[continued from part 1]

IF THERE WAS ONE THING scarier to corporate journalism than the series
itself, it was the image of a future where Big Media was unable to control
the national agenda. Irrespective of what the series had said, "Dark
Alliance" proved that the stranglehold a relative few East Coast editors
and producers had on what became news could be broken. "This story
suddenly raises suspicions that the Internet has changed the equation in
support of democracy," author Daniel Brandt ruminated in October 1996 on an
Internet e-zine. "Unless regional newspapers agree to mild-mannered,
regional interest Web sites, all the resources that the elites have
invested in monopolizing the Daily Spin could end up spinning down the
drain."

In this case the blend of the Internet and talk radio had made the
tradional media irrelevant. The public was marching on without them, and
the message got through clearly to California's top politicians. The L.A.
City Council unanimously approved a resolution calling for a federal
investigation. Both California senators and a half-dozen congressment
wrote letters to CIA director John Deutch and Attorney General Janet Reno
demanding an official inquiry. Deutch agreed to conduct one, which
infuriated the right-wing Washington Times. Deutch was lambasted on the
front page by unnamed critics for "his efforts to curry favor with liberal
politicians." And on the editorial page, editor-at-large Arnaud de
Borchgrave, a "journalist" with a long history of connections to the
intelligence community and the Contras, fumed that "the same old
pro-Marxist CIA bashers are at it again" and quoted unnamed former
colleagues at "another paper" describing me as "an 'activist' journalist
who would dearly love to see the CIA scuttle itself."

In his column, de Borchgrave claimed Congress had given the Contras $100
million before the Boland Amendments went into effect, and chided me for
being too young to remember that the CIA had no need for illicit Contra
funds in those days. When I appeared on political talk-show host Chris
Matthews' live show on CNBC that evening, Matthews eagerly sprung de
Borchgrave's crazy timeline on me, demanding to know how I could have
written what I did, given the fact that the Contras had plenty of money.
After Jack White of Time and I pointed out that he had his "facts"
backward, Matthews, during a commercial break, began bellowing at his
production assistants, loudly accusing them of attempting to "sabotage" his
show.

Soon after Deutch ordered an internal investigation, Attorney General Janet
Reno -- at the urging of Justice Department Inspector General Michael
Bromwich -- followed suit.

Finally, the national news media dipped a toe into the icy waters.
Newsweek devoted an entire page to the story in late September, calling it
"a powerful series" that had some black leaders "ready to carpet-bomb
Langley." Time that month called it "the hottest topic in black America,"
and said the Web site "provides a plethora of court documents, recorded
interviews and photographs. . . . This is the first time the Internet has
electrified African Americans."

Soon, 60 Minutes called. "Don't talk to anyone else," a producer told me.
"We want this story to ourselves." I got an identical call from Dateline
NBC. I told both of them I thought it was unethical for a reporter to
refuse to talk to the press. The 60 Minutes producer said that was the
most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. Dateline ended up doing the story.

Over the next few weeks, we got interview requests from Jerry Springer,
Geraldo Rivera, Tom Snyder, Jesse Jackson and Montel Williams. I was on
CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and CBS Morning News. The Mercury printed up 5,000
copies of the series, and they were gone in a matter of weeks. An employee
from the marketing department was assigned full-time to handle press calls.
Each evening she emailed a list of interview requests, and by early
October the list was three pages long and growing. The London Times did a
story. Le Monde in Paris wrote something. Newspapers in Germany, Belgium,
Spain, Colombia and Nicaragua called for interviews.

It's hard to imagine how many radio stations there are in the United States
until they start calling. At home, my phone would begin ringing at 6 a.m.
and not stop until 10 p.m. Talk radio was burning up the airwaves,
spreading the story and the Web site address from coast to coast. One day,
the hits on the Web page climbed over 1,000,000. People in Japan, Bosnia,
Germany and Denmark sent me email.

Meanwhile, we continued advancing the story. I teamed up with Pamela
Kramer, the Mercury's reporter in Los Angeles, and we wrote several stories
about the 1986 police raids on Danilo Blandon's house. We came up with the
entire Gordon search warrant, which showed that the police had several
informants telling them that drug money was going to the Contras. Our
sources provided us with the case file number to the supposedly nonexistent
investigatory file at the L.A. County Sheriff's Office, and Congresswoman
Maxine Waters and her staff marched in and demanded to see it.

"I told them that the only way they were going to get me out of their
office was to give me the file or arrest me," she said. She got the file
- -- in it were the police reports about the search of [cocaine dealer]
Ronald Lister's house, his claims of CIA involvement, and the inventory of
strange items seized at his house.

NBC News did a strong follow-up, finally exposing the drug-related entries
in Oliver North's notebooks to a national TV audience, but it was the only
network attempting to advance the story. The establishment papers -- the
New York Times, Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times -- the same
newspapers that had so confidently reported in the 1980s that there was no
truth to these claims of Contra drug trafficking, remained largely silent.

"Where is the rebuttal? Why hasn't the media rose in revolt against this
story?" an exasperated Bernard Kalb, former spokesman for the Reagan State
Department, demanded on CNN's Reliable Sources. "It isn't a story that
simply got lost. It, in fact, has resonated and echoed, and the question
is where is the media knocking it down, when that, too, is a journalistic
responsibility?"

Kalb's guest, former Reagan Justice Department spokesman Terry Eastland,
clucked that he "would expect to see this kind of story in a magazine like
In These Times, not in a mainstream newspaper such as the San Jose Mercury
News." No one on Kalb's show bothered to mention that Eastland had a
history of trying to cover up the Contra drug link. In May 1986, his
office had planted a false story in the New York Times stating that the
Justice Department had "cleared" the Contras of any involvement in gun
running and drug smuggling, a statement the Justice Department was later
forced to recant.

One question I was frequently asked during radio appearances was whether I
thought the national media reaction would be different if the series had
appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times. My stock answer was
that it hadn't appeared in those newspapers because they'd decided in 1986
that there was no story here. My feeling was that those newspapers' very
familiarity with the story made it more difficult for them to report it.
How could they come back 10 years later and admit that the Contras had been
selling cocaine to Americans, when they'd already assured us it wasn't
happening?

In early October, I was in New York City getting ready for an appearance on
the Montel Williams Show, which was doing a two-day special on the "Dark
Alliance" series. About 2 a.m. Jerry Ceppos called. The Washington Post
had just moved a story on the wires. It would be in the morning edition,
and it was highly critical of the series. He asked me to take a look at it
and give him my reaction.

"What did they say was wrong?" I asked.

"They don't say any of the facts are wrong," Ceppos said. "They just don't
agree with our conclusions."

"And their evidence is what?"

"A lot of unnamed sources, mainly. It's really a strange piece. I'll send
you a fax of it, and we can talk in the morning."

They story was headlined "The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged
Plot." I laughed. What plot?

The reporters, Walter Pincus and Roberto Suro, wrote that their
investigation "does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed Contras
- -- or Nicaraguans in general -- played a major role in the emergence of
crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States. Instead,
the available data from arrest records, hospitals, drug treatment centers
and drug-user surveys point to a rise in crack as a broad-based phenomenon
driven in numerous places by players of different nationalities, races and
ethnic groups."

Ah ha. The old tidal wave theory. Here it comes again. I wondered what
"available data" Pincus and Suro had gathered from the 1982-83 era, the
dawn of the L.A. crack market, since the DEA and NIDA had admitted a decade
earlier that there was no such data.

The story grudgingly and often back-handedly admitted that the basic facts
presented in the series were correct, and it buried key admissions deep
inside, such as the fact that "the CIA knew about some of these activities
and did little or nothing to stop them." Toward the end Pincus and Suro
confirmed that Norwin Meneses and Blandon had met with Enrique Bermudez in
Honduras, but without disclosing Bermudez's relationship with the CIA. CIA
agent Adolfo Calero, whom the Post euphemistically described as someone
"who worked closely with the CIA," also admitted to the Post reporters that
he had met with Meneses.

Overall, it was a cleverly crafted piece of disinformation that would set
the stage for the attacks to follow. It falsely claimed that the series
made a "racially charged allegation that the 'CIA army' of Contras
deliberately targeted the black community in an effort to expand the market
for a cheap form of cocaine." And, despite Blandon's testimony that he
sold 200 to 300 kilos of cocaine for Meneses in L.A. and that all the
profits were sent to the Contras, the Post quoted unnamed "law enforcement
officials" as saying "Blandon sold $30,000 to $60,000 worth of cocaine in
two transactions."

The story also dove right through the "window" that O'Neale had opened at
the Ross trial. "If the whole of Blandon's testimony is to be believed,"
Pincus ad Suro wrote, '[then there is no connection] between the Contras
and African American drug dealers because Blandon said he had stopped
sending money to the Contras by the time he met Ross." No mention was made
of the DEA reports and the sheriff's department affidavit that said Blandon
was selling Contra cocaine through 1986, nor of the fact that Ross had been
buying Blandon's cocaine long before he actually met him. "Moreover," the
Post declared, "the mere idea that any one person could have played a
decisive role in the nationwide crack epidemic is rejected out of hand by
academic experts and law enforcement officials." But they identified
neither the academic experts nor the law enforcement officials.

I wrote Ceppos a memo pointing out the holes in the Post's story. "The
Pincus piece," I wrote, "is just silly. It's the kind of story you'd
expect from someone who spent three weeks working on a story, as opposed to
16 months." The fact that the Post's unnamed "experts" would reject a
scenario "out of hand," I wrote, was the whole problem. "None of them --
whoever they are -- has ever studied this before."

To his credit, Ceppos fired off a blistering letter to the Post, pointing
out the factual errors in the piece and calling Pincus' claims of a
"racially charged allegation" a "complete and total mischaracterization."

"The most difficult issue is whether a casual reading of our series leads
to the conclusion that the CIA is directly responsible for the outbreak of
the crack epidemic in Los Angeles. While there is considerable
circumstantial evidence of CIA involvement with the leaders of this drug
ring, we never reached or reported any definitive conclusion on CIA
involvement," Ceppos wrote. "We reported that men selling cocaine in Los
Angeles met with people on the CIA payroll. We reported that they received
fundraising orders from the people on the CIA payroll. We reported that
the money raised was sent to a CIA-run operation. But we did not go
further and took pains to say that clearly."

Ceppos posted the letter on the staff bulletin board, along with a memo
defending the series. "We strongly support the conclusions the series drew
and will until someone proves them wrong. What is even more remarkable is
that four experienced Post reporters, re-reporting our series, could not
find a single factual error. The Post's conclusions are very different --
and I believe, flawed -- but the major facts aren't. I'm not sure how many
of us could sustain such a microscopic examination of our work, and I
believe Gary Webb deserves recognition for surviving unscathed."

The Post held Ceppos' letter for weeks, ordered him to rewrite it, and then
refused to print it.

Shortly afterward I got an email message from a woman in Southern
California. There was a story in the Mercury's archives that I needed to
see, she wrote, and provided a date and a page number. I sent it to our
library and got a photocopy of the story in the mail a day later. It had
run on Feb. 18, 1967."

"How I Traveled Abroad on CIA Subsidy" was the headline. The author was
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post.

After disclosures of CIA infiltration of American student associations had
exploded that year, Pincus had written a long, smug confessional of how,
posing as an American student representative, he'd traveled to several
international youth conferences in the late 1950's and early 1960's,
secretly gathering information for the CIA and smuggling in anti-Communist
propoganda. A CIA recruiter had approached him, he wrote, and he'd agreed
to spy not only on the student delegations from other countries but on his
American colleagues as well. "I had been briefed in Washington on each of
them," Pincus wrote. "None was remotely aware of CIA's interest."

This just cannot be true, I thought. The Washington Post's veteran
national security reporter -- a former CIA operative and propogandist?
Unwilling to believe this piece of information until I dug it up for
myself, I went to the state library and got out the microfilm. The story
was there. This was the man who was questioning my ethics for giving
[Ross's attorney] Alan Fenster questions to ask a government witness about
the Contras and drugs? Jesus, I'd certainly never spied on American
citizens.

THE L.A. TIMES and New York Times struck next. On Oct. 20, 1996, both ran
long stories attacking my reporting and the series. They took the same
tack the Washington Post had several weeks earlier: admitting that the
basic facts were true and then complaining that the facts didn't mean a
thing.

Relying again mostly on unnamed sources, these two newspapers of record
claimed Blandon and Meneses hadn't had "official positions" with the
Contras. Drug money had been sent, but not millions; it was only tens of
thousands, according to unnamed sources. And experts scoffed at the notion
that one drug ring could have supplied enough cocaine to feed the tidal
wave of crack that engulfed American, a ridiculous claim I'd never made.

The papers found no need to mention the mass of historical evidence that
supported the series' findings. Without anything approaching
documentation, the papers just flatly declared that I was wrong.

"The crack epidemic in Los Angeles followed no blueprint or master plan.
It was not orchestrated by the Contras or the CIA. No one trafficker, even
kingpins who sold thousands of kilos and pocketed millions of dollars, ever
came close to monopolizing the drug trade," the L.A. Times assured its
readers in the lead paragraph of a three-day series.

THE NEXT DAY, the L.A. Times absolved the CIA of any involvement with
Blandon and Meneses. Its authoritative sources: former CIA director Robert
Gates, former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro and current CIA director
John Deutch. "Like good little boys and girls, the Times, the Washington
Post et al., toddled off to the CIA and asked the agency if it had ever
done such a thing. When the CIA said 'no' the papers solemnly printed it
- -- just as though the CIA hadn't previously denied any number of illegal
operations in which it was later caugh red-handed," columnist Molly Ivins
observed.

Buried deep within the L.A. Times story were admissions by CIA officials
that Contra supporters "were involved in drug running, but they bought
villas and did not put it into the FDN." And the story conceded, "the
allegation that some elements of the CIA-sponsored Contra army cooperated
with drug traffickers has been well documented for years." But the story
dismissed the idea that "millions" went to the Contras from the
Nicaraguans' drug sales. Unnamed sources said it was around $50,000 or
$60,000, which caused former Meneses distributor Rafael Cornejo some mirth.

"Sixty thousand?" he scoffed. "You can raise that in an afternoon."

According to another unnamed source the Times quoted, Blandon and Meneses
were making only $15,000 a kilo in profits.

Unmentioned was Blandon's testimony that he'd sold 200 to 300 kilos for
Meneses during the time they were sending money to the Contras, and his
admission that all of the profits were being sent to the rebels. Using the
Times' own profit figures, that would mean between $3 million and $4.5
million went to the Contras just from Blandon's sales.

And that didn't include the money Meneses' organization -- through Cabezas
and Renato Pena in San Francisco -- was sending. Lost in the debate over
whether it was millions or tens of thousands, was the inanity of the idea
that a reasonably accurate number could ever be found in a business that
deals in cash and eschews written records -- it is just as possible that
the amounts could have been in the tens of millions.

"No solid evidence has emerged that either Meneses or Blandon contributed
any money to the rebels after 1984," the story declared, ignoring the 1986
sheriff's affidavit and the 1986 DEA reports. The story also quoted
another unnamed associate who claimed, apparantly with a straight face,
that the profit margin in the cocaine business in 1982-84 -- when coke was
selling for $60,000 a kilo -- were just too slim to allow million-dollar
donations to the FDN.

[continued in part 3]

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)