HOW JOHN KERRY EXPOSED THE CONTRA-COCAINE SCANDAL

Derided by the Mainstream Press and Taking on Reagan at the Height of His
Popularity, the Freshman Senator Battled to Reveal One of America's Ugliest
Foreign Policy Secrets.

In December 1985, when Brian Barger and I wrote a groundbreaking story for
the Associated Press about Nicaraguan Contra rebels smuggling cocaine into
the United States, one U.S. senator put his political career on the line to
follow up on our disturbing findings.

His name was John Kerry.

Yet, over the past year, even as Kerry's heroism as a young Navy officer in
Vietnam has become a point of controversy, this act of political courage by
a freshman senator has gone virtually unmentioned, even though -- or
perhaps because -- it marked Kerry's first challenge to the Bush family. In
early 1986, the 42-year-old Massachusetts Democrat stood almost alone in
the U.S. Senate demanding answers about the emerging evidence that
CIA-backed Contras were filling their coffers by collaborating with drug
traffickers then flooding U.S. borders with cocaine from South America.
Kerry assigned members of his personal Senate staff to pursue the
allegations. He also persuaded the Republican majority on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee to request information from the Reagan-Bush
administration about the alleged Contra drug traffickers. In taking on the
inquiry, Kerry challenged President Ronald Reagan at the height of his
power, at a time he was calling the Contras the "moral equals of the
Founding Fathers." Kerry's questions represented a particular embarrassment
to Vice President George H.W. Bush, whose responsibilities included
overseeing U.S. drug-interdiction policies. Kerry took on the investigation
though he didn't have much support within his own party.

By 1986, congressional Democrats had little stomach left for challenging
the Reagan-Bush Contra war. Not only had Reagan won a historic landslide in
1984, amassing a record 54 million votes, but his conservative allies were
targeting individual Democrats viewed as critical of the Contras fighting
to oust Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. Most Washington
journalists were backing off, too, for fear of getting labeled "Sandinista
apologists" or worse.

Kerry's probe infuriated Reagan's White House, which was pushing Congress
to restore military funding for the Contras. Some in the administration
also saw Kerry's investigation as a threat to the secrecy surrounding the
Contra supply operation, which was being run illegally by White House aide
Oliver North and members of Bush's vice presidential staff. Through most of
1986, Kerry's staff inquiry advanced against withering political fire. His
investigators interviewed witnesses in Washington, contacted Contra sources
in Miami and Costa Rica, and tried to make sense of sometimes convoluted
stories of intrigue from the shadowy worlds of covert warfare and the drug
trade.

Kerry's chief Senate staff investigators were Ron Rosenblith, Jonathan
Winer and Dick McCall. Rosenblith, a Massachusetts political strategist
from Kerry's victorious 1984 campaign, braved both political and personal
risks as he traveled to Central America for face-to-face meetings with
witnesses. Winer, a lawyer also from Massachusetts, charted the inquiry's
legal framework and mastered its complex details.

McCall, an experienced congressional staffer, brought Capitol Hill savvy to
the investigation. Behind it all was Kerry, who combined a prosecutor's
sense for sniffing out criminality and a politician's instinct for pushing
the limits.

The Kerry whom I met during this period was a complex man who balanced a
rebellious idealism with a determination not to burn his bridges to the
political establishment.

The Reagan administration did everything it could to thwart Kerry's
investigation, including attempting to discredit witnesses, stonewalling
the Senate when it requested evidence and assigning the CIA to monitor
Kerry's probe. But it couldn't stop Kerry and his investigators from
discovering the explosive truth: that the Contra war was permeated with
drug traffickers who gave the Contras money, weapons and equipment in
exchange for help in smuggling cocaine into the United States. Even more
damningly, Kerry found that U.S. government agencies knew about the
Contra-drug connection, but turned a blind eye to the evidence in order to
avoid undermining a top Reagan-Bush foreign policy initiative.

The Reagan administration's tolerance and protection of this dark
underbelly of the Contra war represented one of the most sordid scandals in
the history of U.S. foreign policy.

Yet when Kerry's bombshell findings were released in 1989, they were
greeted by the mainstream press with disdain and disinterest. The New York
Times, which had long denigrated the Contra-drug allegations, buried the
story of Kerry's report on its inside pages, as did the Washington Post and
the Los Angeles Times. For his tireless efforts, Kerry earned a reputation
as a reckless investigator. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch dubbed
Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff." But almost a decade later, in 1998,
Kerry's trailblazing investigation was vindicated by the CIA's own
inspector general, who found that scores of Contra operatives were
implicated in the cocaine trade and that U.S. agencies had looked the other
way rather than reveal information that could have embarrassed the
Reagan-Bush administration.

Even after the CIA's admissions, the national press corps never fully
corrected its earlier dismissive treatment.

That would have meant the New York Times and other leading publications
admitting they had bungled their coverage of one of the worst scandals of
the Reagan-Bush era. The warm and fuzzy glow that surrounded Ronald Reagan
after he left office also discouraged clarification of the historical record.

Taking a clear-eyed look at crimes inside Reagan's Central American
policies would have required a tough reassessment of the 40th president,
which to this day the media has been unwilling to do. So this formative
period of Kerry's political evolution has remained nearly unknown to the
American electorate. Two decades later, it's hard to recall the intensity
of the administration's support for the Contras. They were hailed as
courageous front-line fighters, like the Mujahedin in Afghanistan,
defending the free world from the Soviet empire. Reagan famously warned
that Nicaragua was only "two days' driving time from Harlingen, Texas."

Yet, for years, Contra units had gone on bloody rampages through Nicaraguan
border towns, raping women, torturing captives and executing civilian
officials of the Sandinista government. In private, Reagan referred to the
Contras as "vandals," according to Duane Clarridge, the CIA officer in
charge of the operation, in his memoir, "A Spy for All Seasons." But in
public, the Reagan administration attacked anyone who pointed out the
Contras' corruption and brutality.

The Contras also proved militarily inept, causing the CIA to intervene
directly and engage in warlike acts, such as mining Nicaragua's harbors.

In 1984, these controversies caused the Congress to forbid U.S. military
assistance to the Contras -- the Boland Amendment -- forcing the rebels to
search for new funding sources.

Drug money became the easiest way to fill the depleted Contra coffers.

The documentary evidence is now irrefutable that a number of Contra units
both in Costa Rica and Honduras opened or deepened ties to Colombian
cartels and other regional drug traffickers. The White House also scrambled
to find other ways to keep the Contras afloat, turning to third countries,
such as Saudi Arabia, and eventually to profits from clandestine arms sales
to Iran. The secrets began to seep out in the mid-1980s. In June 1985, as a
reporter for the Associated Press, I wrote the first story mentioning
Oliver North's secret Contra supply operation.

By that fall, my AP colleague Brian Barger and I stumbled onto evidence
that some of the Contras were supplementing their income by helping
traffickers transship cocaine through Central America. As we dug deeper, it
became clear that the drug connection implicated nearly all the major
Contra organizations. The AP published our story about the Contra-cocaine
evidence on Dec. 20, 1985, describing Contra units "engaged in cocaine
smuggling, using some of the profits to finance their war against
Nicaragua's leftist government." The story provoked little coverage
elsewhere in the U.S. national press corps. But it pricked the interest of
a newly elected U.S. senator, John Kerry. A former prosecutor, Kerry also
heard about Contra law violations from a Miami-based federal public
defender named John Mattes, who had been assigned a case that touched on
Contra gunrunning. Mattes' sister had worked for Kerry in Massachusetts.

By spring 1986, Kerry had begun a limited investigation deploying some of
his personal staff in Washington. As a member of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Kerry managed to gain some cooperation from the
panel's Republican leadership, partly because the "war on drugs" was then a
major political issue.

Besides looking into Contra drug trafficking, Kerry launched the first
investigation into the allegations of weapons smuggling and
misappropriation of U.S. government funds that were later exposed as part
of North's illegal operation to supply the Contras. Kerry's staff soon took
an interest in a federal probe in Miami headed by assistant U.S. Attorney
Jeffrey Feldman. Talking to some of the same Contra supporters whom we had
interviewed for the AP's Contra-cocaine story, Feldman had pieced together
the outlines of North's secret network. In a panicked memo dated April 7,
1986, one of North's Costa Rican-based private operatives, Robert Owen,
warned North that prosecutor Feldman had shown Ambassador Lewis Tambs "a
diagram with your name underneath and John [Hull]'s underneath mine, then a
line connecting the various resistance groups in C.R. [Costa Rica]. Feldman
stated they were looking at the 'big picture' and not only looking at
possible violations of the Neutrality Act, but a possible unauthorized use
of government funds." (For details, see my "Lost History: Contras, Cocaine,
the Press and 'Project Truth.'") John Hull was an American farmer with a
ranch in Costa Rica near the Nicaraguan border.

According to witnesses, Contras had used Hull's property for cocaine
transshipments. (Hull was later accused of drug trafficking by Costa Rican
authorities, but fled the country before facing trial.

He returned to the United States.) On April 10, 1986, Barger and I reported
on the AP wire that the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami was examining
allegations of Contra gunrunning and drug trafficking. The AP story rattled
nerves inside the Reagan administration. On an unrelated trip to Miami,
Attorney General Edwin Meese pulled U.S. Attorney Leon Kellner aside and
asked about the existence of this Contra probe.

Back in Washington, other major news organizations began to sniff around
the Contra-cocaine story but mostly went off in wrong directions. On May 6,
1986, the New York Times relied for a story on information from Meese's
spokesman Patrick Korten, who claimed "various bits of information got
referred to us. We ran them all down and didn't find anything. It comes to
nothing." But that wasn't the truth.

In Miami, Feldman and FBI agents were corroborating many of the
allegations. On May 14, 1986, Feldman recommended to his superiors that the
evidence of Contra crimes was strong enough to justify taking the case to a
grand jury. U.S. Attorney Kellner agreed, scribbling on Feldman's memo, "I
concur that we have sufficient evidence to ask for a grand jury investigation."

But on May 20, less than a week later, Kellner reversed that
recommendation. Without telling Feldman, Kellner rewrote the memo to state
that "a grand jury investigation at this point would represent a fishing
expedition with little prospect that it would bear fruit." Kellner signed
Feldman's name to the mixed-metaphor memo and sent it to Washington on June
3. The revised "Feldman" memo was then circulated to congressional
Republicans and leaked to conservative media, which used it to discredit
Kerry's investigation. The right-wing Washington Times denounced the probe
as a wasteful political "witch hunt" in a June 12, 1986, article. "Kerry's
anti-Contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain," screamed the headline
of a Washington Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.

Back in Miami, Kellner reassigned Feldman to unrelated far-flung
investigations, including one to Thailand.

The altered memo was instrumental in steering Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., away from holding hearings,
Kerry's later Contra-drug report, "Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy,"
stated. "Material provided to the Committee by the Justice Department and
distributed to members following an Executive Session June 26, 1986,
wrongly suggested that the allegations that had been made were false," the
Kerry report said.

Feldman later testified to the Senate that he was told in 1986 that
representatives of the Justice Department, the Drug Enforcement
Administration and the FBI had met "to discuss how Senator Kerry's efforts
to get Lugar to hold hearings on the case could be undermined." Mattes, the
federal public defender in Miami, watched as the administration ratcheted
up pressure on Kerry's investigation. "From a political point of view in
May of '86, Kerry had every reason to shut down his staff investigation,"
Mattes said. "There was no upside for him doing it. We all felt under the
gun to back off."

The Kerry that Mattes witnessed at the time was the ex-prosecutor
determined to get to the bottom of serious criminal allegations even if
they implicated senior government officials. "As an investigator, he had a
sense it was there," said Mattes, who is now an investigative reporter for
Fox News in San Diego. "Kerry was a crusader.

He was the consummate outsider, doing what you expect people to do. . At no
point did he flinch." Years later, in the National Archives, I discovered a
document showing that the Central Intelligence Agency also was keeping tabs
on Kerry's investigation. Alan Fiers Jr., who served as the CIA's Central
American Task Force chief, told independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's
Iran-Contra investigators that the AP and Feldman's investigations had
attracted the hostility of the Reagan-Bush administration. Fiers said he
"was also getting a dump on the Senator Kerry investigation about mercenary
activity in Central America from the CIA's legislative affairs people who
were monitoring it."

Negative publicity about the Contras was particularly unwelcome to the
Reagan-Bush administration throughout the spring and summer 1986 as the
White House battled to restore U.S. government funding to the Contras. In
the politically heated atmosphere, the administration sought to smear
anti-Contra witnesses cooperating with Kerry's investigation. In a July 28
memo, initialed as read by President Reagan, North labeled onetime Contra
mercenary Jack Terrell as a "terrorist threat" because of his "anti-Contra
and anti-U.S. activities." North said Terrell had been cooperating "with
various congressional staffs in preparing for hearings and inquiries
regarding the role of U.S. government officials in illegally supporting the
Nicaraguan resistance."

In August 1986, FBI and Secret Service agents hauled Terrell in for two
days of polygraph examinations on suspicion that Terrell intended to
assassinate President Reagan, an allegation that proved baseless.

But Terrell told me later that the investigation had chilled his readiness
to testify about the Contras. "It burned me up," he said. "The pressure was
always there." Beyond intimidating some witnesses, the Reagan
administration systematically worked to frustrate Kerry's investigation.
Years later, one of Kerry's investigators, Jack Blum, complained publicly
that the Justice Department had actively obstructed the congressional probe.

Blum said William Weld, who took over as assistant attorney general in
charge of the criminal division in September 1986, was an "absolute
stonewall" blocking the Senate's access to evidence on Contra-cocaine
smuggling. "Weld put a very serious block on any effort we made to get
information," Blum told the Senate Intelligence Committee a decade after
the events. "There were stalls. There were refusals to talk to us, refusals
to turn over data."

Weld, who later became Massachusetts governor and lost to Kerry in the 1996
Senate race, denied that he had obstructed Kerry's Contra probe.

But it was clear that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was
encountering delays in getting information that had been requested by
Chairman Lugar, a Republican, and Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell, the
ranking Democrat. At Kerry's suggestion, they had sought files on more than
two dozen people linked to the Contra operations and suspected of drug
trafficking. Inside the Justice Department, senior career investigators
grew concerned about the administration's failure to turn over the
requested information. "I was concerned that we were not responding to what
was obviously a legitimate congressional request," Mark Richard, one of
Weld's top deputies, testified in a deposition. "We were not refusing to
respond in giving explanations or justifications for it. We were seemingly
just stonewalling what was a continuing barrage of requests for
information. That concerned me no end." On Sept. 26, 1986, Kerry tried to
spur action by presenting Weld with an 11-page "proffer" statement from a
31-year-old FBI informant who had worked with the Medellin cartel and had
become a witness on cartel activities. The woman, Wanda Palacio, had
approached Kerry with an account about Colombian cocaine kingpin Jorge
Ochoa bragging about payments he had made to the Nicaraguan Contras.

As part of this Contra connection, Palacio said pilots for a CIA-connected
airline, Southern Air Transport, were flying cocaine out of Barranquilla,
Colombia. She said she had witnessed two such flights, one in 1983 and the
other in October 1985, and quoted Ochoa saying the flights were part of an
arrangement to exchange "drugs for guns."

According to contemporaneous notes of this "proffer" meeting between Weld
and Kerry, Weld chuckled that he was not surprised at allegations about
corrupt dealings by "bum agents, former and current CIA agents." He
promised to give serious consideration to Palacio's allegations. After
Kerry left Weld's office, however, the Justice Department seemed to
concentrate on poking holes in Palacio's account, not trying to corroborate
it. Though Palacio had been considered credible in her earlier testimony to
the FBI, she was judged to lack credibility when she made accusations about
the Contras and the CIA.

On Oct. 3, 1986, Weld's office told Kerry that it was rejecting Palacio as
a witness on the grounds that there were some contradictions in her
testimony. The discrepancies apparently related to such minor points as
which month she had first talked with the FBI.

Two days after Weld rejected Palacio's Contra-cocaine testimony, other
secrets about the White House's covert Contra support operations suddenly
crashed --literally -- into view.

On Oct. 5, a quiet Sunday morning, an aging C-123 cargo plane rumbled over
the skies of Nicaragua preparing to drop AK-47 rifles and other equipment
to Contra units in the jungle below.

Since the Reagan administration had recently won congressional approval for
renewed CIA military aid to the Contras, the flight was to be one of the
last by Oliver North's ragtag air force. The plane, however, attracted the
attention of a teenage Sandinista soldier armed with a shoulder-fired
surface-to-air missile.

He aimed, pulled the trigger and watched as the Soviet-made missile made a
direct hit on the aircraft. Inside, cargo handler Eugene Hasenfus, an
American mercenary working with the Contras, was knocked to the floor, but
managed to crawl to an open door, push himself through, and parachute to
the ground, where he was captured by Sandinista forces.

The pilot and other crew members died in the crash. As word spread about
the plane crash, Barger -- who had left the AP and was working for a CBS
News show -- persuaded me to join him on a trip to Nicaragua with the goal
of getting an interview with Hasenfus, who turned out to be an unemployed
Wisconsin construction worker and onetime CIA cargo handler. Hasenfus told
a press conference in Managua that the Contra supply operation was run by
CIA officers working with the office of Vice President George Bush.
Administration officials, including Bush, denied any involvement with the
downed plane.

Our hopes for an interview with Hasenfus didn't work out, but Sandinista
officials did let us examine the flight records and other documents they
had recovered from the plane.

As Barger talked with a senior Nicaraguan officer, I hastily copied down
the entries from copilot Wallace "Buzz" Sawyer's flight logs. The logs
listed hundreds of flights with the airports identified only by their
four-letter international codes and the planes designated by tail numbers.

Upon returning to Washington, I began deciphering Wallace's travels and
matching the tail numbers with their registered owners.

Though Wallace's flights included trips to Africa and landings at U.S.
military bases in the West, most of his entries were for flights in Central
and South America. Meanwhile, in Kerry's Senate office, witness Wanda
Palacio was waiting for a meeting when she noticed Sawyer's photo flashing
on a TV screen.

Palacio began insisting that Sawyer was one of the pilots whom she had
witnessed loading cocaine onto a Southern Air Transport plane in
Barranquilla, Colombia, in early October 1985. Her identification of Sawyer
struck some of Kerry's aides as a bit too convenient, causing them to have
their own doubts about her credibility.

Though I was unaware of Palacio's claims at the time, I pressed ahead with
the AP story on Sawyer's travels.

In the last paragraph of the article, I noted that Sawyer's logs revealed
that he had piloted a Southern Air Transport plane on three flights to
Barranquilla on Oct. 2, 4, and 6, 1985. The story ran on Oct. 17, 1986.

Shortly after the article moved on the AP wires, I received a phone call
from Rosenblith at Kerry's office.

Sounding shocked, the Kerry investigator asked for more details about the
last paragraph of the story, but he wouldn't say why he wanted to know.
Only months later did I discover that the AP story on Sawyer's logs had
provided unintentional corroboration for Palacio's Contra-drug allegations.

Palacio also passed a polygraph exam on her statements. But Weld and the
Justice Department still refused to accept her testimony as credible. (Even
a decade later, when I asked the then-Massachusetts governor about Palacio,
Weld likened her credibility to "a wagon load of diseased blankets.") In
fall 1986, Weld's criminal division continued to withhold Contra-drug
information requested by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. According
to Justice Department records, Lugar and Pell -- two of the Senate's most
gentlemanly members -- wrote on Oct. 14 that they had been waiting more
than two months for information that the Justice Department had promised
"in an expeditious manner."

"To date, no information has been received and the investigation of
allegations by the committee, therefore, has not moved very far," Lugar and
Pell wrote in a joint letter. "We're disappointed that the Department has
not responded in a timely fashion and indeed has not provided any materials."

On Nov. 25, 1986, the Iran-Contra scandal was officially born when Attorney
General Edwin Meese announced that profits from secret U.S. arms sales to
Iran had been diverted to help fund the Nicaraguan Contras. The Washington
press corps scrambled to get a handle on the dramatic story of clandestine
operations, but still resisted the allegations that the administration's
zeal had spilled over into sanctioning or tolerating Contra-connected drug
trafficking.

Though John Kerry's early warnings about White House-aided Contra
gunrunning had proved out, his accusations about Contra drug smuggling
would continue to be rejected by much of the press corps as going too far.
On Jan. 21, 1987, the conservative Washington Times attacked Kerry's
Contra-drug investigation again; his alleged offense this time was
obstructing justice because his probe was supposedly interfering with the
Reagan administration's determination to get at the truth. "Kerry's
staffers damaged FBI probe," the Times headline read.

"Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal
drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing
allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law
enforcement officials said," according to the Times article. The mainstream
press continued to publish stories that denigrated Kerry's investigation.
On Feb. 24, 1987, a New York Times article by reporter Keith Schneider
quoted "law enforcement officials" saying that the Contra allegations "have
come from a small group of convicted drug traffickers in South Florida who
never mentioned Contras or the White House until the Iran-Contra affair
broke in November."

The drift of the article made Kerry out to be something of a dupe. His
Contra-cocaine witnesses were depicted as simply convicts trying to get
lighter prison sentences by embroidering false allegations onto the
Iran-Contra scandal.

But the information in the Times story was patently untrue. The AP
Contra-cocaine story had run in December 1985, almost a year before the
Iran-Contra story broke.

When New York Times reporters conducted their own interview with Palacio,
she immediately sensed their hostility.

In her Senate deposition, Palacio described her experience at the Times
office in Miami. She said Schneider and a "Cuban man" rudely questioned her
story and bullied her about specific evidence for each of her statements.
The Cuban man "was talking to me kind of nasty," Palacio recalled. "I got
up and left, and this man got all pissed off, Keith Schneider."

The parameters for a "responsible" Iran-Contra investigation were being
set. On July 16, 1987, the New York Times published another story that
seemed to discredit the Contra-drug charges.

It reported that except for a few convicted drug smugglers from Miami, the
Contra-cocaine "charges have not been verified by any other people and have
been vigorously denied by several government agencies."

Four days later, the Times added that "investigators, including reporters
from major news outlets, have tried without success to find proof of ...
allegations that military supplies may have been paid for with profits from
drug smuggling." (The Times was inaccurate again. The original AP story had
cited a CIA report describing the Contras buying a helicopter with drug
money.) The joint Senate-House Iran-Contra committee averted its eyes from
the Contra-cocaine allegations. The only time the issue was raised publicly
was when a demonstrator interrupted one hearing by shouting, "Ask about the
cocaine." Kerry was excluded from the investigation. On July 27, 1987,
behind the scenes, committee staff investigator Robert A. Bermingham echoed
the New York Times. "Hundreds of persons" had been questioned, he said, and
vast numbers of government files reviewed, but no "corroboration of
media-exploited allegations of U.S. government-condoned drug trafficking by
Contra leaders or Contra organizations" was found.

The report, however, listed no names of any interview subjects nor any
details about the files examined.

Bermingham's conclusions conflicted with closed-door Iran-Contra testimony
from administration insiders.

In a classified deposition to the congressional Iran-Contra committees,
senior CIA officer Alan Fiers said, "with respect to [drug trafficking by]
the Resistance Forces [the Contras] it is not a couple of people. It is a
lot of people." Despite official denials and press hostility, Kerry and his
investigators pressed ahead.

In 1987, with the arrival of a Democratic majority in the Senate, Kerry
also became chairman of the Senate subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and
international operations. He used that position to pry loose the facts
proving that the official denials were wrong and that Contra units were
involved in the drug trade.

Kerry's report was issued two years later, on April 13, 1989. Its stunning
conclusion: "On the basis of the evidence, it is clear that individuals who
provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the
supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations,
and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and
material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another
agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement
either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter." The report
discovered that drug traffickers gave the Contras "cash, weapons, planes,
pilots, air supply services and other materials." Moreover, the U.S. State
Department had paid some drug traffickers as part of a program to fly
non-lethal assistance to the Contras. Some payments occurred "after the
traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug
charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by
these same agencies."

Although Kerry's findings represented the first time a congressional report
explicitly accused federal agencies of willful collaboration with drug
traffickers, the major news organizations chose to bury the startling
findings. Instead of front-page treatment, the New York Times, the
Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all wrote brief accounts and
stuck them deep inside their papers.

The New York Times article, only 850 words long, landed on Page 8. The Post
placed its story on A20. The Los Angeles Times found space on Page 11.

One of the best-read political reference books, the Almanac of American
Politics, gave this account of Kerry's investigation in its 1992 edition:
"In search of right-wing villains and complicit Americans, [Kerry] tried to
link Nicaraguan Contras to the drug trade, without turning up much credible
evidence." Thus, Kerry's reward for his strenuous and successful efforts to
get to the bottom of a difficult case of high-level government corruption
was to be largely ignored by the mainstream press and even have his
reputation besmirched.

But the Contra-cocaine story didn't entirely go away. In 1991, in the trial
of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega for drug trafficking, federal
prosecutors called as a witness Medellin cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder, who
testified that the Medellin cartel had given $10 million to the Contras, a
claim that one of Kerry's witnesses had made years earlier. "The Kerry
hearings didn't get the attention they deserved at the time," a Washington
Post editorial on Nov. 27, 1991 acknowledged. "The Noriega trial brings
this sordid aspect of the Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention."
Kerry's vindication in the Contra drug case did not come until 1998, when
inspectors general at the CIA and Justice Department reviewed their files
in connection with allegations published by the San Jose Mercury News that
the Contra-cocaine pipeline had contributed to the crack epidemic that
ravaged inner-city neighborhoods in the 1980s. (Ironically, the major
national newspapers only saw fit to put the Contra-cocaine story on their
front pages in criticizing the Mercury News and its reporter Gary Webb for
taking the allegations too far.) On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post
published a front-page story, with two more pages inside, that was critical
of the Mercury News. But while accusing the Mercury News of exaggerating,
the Post noted that Contra-connected drug smugglers had brought tons of
cocaine into the United States. "Even CIA personnel testified to Congress
they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers," the Post
reported.

A Post editorial on Oct. 9, 1996, reprised the newspaper's assessment that
the Mercury News had overreached, but added that for "CIA-connected
characters to have played even a trivial role in introducing Americans to
crack would indicate an unconscionable breach by the CIA." In the months
that followed, the major newspapers -- including the New York Times and the
Los Angeles Times -- joined the Post in criticizing the Mercury News while
downplaying their own inattention to the crimes that Kerry had illuminated
a decade earlier.

The Los Angeles Times actually used Kerry's report to dismiss the Mercury
News series as old news because the Contra cocaine trafficking "has been
well documented for years." While the major newspapers gloated when
reporter Gary Webb was forced to resign from the Mercury News, the internal
government investigations, which Webb's series had sparked, moved forward.

The government's decade-long Contra cocaine cover-up began to crumble when
CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz published the first of two volumes of
his Contra cocaine investigation on Jan. 29, 1998, followed by a Justice
Department report and Hitz's second volume in October 1998.

The CIA inspector general and Justice Department reports confirmed that the
Reagan administration knew from almost the outset of the Contra war that
cocaine traffickers permeated the CIA-backed army but the administration
did next to nothing to expose or stop these criminals.

The reports revealed example after example of leads not followed, witnesses
disparaged and official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged.

The evidence indicated that Contra-connected smugglers included the
Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran
military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros,
and Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans. Reviewing evidence that existed in the
1980s, CIA inspector general Hitz found that some Contra-connected drug
traffickers worked directly for Reagan's National Security Council staff
and the CIA. In 1987, Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veteran Moises Nunez told
CIA investigators that "it was difficult to answer questions relating to
his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he
had performed at the direction of the NSC."

CIA task force chief Fiers said the Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued
then "because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be
somehow connected to the Private Benefactor program [Oliver North's
fundraising]. A decision was made not to pursue this matter." Another
Cuban-American who had attracted Kerry's interest was Felipe Vidal, who had
a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker in the 1970s. But the CIA still
hired him to serve as a logistics officer for the Contras and covered up
for him when the agency learned that he was collaborating with known
traffickers to raise money for the Contras, the Hitz report showed. Fiers
had briefed Kerry about Vidal on Oct. 15, 1986, without mentioning Vidal's
drug arrests and conviction in the 1970s.

Hitz found that a chief reason for the CIA's protective handling of
Contra-drug evidence was Langley's "one overriding priority: to oust the
Sandinista government ... [CIA officers] were determined that the various
difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective
implementation of the Contra program."

According to Hitz's report, one CIA field officer explained, "The focus was
to get the job done, get the support and win the war." This pattern of
obstruction occurred while Vice President Bush was in charge of stanching
the flow of drugs to the United States. Kerry made himself a pest by
demanding answers to troubling questions.

"He wanted to get to the bottom of something so dark," former public
defender Mattes told me. "Nobody could imagine it was so dark." In the end,
investigations by government inspectors general corroborated Kerry's 1989
findings and vindicated his effort.

But the muted conclusion of the Contra-cocaine controversy 12 years after
Kerry began his investigation explains why this chapter is an overlooked --
though important -- episode in Kerry's Senate career.

It's a classic case of why, in Washington, there's little honor in being
right too soon. Yet it's also a story about a senator who had the personal
honor to do the right thing.