Stuff They Dont Want You to Know Gary Webb

Jeff Leen is The Washington Post'due south banana managing editor for investigations.

An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. That old dictum ought to hang on the walls of every journalism schoolhouse in America. It is the salient lesson of the Gary Webb affair. It might have saved his journalism career, though it would have precluded his canonization in the new moving-picture show "Kill the Messenger."

The Hollywood version of his story — a truth-teller persecuted by the cowardly and craven mainstream media — is pure fiction. Just Webb was a real person who wrote a existent story, a iii-office series called "Dark Alliance," in August 1996 for the San Jose Mercury News, i of the flagship newspapers of the then-mighty Knight Ridder chain. Webb'due south story made the extraordinary claim that the Key Intelligence Agency was responsible for the cleft cocaine epidemic in America. What he lacked was the boggling proof. But at first, the claim was plenty. Webb's story became notable as the first major journalism cause celebre on the newly emerging Internet. The black community roiled in anger at the supposed CIA perfidy.

Then it all began to come apart. The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, in a rare evidence of unanimity, all wrote major pieces knocking the story down for its overblown claims and undernourished reporting.

Gradually, the Mercury News backed abroad from Webb'due south scoop. The paper transferred him to its Cupertino bureau and did an internal review of his facts and his methods. Jerry Ceppos, the Mercury News's executive editor, wrote a slice concluding that the story did non meet the newspaper's standards — a courageous stance, I thought. "We oversimplified the circuitous consequence of how the crack epidemic in America grew," Ceppos wrote. "Through imprecise linguistic communication and graphics, we created impressions that were open to misinterpretation."

Jeremy Renner plays Gary Webb in "Kill the Messenger." (Chuck Zlotnick/Focus Features)

Webb resigned and wrote a book defending his reporting. The mainstream press, now known as the legacy media, which had vilified him and which he had vilified in turn, never employed him again. He worked as an investigator for a legislative committee in California and finally for an alternative weekly in Sacramento. He had coin troubles and other problems, and ended up taking his ain life at 49 in December 2004.

I had a ringside seat to the Webb saga. As an investigative reporter covering the drug trade for the Miami Herald, also a Knight Ridder newspaper, I wrote nearly the explosion of cocaine in America in the 1980s and 1990s, and the function of Republic of colombia's Medellin Dare in fueling information technology.

Beginning in 1985, journalists started pursuing tips nigh the CIA'south role in the drug trade. Was the agency assuasive cocaine to menstruation into the United states of america every bit a means to fund its secret war supporting the contra rebels in Nicaragua? Many journalists, including me, chased that story from unlike angles, but the extraordinary proof was always lacking.

Finally, in April 1989, the U.S. Senate subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations, chaired by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), weighed in. After an exhaustive three-year investigation, the committee'due south report concluded that CIA officials were aware of the smuggling activities of some of their charges who supported the contras, but it stopped short of implicating the agency directly in drug dealing.

That seemed to exist the terminal discussion on the matter. And then Gary Webb came along.

I was in the Miami Herald's newsroom when the rumble came across that the Mercury News had finally nailed the CIA-cocaine story, proving that the CIA was involved in the cocaine merchandise and, more than significantly, that the agency was responsible for the U.Due south. scissure epidemic. I was astonished — and envious. Until I read Webb'southward story.

The beginning thing I looked for was the amount of cocaine that the story said "the CIA's army" had brought into the country and funneled into the crack merchandise. It turned out to be relatively small-scale: a ton in 1981, 100 kilos a week past the mid-1980s, nowhere nigh plenty to flood the state with crack.

I was also eager to see exactly how he linked the CIA to the cocaine trafficking. (The online presentation of the articles memorably showed a crack pipe superimposed on the agency'south seal.) Was he talking nearly CIA officers, who are employees of the bureau, or CIA agents, who are hired foreign contractors? Or subcontractors? Did he name or quote any of them? Did he accept any documents?

What he had was this: the testimony of Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes, described as a onetime contra leader and drug dealer. Blandon claimed that the leader of his contra group, who was on the CIA payroll, had said, "The ends justify the means." In Blandon's words, "So we started raising coin for the contra revolution." Blandon'southward lawyer told Webb: "Was he involved with the CIA? Probably."

Webb also wrote that Blandon'due south dominate had been defendant past a witness at his Nicaragua drug trial of participating in a drug ring that flew cocaine into a U.S. Air Force base in Texas, though the base was not named.

There was no response from the CIA in the story. But the claims Gary made, man, were they extraordinary:

"For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug band sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Key Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.

"This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a metropolis now known every bit the 'crevice' capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a fissure explosion in urban America and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'south gangs to buy automatic weapons."

And this: "Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine — a drug that was most unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA'due south army started bringing it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices."

In the business concern, these are chosen nut graphs, and they are the hardest things for an investigative reporter to write. You must summarize the sometimes bewildering facts you have uncovered, notwithstanding incomplete or contradictory, and synthesize them into a picture that makes sense. That is what Webb did. And he went likewise far.

As the Mercury News was first coming under criticism for his reporting, and while the story was the hottest one in the country, an appeal went out to other Knight Ridder newspapers to pick upwards his journalism. I was asked to evaluate his reporting for my bosses at the Herald. The Herald did not publish Webb's work.

After Webb was transferred to Cupertino, I debated him at a briefing of the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization in Phoenix in June 1997. He was preternaturally at-home. While investigative journalists are ordinarily bundles of insecurities and questions and skepticism, he brushed off any criticism and admitted no error. When asked how I felt well-nigh it all, I said I felt pitiful for him. I yet feel that manner.

Webb'southward supporters betoken to a 1998 study past CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz every bit vindication, because information technology uncovered an bureau mind-set up of indifference to drug-smuggling allegations. Actually, information technology is more similar the Kerry committee'due south report on steroids: "We have found no show in the course of this lengthy investigation of any conspiracy by CIA or its employees to bring drugs into the U.s.," Hitz said. ". . . In that location are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra plan who were declared to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations."

Significantly, the report found no CIA human relationship with the drug band Webb had written near.

Webb could depict a Pyrrhic victory from Hitz's report. His work and the controversy it engendered forced the CIA to undertake one of the nigh extensive internal investigations in its history. Jack Blum, the special counsel who led the investigation for the Kerry committee, said subsequently Webb'south death that even though Webb got many of the details "completely wrong," he had at to the lowest degree succeeded in focusing attention on the issue.

But investigative reporting is unforgiving to those who get it only partially right, especially on their core claims. When a story gets that large, information technology invites scrutiny and criticism. And criticism of the criticism. Where does it all land in the stop? The criticism of the criticism usually fails to come up to grips with the salient point: No matter what yous think of the CIA, there's no putting the crevice-epidemic genie back in the bottle.

You lot don't take to believe me or Ceppos, or anybody else from the mainstream media on this one. These are the words of Nick Schou, the OC Weekly editor who wrote the book that serves as the basis, with Webb's book, for the movie: " 'Dark Alliance' contained major flaws of hyperbole that were both encouraged and ignored by his editors, who saw the story as a take chances to win a Pulitzer Prize," Schou wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2006. On the fissure explosion claim: "The story offered no prove to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal fault that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors."

Despite his facade of certainty, Webb must take known this better than anyone. In his book he took pains to distance himself from the fissure merits. "I never believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA conspiracy behind the crack plague," he wrote. ". . . The CIA couldn't fifty-fifty mine a harbor without getting its trench coat stuck in its fly."

Webb also admitted to mistakes in the execution of the story — though he put the blame on his editors, who he said requested "an increased accent on CIA involvement." He said he rewrote those nut graphs at their insistence.

Every bit for "Impale the Messenger," the best that can exist said for the movie is that Jeremy Renner gives a spirited performance in a fantasy version of the story in which everyone is incorrect but Gary Webb. Information technology would take an article longer than this one to bespeak out the many departures from what actually happened.

Webb will be lionized by some, and the simple story volition get told and retold that the mainstream printing and his direction betrayed him, threw him under the bus. Many people will believe information technology. Hollywood was making movies about U.Due south. government cocaine trafficking as early on equally 1988. Go ahead and rent "The Last of the Finest" or "Higher up the Police," if you lot can find them on Netflix. In the historic period of waterboarding and Edward Snowden, widespread CIA cocaine trafficking seems not only plausible but downright blowsy.

Before seeing the film this past week, I hadn't thought much about Webb in a long time. Mostly, he stands out in my mind as a cautionary tale, a warning, especially for the younger reporters on my staff, to proceed the hype out of their nut graphs.

jeff.leen@washpost.com

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gary-webb-was-no-journalism-hero-despite-what-kill-the-messenger-says/2014/10/17/026b7560-53c9-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html