[continued from part 2]

THE UNPRECENDENTED attacks by three major newspapers alarmed the Mercury's
editors. I was called to a meeting with Ceppos and the other editors and
told that I should quit trying to advance the story. We needed to start
working on a written response to the other newspapers, he said. I
vehemently disagreed. "The best way to shut them up is to put the rest of
what we know in the paper and keep plowing ahead," I argued. "Let's run a
story about Walter Pincus' CIA connections. Let's write about how the L.A.
Times has been booting this story since 1987." I told them of my discovery
that the L.A. Times Washington bureau had been sent a copy of the notes
found in Ronald Lister's house in 1990 and had thrown them away. Ceppos
disagreed.

"I don't want to go to war with them," he said.

Fortunately, both Dawn Garcia and Paul Van Slambrouck agreed that we should
continue developing the story.

"The best way to answer our critics," Van Slambrouck told Ceppos, "is to
advance the story. Let's go out and get some more evidence of drug money
being sent to the Contras. Let's get more evidence of this drug ring's
dealings with the Contras." Ceppos relented, authorizing another reporting
trip to Central America. He also assigned L.A. bureau reporter Pamela
Kramer and Pete Carey, an investigative reporter, to gather information
about the start of the L.A. crack market. He also made another decision:
He was changing the logo that the series had used on the Internet and in
the reprints. The CIA's seal was coming off.

"What's the point of doing that?" I asked. "We documented that these
traffickers were meeting with CIA agents. If you change the logo, the rest
of the media is going to accuse us of backing away from the story."

But Ceppos wouldn't budge. Thousands of reprints with the CIA-crack smoker
logo were gathered up and burned, and a CD-ROM version of the series --
which had been pressed and ready for distribution -- was also destroyed.
The Post and L.A. Times immediately crowed that the Mercury was retreating
from the series.

Georg and I flew to Costa Rica and began interviewing police officials,
lawyers, prosecutors and ex-Contras about Meneses' activities there,
fleshing out his role as a DEA informant and his drug operation's
connections to Oliver North's re-supply network on the Southern Front. In
Managua, we interviews police and Blandon's suspected money launderer,
Orlando Murillo. I flew back and started writing the follow-up stories;
Georg continued hunting for other members of the Meneses drug ring.

He called me in December 1996, barely able to contain his excitement. He'd
found Carlos Cabezas, who admitted that he had in fact delivered millions
of dollars in drug money to the Contras. Cabezas had names, dates and
amounts, Georg said, and pages from his drug ledgers. He'd identified a
CIA agent, Ivan Gomez, as having had direct knowledge of it all.

"We've got it," Georg cried. "Cabezas is willing to talk on the record."

A week later Georg called me with more good news. Enrique Miranda, the
former Meneses aide who'd escaped a year earlier, had been found in Miami
and tossed on a plane to Nicaragua. Georg had visited him in prison, and
Miranda started talking. Meneses' relationship with the CIA and the
Contras was deeper than we'd ever realized, Georg said. "We didn't know
how right we were," he laughed. "I can't wait to see what the Washington
Post does with this." I could have kissed him.

In January 1997, I sent first drafts of four follow-up stories to Dawn,
written as a two-day series. The first part dealt with Meneses' DEA
connections and his Costa Rican operation, along with the interviews Georg
had done with Carlos Cabezas and Enrique Miranda. I wrote a sidebar about
the drug-dealing Costa Rican shrimp company North and the Cuban CIA
operatives were using to funnel aid to the Contras.

The second part was a story about the parallel investigations of Contra
drug-trafficking done in the summer of 1986 by DEA agent Celering Castillo
at Ilopango and L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy Tom Gordon, drawing on
recently declassified FBI and CIA records at the National Archives and
3.000 pages of once-secret documents about the Blandon raids that had just
been released by the L.A. County Sheriff's Office. I also wrote a sidebar
on Joe Kelso's attempts to investigate allegations of DEA drug trafficking
in Costa Rica. Altogether the drafts ran 16,000 words.

We'd done it. We had an eyewitness, on the record, who'd delivered the
drug money. We had DEA records saying Blandon had sent money to the
Contras far longer than we'd previously reported. We had a top CIA
official admitting the agency had reports of drug trafficking at Ilopango.
We had evidence Ronald Lister had been meeting with the CIA's former head
of covert operations. I expected the editors to be beside themselves with
joy.

I heard absolutely nothing. Aside from Dawn, no one called to tell me
they'd read the new stories. No one called with questions. No one even
suggested that we begin editing them. They sat.

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jerry Ceppos called me at home on March 25, 1997, to
inform me that he'd made "a very difficult decision." Mistakes had been
made in the series, he said, and the newspaper was going to print a letter
to its readers saying so.

"Is this a fait accompli?" I asked. "Or do I get a chance to say something?"

"The decision has been made," Ceppos said. "I'll fax you a draft of what
we're considering."

According to Ceppos' proposed column, we should have said that Blandon
claimed he quit dealing with the Contras in 1983 -- something that the
editors had cut to save space. We had "insufficient proof" to say millions
went to the Contras; we should have said it was an estimate. We should
have said that we didn't find proof of involvement of "CIA
decision-makers," whatever that meant. We should have said Ricky Ross
wasn't the only crack supplier in L.A. -- but we hadn't said that. And,
finally, Ceppos wrote, the experts were unanimous in saying that the
Contras had not played a major role in the crack trade and that the series
had "oversimplified" how crack had become a problem. Strangley, Ceppos had
borrowed his conclusions from Pete Carey's never-published crack story.

I brought a written response to San Jose with me the next day when I met
with Ceppos and the other editors in the ornate conference room near the
editors' offices. "That 'experts' would disagree with the findings of
original research is one of the perils of doing it, as any researcher can
tell you," I wrote. "But just because they have a differing opinion -- and
when you get down to it, that's all it is -- is a pretty shoddy reason to
take a swan dive on a story . . . . How can we honestly say that we don't
know millions went to the Contras, or that the CIA didn't know about this,
when we've got an eyewitness telling us that he personally gave drug money
to a CIA agent? What are we going to do about all that other inconvenient
information in the follow-ups? We're going to look awful god-damned stupid
running this apology and then printing stories that directly contradict
it."

The other editors looked at the table uncomfortably.

"We are going to print those other stories, aren't we?"

Ceppos shook his head slightly.

"We're not" I asked incredulously. "Why not?"

"They're a quarter-turn of the screw," he said. "We're not going to print
anything else unless it's a major advance."

I exploded. "You think the fact that the head of this Contra drug ring was
working for the DEA is a quarter-turn of a screw?" I shouted. "You don't
think the fact that the DEA helped an accused CIA drug trafficker escape
criminal charges is a major advance? You've got to be kidding me. Are we
even going to pursue this story any more?"

"No," Ceppos said.

"Let me get this straight," I said. "We're killing the other stories.
We're not going to do any more investigation of this topic. And we're
going to run this mealy-mouthed column that pretends we don't know anything
else, tuck our tails between our legs and slink off into the sunset.
That's what you've got in mind?"

"You and I have very different views of this situation," he said quietly.

"You got that right."

The result of the stormy meeting was that Ceppos rewrote his column,
removing the obvious factual errors but leaving the rest virtually
unchanged.

"No matter how many times the words and phrases are tweaked, the end result
is still a sham," I responded in a memo. "You're sitting on information
that supports what I wrote and pretending to be unaware of it."

AT A FINAL MEETING before the column ran, I predicted that the mainstream
press would read the column as a retraction, one that covered everything
the series had revealed. "You run this, and all we'll hear is, 'The
Mercury News has admitted it isn't true! The Contras weren't dealing
cocaine! The CIA had nothing to do with it!" And you know as well as I
do, that's not true."

Ceppos' column ran on May 11, 1997, and if there was ever a chance to
getting to the bottom of the CIA's involvement with drug traffickers, it
died on that day. The New York Times, which hadn't found the original
story newsworthy enough to mention, splashed Ceppos's apology on its front
page. An editorial lauded Ceppos for his courage and declared that he'd
set a brave new standard for dealing with "egregious errors."

Howard Kurtz, the media critic for the Washington Post, called for a
comment. "It's nauseating," I told him. I had never been more disgusted
with my profession in my life. It wasn't because outrages were unknown in
the newspaper business. They weren't. Shortly before I arrived at the
Plain-Dealer, the paper printed a front-page retraction of a story that had
appeared more than a year earlier, revealing that former Teamsters Union
president Jackie Presser was an FBI informant.

Presser was indeed an informant, as the FBI confirmed years later. But
truth had taken a back seat to realpolitik. Court records later revealed
that the paper had been pressured into retracting the story by New York mob
boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, who'd asked his attorney, Roy Cohn, to
intercede with the Newhouse family, which owned the Plain Dealer.

Whether similar pressures were applied to Ceppos from outside the newspaper
is something I do not know, not do I particularly want to. I would prefer
to believe the theory advanced by my editor, Dawn Garcia, who suggested
that Ceppos's treatment for prostrate cancer in the winter of 1996-97 had
been a factor. That extended illness, combined with pressure from other
editors, had taken their toll, she believed.

It's a plausible explanation, because there really were only two ways the
newspaper could have gone with "Dark Alliance" at that point -- forward or
backward. The series had created such a superheated controversy that it
had become impossible to simply do nothing. Ceppos, who had stood by the
story bravely at key moments, simply may not have had the endurance, at
that period of his life, to ride the story out.

If the Mercury continued pursuing the story and publishing follow-ups,
editor Jon Krim worried in a memo, the editors needed to be ready "to deal
with the firestorm of criticism that is sure to follow." The other way out
was to back out: confess to some "shortcomings," take some quick lumps and
move on, which is the course Ceppos chose. It was certainly the course of
least resistance, as the happy reaction of the national media proved.

THE CONTROVERSY raged for another month, and the issue gradually became
what Ceppos reportedly had dreaded: he was being accused of suppressing
information. He was convering things up. Talk radio had a field day. In
Washington, DJ Joe Madison, who'd been making hay with the story for
months, urged the listeners of his 50,000-watt station to call Ceppos and
demand that he print the stories he was suppressing. Letters and email
from outraged readers began pouring in.

Ceppos, who'd not spoken to me since his column ran, called me at home in
early June. He was killing the follow-ups, he shouted. I was off the
story for good. He couldn't trust me anymore because I'd "aligned myself
with one side of the issue."

"Which side is that, Jerry? The side that wants the truth to come out?"

He wasn't getting into a debate, he told me. I was to report to his office
in two days "to discuss your future at the Mercury News."

It was a very one-sided discussion. Reading from a prepared statement,
Ceppos told me that my editors had lost faith in me. I needed closer
supervision, which I couldn't get in Sacramento. I needed to regain their
faith and thier trust, and the only way to do that was to accept a transfer
to the main office in San Jose. If I refused, I would be transfered
against my will to the West Bureau in Cupertino, the newspaper's version of
Siberia -- a somnolent training ground for new reporters and a pasture for
older ones who'd fallen from favor. It made little sense, because the
reporters there had no direct supervision, either. Whichever I decided, I
had to report in 30 days.

And by the way, Ceppos said, Pete Carey was going to take over the Contra
drug story, and I was to give him all the cooperation he requested.

That night I sat down with my wife, Sue, and my children and gave them the
news. In one month, I was going to have to start working in Cupertino, 150
miles away. I'd have to drive there on Mondays and come home on Fridays.
In the meantime, I'd fight the transfer through the Newspaper Guild.

My 6-year-old daughter looked at me strangely. "Are you still going to
sleep here?"

"No, I won't be able to," I told her. "I have to live in another place
during the week. But I'll be home on the weekends." She got up, went into
her room, and closed the door.

RELUCTANTLY I WENT, spending July and part of August in the Cupertino
bureau under protest. I was assigned such pressing matters as the death of
a police horse, clothing collections for Polish flood victims and summer
school computer classes. I went on a byline strike, refusing to put my
name on any story written while I was working under protest.

To the chagrin of my editors, who were under orders to keep me away from
any decent assignments, I turned a press release rewrite about a San Jose
landfill into a front-page story. It was the last piece I wrote for the
Mercury -- a page-one story with no one's name on it, which reportedly
infuriated Ceppos.

Occasionally, Pete Carey would call with a question or two. He wasn't
having much luck corroborating Carlos Cabezas' statements, he told me.
He'd been trying to locate the Venezuelan CIA agent Cabezas said he worked
with, Ivan Gomez, but couldn't. He'd tried directory assistance in Caracas
and complained about how many Ivan Gomezes there were in the phone book. I
felt saddened that my two-year investigation had come to this.

I never heard another word from him about it, and none of the follow-up
stories ever ran. On Nov. 19, 1997, the Mercury News agreed to settle my
arbitration but, amusingly, required me to sign a confidentiality agreement
swearing that I would never disclose its terms. Nineteen years after
becoming a reporter, I quit the newspaper business.

Bob Parry, the AP reporter who first broke the Contra drug story in 1985,
sent me a note of condolence. "Like you, I grew up in this business
thinking our job really was to tell the public the truth," he wrote.
"Maybe that was the mission at one time. Maybe there was that Awakening in
the 1970's with Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the CIA scandals, etc.

"But something very bad happened to the news media in the 1980's. Part of
it was the 'public diplomacy' pressures from the outside. But part of it
was the smug, snotty, sophmoric crowd that came to dominate the national
media from the inside. These characters fell in love with their power to
define reality, not their responsibility to uncover the facts. By the
1990's, the media had become the monster.

"I wish it weren't so. All I ever wanted to do was report and write
interesting stories -- while getting paid for it. But that really isn't
possible anymore and there's no use crying over it.

"Hang in there," he concluded. "You're not alone."

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)