BOOK REVIEW: MOONLIGHTING?

Two Books Revisit Charges That The C.I.A. Condoned The Sale Of Crack.

For Gary Webb, this should have been ''the Big One,'' the story that
leads to the Pulitzer, fame and glory. In August 1996 he wrote a
three-part series in The San Jose Mercury News, entitled ''Dark
Alliance,'' on the origins of the crack cocaine epidemic in Los
Angeles. The series implied that the Central Intelligence Agency
encouraged the drug trafficking and knew that some of the profits were
being funneled to the contra rebels in Nicaragua.

At first, the series -- on which Webb, a highly regarded investigative
reporter, had labored for months -- appeared to be getting exactly the
reception the Biggest Story You'd Ever Write deserved. Talk radio
exaggerated its central thesis of American intelligence run amok, and
African-American leaders called for an investigation into why the
Government had orchestrated such an attack on blacks and then covered
it up. The newspaper's Web site received over a million hits in a
single day. Webb's executive editor wrote him a memo praising his work
and gave him a $500 bonus.

Then it all began to go badly wrong. To hear Webb tell it, he became a
victim of his own cowardly editors and an establishment conspiracy led
by the mainstream press, who sided with the C.I.A. and ignored his
compelling findings. The end result was a long apology by The Mercury
News; the banishment of Webb to a minor bureau 150 miles from
headquarters, where he covered the death of a police horse; and his
eventual resignation from the newspaper. So much for the Big One.

Webb's book, ''Dark Alliance,'' is his effort to tell his side of the
story and set the record straight. The core of his argument is that
two Los Angeles drug dealers, both Nicaraguans and contra partisans,
began the crack cocaine epidemic that was eventually to engulf
America. Webb's key evidence for C.I.A. participation involves the two
men, Juan Norwin Meneses Canterero and Oscar Danilo Blandon. Webb
places considerable stock in their statements that they sent large
sums of money back to the contras and that the C.I.A. knew of their
drug-smuggling activities. But it is difficult to find a single source
inside any branch of American intelligence that can support the charge
of actual C.I.A. involvement in the smuggling.

On the contrary, much of the difficulty with this story is that all
the other investigations carried out by newspapers like The New York
Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have, to varying
degrees, undermined the Webb thesis. For example, The Los Angeles
Times asserted that far from being big-time supporters of the contras,
Meneses and Blandon were such incompetent drug dealers that when the
rebels needed cash they had none to give them. At most, the Los
Angeles Times story said, the duo may have passed on around $50,000,
neither a significant sum nor evidence of a huge conspiracy.

In the end, Webb himself appears confused about just how far he is
prepared to push the C.I.A.'s involvement. ''I never believed, and
never wrote, that there was a grand C.I.A. conspiracy behind the crack
plague,'' he writes. ''Indeed, the more I learned about the agency,
the more certain of that I became. The C.I.A. couldn't even mine a
harbor without getting its trench coat stuck in its fly.'' Yet the
book has a foreword written by Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat
of California, one of the most vociferous of Webb's supporters: ''The
time I spent investigating the allegations of the Dark Alliance series
led me to the undeniable conclusion that the C.I.A., D.E.A., D.I.A.
and F.B.I. knew about drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles.
They were either part of the trafficking or turned a blind eye to it,
in an effort to fund the contra war. . . . This book is the final
chapter on this sordid tale and brings to light one of the worst
official abuses in our nation's history.''

It is the Waters view that is going to become the accepted
conspiracist perception of the Webb affair. It matters little that the
C.I.A.'s own inspector general said he found no evidence to support
allegations of agency involvement in or knowledge of the drug
trafficking in the United States. It also matters little that
reporters who specialize in writing about the intelligence community
have found no clear evidence to support C.I.A. involvement.

Webb does receive considerable support from Alexander Cockburn and
Jeffrey St. Clair in ''Whiteout.'' Cockburn (the author of ''The
Golden Age Is in Us,'' among other books, and the co-editor of
Counterpunch, a newsletter) and St. Clair, a contributing editor to In
These Times, believe that the Dark Alliance series provided just the
latest illustration in a long list of C.I.A. involvement with drug
trafficking. Much old ground is walked through South Asia, Afghanistan
and Central America in an effort to prove a continuum. To those
familiar with the C.I.A. and its murkier past, there is nothing new
here and nothing about the Webb affair that isn't covered in better
detail by Webb himself.

What makes both of these books so unsatisfactory is their inability to
reach inside the intelligence community to cross-check sources and
allegations. It is not the covert warriors of yesteryear but the
lawyers who control the Central Intelligence Agency today, and it is
laughable to suggest that today's C.I.A. has the imagination or the
courage to manage a cover-up on the scale that these books suggest.
Neither gives us an explanation of how such a huge cover-up might have
worked, who the puppeteers are behind it and just why career civil
servants should risk jail over such an issue.

Webb has said that the C.I.A. didn't return his calls; Cockburn and
St. Clair give no indication in their book that they even tried such a
conventional approach. For investigative reporters determined to
uncover the truth, procedures like these are unacceptable. Neither the
editors of The San Jose Mercury News nor the publishers of these books
should have allowed their writers to take such relaxed approaches to a
serious subject.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry