kerry and his work on the

contra-cocaine scandal, Newsweek even dubbed the Massachusetts senator a

"randy conspiracy buff." [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Kerry's

Contra-Cocaine Chapter [1]" or Robert Parry's Lost History: Contras,

Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth [2].]

Thus, the ugly reality of the contra-cocaine scandal was left in that

netherworld of uncertainty, largely proven with documents and testimony but

never accepted by Official Washington, including its premier news

organizations, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

But Webb's series thrust the scandal back into prominence by connecting the

contra-cocaine trafficking to the spread of crack that ravaged Los Angeles

and other American urban centers in the 1980s. For that reason,

African-American communities were up in arms as were their elected

representatives in the Congressional Black Caucus.

So, Webb's "Dark Alliance" series offered a unique opportunity for the major

news outlets to finally give the contra-cocaine scandal the attention it

deserved.

But that would have required some painful self-criticism among Washington

journalists whose careers had advanced in part because they had not offended

Reagan supporters who had made an art out of punishing out-of-step reporters

for pursuing controversies like the contra-cocaine scandal.

Also, by the mid-1990s, a powerful right-wing news media had taken shape and

was in no mood to accept the notion that many of President Reagan's beloved

contras were drug traffickers. That recognition would have cast a shadow

over the Reagan Legacy, which the Right was busy elevating into mythic

status.

There was the turf issue, too. Since Webb's stories coincided with the

emergence of the Internet as an alternate source for news and the San Jose

Mercury News was at the center of Silicon Valley, the big newspapers saw a

threat to their historic dominance as the nation's gatekeepers for what

information should be taken seriously.

Plus, the major media's focus in the mid-1990s was on scandals swirling

around Bill Clinton, such as some firings at the White House Travel Office

and convoluted questions about his old Whitewater real-estate deal.

In other words, there was little appetite to revisit scandals from the

Reagan years and there was strong motive to disparage what Webb had written.

Rev. Moon's Newspaper

It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon's right-wing Washington Times to begin the

counterattack. The Washington Times turned to some ex-CIA officials, who had

participated in the contra war, to refute the drug charges.

Then - in a pattern that would repeat itself over the next decade - the

Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind the

right-wing press. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a

front-page article knocking down Webb's story, although acknowledging that

some contra operatives did help the cocaine cartels.

The Post's approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine

allegations as old news - "even CIA personnel testified to Congress they

knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers," the Post

sniffed - and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one contra

smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted - that it had not "played a

major role in the emergence of crack."

A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to "conspiracy

fears."

Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling on

against Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA's internal

reviews in 1987 and 1988 - almost a decade earlier - that supposedly had

cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine smuggling.

But the CIA's decade-old cover-up began to weaken on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA

Inspector General Frederick Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence

Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, the second only

three days. He promised a more thorough review.

Nevertheless, Webb was becoming the target of media ridicule. Influential

Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal

that he would explore the possibility that the contra war was primarily a

business to its participants.

"Oliver Stone, check your voice mail," Kurtz smirked. [Washington Post, Oct.

28, 1996]

Webb's suspicion was not unfounded, however. Indeed, White House aide Oliver

North's chief contra emissary Rob Owen had made the same point in a March

17, 1986, message about the contra leadership.

"Few of the so-called leaders of the movement . really care about the boys

in the field," Owen wrote. "THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM."

[Capitalization in the original.]

Mercury News Retreat

Kurtz and other big-name journalists may have been ignorant of key facts

about the contra war, but that didn't stop them from pillorying Gary Webb.

The ridicule also had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury

News. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos was in retreat.

On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series

"fell short of my standards." He criticized the stories because they

"strongly implied CIA knowledge" of contra connections to U.S. drug dealers

who were manufacturing crack-cocaine. "We did not have proof that top CIA

officials knew of the relationship," Ceppos wrote.

The big newspapers celebrated Ceppos's retreat as vindication of their own

dismissal of the contra-cocaine stories. Ceppos next pulled the plug on the

Mercury News' continuing contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb to

a small office in Cupertino, California, far from his family. Webb resigned

the paper in disgrace.

For undercutting Webb and other Mercury News reporters working on the contra

investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism Review and was

given the 1997 national "Ethics in Journalism Award" by the Society of

Professional Journalists.

While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his marriage

break up.

Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations that

would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan

administration had conducted the contra war.

The CIA published the first part of Inspector General Hitz's findings on

Jan. 29, 1998. Despite a largely exculpatory press release, Hitz's Volume

One admitted that not only were many of Webb's allegations true but that he

actually understated the seriousness of the contra-drug crimes and the CIA's

knowledge.

Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in

the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an

image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco-based drug

ring with suspected ties to the contras, the so-called "Frogman Case."

On May 7, 1998, another disclosure shook the earlier presumptions of the

Reagan administration's innocence. Rep. Maxine Waters, a California

Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982, letter

of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department.

The letter, which had been requested by CIA Director William Casey, freed

the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA

assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan contras and Afghan

rebels who were fighting a Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan and who

were implicated in heroin trafficking.

Justice Report

The next break in the cover-up was a report by the Justice Department's

inspector general Michael Bromwich. Given the hostile climate surrounding

Webb's series, Bromwich's report opened with criticism of Webb. But, like

the CIA's Volume One, the contents revealed new details about government

wrongdoing.

According to evidence cited by Bromwich, the Reagan administration knew

almost from the outset of the contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated

the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to

expose or stop the crimes.

Bromwich's report revealed example after example of leads not followed,

corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations

sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers.

The report showed that the contras and their supporters ran several parallel

drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of Webb's series.

The report also found that the CIA shared little of its information about

contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on three occasions disrupted

cocaine-trafficking investigations that threatened the contras.

Though depicting a more widespread contra-drug operation than Webb had

understood, the Justice report also provided some important corroboration

about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was a key figure in

Webb's series.

Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information

about Meneses's operation and his financial assistance to the contras.

For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that

in the early 1980s, the CIA allowed the contras to fly drugs into the United

States, sell them and keep the proceeds.

Pena, who was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed FDN

contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the contras by the

inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance.

The Justice report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S.

embassies in Central America discouraging Drug Enforcement Administration

investigations, including one into contra-cocaine shipments moving through

the international airport in El Salvador.

Inspector General Bromwich said secrecy trumped all. "We have no doubt that

the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its

investigation at the airport," he wrote.

Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big

newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases.

Cocaine Crimes & Monica

By fall 1998, Official Washington was obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky sex

scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning contra-cocaine

disclosures in the CIA's Volume Two.

In Volume Two, published Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General 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 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 CIA field report.

ADREN also employed terrorist methods, including the bombing of Nicaraguan

civilian planes and hijackings, to disrupt the Sandinista government, the

CIA knew. Cocaine smuggling was also in the picture.

According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN members

made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981, the CIA cable

reported.

ADREN's leaders included Enrique Bermudez and other early contras who would

later direct the major contra army, the CIA-organized FDN. Throughout the

war, Bermudez remained the top contra military commander.

The CIA later corroborated the allegations about ADREN's cocaine

trafficking, but insisted that Bermudez had opposed the drug shipments to

the United States which went ahead nonetheless.

Ends and Means

The truth about Bermudez's supposed objections to drug trafficking, however,

was less clear. According to Volume One, Bermudez enlisted Norwin Meneses, a

large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler, to raise money and buy supplies for

the contras.

Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan trafficker

named Danilo Blandon, who told Hitz's investigators that he and Meneses flew

to Honduras to meet with Bermudez in 1982.

At the time, Meneses's criminal activities were well known in the Nicaraguan

exile community. But Bermudez told the cocaine smugglers that "the ends

justify the means" in raising money for the contras.

After the Bermudez meeting, contra soldiers helped Meneses and Blandon get

past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking

suspicions. After their release, Blandon and Meneses traveled on to Bolivia

to complete a cocaine transaction.

There were other indications of Bermudez's drug-smuggling tolerance. In

February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade accused

Bermudez of narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz's report.

After the contra war ended, Bermudez returned to Managua, where he was shot

to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved.

Along the Southern Front, in Costa Rica, the drug evidence centered on the

forces of Eden Pastora, another leading contra commander. But Hitz

discovered that the U.S. government may have made matters worse.

Hitz revealed that the CIA put an admitted drug operative - known by his CIA

pseudonym "Ivan Gomez" - in a supervisory position over Pastora. Hitz

reported that the CIA discovered Gomez's drug history in 1987 when Gomez

failed a security review on drug-trafficking questions.

In internal CIA interviews, Gomez admitted that in March or April 1982, he

helped family members who were engaged in drug trafficking and money

laundering. In one case, Gomez said he assisted his brother and

brother-in-law in transporting cash from New York City to Miami. He admitted

that he "knew this act was illegal."

Later, Gomez expanded on his admission, describing how his family members

had fallen $2 million into debt and had gone to Miami to run a

money-laundering center for drug traffickers. Gomez said "his brother had

many visitors whom [Gomez] assumed to be in the drug trafficking business."

Gomez's brother was arrested on drug charges in June 1982. Three months

later, in September 1982, Gomez started his CIA assignment in Costa Rica.

Years later, convicted drug trafficker Carlos Cabezas alleged that in the

early 1980s, Ivan Gomez was the CIA agent in Costa Rica who was overseeing

drug-money donations to the contras.

Gomez "was to make sure the money was given to the right people [the

contras] and nobody was taking ... profit they weren't supposed to," Cabezas

stated publicly.

But the CIA sought to discredit Cabezas at the time because he had trouble

identifying Gomez's picture and put Gomez at one meeting in early 1982

before Gomez started his CIA assignment.

While the CIA was able to fend off Cabezas's allegations by pointing to

these discrepancies, Hitz's report revealed that the CIA was nevertheless

aware of Gomez's direct role in drug-money laundering, a fact the agency hid

from Sen. Kerry's investigation in 1987.

The Bolivian Connection

There also was more about Gomez. In November 1985, the FBI learned from an

informant that Gomez's two brothers had been large-scale cocaine importers,

with one brother arranging shipments from Bolivia's infamous drug kingpin

Roberto Suarez.

Suarez already was known as a financier of right-wing causes. In 1980, with

the support of Argentine's hard-line anti-communist military regime, Suarez

bankrolled a coup in Bolivia that ousted the elected left-of-center

government.

The violent putsch became known as the Cocaine Coup because it made Bolivia

the region's first narco-state. Bolivia's government-protected cocaine

shipments helped transform the Medellin cartel from a struggling local

operation into a giant corporate-style business for delivering cocaine to

the U.S. market.

Some of those profits allegedly found their way into contra coffers.

Flush with cash in the early 1980s, Suarez invested more than $30 million in

various right-wing paramilitary operations, including the contra forces in

Central America, according to U.S. Senate testimony by an Argentine

intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse.

In 1987, Sanchez-Reisse said the Suarez drug money was laundered through

front companies in Miami before going to Central America. There, other

Argentine intelligence officers - veterans of the Bolivian coup - trained

the contras.

CIA Inspector General Hitz added another piece to the mystery of the

Bolivian-contra connection. One contra fund-raiser, Jose Orlando Bolanos,

boasted that the Argentine government was supporting his anti-Sandinista

activities, according to a May 1982 cable to CIA headquarters.

Bolanos made the statement during a meeting with undercover DEA agents in

Florida. He even offered to introduce them to his Bolivian cocaine supplier.

Containing the Scandal

Despite all this suspicious drug activity around Ivan Gomez and the contras,

the CIA insisted that it did not unmask Gomez until 1987, when he failed a

security check and confessed his role in his family's drug business.

The CIA official who interviewed Gomez concluded that "Gomez directly

participated in illegal drug transactions, concealed participation in

illegal drug transactions, and concealed information about involvement in

illegal drug activity," Hitz wrote.

But senior CIA officials still protected Gomez. They refused to refer the

Gomez case to the Justice Department, citing the 1982 DOJ-CIA agreement that

spared the CIA from a legal obligation to report narcotics crimes by

non-employees.

Instead, the CIA eased Gomez, an independent contractor, out of the agency

in February 1988, without alerting law enforcement or the congressional

oversight committees.

When questioned about the case nearly a decade later, one senior CIA

official who had supported the gentle treatment of Gomez had second

thoughts.

"It is a striking commentary on me and everyone that this guy's involvement

in narcotics didn't weigh more heavily on me or the system," the official

acknowledged.

A Medellin drug connection arose in another section of Hitz's report, when

he revealed evidence suggesting that some contra trafficking may have been

sanctioned by Reagan's National Security Council.

The protagonist for this part of the contra-cocaine mystery was Moises

Nunez, a Cuban-American who worked for Oliver North's NSC contra-support

operation and for two drug-connected seafood importers, Ocean Hunter in

Miami and Frigorificos de Puntarenas in Costa Rica.

Frigorificos de Puntarenas was created in the early 1980s as a cover for

drug-money laundering, according to sworn testimony by two of the firm's

principals - Carlos Soto and Medellin cartel accountant Ramon Milian

Rodriguez.

Drug allegations were swirling around Moises Nunez by the mid-1980s. At the

AP, his operation was one of the targets of our investigation.

Finally reacting to these suspicions, the CIA questioned Nunez on March 25,

1987, about his alleged cocaine trafficking. He responded by pointing the

finger at his NSC superiors.

"Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine

relationship with the National Security Council," Hitz reported, adding:

"Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it

was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics

trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction

of the NSC. Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had

been involved."

After this first round of questioning, CIA headquarters authorized an

additional session, but then senior CIA officials reversed the decision.

There would be no further efforts at "debriefing Nunez."

Hitz noted that "the cable [from headquarters] offered no explanation for

the decision" to stop the Nunez interrogation.

But the CIA's Central American task force chief Alan Fiers said the

Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued "because of the NSC connection and the

possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private Benefactor

program [the contra money handled by North]. A decision was made not to

pursue this matter."

Joseph Fernandez, who had been the CIA's station chief in Costa Rica, later

confirmed to congressional Iran-Contra investigators that Nunez "was

involved in a very sensitive operation" for North's "Enterprise." The exact

nature of that NSC-authorized activity has never been divulged.

At the time of the Nunez-NSC drug admissions and his truncated

interrogation, the CIA's acting director was Robert M. Gates, who is now

President George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense.

Miami Vice

The CIA also worked directly with other drug-connected Cuban-Americans on

the contra project, Hitz found.

One of Nunez's Cuban-American associates, Felipe Vidal, had a criminal

record as a narcotics trafficker in the 1970s. But the CIA still hired him

to serve as a logistics coordinator for the contras, Hitz reported.

The CIA also learned that Vidal's drug connections were not only in the

past.

A December 1984 cable to CIA headquarters revealed Vidal's ties to Rene

Corvo, another Cuban-American suspected of drug trafficking. Corvo was

working with anti-communist Cuban, Frank Castro, who was viewed as a

Medellin cartel representative within the contra movement.

There were other narcotics links to Vidal. In January 1986, the DEA in Miami

seized 414 pounds of cocaine concealed in a shipment of yucca that was going

from a contra operative in Costa Rica to Ocean Hunter, the company where

Vidal worked.

Despite the evidence, Vidal remained a CIA employee as he collaborated with

Frank Castro's assistant, Rene Corvo, in raising money for the contras,

according to a CIA memo in June 1986.

By fall 1986, Sen. Kerry had heard enough rumors about Vidal to demand

information about him as part of a congressional inquiry into contra drugs.

But the CIA withheld the derogatory information.

On Oct. 15, 1986, Kerry received a briefing from Alan Fiers, who didn't

mention Vidal's drug arrests and conviction in the 1970s.

But Vidal was not yet in the clear. In 1987, the U.S. attorney in Miami

began investigating Vidal, Ocean Hunter and other contra-connected entities.

This prosecutorial attention worried the CIA. The CIA's Latin American

division felt it was time for a security review of Vidal. But on Aug. 5,

1987, the CIA's security office blocked the review for fear that the Vidal

drug information "could be exposed during any future litigation."

As expected, the U.S. Attorney did request documents about "contra-related

activities" by Vidal, Ocean Hunter and 16 other entities. The CIA advised

the prosecutor that "no information had been found regarding Ocean Hunter,"

a statement that was clearly false.

The CIA continued Vidal's employment as an adviser to the contra movement

until 1990, virtually the end of the contra war.

Honduras Trafficking

Hitz revealed that drugs also tainted the highest levels of the

Honduran-based FDN, the largest contra army.

Hitz found that Juan Rivas, a contra commander who rose to be chief of

staff, admitted that he had been a cocaine trafficker in Colombia before the

war. The CIA asked Rivas, known as El Quiche, about his background after the

DEA began suspecting that Rivas might be an escaped convict from a Colombian

prison.

In interviews with CIA officers, Rivas acknowledged that he had been

arrested and convicted of packaging and transporting cocaine for the drug

trade in Barranquilla, Colombia. After several months in prison, Rivas said,

he escaped and moved to Central America where he joined the contras.

Defending Rivas, CIA officials insisted that there was no evidence that

Rivas engaged in trafficking while with the contras. But one CIA cable noted

that he lived an expensive lifestyle, even keeping a $100,000 thoroughbred

horse at the contra camp.

Contra military commander Bermudez later attributed Rivas's wealth to his

ex-girlfriend's rich family. But a CIA cable in March 1989 added that "some

in the FDN may have suspected at the time that the father-in-law was engaged

in drug trafficking."

Still, the CIA moved quickly to protect Rivas from exposure and possible

extradition to Colombia. In February 1989, CIA headquarters asked that DEA

take no action "in view of the serious political damage to the U.S.

Government that could occur should the information about Rivas become

public."

Rivas was eased out of the contra leadership with an explanation of poor

health. With U.S. government help, he was allowed to resettle in Miami.

Colombia was not informed about his fugitive status.

Another senior FDN official implicated in the drug trade was its chief

spokesman in Honduras, Arnoldo Jose "Frank" Arana.

The drug allegations against Arana dated back to 1983 when a federal

narcotics task force put him under criminal investigation because of plans

"to smuggle 100 kilograms of cocaine into the United States from South

America."

On Jan. 23, 1986, the FBI reported that Arana and his brothers were involved

in a drug-smuggling enterprise, although Arana was not charged.

Arana sought to clear up another set of drug suspicions in 1989 by visiting

the DEA in Honduras with a business associate, Jose Perez. Arana's

association with Perez, however, only raised new alarms.

If "Arana is mixed up with the Perez brothers, he is probably dirty," the

DEA responded.

Through their ownership of an air services company called SETCO, the Perez

brothers were associated with Juan Matta Ballesteros, a major cocaine

kingpin connected to the murder of a DEA agent, according to reports by the

DEA and U.S. Customs.

Hitz reported that someone at the CIA scribbled a note on the DEA cable

about Arana stating: "Arnold Arana ... still active and working, we [CIA]

may have a problem."

Despite its drug ties to Matta Ballesteros, SETCO emerged as the principal

company for ferrying supplies to the contras in Honduras.

During congressional Iran-Contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo

Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver

North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying

supplies to the contras in 1986.

Drug Flights

Hitz found that other air transport companies, which were used by the

contras, also were implicated in the cocaine trade. Even FDN leaders

suspected that they were shipping supplies to Central America aboard planes

that might be returning with drugs.

Mario Calero, Adolfo Calero's brother and the chief of contra logistics,

grew so uneasy about one air-freight company that he notified U.S. law

enforcement that the FDN only chartered the planes for the flights south,

not the return flights north.

Hitz found that some drug pilots simply rotated from one sector of the

contra operation to another. Donaldo Frixone, who had a drug record in the

Dominican Republic, was hired by the CIA to fly contra missions from

1983-85.

In September 1986, however, Frixone was implicated in smuggling 19,000

pounds of marijuana into the United States. In late 1986 or early 1987, he

went to work for Vortex, another U.S.-paid contra supply company linked to

the drug trade.

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, the 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 leftist 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 the

major news organizations - serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary

Webb and his series in 1996.

See No Evil

Although Hitz's report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt

by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big American newspapers. [For

more details on the report, see Parry's Lost History [3].]

On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz's Volume Two was posted at the CIA's

Internet 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 never published a story on the

release of Volume Two.

To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-cocaine story has

been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, some of them rose to become

top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb's

career never recovered.

Unable to find decent-paying work in a profession where his past awards

included a Pulitzer Prize, Webb grew despondent. His marriage broke up. By

December 2004, he found himself forced to move out of his rented house near

Sacramento.

Instead, Webb decided to end his life.

On the night of Dec. 9, 2004, Webb typed out four suicide notes for his

family, laid out a certificate for his cremation, put a note on the door

suggesting a call to 911, and removed his father's handgun from a box.

The 49-year-old Webb, a father of three, then raised the gun and shot

himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more.

His body was found the next day after movers who were scheduled to clear out

Webb's rental house, arrived and followed the instructions from the note on

the door.

A Last Chance

Webb's suicide offered the New York Times, the Washington Post and the L.A.

Times one more chance to set matters right, to revisit the CIA's admissions

in 1998 and to exact some accountability from the Reagan-era officials

implicated in the contra crimes.

But all that followed Gary Webb's death was more trashing of Gary Webb.

The L.A. Times ran its mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of the

admissions in the CIA's Volume Two. The Times obituary was republished in

other newspapers, including the Washington Post.

No one reading this obit would understand the profound debt that American

history owed to Gary Webb, who deserved the lion's share of the credit for

forcing the CIA to make its extraordinary admissions.

Though a personal tragedy, the destruction of Gary Webb had a larger

meaning, too. Gary Webb was a kind of canary in the mine shaft, whose fate

represented a warning about the dangers that can befall a nation whose

journalists care more about their salaries and status than the truth and the

public's right to know.

Today, when Americans look at the mounting death toll in Iraq, the collapse

of the U.S. dollar on international markets, and their nation's loss of

prestige around the world, they should recall what happened to Gary Webb

when he tried to shed some light amid the shadows of corrupt and covert

government actions.

Webb's career destruction in the 1990s and his desperate act of suicide in

2004 were warnings to the American people that they must demand much more

from their existing news outlets - or they must build honest new ones.

That understanding may be Gary Webb's enduring legacy.

--

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson