DARK DEFIANCE: WHERE THERE'S SMOKE . . .

In his just-released book, 'Dark Alliance,' deposed Mercury News reporter
Gary Webb tells his side of the story behind the award-winning CIA-crack
connection that tanked his career.

IN DECEMBER I gathered up all my notes and files and wrote a four-page
project memo for my editors, outlining the story as I saw it. I proposed
to tell the tale of how the infant L.A. crack market had been fueled by
tons of cocaine brought in by a Contra drug ring, which helped to spread a
deadly new drug habit "through L.A. and from there to the hinterlands."

"This series will show that the dumping of cocaine on L.A.'s street gangs
was the back end of a covert effort to arm and equip the CIA's raging army
of anti-Communist Contra guerrillas," I wrote. "While there has long been
solid -- if largely ignored -- evidence of a CIA-Contra-cocaine connection,
no one has ever asked the question: 'Where did all the cocaine go once it
got here?' Now we know."

I met with [my editor] Dawn [Garcia] and managing editor David Yarnold in
San Jose, and we spent an hour discussing the progress of the investigation
and the proposed series. Yarnold reread the project memo, shook his head
and grinned.

"This is one hell of a story," he said. "How soon do you think you can
finish it?"

I told him I needed to go to Miami and Nicaragua to do some interviews with
[drug trafficker Norwin} Meneses, some former Contras and the Nicaraguan
police. If that came off, we might be able to have the series ready by
March 1996, in time for the [L.A. drug dealer Ricky] Ross trial, which
would give it a hard news angle. But, I said, I wanted to get some
assurances right up front from both of them.

Because the story had what I called a "high unbelievability factor," I
wanted to use the Mercury's Web site, Mercury Center, to help document the
series. I wanted us to put our evidence up on the Internet so that readers
could see our documents and reports, read the grand jury transcripts,
listen to the undercover DEA tapes, check our sources and make up their own
minds about the validity of the story. After seeing the government's
reaction to the Contra-cocaine stories of the 1980's, I didn't want to be
caught in the old officials-say-there's-no-evidence trap.

The technology now exists for journalists to share our evidence with the
world, I told them, and if there was ever a story that needed to be solidly
backed up, it was this one. Not only would it help out the story, I wrote
in my memo, it would hopefully raise the standards of investigative
reporting by forcing the press to play show and tell, rather than hiding
behind faceless sources and whisperings from "senior administration
officials."

The editors enthusiastically agreed. It would be a good way to showcase
the Mercury's cutting-edge Web site, they said, and it was good timing --
management directives were coming out to incorporate the Web page into our
print stories whenever possible. We were, after all, the newspaper of the
Silicon Valley. This would be a chance to use the Internet in a way that
had never been done before, they agreed. No problem. What else?

The second point I made was something I was sure they were tired of hearing
about. We're going to need space to tell this story, I told them, a lot
more space than the paper usually devotes to its investigative projects.
It was the one issue that drove me crazy about working for the Mercury
News.

After writing for the Plain Dealer for five years and having as much space
as I wanted, I'd found the Mercury's mania for brevity almost unbearable.
My forfeiture series, for example, had been held to two parts, and even
those stories had been chopped up into bite-sized bits. I'd had other
stories held for weeks and even months because I wouldn't give in to
editor's demands to cut them in half.

No one reads long stories, I was told. Our focus groups had shown that
readers wanted our stories to be even shorter than they already were --
"tighter and brighter" was the answer to dwindling readership. Details
were boring. Readers didn't like to having to turn pages to follow jumps.
If you couldn't tell a daily story in 12 inches or less, then maybe it was
too complicated to tell. For a time, we even had a rule: no stories could
be longer than 48 inches. Period. And that was for Sundays.

Daily stories had an absolute max of 36 inches.

"We've got to lay out everything we know," I told Yarnold, "because people
are going to come after us on this, and I don't ever want to be in a
position where I have to say, 'Oh, yeah, we knew that, but we didn't have
the space to put it in the paper.' And I don't think you want to be in
position, either."

You'll get as much space as you need, Yarnold assured me. Don't worry
about it. Just go out and bring this thing home.

IN MID-APRIL I finished the first drafts and sent them up to my editors,
with no clue as to how they would be received. They were like nothing I
had ever written before, and probably unlike anything my editors had ever
grapppled with either: a tale spanning more than a decade, that attempted
to show how two of the defining issues of the 1980s -- the Contra war and
the crack explosion, seemingly unconnected social phenomena -- were
actually intertwined, thanks largely to government meddling.

The four-part series I turned in focused on the relationship between the
Contras and the crack king. It mentioned the CIA's role in passing, noting
that some of the money had gone to a CIA-run army and that there were
federal law enforcement reports suggesting the CIA knew about it. I never
believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA conspiracy behind the
crack plague. Indeed, the more I learned about the agency, the more
certain of that I became. The CIA couldn't even mine a harbor without
getting its trench coat stuck in its fly.

That the Contras' cocaine ended up being turned into crack was a horrible
accident of history, I believed, not someone's evil plan. The Contras just
happened to pick the worst possible time ever to begin peddling cheap
cocaine in black neighborhoods. That, I believed, was the real danger the
CIA has always presented -- unbridled criminal stupidity, cloaked in a
blanket of national security.

"The fact that a government-connected drug ring was dumping tons of cocaine
into the black neighborhoods in L.A. -- and to a lesser extent in San Jose,
Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, Houston, Oklahoma City, Alabama and New
Orleans -- goes a long way toward explaining why crack developed such deep
roots in the black community," I wrote. "It's where the seed was planted."

Looking back, I can barely believe I was permitted to write such a story,
but that was the kind of newspaper the Mercury News was at the time. No
topic was too taboo, or at least if there was one, I never discovered it.
And I was always looking.

The reason I'd left a much larger paper in Cleveland to work for the
Mercury News was because the editors convinced me that they ran one of the
few newspapers in the country with that kind of courage. There were no
sacred cows, they pledged; and for nine years they had been true to their
word. Not one of my stories was ever spiked of significantly watered down;
nearly 300 of them had appeared on the Merc's front page, including many
that wouldn't have stood a chance in hell of being printed in other
mainstream newspapers.

SO WHEN DAWN CALLED me with the official reaction to "Dark Alliance," I was
gratified but not suprised. They loved it, she said happily. They
couldn't wait to get it in the newspaper. They thought it was important,
groundbreaking reporting. Congratulations. But there was one hitch.
"They thought it was too long," she said. It needed to be cut.

The four main stories ranged between 2,400 words and 3,200 words apiece,
and for a major metropolitan daily, that's not a lot of space. For the
Mercury, though, it was as if I'd asked for the moon, a raise, a shower in
my office and an executive parking place all at the same time.

"They're never going to go for four parts," Dawn warned.

"Yarnold told me I could have as much space as I needed," I reminded her.
"I can't do it in less than four parts. I've gotten this thing down as far
as I can get it. You're going to start cutting into its spinal cord if you
cut it any more." The problem was that the believability of the story
hinged on the weight of the evidence. Every fact that was cut would make
the story appear more speculative than it really was.

For weeks we wrangled back and forth, and then I got the word. David
Yarnold, the managing editor, had decreed that it was three parts or
nothing.

Fine, I said. I stitched the second and third parts together into one long
part and resubmitted the series.

"Gee," Dawn said. "This second part is kind of long. We need to cut it."

This tug-of-war continued throughout the spring of 1996. She would cut the
paragraphs out, I would put them back in. We tried creating sidebars --
small stories that ran alongside the main one -- so we could hit the "magic
numbers," the maximum length the editors had set for stories. It was still
too long. Finally I put my foot down. No more cuts. The editors
relented.

"Okay," Dawn said. "You've made your point. Let's try it again as a
four-parter."

I reassembled all the scattered bits and peices and resubmitted it. She
read it, approved it and sent it up the editing chain. I got a call a few
days later.

"Well, they liked it, and Yarnold agreed four parts is fine. But they want
the first part rewritten," she said. "They think it's too feature-y. It
should have a harder edge on it, more news. We need to go through and pull
out all of the information about the CIA and the Contras and put it in the
first day."

"The reason it's got a feature lead is because the series is a feature," I
argued. "It's about the three men who started the L.A. crack market.
That's the story I want to tell. If we turn this thing into a Contra
cocaine story, everyone is going to say, 'Oh, that's old news.' We agreed
on this already, remember?"

"That's what they want," Dawn said. "I'm just telling you what they told me."

"Well I'm not writing it that way. I'm tired of this nonsense."

"Just try it, OK? Give it a quick write-through. And if it doesn't work,
it doesn't work, and we'll go back to the old way. But we've got to give
it a try."

I gritted my teeth. OK. If they wanted a hard edge on this thing, I'd
give them one. I sat down at my computer, and in a few minutes I hammered
out the paragraph that, with a few changes, would open the "Dark Alliance"
series:

"For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine
to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions
in drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army run by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found. This drug
network, federal records show, opened the first pipeline between Colombia's
cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now
known as the crack capital of the world. The cocaine it brought into the
United States fueled the crack explosion in urban America, and the
simultaneous rise in power of the murderous gangs of black L.A."

I hit the transmit button.

Dawn called the next morning. "This is perfect," she said. "This is
exactly what they wanted." The rest of the editing went fairly smoothly,
and by July 26, 1996, the four-part series was done, edited, and ready to
go in the paper, starting Aug. 18.

Late one night, toward the end of July, the phone rang. "Well, I have some
good news and some bad news," Dawn began. "The bad news is that David
Yarnold is no longer the editor on this series. He took a new job with
Knight-Ridder, and he's out of here. The good news is that Paul Van
Slambrouck is the new editor, and I showed him the series today and he
really likes it and thinks we've got a great story here."

"We've got a brand-new editor on this?" I cried. "Now? And he just read it
for the first time today? You're shitting me. So what does this mean?"

"Well, unfortunately, it means it's not going to run on the 18th. He has
some changes he wants to make to it."

I sat up and started laughing. "Really? What kind of changes?"

"He thinks it's too long. We need to make it three parts."

I howled. "You can't be serious, Dawn. This is a joke, right?"

"No, I'm sorry. Maybe you should talk to Paul."

Van Slambrouck, the Mercury's national editor and a smart, thoughtful
journalist, was apologetic. It wasn't the way he wanted to do things,
either. But he thought the series was terrific, and he wanted very much to
get it in the paper and hoped I still felt the same way.

"Dawn said you wanted to make some changes."

It needed to come down in length, he said, and we needed more CIA stuff in
the first day. I was back to square one.

I sat down and fired off an angry memo to Dawn. Van Slambrouck had asked
me to cut 65 inches, I complained. He had suggested that I needed to go
through the story myself and be "ruthless" and I'd be able to find 65
inches to cut, no problem. If there were 65 inches left of fat in these
stories, I wrote to Dawn, "we both ought to resign because we obviously
aren't doing our jobs right."

An additional problem, I reminded Dawn, was that my family and I were in
the midst of moving and were taking our vacation while the new house was
being readied. During the next three weeks I rewrote the series on a
laptop while on "vacation," first in a beach house on the Outer Banks of
North Carolina, then in a motel room in Washington, D.C. and finally in the
basement of my in-laws' house in Indiana. It was horrible. I had no way
of telling what was being cut back at the Mercury, what was being put back
in or what was being rewritten. Five or six different versions were flying
around. Don't these people know what they're dealing with here? I
wondered. Don't they realize the import of what we're printing?

I eventually realized that for the most part they did not, which may have
been the reason the series got in the paper in the first place. It came in
under the radar. Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos would later
tell Newsweek that "he read only part of the story" before it appeared in
print, an amazing admission if true.

Perhaps my editors thought I was exaggerating the story's significance,
trying to gobble up more space than was really justified? It is a common
sight in newsrooms to see reporters hype their stories. I knew reporters
who worked their editors like PR agents, or lobbyists pimping a bill. But
I had never worked that way. I figured my editors know how to read as well
as anyone. My paycheck was the same every week, no matter which page they
put my story on . . . I also know from my research what kind of backlash
would result from a story that dirtied up the CIA, and stressed it
repeatedly to my editors. New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh's 1974
expose of Operation Chaos, a massive illegal CIA domestic spying operation,
had brought on attacks in the Washington Post (he had no "hard" proof) and
Time ("There is a strong likelihood that Hersh's CIA story is considerably
exaggerated"), among many others.

AT 2 AM -- midnight in San Jose -- on Aug. 18 1996, I was at a party at my
best friend's house in Indianapolis. I excused myself, went into a
bedroom, plugged into my laptop, and dialed into the Mercury's Web site. A
picture of a man smoking crack, superimposed upon the seal of the CIA, drew
itself on the screen. After more than a year of work, "Dark Alliance" was
finally out. I emailed [freelance journalist] Georg [Hodel] with the
news, went back out to the party and got drunk. The next morning I flew
back to Sacramento.

Initially, the silence was deafening. Then we realized why. They had
intentionally run the series the week between the Republican and Democratic
national conventions. The national media and the nation's politicians were
on vacation; nobody was paying much attention to anything, and particularly
not a story in a regional Northern California newspaper.

By Aug. 21, though, some radio stations began calling. What was this CIA
story we've been hearing about on the Web?

That combination -- talk radio and the Internet -- is what saved "Dark
Alliance" from slipping silently below the surface and disappearing without
a trace. The Internet wizards at Mercury Center -- Mark Hull, Donna Yanish
and Albert Poon -- had done a brilliant, eye-popping job on the "Dark
Alliance" Web page. It was something right out of the movies: full-color
animanted maps, one click access to uncut source documents, unpublished
photos, audio clips from undercover DEA tapes and [drug trafficker Danilo]
Blandon's federal court testimony, a bibliography, a timeline -- all in far
more depth and detail than we were able to get into the newspaper.

AT THE END of that first week I returned to San Diego for Ricky Ross's
sentencing. That was where I had my first inkling of the firestorm I'd
touched off. Radio stations were blanketing the newspaper with interview
requests. Before heading for the courthouse that morning, I'd done radio
shows in Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas and Detroit.

A haggard-looking L.J. O'Neale, the assistant U.S. attorney, spotted me in
the hallway outside the courtroom.

"Hey there," I said. "You see the story?"

He scowled and pushed by without saying a word. He'd already fought his
way through television camera crews outside the courthouse, and he clearly
wasn't pleased with all the attention. Inside the courtroom, reporters
jostled for seats.

Fenster asked for a postponement of the sentencing, saying the series had
raised significant questions about Blandon and his connections to the CIA.
O'Neale protested angrily, accusing Ross of dreaming up the whole CIA plot
and feeding it to gullible journalist who was spreading the ridiculous
conspiracy theories.

But Judge Huff looked troubled and told O'Neale she wanted some answers
from the CIA before she passed sentencing on Ross and his codefendents.
And she also wanted the Justice Department to begin deportation proceedings
against Blandon immediately. The news made the wires, and the switchboard
at the Mercury News lit up. "This place is going crazy!" Dawn reported.
"The Web page had something like 500,000 hits on it today!"

The Mercury News executive editor, Jerry Ceppos, called and congratulated
me. The TV networks were calling the paper. We were getting phone calls
from all over the world. "Let's stay on top of this," he said. "Anything
you need, you let us know. We want to run with this thing." A few days
later, I got a $500 bonus check in the mail and a note from Ceppos:
"Remarkable series! Thanks for doing this for us."

I was on National Public Radio the following Monday and, as always, gave
out the Web site address so people could read the series and see our
documents. We had 800,000 hits that day. The synergy was amazing. For
the first time, people could hear about a story and on the radio -- even
one that appeared several weeks earlier and thousands of miles away -- and
immediately read it on their computer screens.

Unlike all the previous stories about the Contras and cocaine, this one
couldn't be killed off in the traditional manner, by Big Media ignoring it
or relegating it to the news briefs. Millions of people were finding out
about "Dark Alliance" anyway -- even though not a word had appeared in the
so-called national press. That phenomenon was newsworthy of by itself.

"The story had serious legs, moving rapidly through the African American
community via email and file downloads, and then into living rooms, offices
and churches, and onto streets and into more mainstream black papers and
radio broadcasts," HotWired magazine wrote in October 1996. "For the first
time, my grandmother asked me to go online and read something. I couldn't
believe it. She wouldn't look at a computer before," one black government
lawyer emailed the magazine. "This story is causing a sensation among
blacks. It's all they're talking about. They are enraged about it, and
they can't believe it isn't on every front page in America."

[continued in part 2]

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)