Kill the Messenger (27 page)

Journalists who helped expose the connection between the CIA, the Nicaraguan contras, and drug smuggling say that while “Dark Alliance” wasn't a perfect piece of journalism, Gary Webb deserves to be celebrated for forcing the CIA to admit that it had protected contra drug smugglers from prosecution and then lied about it for years. They mourn the fact that Webb paid such a heavy price for one story, however controversial.

“What happened to Gary is an American tragedy, but one that still hasn't been addressed,” says Bob Parry, the AP reporter who originally broke the contra-cocaine story. “I'm stunned at how mean the mainstream press has chosen to be. [They are] so lacking of any self criticism about this. The press has displayed much more self criticism on such smaller issues, but there's been no self criticism on this one.”

“A good editor would have made Gary modify his conclusions,” says the
Nation
's David Corn. “This would have saved ‘Dark Alliance,' and perhaps saved Gary. He would have gone on with his life. It was an explosive story because it over-reached. It's fair to assume had it not overreached it would have been better for him. But because it overreached those Inspector General reports came out. One thing Gary should be remembered for is that his pursuit of this issue did cause huge chunks of the truth to come out of the CIA.”

“I don't know why he killed himself or what would have prevented that,” says Marc Cooper of
LA Weekly
. “What I can say is that the media killed his career. That's obvious and it's really a nauseating and very discouraging story, because
as a journalist, the only thing you have is your credibility. When that is shredded, there's no way to rebuild it.”

Cooper agrees with Corn that “Dark Alliance” contained serious flaws, but reserves special scorn for the journalists who criticized his story. “If Gary Webb made mistakes I have no problem with exposing them,” he says. “But given the sweep of American journalism over the past fifty years, this is an outstanding case where three of the major newspapers in the country decided to take out somebody, a competitor whose mistakes seem by any measure to be very minor.”

French journalist Paul Moreira, who interviewed Webb in 1997, filmed a forty-five-minute documentary about Webb for the investigative program
90 Minutes
on France's Canal Plus—the only televised coverage of his suicide anywhere in the world. Moreira also interviewed
Washington Post
reporter Walter Pincus about the media's lack of coverage on the CIA's inspector general report admitting the agency worked with drug dealers throughout the 1980s.

“It was much, much more grave than Watergate,” Moreira says. “The report comes out precisely in the middle of all the noise around Monica and Bill, and no one pays attention! That's when I discovered that media-noise is the new censorship.” Moreira says his bosses weren't overjoyed about broadcasting his documentary. “They thought it was too distant for the French, and they were right; the ratings were not that good,” he says. (Shortly after this interview, Canal Plus cancelled the show). “But somehow I knew I was doing the right thing. I felt like justice should be given to his work, his name. Not enough people in this job are ready to take some risks. He did.”

The
Post
's Pincus says Webb was ultimately a victim of his own celebrity, not other journalists. “One thing I have been fascinated with is what notoriety does to people who have never felt it,” he says. “The fifteen minutes of fame business is really dangerous. There are people who fawn all over you, who make you think you are much more important than you really are. It happens in this city all the time.”

Pincus believes that the most important legacy of “Dark Alliance” was that the story—along with other scandals that plagued the agency in the 1990s, including its ties to a Guatemalan Army officer who murdered a left-wing rebel married to U.S. citizen Jennifer Harbury—encouraged the CIA to be less aggressive in its efforts against Islamic terrorism, which helped enable Osama bin Laden's 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“That's horseshit,” says Jack Blum, who headed Senator Kerry's subcommittee on narcotics and terrorism during the 1980s. “The CIA and FBI didn't stop 9/11 because nobody listened to their agents in the field. And the disease that led the mainstream media to dump all over Gary Webb is the same disease that led the media to be so uncritical about the Iraq war. This guy was abused for doing his job. To the extent he was wrong, the fault lies with his editors who probably didn't work with him sufficiently or do certain checking on some of the stuff he was told.”

Greg Wolf believes his lifelong friend died because he stopped taking his anti-depressants. “This has got nothing to do with politics or his career, but brain chemistry,” he says. “He was clinically depressed. He was having a continuous midlife crisis and that's what killed him.” But Wolf
suspects that “Dark Alliance” was the central cause of Webb's depression. “That story was his first big hit of crystal meth,” he says. “And then he was no longer just some respected reporter, he was a celebrity. And they took that away from him and it was too much for him. He wrote the biggest story of his life and then he was a pariah.”

“He was a courageous guy, but too stubborn for his own good—and paid the price,” says Tom Loftus, one of Webb's friends from the
Kentucky Post
. “I've never seen an investigative project come under fire like ‘Dark Alliance.' It hasn't happened before or since. I wonder how many Pulitzer prizes would be revoked in the
Washington Post
or
New York Times
if those papers used their best reporters to examine each other. Now all his editors have better jobs and the reporter is dead.”

Tom Scheffey, who co-authored the Coal Connection articles with Webb at the
Kentucky Post
, believes Webb's editors at the
Mercury News
betrayed him. “I think that being an investigative reporter is like being a trained Doberman,” he says. “All their training goes into being good at sniffing things out, running at the ground, and going after the story. For inexplicable reasons, after all these instincts and talents are built in, the chain is jerked. This is what drives Dobermans and investigative reporters nuts—getting really good at something and then being told you can't do it. Gary was betrayed by his handlers.”

Tom Andrzejewski—the Polish-American reporter who always thought every phone call was “The Big One”—asserts that anybody who would claim to know the truth behind the dark events Webb chronicled in his big story is misguided.
“Somewhere in there was the truth,” he says. “Gary probably got close to it. The problem was he couldn't prove it.” Andrzejewski believes the attacks Webb endured were “the beginning of the end” for his friend. “It was such an egregious, mean-spirited response,” he says. “The way the respected papers took him on and treated him so shabbily was unprecedented.”

Anita Webb, the last person to speak with her son before he shot himself, says she will never forgive the journalists who spent so much time and energy attacking Gary Webb. “They destroyed my son's career,” she says. “Gary was an honest reporter, and they killed him. I'll never forgive the people who destroyed my son.”

The mainstream media's attacks continued even after Webb's suicide. On December 12, the
Los Angeles Times
, which had done more than any other newspaper to destroy Webb's career eight years earlier, published a brief obituary saying his work on the CIA and drugs had been “discredited.” The source for this alleged discrediting was, of course, the
Times
itself. The obituary writers, Nita Lelyveld and Steve Hymon, looked no further than the paper's own response to “Dark Alliance.”

Bob Parry recalls learning of Webb's suicide from the
LA Times
, which called him for a comment. Parry told the reporter that the American people owed a “huge debt” to Gary Webb for exposing an important, dark chapter in their country's history. “I said you'll have trouble writing about it accurately, because if you look at your paper's clips you'll have trouble finding a single accurate story about what he exposed,” Parry says.

The
San Jose Mercury News
finally acknowledged its role in Webb's tragic fate in a December 16 editorial. “After any suicide, survivors feel guilty,” wrote Scott Herhold, the editor who worked with Webb in his early years at the
Mercury News
. “Was there any way it could have been avoided?” Webb, he said, was an “immensely talented reporter, a good writer and a sometimes-difficult human being. In many ways he represented the best of our craft—its compassion, its obligation to speak truth to power.”

Herhold also wrote that Webb's “lack of doubt” in his beliefs “demanded a firm editor to challenge him. “Gary didn't get that on any level . . . ‘Dark Alliance' was as much an institutional failure as it was a personal one. Yet Webb bore the chief consequences.” Herhold refused to comment on a claim by a former
Mercury News
reporter that the paper killed an additional line in his obituary stating that while Webb lost his job over “Dark Alliance,” all of the editors who worked on that story were later promoted.

“The zeal that helped make Gary a relentless reporter was coupled with an inability to question himself, to entertain the notion that he might have erred,” says former
Mercury News
editor Jonathan Krim. He wonders if Gary's reaction to criticism allowed other people involved in his story—like his editors—to escape harsher scrutiny. “There was plenty of responsibility to go around,” he concludes. “We failed as a newspaper.”

Dawn Garcia emerged from the “Dark Alliance” controversy with her career intact. In 2000, she left the
Mercury News
and became the deputy director for Stanford University's John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional
Journalists. Garcia never kept in touch with Webb after he left the paper, but according to Webb's former colleague, Pamela Kramer, Webb told her shortly before his death that he didn't blame Garcia for what happened to his career.

Unlike the other editors who handled the project, Garcia recognizes her own failures. “Had I to do all over again, I would have pushed to hold the story until everything was truly ready,” she says. “I would have recast parts of the series to focus on the very strong reporting Gary had done, and be much more careful about how we worded the conclusions of that reporting.” Garcia believes “the core of the series was correct but that the conclusions Gary drew were too sweeping. We could have had almost as strong or stronger a story by being more explanatory in what we thought and why we thought so.”

But Garcia also feels the “Dark Alliance” controversy helped reveal an important part of U.S. history that had been largely ignored by the American media. “Two years after the series ran, a CIA Inspector General's report acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drug runners while supporting the contras,” she says. “The IG report would not have happened if ‘Dark Alliance' had not been published. I also think we began a long overdue investigation into a dark chapter of U.S. policy. We raised important questions about what the government knew about drug smuggling that hadn't been covered well by the media.”

Managing Editor David Yarnold, who stopped reading Webb's story halfway through the editing process, rose to become executive editor, then editor of the paper's opinion
section. He left the
Mercury News
in 2005 and is now director of an environmental organization in New York City. Paul Van Slambrouck, who replaced Yarnold on the story, was promoted to a corporate position with Knight Ridder before becoming editor of the
Christian Science Monitor
. In 2003, the
Monitor
published a story based on forged documents accusing George Galloway, a left-wing member of the British parliament, of accepting millions of dollars from Saddam Hussein during the 1990s. After issuing a formal apology to Galloway, Van Slambrouck stepped down as editor and became a San Francisco-based correspondent for the paper.

In 1997, Jerry Ceppos received the Society of Professional Journalists' Ethics in Journalism award for publishing his mea culpa about “Dark Alliance.” Two years later, he left the
Mercury News
to become vice president for news at Knight Ridder. Ceppos celebrated his final day in journalism on August 31, 2005, taking an early retirement to enjoy his vineyard in Saratoga.

Had he lived, Gary Webb would have turned fifty years old that day. Two weeks later, his family—Sue, Anita, Kurt, Ian, Eric, and Christine—marked Webb's birthday by driving to Santa Cruz Bay. With the Rolling Stones song, “You Can't Always Get What You Want,” blaring from a boom box, they obeyed his final wish—and let him bodysurf for eternity.

They tossed his ashes into the crashing waves of the Pacific.

AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

KILL THE MESSENGER
shares its title with a December 2004 obituary I wrote about Gary Webb for
OC Weekly
. As I wrote at the time, I knew Gary through his “Dark Alliance” story. Shortly after I published a follow-up article to his 1996
San Jose Mercury News
series, Webb called me to thank me for advancing his reporting. Over the next several years, I wrote numerous investigative stories concerning members of the drug ring he exposed; Webb used much of the material I uncovered in his 1998 book,
Dark Alliance
. (Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes attributed to Webb come from his book).