Talk:Gary Webb

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[edit] More External links

The comments on the Kuro5hin article have many additional/related links. See R.I.P. Gary Webb -- Unembedded Reporter, in particular BACKGROUND ON THE CIA-DRUG CONNECTION - haven't gone through these though. --L

[edit] Comments by Andres Kargar

Comments by Andres Kargar have been removed. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, chatroom, discussion forum, propaganda, advocacy of any kind, nor critical reviews, personal essays, primary research, or memorials. Please consult the edit history. Please read Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. Feel free to discuss improving this article on this page. --Viriditas | Talk 11:42, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Comments in question are second from bottom in 'history', for the record. I have copied them to Talk:David_Corn where they may help those writing that article. By the way, "What wikipedia is" is not exactly the same as what the Talk: pages are. 67.124.101.60 23:43, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Actually, you're mistaken. See Wikipedia:Talk page. On Wikipedia, the purpose of a talk page is to help to improve the contents of the main page, from an encyclopedic point of view. Questions, challenges, excised text (due to truly egregious confusion or bias, for example), arguments relevant to changing the text, and commentary on the main page are all fair play.Wikipedians generally oppose the use of talk pages just for the purpose of partisan talk about the main subject. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, it's an encyclopedia. In other words, talk about the article, not about the subject. It's only the habits we encourage that keep Wikipedia from turning into another H2G2 or Everything2. --Viriditas | Talk 00:47, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Are there any other Pulitzer prize winning journalists on this clearly bias site that don't include the fact that the person won a Pulitzer prize in their introduction? "Gary Webb was a controversial American investigative journalist" I mean come on, have a little respect. You hacks could learn something from Gary Webb.211.72.233.8 13:04, 24 November 2006 (UTC)U. Dicks

Agreed; that info should be in the intro. csloat 22:24, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow. Thanks for changing that. Sorry about the negative remarks.

[edit] Missing references section

The background for Dark Alliance is complicated and not easy to penetrate from a quick glance. Moreover, the picture changed drastically over time (in Webbs favor). The article should therefore have a good reference section.

There still seems to be substantial confusion from the DoJ and CIA reports, which probably stems from the highly misleading executive summaries of the long documents (also see CIA Confirms It Allowed Contra Drug Trafficking). This should be mentioned in the references section, to avoid further confusion.

Also, the link collection here (also mentioned above) is worth looking into further. --Vinsci | Talk 08:26, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vinsci's lead vs. Viajero

[edit] Vinsci

Gary Webb (1955 – December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist for 19 years, focusing on government and private sector corruption and winning more than 30 journalism awards. He was best known for his 1996 "Dark Alliance" newspaper article series (later published as a book under the same title) in which he explored the Contra-crack cocaine connection. His controversial and highly damaging revelations were disputed at the time and while later confirmed, the affair effectively ended his career as a journalist.

[edit] Viajero

Gary Webb (1955 – December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist best known for his 1996 "Dark Alliance" series for the San Jose Mercury News in which he explored the Contra-crack cocaine connection (it was later published as a book under the same title). His controversial and highly damaging revelations were disputed at the time, and the affair effectively ended his career as a journalist.

See also: Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles

[Posted by Viriditas on 27 March 2005 11:28]

Viajero's version lacks the ring of truth that should be expected in an open source capsule. The facts referenced by Vinsci were later verified nearly point by point in the evidence uncovered by commission reports, which actually revealed that the scope of the CIA's operation was much larger than the shard Webb reported on. The commission reports went out of their way to downplay their own findings. The fact that Webb was actually vindicated received little press coverage, especially when compared to the unbridled backlash against Webb that also happened to prompt the Mercury News to disown him. Most mainstream press reports after Webb's death continued in this vein, as has Viajero. Ombudsman 06:54, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I am quite aware that Webb has been largely vindicated. Please note operative phrase at the time. I am sure it isn't necessary to spell this out for you, but it implies that people think differently now, that is to say, the revelations are now longer rejected out of hand. I think it is safe to assume our readers have the cognitive abilities to parse this statement correctly and reach this conclusion on their own. -- Viajero 08:46, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Excellent point. --Viriditas | Talk 10:34, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Archives of articles by Gary Webb

  • BBC News
Shortly before his death, Webb was asked by the BBC to comment on the U.S. presidential election 2004 on a 'U.S. voters panel'. This was a series of short commentaries.
  • BBC Election Coverage Main page (see voter's view section)
"When the BBC asked me to be on this voter panel, I had no intention of voting. [...] Rejecting both candidates is the only honest choice in that case. [...] George Bush did all of those things, unapologetically, to this nation's everlasting disgrace. That's why I'm voting for John Kerry."
Panel comments he didn't participate in are omitted.

[edit] Book reviews

  • Dark Alliance
Venomous critique, ridicules the author and the story while at the same time omitting supportive evidence, such as the secret CIA/DoJ agreement of 1982, North's diary entry that 14 million USD to finance arms came from drugs[1], CIA's confessions, etc. Discusses the .ni side of the story. Also mentions 1980's lawsuits that were dropped - followup.
Written in a matter of factly manner. Interesting, many references. Followup.

[edit] Comments in media at the time

On blaming it on "black paranoia". Another "must read", also mentions AP (12/20/85) and CBS News (West 57th, 4/6/87, 7/11/87) stories on CIA-backed contras and cocain trade and CIA participation in opium trafficing in Southeast Asia (The Politics of Heroin, Alfred W. McCoy).
Washington Times [...] described Pincus as a journalist "who some in the agency refer to as 'the CIA's house reporter.'"
Highly interesting, comments on the media reactions to the story. Interesting quote from Post owner at the end, from a speech given at CIA headquarters: "We live in a dirty and dangerous world," Graham told agency leaders (Regardie's Magazine,1/90). "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.".


More to come... --Vinsci 12:52, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Classic. I added it to Katherine Graham. -- Viajero 22:30, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Articles mentioning Webb (from 2005 onwards)

Note: also mentions a story on Gary Webb on p. 20: "The Sad Saga of Gary Webb". This doesn't seem to be up on the web yet.
  • Susan Bell: a shameful secret history ('The Last Rebel' in print edition) , by Robert Chalmers The Independent, 9 October 2005. Interview with the widow of Gary Webb that takes an in-depth look at Webb's story and especially the wrath he endured from U.S. media outlets and Intelligence Establishment.

[edit] 2x ext links Sacbee

I have reorganized the external links. Given the large number links we now have, I we can afford to be selective and I have moved these two here:

If any one feels strongly they should be included, please state your reasons and we can discuss it. -- Viajero 09:31, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

They should be moved to a "Notes" section and used as footnote references. I'll get around to it some time (anyone is welcome to help). Feel free to leave them here, for now. --Viriditas | Talk 09:46, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Finally starting on this...a year later. —Viriditas | Talk 02:14, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Current CIA and drugs connection stories

[edit] Removed Jack Anderson link?

Several days ago I included a link to the Jack Anderson wiki page and it has since been removed, why?

Perhaps because it had absolutely nothing to do with the topic?--csloat 17:12, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
A journalist elements within the US government planned on assassinating has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of Gary Webb?
Is there an echo in here?
Seriously, did Gary Webb report on this? Did Gary Webb have anything to do with this? If so, let us know, but so far there is no link whatsoever.--csloat 06:18, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Thank you for answering my earlier question. *sarcasm*
But you are right, Gary Webb did not report on the planned assassination of Jack Anderson, in fact I'm fairly certain Webb was not even a journalist when that occurred, but considering some of the claims regarding Webbs death and the known facts regarding certain elements within the Nixon administration and their intentions toward Jack Anderson, as well as the fact that there is already a link to another journalist who died under mysterious circumstances in the early 1990s on the Gary Webb page as well as a link to Gary Webb on the Jack Anderson page, I think it is pertinent and should be included.--LamontCranston 06:03, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
My apologies if I am being dense, but I just don't understand. Did Gary Webb have anything to do with Jack Anderson? Is your claim that this belongs here just because it is another mysterious death that could have been an assassination? If we include all such folks here the list would be practically endless. If there are other such links they should be removed too -- I think this article should be about Gary Webb, not about mysterious deaths or conspiracy theories in general. --csloat 20:52, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
My apologies if I am being dense, but if we were to remove references to "mysterious deaths" then all references to Mr. Webbs suicide would need to be removed. No, Webb did not have anything to do with Jack Anderson. "Is your claim that this belongs here just because it is another mysterious death that could have been an assassination" - I suggest you read again: Jack Anderson is not dead, they merely planned to kill him. As for “conspiracy theories”, well I seem to recall that’s the slur they used against Gary Webb, despite being vindicated by a subsequent CIA investigation in 1998 and a previous investigation by Senator John Kerry in 1987.--LamontCranston 12:38, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
Dude you are barking up the wrong tree. I am not trying to be pejorative about conspiracy theories; just suggesting that this information belongs in a different category. This page is about Webb, and if it is about any "conspiracy theory" it is just about such theories that are relevant to Webb. Jack Anderson had nothing to do with Gary Webb, therefore he doesn't belong here. How hard is that to understand? Can someone else please engage this conversation so I know I am not going nuts here? --csloat 03:17, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
"This page is about Webb, and if it is about any "conspiracy theory" it is just about such theories that are relevant to Webb." applying this logic of yours to my argument, it makes perfect sense to include a link to the Jack Anderson page. --LamontCranston 17:23, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

What the hell are you on about? Does anyone else understand this claim? Am I missing something here? As far as I can tell, there is nothing directly connecting Webb and Anderson other than a vague similarity of circumstances? Please, someone else intervene in this discussion.--csloat 07:14, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Suicide

The statement that his death was ruled a suicide despite 2 gunshots in the back of the head needs to have further explanation. The article can't just leave it at that and leave the obvious questions open. Tempshill 23:46, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Any explanation would have to be based on reliable sources. Remember, no original research. —Viriditas | Talk 23:49, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
That it was a suicide despite two gunshots is well explained in Rupperts "Saying Goodbye to a Giant" (link in the Commentaries section). –Vinsci 01:02, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
I can't find any report of the gunshots being from the back of the head! I suspect that bit is baloney.

Check here: [2] [3] [4] Richard75 17:00, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Also, there is a conflict with this part of the article and the article Multiple gunshot suicide. In this article, it reads "Many have pointed to the fact that Webb was shot not once, but twice to the face, which is extremely odd in cases of suicide." However, in the multiple gunshot suicide article, it reads "that suicides by firearm involving multiple gunshots, although uncommon, are by no means rare; as many as eight percent (nearly one in every twelve) of suicides by firearm involve multiple gunshots." Suggestions, anyone? 204.181.137.127 14:46, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Edits by 66.68.69.130

66.68.69.130 (talk · contribs) appears to be editing articles without reading them, copying and pasting the same or similar content to Gary Webb, Contras and Sandinista National Liberation Front. In the case of this article, 66.68.69.130 appears to be claiming that a 1997 USDOJ/OIG Special Report came after an October 8, 1998, CIA internal investigation (66.68.69.130 may be close to the truth -- it looks like the Dec. 1997 report was withheld until July, 1998 [5]). I suggest that 66.68.69.130 read the article before editing. Furthermore, 66.68.69.130 continues to duplicate information about the media that is already in the "Dark Alliance" section. Any information that 66.68.69.130 wants to add should not duplicate information in the article, and should follow the chronology already in place (paying particular attention to the "Investigations" section dated July 23, 1998, and the "Dark Alliance: the book" section. 66.68.69.130 will notice that the information he wants to add already appears in the article twice. Please do not add it for a third time). Lastly, 66.68.69.130 repeats the same, tired distortion that Webb's assertions were "later widely debunked". In fact, the DOJ quote 66.68.69.130 is fond of pasting, namely , "...claims that Blandon and Meneses were responsible for introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and spreading the crack epidemic throughout the country were unsupported" -- this exact claim was never made by Gary Webb. —Viriditas | Talk 01:58, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This Page Violates Wikipedia's POV Standard

Every single paragraph and source in this review assumes that all statements made by Webb supporters are true, and every single statment or judgment made by Webb detractors are false. Just look at the articles cited: Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, etc., all far-left opinion sources. All of Webb's accusations are highly controversial outside the narrow confines of the far-left,a nd should not be reported as though they were fact. This should be an encyclopedia entry, not haigography. (--preceeding unsigned comment by 209.163.206.215, aka 66.68.69.130)

That's actually incorrect. Among scholars as well as reporters, it is generally agreed that the attacks on Webb in 1996 were unjustified, and indeed the CIA's own self-study confirmed the bulk of Webb's findings (minus the sensationalism).--csloat 22:35, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
That statement is false. Webb's results are NOT "generally agreed among scholars as well as reporters" that's Webb's allegations were true, especially given who widely debunked they were in the mainstream media of the day. The only people who give Webb's conspiracy theory any credence these days are those on the far left. (--preceeding unsigned comment by 66.68.69.130, aka 209.163.206.215)
Actually, you are wrong about that. Can you even name a single scholar or historian who has refuted the Webb stories and their implications regarding the CIA and drugs? In 1996 there were three major stories refuting the series, you are correct about that, but those stories essentially nitpicked, leaving most of the Webb series intact, and in the years since, scholars who have taken a look at all of the articles have pointed this out. Even the newspapers that came out against Webb in 1996 have since published information that supported his conclusions. The CIA itself even pubished such information in 1998! Look through the article, there are plenty of sources supporting the Webb series besides the "far left." If you want to look through even more information and decide for yourself, this site is really old, but it has links to a lot of information specific to the Webb story. Do you have a specific source of information that you woulde like to see included here that is not present? It's reasonable to put an NPOV tag on a page if you think it needs more information to fix the POV slant, but you should include specific information about what you consider a reasonable remedy for the situation so the tag is not there forever.--csloat 05:51, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reliable Sources

Opinion magazines with a recognized readership - e.g. Counterpunch - are fine for indicating notable opinions. The Sacramento Bee is a reliable source. Two CIA self-investigations are also reliable sources. Please do not follow me from page to page deleting quotes, TDC; it is trolling, wikistalking behavior. You'll find that it is much more satisfying to actually work on articles you know something about and try to improve them rather than deleting things to annoy other users.--csloat 19:36, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

As has been argued in the past (succesfully too I might add), while some of Counterpunch’s contributors may have some notoriety, the use of material from sites like counterpunch and FPM are highly discouraged and Richard Thieme’s notability on this subject appears to be zero. I would add to this that “From the Wilderness” and Indymedia (and most especially your university website) most definitely do not conform to WP:RS and WP:V. Also, the information on the CIA reports seems to have been cherry picked to present the material in a way to make it as supportive of Webb's work as possible, this too needs corrections. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 20:20, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Let's remove the Daniel Pipes quote too then, since it is not from a refereed publication, and is written by someone whose, as you put it, "notability on this subject appears to be zero." Fair enough? Stuff from Indymedia, or a university website, are fine, if they reproduce published articles from reliable sources, as these do. Also, I don't understand why you took away Webb's Pulitzer; it's pretty typical of your edits to sneak in the most controversial edit without ever mentioning it, in the hopes that other editors will miss it. As for the CIA material being "cherry picked"; that is nonsense. I don't believe that you ever even read those CIA reports, nor the Webb series to begin with. As I have said, it is pretty clear your only interest in this page is in annoying me by stalking articles I have contributed to in the past. I'd encourage you to work on articles for the purpose of improving them rather than for the purpose of annoying other editors. Thanks!--csloat 23:35, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Pipes wrote a rather lengthy book on conspiracy theories, and devoted a section to this one, so I think his comments are relvant. Webb never won a Pulitzer, the San Jose Mercury News did, but not Webb. Its dishonest to inlcude him on that. The reposted articles from your university website and indymedia are not fine because the content is unverifiable. Find the information elsewhere, where all can verify its meaning or it goes. I spent all last nite reading the CIA reports [6], and I can say with a good deal of certainty that the informaiton presented bears little resemblance to the report. Question my motives all you like, but you have far more pressing work to do, like looking for those lost sources. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 00:03, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Pipes book is long, but he has no expertise in the subject matter and it was never refereed. So his comments are not relevant here, or at least, they fail to meet the standard you set for articles you happen to disagree with. Webb was a central player in the Pulitzer story, and was reported as such, so it is dishonest to delete this information. The articles are fine because the content is verifiable -- go to the freaking library and look them up yourself if you think I or my university altered the content. The information is from the Congressional Record, New York Times, etc. -- all verifiable sources. Bitching that the link is to a university site is ridiculous -- if you want to remove the link, fine, but instead of the FACT tag just include the facts (i.e. a bibliographic cite without the link). Claiming something is not "verifiable" because it's not on the web is ludicrous. As for you spending the night reading, good for you, but your "certainty" is meaningless compared to the facts presented here.--csloat 00:18, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
One more note here, if you're going to delete relevant citations from the article, try not to butcher the grammar too. Thanks.--csloat 00:21, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Listen, I know you have been dying to use you "Cocaine Importing Agency" materials somewhere outside of class, but this is not the place. On Webb's Pulitzer, interestingly enough, the Pulitzer site does not seem fit to mention him , so why are we?Torturous Devastating Cudgel 00:29, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
On the contrary, the Pulitzer site references exactly what was stated. [7] Furthermore, Robert Chalmers of The Independent visited the home after Webb's death and wrote "...the room is decorated with his trophies: a Pulitzer prize hangs next to his HL Mencken award." —Viriditas | Talk 02:12, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
I didn't replace the pulitzer stuff; I'll let someone else fight that battle with you. I am not dying to use this material anywhere (and I don't use them in any classes); if you find better links to those articles, go for it, but don't just delete them and replace them with a fact tag as if you don't believe they exist. Cite the articles in the normal manner if you are offended by links to websites from state universities, but don't just delete them. I'm not sure what is wrong with a link to a university site, but whatever. The point is these articles are sourced to the LATimes and Congressional Record, not to a university.--csloat 01:36, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
You did not replace the pulitzer stuff because you dont have a leg to stand on, dont be coy. Also, you most certainly do use the material, I saw it on your syllabus. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 01:53, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
TDC, please be civil towards your fellow editors. I restored the information you removed about the Pulitzer price because it is accurate and you are misinformed. Additionally, I added a more detailed reference. —Viriditas | Talk 02:02, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Civility is a 2 way street, and your citation for the pulitzer does not mention Webb bieng part of the award. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 02:13, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
The Pulitzer Prize, in General News Reporting was awarded to the Staff of the San Jose Mercury News for its coverage of the October 17, 1989, Bay Area earthquake. As a member of the staff, Webb received the award, and the award itself was seen in Webb's home by Robert Chalmers of The Independent. —Viriditas | Talk 02:20, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
All very interesting and all very irrelevant. It's not on the Pulitzers website and therefore does not meet WP:V. And since there is an accuracy dispute, dont remove the tag. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 02:24, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Now, you are trolling. The Pulitzer Prize, in General News Reporting was awarded to the Staff of the San Jose Mercury News for its coverage of the October 17, 1989, Bay Area earthquake. As a member of the staff, Webb received the award, and the award itself was seen in Webb's home by Robert Chalmers of The Independent. (Chalmers, Robert. (2005). "The Last Rebel; In 1996, the award-winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered CIA links to Los Angeles drug dealers. It was an amazing scoop but one that would ruin his career and drive him to suicide. His widow, Susan Bell, looks back on a shameful secret history." The Independent on Sunday (London, England) (Oct 9, 2005): p8.) —Viriditas | Talk 02:26, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Sorry guy, but thats bullshit. I dont know if Webb bought it on EBay or what, but the Pulitzer site does not credit him. Again, in case you did not catch that THE PULITZER CITE DID NOT CREDIT HIM. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 02:30, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
The pulitzer credits the staff of the San Jose Mercury News of which he was a part, and that is documented. According to Dan Hellinger, Webb, "...shared with the staff a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the 1989 California earthquake." (St. Louis Journalism Review 35.273 (Feb 2005): p18(2).) However, Susan Paterno writes that Webb "...spent the next few years exposing incompetence in state government, helping the paper win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for covering the Loma Prieta earthquake, writing stories investigating faulty construction in highway bridges that collapsed." (American Journalism Review 27.3 (June-July 2005): p20(16).) Furthermore, Pia Hinckle states, "He was also part of the six-person Mercury News team that won a 1990 Pulitzer for its coverage of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake." (Columbia Journalism Review v36.n2 (July-August 1997): pp38(6). ) Referring to the rebuttal of Web's thesis in the Los Angeles Times, Peter Kornbluh of Columbia Journalism Review alleges that "...one Times reporter characterized himself as being "assigned to the 'get Gary Webb team"' and another was heard to say "We're going to take away that guy's Pulitzer." (Columbia Journalism Review v35.n5 (Jan-Feb 1997): pp33(7).) —Viriditas | Talk 02:53, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
I've temporarily removed the category until I can confirm that its usage is appropriate. TDC's "dispute" is not over facts, but regards the use of the correct category. —Viriditas | Talk 10:17, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
TDC I teach over 20 different courses at different times; which syllabus did you see it on? I'm glad to hear you are educating yourself using my teaching materials, but please don't use such materials to insult me. It is considered a personal attack by wikipedia standards. If you have a problem with my teaching, take it up with my department head. I don't understand what any of that has to do with the question of whether verifiable articles from sources like the Congressional Record can be used on wikipedia. Your whine that they are reproduced on a university web page simply has nothing to do with this discussion.--csloat 02:08, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

To speak to the basic issue here, "reliable" does not mean "having no point of view." As is implicit in the WP:NPOV policy, everyone has a point of view. The goal of WP is to provide the range of POVs and not to base its articles on the nonexistent sources out there without POV. Nareek 10:34, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Apparent contradiction

Maybe someone can clear this up for me. The lead paragraph states:

"Webb reported that the CIA was not only aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of cocaine into the U.S. by the Contra personnel but directly aided drug dealers to raise money for the Contras."

Then, in the Dark Alliance section, the article states:

"Webb never asserted that the CIA directly aided drug dealers to raise money for the Contras,"

(emphasis added). I'm not sure which of these statements is correct and so I've flagged it for someone else to clarify. BFD1 18:45, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Unbelievable. It looks like the troll User:TDC deliberately added that contradiction [8] on July 20. Something needs to be done about that user. In any case, I've reverted to the previous version. —Viriditas | Talk 09:39, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Good catch. I agree, the guy is a troll. Anyone who read the article or the book can confirm that Webb never made the claim TDC accuses him of. I have often caught him making false claims in articles, or deleting accurate ones wholesale, and then demanding that others who he disagrees with go do additional research before he will allow an article to be restored to its previously accurate state. Rarely does this result in improvements in the article, and if it does, it is only after agonizing flamewars in the talk page.--csloat 10:10, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Webbs thoughts on the CIA's involvement

From page one, Maxine Water’s intro:

“The CIA, DEA, DIA and the FBI knew about drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles. They were either a part of the trafficking or turned a blind eye to it. “

From Page 338 of Dark Alliance

As an aside, Rewald also told Anderson that he was approached in 1982 by “a senior CIA official and asked if he would help in a CIA drug smuggling operation. When Rewald told the CIA that he had no one in his firm with drug operations, the CIA man contradicted hum and named (a Rewald) employee who had been a longtime CIA contract agent in Southeast Asia.

From the San Francisco Gate review[9]: Webb is most controversial when implicating the CIA, relying heavily on slippery phrases like ``CIA agent. To him it is important that in December 1981 a ``CIA agent, Contra commander Enrique Bermudez, ``had given the goddamned order to Meneses and Blandon to begin trafficking in support of the Contras. In the larger context of such a powerful book, this seems likely to generate needless quibbles, and remains a side issue at best. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 19:40, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

If you want to include quotes from Maxine Waters (which is not on p.1 in my copy) or information about something Rewald told Anderson "as an aside" about 1982, that would be fine later on in the page, but it hardly belongs in the intro, which should state the main thesis of Webb's book clearly and without exaggeration or distortion. The charges at stake are incendiary enough as it is without being intentionally distorted or misinterpreted. I'm not sure at all what the SF Gate quote has to do with this.--csloat 20:58, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Document vs. Assert

For Wikipedia, a fact is something that everyone agrees on. Would Daniel Pipes and Glenn Garvin agree that Webb "document[ed] that the CIA was aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of cocaine into the U.S. by the Contra personnel"? Nareek 10:52, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, he did provide copious documents. . . but I think "assert" would be a better word. – Quadell (talk) (random) 13:38, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
If he provided "documents," why would "assert" be a better word? "Assert" implies a lack of evidence. "Documents" implies, "documents," which we seem agreed that he supplied.--csloat 18:00, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
No, documented does not mean provided documents. It means to proved your case using documents. You can't say, "He documented his case, but the documents turned out to be bogus"--that's not idiomatic English.
The fact that he provided documents to back up his assertion is mentioned in the next sentence. Though even that sentence could probably use toning down a bit.
I'll admit that I'm a big fan of Webb; that's why I'm editing here, because I think he deserves a good article. But a good Wikipedia article is one that doesn't take sides, that presents the issues, cites sources and lets the reader pursue it further.
I promise I'll send my high horse on his way now. Good boy! Have an apple! Nareek 18:33, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry - which documents turned out to be bogus? I'm not aware of any of the documents or testimony that supported his arguments having been fabricated. To me, to say something is "documented" does not mean "proven beyond a shadow of a doubt" but rather "we have actual documents that provide evidence to support this argument." If we can't agree on this word it's fine, perhaps there is a better word, but I don't like "asserted" since it sounds like there are no documents whatsoever backing it up. The original SJMerc website had a plethora of documents in the form of photographs, testimony, audio recordings, etc. that supported the argument Webb's article put forth. I have researched the three main replies to the Webb series -- LAT, NYT, and WP -- pretty carefully, and while they correctly dressed the Merc down a bit for sensationalizing the evidence, none of them indicated that the evidence had been fabricated or did not exist. Most ironic is the fact that in november 96 I believe, while the controversy was still raging, a Miami jury indicted a Venezuelan CIA asset for bringing a ridiculous amount of cocaine to Miami and Atlanta (something like 20,000 pounds), and the CIA admitted to the grand jury that they authorized some of the shipments. (Of course, that's not what the Webb story was specifically about, but it does show the irony of the major papers arguing so vehemently against the Webb story when lots of documentation existed to support it).
The issue of documentation brings up another issue, which is the Mercury News website, which was absolutely revolutionary at the time. I can't think of an earlier example of that kind of use of the web to support and document a controversial news story. The blogging revolution certainly owes a lot to the Webb story, and something about that should be discussed in the article - I'll have to look around for citations to support my claim here of course, but I don't think it's very controversial. This was just over a decade ago, after all.--csloat 20:31, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Whoa, sorry--I didn't mean to suggest that Webb's documents were bogus--I was just using that as an illustration of how the word is (not) used. I in fact do believe, personally, that Webb documented his charges, but I don't think Wikipedia can adopt that position--because not everybody agrees that he did so. Nareek 21:26, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Can you tell us who disagrees that he did so? As I said, people have criticized certain of Webb's claims, but I don't know of a single source that claims he did not document these points or that the documentation was somehow invalid. Unless you take "documented" to mean "proved beyond all doubt," I'm not sure I see your point.--csloat 22:32, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
It does mean "proved", basically. That is my point. And I don't think everyone acknowledges that he proved his central claim. Nareek 23:41, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
It means "documented," not "proved."; try this:
[tr.v. (-mnt) doc·u·ment·ed, doc·u·ment·ing, doc·u·ments
1. To furnish with a document or documents.
2. To support (an assertion or claim, for example) with evidence or decisive information.
3. To support (statements in a book, for example) with written references or citations; annotate.
None of those definitions state (or even imply) *proof*; what we are talking about is evidence in the form of documentation, which Webb certainly provided. I agree not everyone acknowledges he proved his central claim (to be more precise, I think there was disagreement about what his central claim actually was -- most people agreed there was documentation that the CIA knowingly allowed drug dealers to deal drugs, but they disagreed with a claim that Webb never actually made - that there was some kind of CIA conspiracy to push crack cocaine into inner cities). Anyway, perhaps you can find another word we can both be happy about, or perhaps we should rewrite that whole section. As I said, I think this article would benefit from a discussion of the documentation itself, and of Webb's use of the web to disseminate that documentation.--csloat 00:21, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Too many colons! Let's start over again over here.

I think the second definition is the relevant one here, and the key word is "decisive"--you provide the information that decides the case, which is to say proves it.

"Documented" is one of those words like "noted", "pointed out" (OK, that's two words), "revealed" etc. that must be used cautiously on Wikipedia--they all indicate that the information that follows is true, and can be at odds with NPOV. You could make a case that "asserted" is in the opposite category of words that tend to cast doubt on claims--like "claimed". There may well be a better word that is more neutral on the question of whether Webb's evidence makes his case--or more likely a phrase. Nareek 01:13, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

"Decisive" does not mean "proved"; if we mean proved we would say proved. Documented does not mean the info is true; it means it is "documented." If we wanted to say the information was true, we would say that it is "true." I don't see how there is a POV issue here. "Assert," like "claim," is problematic because in context it implies a lack of evidence, which we agree is not the case here. Anyway I don't want to keep wasting time on this one word; can you suggest another? I want it to be clear that Webb documents his case (and, in fact, does so quite well, and his documentation has not been refuted). The problem, again, is that the people who disagree with Webb actually disagree with a claim Webb never made. This needs to be clear.--csloat 01:45, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
It needs to be clear. But saying Webb "documented" it is not a good word choice. It strongly implies that the claim is true. I think the claim is true. But that's not good enough. "Webb provided documents supporting a claim that" is fine. "Web documented that" is POV. – Quadell (talk) (random) 12:53, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Honestly, I think you're splitting hairs, but I have no other objection to that change.--csloat 17:46, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] External links

I'm in the process of merging the external links section into inline references. If anyone wants to help, that would be great. —Viriditas | Talk 00:20, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of Daniel Pipes

I recently made an account so I could remove Daniel Pipes out of the page because I belive that he is not respectful enough to provide so much critisism. This is because he thinks Islam is counterintuitive to Democracy. I consider that someone so disrespectful should not be commenting on Gary Webbs work. I have tried repeatedly to remove it, but blueboy96 says that it is vandalism, without giving an explanation.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.46.0.13 (talk • contribs)

I agree with the removal, not just because of Pipes' well-known chauvinism, but more to the point because he has no expertise whatsoever on this topic, and because his claims are all based on the three media accounts that responded to the Merc back in 1996. His quote adds nothing to the article except a bit of unnecessary invective. csloat 21:46, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
An addition of Walter Pincus might be useful, in order to show Webb's worst mainstream opposition, and the fact that it was CIA backed. Could border on non-neutrality, but Pincus was his fiercest critic.(*I made the 1st commment)Luis Posada 05:11, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Worst reason possible

Establishing a Wikipedia account just so you can remove someone who you don't like or disagree with is the worst reason to open one. Who the hell are you to decide that I can't read what Mr. Pipes (whoever he may be) has to say. Such action is better suited to totalitarian governments, not a public encyclopedia. Such action goes a long way to disproving the concept of a publicly edited encyclopedia. Actions like this will be the destruction of Wikipedia, which seems more and more like it's becoming a place where only certain opinion, of a certain few people, on a particular subject are tolerated. If someone thinks Islam is counterintuitive to democracy (and many, many other people agree) why should that be reason to remove him from an article on Gary Webb? It is assasination, plain and simple. If "expertise" on a subject is to be required in the comment sections why bother having Wikipedia at all? Who is to judge "expertise"? We can get 'carved in stone' articles from any number of better places. "Could border on non-neutrality"? Is sombody kidding? Does any writer here want to honestly claim 'non-neutrality"? I hope that,atleast,you can be honest with yourselves.I wonder how long this criticism will survive. I don't have an account but my name is Doug Wargo. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.164.155.71 (talk) 18:22, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I think you misunderstand. Mr. Pipes is not, to my knowledge, a Wikipedia editor; and, if he is, nobody is advocating his removal from Wikipedia. What is being advocated above is the removal of a quote from his book because it may not belong here. No "assassination" is being suggested. csloat 18:51, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
Apparently, I did misunderstand and I apologize. In my defence the sentence "I recently made an account so I could remove Daniel Pipes out of the page because I belive that he is not respectful enough to provide so much critisism." set me off. It was indicative of what we are seeing way too much of in Wikipedia lately and which will, I think, eventually render Wikipedia all but useless. And that is the removal of things which don't happen to coincide with someone's belief system leaving future readers to wonder what the banished person may have had to say. Whether a person is "respectful" or not is irrelevent. Judging "non-respectfulness" is itself non-neutral. I believe that no ONE person (and certainly no one unidentified person) should have the power of censorship of an article. One person should be able to propose the censoring but it should require some other person(s), independant of the first, to make it happen. Just my two cents.75.164.150.119 (talk) 12:00, 13 January 2008 (UTC)Doug Wargo

[edit] VETERAN DRUG AGENTS BACKED WEBB STORY / "THE PARIAH"

Esquire removed this article from the web.....

VETERAN DRUG AGENTS BACKED WEBB STORY http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Esquire/1998/09/01/170764

Contributor's profile:

Two weeks after Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series appeared in the San Jose Mercury News in August 1996, contributing editor Charles Bowden found himself in a bar, having a few drinks with some narcs (his idea of a good night). "For some reason, Webb's piece came up, and I asked the guys, 'So, what do you think? Is what Webb wrote about the CIA true?'" recalls Bowden, the author of fifteen books, including Blood Orchid and Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future. "And they all turned to me and said, "Of course it is.' That's when I knew that somebody would have to do this story, and I figured it might as well be me." "The Pariah," Bowden's story on Webb -- a man he describes as "real smart, real straight, lives on a cul-de-sac, family man, all that crap" -- begins on page 150.


Editor's letter [excerpt]:

....The world Charles Bowden leads us into in his story, "The Pariah" (page 150), is, on the other hand, a place few would willingly visit. Reporter Gary Webb chose to enter the alternate universe where the CIA sponsors armies and sometimes finds itself allied with drug dealers who sell their wares in the United States. Webb wrote a newspaper series that documented how the Nicaraguan contras of the 1980s were in part financed by just such an arrangement -- and he was then professionally destroyed for it. Bowden, in the course of reporting this story over the last six months, found considerable evidence that parallels and supports Webb's articles -- including revelations from one of the DEA's most decorated agents, who speaks for the first time about the CIA's complicity in the drug trade. It was not, however, the agency's ties to drug traffickers that Bowden found most disturbing. It was that a man can lose his livelihood, his calling, his reputation, for telling the truth....

--David Granger


THE PARIAH

Two years ago, Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that said some bad things about the CIA and drug traffickers. The CIA denied the charges, and every major newspaper in the country took the agency's word for it. Gary Webb was ruined. Which is a shame, because he was right.

By Brad Wilson Charles Bowden | Sep 01 '98


HE TELLS ME I'VE GOT TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT WHEN THE BIG DOG GETS OFF THE PORCH, and I'm getting confused here. He is talking to me from a fishing camp up near the Canadian border, and as he tries to tell me about the Big Dog, I can only imagine a wall of green and deep blue lakes with northern pike. But he is very patient with me. Mike Holm did his hard stints in the Middle East, the Miami station, and Los Angeles, all for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, and he is determined that I face the reality he knows. So he starts again. He repeats, "When the Big Dog gets off the porch, watch out." And by the Big Dog, he means the full might of the United States government. At that moment, he continues, you play by


Big Boy rules, and that means, he explains, that there are no rules but to complete the mission. We've gotten into all this schooling because I asked him about reports that he received when he was stationed in Miami that Southern Air Transport, a CIA-contracted airline, was landing planeloads of cocaine at Homestead Air Force Base nearby. Back in the eighties, Holm's informants kept telling him about these flights, and then he was told by his superiors to "stand down because of national security." And so he did. He is an honorable man who believes in his government, and he didn't ask why the flights were taking place; he simply obeyed. Because he has seen the Big Dog get off the porch, and he has tasted Big Boy rules. Besides, he tells me, these things are done right, and if you look into the matter, you'll find contract employees or guys associated with the CIA, but you won't find a CIA case officer on a loading dock tossing kilos of coke around. Any more than Mike Holm ever saw a plane loaded top to bottom with kilos of coke. He didn't have to. He believed his informants. And he believed in the skill and power of the CIA. And he believed in the sheer might and will of the Big Dog when he finally decides to get off the porch.

As his words hang in the air, I remember a convict who says he once worked with the United States government and who also tasted Big Boy rules. This man has not gone fishing. This convict insisted that I hold the map up to the thick prison glass as he jabbed his finger into the mountains. There, he said, that's the place, and his eyes gleamed as his words accelerated. There, in the mountains, they have a colony of two thousand Colombians out of Medellin, guarded by the Mexican army. I craned my neck to see where his finger was rubbing against the map, and made an x with my pen. That's when the guard burst into the convict's small cubicle and ordered him to sit down.

The convict is a man of little credibility in the greater world. He is a Mexican national, highly intelligent and exact in his speech. He is a man electric with the memory of his days working as a DEA informant in Mexico, huddling in his little apartment with his clandestine radio. He said I must check his DEA file; he gave the names of his case officers; he noted that he delivered to them the exact locations of thirteen airfields operated jointly by the drug cartels and the CIA. The man's eyes bugged out as his excitement shredded the tedium of doing time and he returned to his former life of secret transmissions, cutouts, drinks with pilots ferrying dope, bullshitting his way through army checkpoints.

He said, "I'll be out in six months or one year, depending on the hearing. We can go. I'll take you up there." I have always steered clear of the secret world, because it is very hard to penetrate, and because if you discover anything about it, you are not believed. And because I remember what happened to one reporter who wrote about that world, about the Big Dog getting off the porch, about the Big Boy rules. So I thought about the convict's information and did nothing with it.

But this reporter who went ahead and wrote while I stopped, I kept thinking about him. When I mention him, and what happened to him, to Mike Holm, he says, "Ah, he must have drawn blood." Holm is very impressed with the CIA, and he wants me to slow down, think, and understand something: "The CIA's mission is to break laws and be ruthless. And they are dangerous."

I had been thinking about looking into the claim that during the civil war in Nicaragua in the eighties, the CIA helped move dope to the United States to buy guns for the contras, who were mounting an insurrection against the leftist Sandinistas. So I called up Hector Berrellez, a guy who worked under Mike Holm in Los Angeles, a guy known within the DEA as its Eliot Ness, and he said, "Look, the CIA is the best in the world. You're not going to beat them; you're never going to get a smoking gun. The best you're going to get is a little story from me."

What Berrellez meant by a smoking gun is this: proof that the United States government has, through the Central Intelligence Agency and its ties to criminals, facilitated the international traffic in narcotics. That's the trail the reporter was on when his career in newspapers went to rack and ruin. So I decided to look him up.

His name is Gary Webb.

GARY WEBB LOVES THE STACKS OF THE STATE LIBRARY ACROSS from the capitol in Sacramento, the old classical building framed with aromatic camphor trees. He enters the lobby and becomes part of a circling mural called War Through the Ages, an after-flash of World War I painted by Frank Van Sloun in 1929. The panels start with the ax and club, then wade through gore to doughboys marching off to the War to End All Wars. THIS HOUSE OF PEACE, the inscription on the west wall admonishes, SHALL STAND WHILE MEN FEAR NOT TO DIE IN ITS DEFENSE.

He was here in the summer of 1995 because of a call from a woman named Coral Marie Talavera Baca. She told him her drug-dealer boyfriend was in jail and one of the witnesses against him was "a guy who used to work with the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it." Webb was brought up short: In eighteen years of reporting, every person who'd ever called him about the CIA had turned out to be a flake. Webb started to back away on the phone, and the woman sensed it and exploded: "How dare you treat me like an idiot!" She said she had lots of documents and invited him to a court date that month. And so he went.

Coral's boyfriend turned out to be a big-time trafficker. She brought Webb a pile of DEA and FBI reports about, and federal grand-jury testimony by, a guy named Oscar Danilo Blandon. Webb was intrigued by government files that told of Nicaraguans selling dope in California and giving dope money to the contras. During a break in the hearing, he headed for the restroom and ran into the U.S. attorney, David Hall. Webb told him he was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, and Hall asked why he was at a piddling hearing. "Actually, I've been reading," Webb answered, "and I was curious to know what you made of Blandon's testimony about selling drugs for the contras in L.A. Did you believe him?" "Well, yeah," Hall answered, "but I don't know how you could absolutely confirm it. I mean, I don't know what to tell you. The CIA won't tell me anything."

Webb followed a trail of crumbs: some San Francisco newspaper clips, some court records in San Diego, where this strange figure, Blandon, had been indicted for selling coke in 1992 and, according to the documents, had been at it for years and sold tons. He and his wife had been held without bail because the federal prosecutor, L.J. O'Neale, said his minimum mandatory punishment would be life plus a $4 million fine. Blandon's defense attorney had argued that his client was being smeared because he'd been active in helping the contras in the early eighties. The file told Webb that Blandon wound up doing about two years, and that he was now out. The file recorded that at O'Neale's request, the government had twice quietly cut Blandon's sentence and that he was now working as a paid undercover informant for the DEA.

After about six weeks of this kind of foraging, Webb went to the state library. For six days in September, he sat at a microfiche with rolls of dimes and read an eleven-hundred-page report from 1989 compiled by a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a subcommittee chaired by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts that dealt with the contras and cocaine. http://www.thememoryhole.org/kerry/index.htm Buried in the federal document was evidence of direct links between drug dealers and the contras; evidence, dated four years before the American invasion of Panama, that Manuel Noriega was in the dope business; drug dealers saying under oath that they gave money to the contras (and passing polygraphs); pilots talking of flying guns down and dope back and landing with their cargoes at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida.

Suddenly, Coral's phone call didn't seem so crazy. Webb called up Jack Blum, the Washington, D.C., lawyer who led the Kerry inquiry and said, "Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems like a huge story to me." "Well, it's nice to hear someone finally say that, even if it is ten years later," Blum allowed, and then he proceeded to tell Webb almost exactly what he told me recently when I made a similar innocent phone call to him. "What happened was, our credibility was questioned, and we were personally trashed. The [Reagan] administration and some people in Congress tried to make us look like crazies, and to some degree it worked. I remember having conversations with reporters in which they would say, 'Well, the administration says this is all wrong.' And I'd say, 'Look, why don't you cover the fucking hearing instead of coming to me with what the administration says?' And they'd say, 'Well, the witness is a drug dealer. Why should I do that?' And I used to say this regularly: 'Look, the minute I find a Lutheran minister or a priest who was on the scene when they delivered six hundred kilos of cocaine at some air base in contra land, I'll put him on the stand, but until then, you take what you can get.' The big papers stayed as far away from this issue as they could. It was like they didn't want to know."

Webb was entering contra land, and when you enter that country, you run into the CIA, since the contras were functionally a CIA army. (The agency hired them, picked their leaders, plotted their strategy, and sometimes, because of contra incompetence, executed raids for them.) This is hardly odd, since the agency was created in 1947 for precisely such toils and has over the decades sponsored armies around the world, whether to land at the Bay of Pigs or kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan. After a year of research, in August 1996, Webb published a three-day, fifteen-thousand-word series in the Mercury News called "Dark Alliance." It is a story almost impossible to recapitulate in detail but simple in outline: Drug dealers working with the contras brought tons of cocaine into California in the 1980s and sold a lot of it to one dealer, a legend called Freeway Ricky Ross, who had connections with the L.A. street gangs and through this happenstance helped launch the national love of crack. That's it, a thesis that mixes the realpolitik of the-ends-justify-the-means with dollops of shit-happens.

The series set off a firestorm in black communities, where many suspected they had been deliberately targeted with the dope as an act of genocide (there is no evidence of that), and provoked repudiations of the story by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. The knockdowns of Webb's story questioned the importance of Nicaraguan dealers like Blandon, the significance of Ricky Ross, how much money, if any, reached the contras, and how crucial any of this was to the crack explosion in the eighties, and brushed aside any evidence of CIA involvement. But while raising questions about Webb's work, none of these papers or any other paper in the country undertook a serious investigation of Webb's evidence. A Los Angeles Times staff member who was present at a meeting called to plan the Times's response has told me that one motive for the paper's harsh appraisal was simply pride: The Times wasn't going to let an out-of-town paper win a Pulitzer in its backyard.

Later, when it was all over, Webb spelled out exactly what he meant and exactly what he thought of the CIA's skills: The series "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 that 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."

After a while, the San Jose Mercury News series disappeared except on a few byways of the Internet, Gary Webb was ruined, and things went back to normal. Things like Oliver North's diary entry linking dope and guns for the contras, like Carlos Lehder, a big Colombian drug dealer, testifying as a prosecution witness in federal court during the Noriega trial about the Medellin cartel's $10 million donation to the contras, like the entire history of unseemly connections between the international drug world and the CIA -- all this went away, as it has time and time again in the past. A kind of orthodoxy settled over the American press that assumed that Webb's work had been thoroughly refuted. He became the Discredited Gary Webb.

And so in June 1997, Webb wound up going to a motel room he hated. The Mercury News's editors were supposed to fix him up with an apartment, but they never figured he'd show up for his dead-end transfer from investigative reporter to pretty much a nothing. So they made no arrangements, just shunted him to the paper's Cupertino bureau on the south end of Silicon Valley, his family 150 miles away in Sacramento. After a few days of the motel, he found himself in a tiny apartment. He was in his early forties, and his life and his life's work were over. He endlessly watched a tape of Caddyshack and tried to forget about missing his wife, Sue, his three kids, his dog, his work. He was an ordinary guy, by his lights, with the suburban home, an aquarium in the study, two games a week in an amateur hockey league. Now, during the day, he visited the bureau, and the guys there treated him okay, because they were all in the same boat, people who had pissed off their newspaper and been shipped to its internal Siberia, where they were paid to retool the press releases of the computer and software companies. Webb was fighting the paper through arbitration with the Newspaper Guild, and so while his case dragged on, he refused to let his byline run. But he did his assignments. After all, they were paying him a solid mid-five-figure wage; he was their star investigative reporter, the guy they had brought in from The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1987 to do, in their words, "kick-ass journalism." Within two years, he'd helped them bring home a Pulitzer with a team of Mercury News reporters who jumped on the San Francisco earthquake. Then he blew the lid off civil forfeiture in California -- law enforcement's practice of seizing property from alleged crooks and then forgetting to ever convict, try, or even charge them. That series got the law changed. He was hot. He was good. He kicked ass.

Now Caddyshack flickered against his eyes hour after hour. His thirteen-year-old son asked, "Why don't you get another job?" And Gary Webb told him, "That's what they think I'll do. But they're wrong. I'm gonna fight." But fight how? He was one fucking disgrace. Oliver North described his work as "absolute garbage." Webb was stretched thin. The week the series ran, he and his wife closed on a new house and moved in. Payments. So each morning, he went to the Cupertino bureau, and there were assignments from the city desk. Seems a police horse died, and he was supposed to nail down this equine death. So he did. He investigated the hell out of it and wrote it up, and, by God, the thing was good. Went on page one, of course, without his name on it. The horse died from a medical problem, constipation. The horse was full of shit.

HECTOR BERRELLEZ STUMBLED ONTO GARY WEBB'S STORY YEARS before Gary Webb knew a thing about it. His journey into that world happened this way: Hector was not fond of cops. He remembered them slapping him around when he was a kid. He was a barrio boy from South Tucson, a square mile of poverty embedded in the booming Sun Belt city. His father was a Mexican immigrant. After being drafted into the Army in the late sixties, Berrellez couldn't find a job in the copper mines, so he hooked up as a temporary with the small South Tucson police force to finance his way through college. And it was then that Hector Berrellez accidentally discovered his jones: He loved working the streets with a badge. The state police force hired him, and Hector, still green, managed to do a one-kilo heroin deal in the early seventies, a major score for the time. The DEA snapped him up, and suddenly the kid who had wanted to flee the barrio and become a lawyer was a federal narc. He loved the life. In the DEA, there are the administrators, who usually have little street experience, the suits. And then there are the street guys like Hector, and they call themselves something else. Gunslingers. His hobbies were jogging, weight lifting, guitar playing. And firearms. A Glock? Never. "Only girls carry Glocks," he snaps. "They're a sissy gun. Plastic. You can't hit anyone over the head with a Glock."

In September 1986, Sergeant Tom Gordon of the Los Angeles sheriff's narcotics strike force pieced together intelligence about a big-time drug ring in town run by Danilo Blandon. A month later, on October 23, Gordon went before a judge with a twenty-page detailed statement documenting that "monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered....The monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua." He got a search warrant for the organization's stash houses. On Friday, October 24, there was a briefing of more than a hundred law-enforcement guys from the sheriff's office, the DEA, the FBI. That was the same day that President Ronald Reagan, after months of hassle, signed a $100 million aid bill that reactivated a licit cash flow to the beleaguered contras. And on Monday, October 27, at daybreak, the strike force simultaneously hit fourteen L.A.-area stash houses connected with Blandon.

That's where just another day in the life of Hector Berrellez got weird. Generally, at that early hour, good dopers are out cold; the work tends toward long nights and sleeping. As Berrellez remembers, "We were expecting to come up with a lot of coke." Instead, they got coffee and sometimes doughnuts. The house he hit had the lights on, and everyone, two men and a woman, was up. The guy who answered the door said, "Good morning; we've been expecting you. Come on in." The house was tidy, the beds were already made, and the damn coffee was on. The three residents were polite, even congenial. "It was obvious," says Berrellez, "that they were told." The place was clean; all fourteen houses were clean. The only thing Berrellez and the other guys found in the house was a professional scale.

But there was a safe, and Berrellez got one of the residents to open it reluctantly. Inside, he found records of kilos matched with amounts of money, an obvious dope ledger, a photograph of a guy in flight dress in front of what looked to be a military jet, and photographs of some guys in combat. Hector asked the guy who the hell the people in the photographs were, and the guy said, "Oh, they are freedom fighters." What the hell is this? Berrellez wondered. He left and went to a couple of the other houses that had been hit, and Jesus, they were clean, the coffee was on, sometimes there were doughnuts for the cops, and the same kind of documents showed up. But no dope, not a damn thing.

For a holy warrior, October 27, 1986, was a bad day. At the debriefing after the raid, Berrellez remembers one of the cops saying that the houses had been tipped to the raid by "elements of the CIA." And he thought, What? "I was shocked," he says now. "I was in a state of belief." He was supposed to believe that his own government was helping dopers? No way. "I didn't want to believe," he says And so he didn't. He was that rock-solid first-generation citizen, and he believed in America. He remembers having this ongoing argument with his dad about whether there was corruption in the U.S. like the old man had tasted in Mexico. His father would ask, Do you really think things are so clean here? And Hector would have none of it; damn right they're clean here. And he was clean, and he was in a good outfit (a position he is still passionate about -- his absolute love for the troops he served with in the DEA), and he was in a holy war against a tide of poison.

In 1987, he was transferred to Mazatlan in Sinaloa, Mexico, to run the DEA station. Sinaloa was the drug center for Mexico; in the history of the Mexican drug cartels, all but one leader has been Sinaloan born and bred. He took the wife, got a beach house in the coastal city, and ran with the job. Two months into the assignment, narcotrafficantes chased his wife and two-year-old daughter from the beach back to the house, and they had to be evacuated to the States.

In October 1988, Hector and some Mexican federal police hit a small hamlet that housed a ton of coke and twenty tons of marijuana. The firefight lasted three hours, with thousands of rounds exchanged. When three federales were mowed down on the field of fire, Hector managed to pull them to safety with another agent. He commandeered a cab to take the wounded to a hospital, then returned to the shoot-out. For this combat, Hector and two other agents at the scene were brought to the White House and given a medal by Attorney General Edwin Meese. He was on a roll that would eventually earn him twelve consecutive superior-performance awards.


(photo) Hector Berrellez, twenty-four years in the DEA, known as the agency's Eliot Ness. As he read about Gary Webb, he thought, This shit is true.


In Mexico, Hector was running two hundred to three hundred informants, and he was bringing in a torrent of information on the drug world and its links to the Mexican government. But something else happened down there in Sinaloa that stuck in his mind. His army of informants was constantly reporting strange fortified bases scattered around Mexico, but they were not Mexican military bases, and, his informants told him, the planes were shipping drugs. Camps in Durango, Sinaloa, Baja, Veracruz, all over Mexico. Hector wrote up these camps and the information he was getting on big drug shipments. And each month, he would go to Mexico City to meet with his DEA superiors and American-embassy staff, and he started mentioning these reports. He was told, Stay away from those bases; they're our training camps, special operations. He thought, What the hell is this? I'm here to enforce the drug laws, and I'm being told to do nothing.

THE EMPTY ROOM SAGS WITH FATIGUE AS THE SPORTS TELEVISIONS quietly float in the corner. California's ban on smoking has emptied the watering holes. The hotel squats by a four-lane highway amid bland suburbs that blanket Sacramento's eastern flank against the Sierra Nevada. Everything is normal here; this is the visual bedrock of Ronald Reagan's America.

Gary Webb orders Maker's Mark on the rocks. He is a man of average height, with brown hair, a trim mustache, an easy smile, and laconic, laid-back speech, the basic language of Middle America. He moves easily, a kind of amble through life. His father was a marine, and his childhood meant moving a lot before finally coming to ground in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. He's married to his high school sweetheart; they have three kids and live on a tree-lined cul-de-sac with a pool in back, a television in the family room, his Toyota with 150,000 miles in the drive, Sue's minivan, and on the cement the chalk outline of a hopscotch game. He looks white-collar, maybe sells insurance.

All he has ever wanted to be is a reporter. He started out as a kid, writing up sports results for a weekly at a nickel an inch. The Gary Webb who suddenly loomed up nationally with this bad talk about the CIA and drugs was a long time coming, and he came from the dull center of the country, and he came from an essay entitled, "What America Means to Me," for which he was runner-up in the fifth-grade essay contest, and he came from the smell of ink, the crackle of a little weekly where he nailed cold the week's tumult in the Little League.

Webb is not a drinker, probably because his marine father was, but now in the empty hotel bar, he is drinking. He is not used to talking about himself, because he is a reporter, and a reporter is not the story, but now he is talking about himself. When Gary Webb talks, he sometimes leans back, but often as not, he leans forward, and when he is really into what he is saying, he grabs his left wrist with his right hand as if he were taking his own pulse, and then his voice gets even flatter, and the words are very evenly spaced, and he never goes too fast, hardly any hint of rat-a-tat-tat -- he is always measured and unexcited. But when he grabs that wrist, you can tell now that the words really matter. Because he believes. In facts. In publishing facts. In the fact that publishing facts makes a difference in how people look at things. Believes, without reason or question, believes absolutely. As for coincidence, it doesn't fit in with his mission. He also has no tolerance for conspiracy theories. By God, if he finds a conspiracy, it is not a theory, it is a fucking conspiracy, because it is grounded in facts.

When he was twenty-three, he was kind of drifting, living in the basement of Sue's house with her parents. He was writing rock 'n' roll stuff for a weekly, still grinding away at college and about three units shy of a degree. His father walked out on the marriage, leaving his mother, a housewife, and his younger brother without a check. So Webb quit college to support them. A teacher in his journalism department told him that the strange guy who ran the Post in Lexington, Kentucky, set aside one day a week for walk-ins. Webb walked in and said, "I need a job." The editor said, "Go do two pieces and bring them back in a week."

One was on the barmaids and strippers of Newport, Kentucky, the sin town across the river from Cincinnati. The editor tossed it aside and said, "Thrice-told tale." The other was on a guy who carved gravestones; that one the editor kind of liked. He said, "Bring me two more." Webb was shaken, went home and sat in the backyard, and then he thought, Fuck, I can do this. This goes on for weeks. A kid calls the paper about the dog he's found run over in the street. He's taken it to the Humane Society; they want to put it to sleep, and the kid is very upset. Webb is sent out to see if he can do anything fit for a newspaper. He talks to the vet, who says it is hopeless, that the dog will never walk again, whether he operates or not. When Webb reports back to the editor, he says, "Get that guy on the phone," and after a few blunt words from the editor, by God, the vet is going to operate. And it works. The damn dog is leaping in the air. Finally, the dog goes home to the kid who found him, a kid in a wheelchair who seemed to identify with an injured mutt and was horrified at the idea that a cripple should be done away with. Story and photograph on the front page. Webb is hired. Years later, the old editor would tell him, "If that dog hadn't walked, you'd have never been hired."

There is a guy in the newsroom who is kind of burned out, a city editor. He watches the new hire for a few weeks. He tells him he will teach him the ropes, how to ferret out facts, how to find out damn near anything, how to be an investigative reporter. On one condition. He says Webb has to swear never to become a fucking editor. Webb agrees. His first series was seventeen parts on organized crime in the coal industry. Then he moved up to a good job on The Cleveland Plain Dealer and was in heaven: Ohio was the mother lode of corruption in government. He got an offer from the Mercury News in 1987. After a brief bidding war, he moved the family west, great place to raise kids, and besides, during his father's wanderings as a marine, Webb happened to be born in California. Everything was fine. He was in the Sacramento bureau and so hardly ever in the newsroom, much less around editors. In a big story for the paper, he took on one of the area's major employers. After the first day of the story, the company bought a full-page ad refuting it. After the next installment, the company bought a two-page ad. Webb looked around and noticed that nothing happened to him. The paper backed him up.

GARY WEBB'S "DARK ALLIANCE" BROKE AN OLD STORY. THE HISTORY of the CIA's relationship with international drug dealers has been documented and published, yet it is almost completely unknown to most citizens and reporters. Webb himself had only a dim notion of this record. And so he reacted with horror when the implications of his research first began to become clear to him: that while much of the federal government fought narcotics as a plague, the CIA, in pursuing its foreign-policy goals, sometimes facilitated the work of drug traffickers. "Dark Alliance" is surrounded by a public record that bristles with similar instances of CIA connections with drug people:

-- Alan Fiers, who headed the CIA Central American Task Force, testified during the Iran-contra hearings in August 1987, "With respect to [drug trafficking by] the resistance forces...it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people."

-- In 1983, fifty people, many of them Nicaraguans, were caught unloading a big coke shipment in San Francisco. A couple of them claimed involvement with the CIA, and after a meeting between CIA officials and the U.S. attorney handling the case, $36,000 found in a bedside table was returned because it "belonged to the contras." This spring, when the CIA published its censored report on involvement of the agency with drug traffickers in the contra war (a report that exists solely because a firestorm erupted in Congress after Webb's series), this incident was explained thusly: "Based upon the information available to them at the time, CIA personnel reached the erroneous conclusion that one of the two individuals...was a former CIA asset." Logically, an admission that CIA "assets" can sometimes be drug dealers.

-- In 1986, Wanda Palacio parted company with the Medellin cartel and started talking to Senator John Kerry's subcommittee, which was looking into the byways of the contra war and dope. Palacio said she'd witnessed two flights of coke out of Barranquilla, Colombia, on planes belonging to the CIA-contracted Southern Air Transport. She also had the dates and had seen the pilot. She also said Jorge Ochoa, another drug boss, said the flights were part of a "drugs for guns" deal. On September 26, 1986, Kerry took her eleven-page statement to William Weld, who was then the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division of the Justice Department. Weld allowed that he was not surprised to find claims of "bum agents, former and current CIA agents" dabbling in dope deals with the Colombian cartels. On October 3, Weld's office rejected Palacio's statement and offer to be a witness because of what it saw as contradictions in her testimony. On October 5, 1986, the Sandinistas shot a CIA plane out of the sky and captured one of Oliver North's patriots, one Eugene Hasenfus. Palacio was sitting in Kerry's office when a photograph of Hasenfus's dead pilot flashed across the television screen. She whooped that the pilot was the same guy she'd seen in Colombia loading coke on the Southern Air Transport flight in early October 1985. An Associated Press reporter, Robert Parry, investigated the crash and obtained the pilot's logs, which showed that on October 2, 4, and 6, 1985, the pilot had taken a Southern Air Transport plane to Barranquilla, Colombia. Palacio took a polygraph on the matter and passed.

-- Through much of the contra war, SETCO Air, an airline run by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros out of Honduras, was the principal airline used to transport supplies and personnel for the contras. Hector Berrellez later sent Ballesteros to Marion Federal Prison in Illinois to serve a couple of life sentences for dope peddling.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME GARY WEBB WAS MAKING HIS BONES AT The Cleveland Plain Dealer and winning part of a Pulitzer at the Mercury News, Hector Berrellez was becoming a legend. After two years of living at ground zero in Sinaloa, he was brought home to Los Angeles in 1989 to take over the most significant investigation in DEA history, that of the murder of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena. Camarena had been bagged in broad daylight from in front of the American consulate in Guadalajara in February 1986. His tortured body was found a month later. The investigation had stalled, so the DEA tossed it in Hector's lap. He ran with the new power, the raft of agents under his command, the huge budget for buying informants in Mexico. The case was a core matter for the DEA: The murder of Camarena was the event that gave the ragtag agency its martyr. The investigation was called Operation Leyenda, "Operation Legend."

During Operation Leyenda, a major drug guy in Sinaloa called Cochi Loco, "the Crazy Pig," put a contract on Hector's head. In the drug world, there are so many possible reasons for murder that a simple one is seldom clear. Whatever the immediate cause, in the early nineties a hit team was sent north to kill Hector.

One day in 1991, in the underground garage of the building in Los Angeles where the DEA and a bunch of federal agencies rent office space, someone walked up to a guy sitting in a car and clipped him in the head with a .22. The man died instantly and fell forward into the steering wheel, and the sound of a car horn wailed through the garage. Hector remembers that they found him with the motor running, and neatly placed on the floorboard of the car was the gun, in a Mexican-tooled holster, and the two latex surgical gloves that had been worn by the hit man. Someone wanted a clear message delivered.

The dead man was a guy from the General Services Administration who happened to work in the same building as the DEA. He had been in some kind of a hurry and had pulled into a DEA parking space. The guy was a ringer for Hector's partner. Three days after the hit, Hector picked up the phone in his office and heard the voice of Chichon Rico Urrea, a significant drug figure who was doing a stint in a prison in Guadalajara. Chichon told Hector, "You see what happened to your guy in the garage? That's going to happen to more of your guys."

Hector told the guy to go fuck himself, said he could kill all the fucking GSA guys he wanted. But Hector was questioning his faith. The faith was the war on drugs. The faith was that he was a righteous soldier in this war. The faith was that he was risking his life for the forces of light against the forces of darkness. And he was Eliot Ness, goddammit; he was the most decorated guy anyone could remember in the DEA, the man running its key investigation, the guy who had killed people, the guy bloodied in the world of Mexican corruption. All of that Hector could handle -- none of that could ever touch the faith. But other things could. Things he saw and learned in Mexico. And things he saw in the United States. He began to doubt that there was a real commitment to win this war on drugs. He saw his government winking at too many narcotics connections. He took Kiki Camarena's murder personally, because as agents they were mirror images -- gung-ho, committed drugbusters. And impediments to his investigation pissed Hector off. So in 1992, four years before Gary Webb sprang "Dark Alliance" on the world, Hector Berrellez sat down in his federal office in Los Angeles and picked up the phone and recommended action to the DEA. Things had come to his attention, and he thought, Somebody's gotta investigate this crap. In fact, he hoped to be that investigator.

Hector Berrellez wanted a criminal investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency. His $3 million snitch budget had brought in an unseemly harvest, report after report from informants that in the eighties CIA-leased aircraft were flying cocaine into places like the air-force base in Homestead, Florida, and the airfield north of Tucson long believed to be a CIA base. And that these planes were flying guns south. One of his witnesses in the Camarena case told him about flying in a U.S. military plane loaded with drugs from Guadalajara to Homestead. Other informants told him that major drug figures, including Rafael Caro Quintero, the man finally imprisoned for the Camarena murder, were getting guns delivered through CIA connections. Everywhere he turned, he ran into dope guys who had CIA connections, and to a narc this didn't look right. "I can't believe," he told his superiors, "that the CIA is handling all this shit and doesn't know what these pilots are doing." His superiors asked if he had hard evidence of actual CIA case officers moving dope, and he said no, just lots of people they employed. All intelligence services use the fabled “cutouts” to separate themselves from their grubby work.

The DEA in Washington asked for a memo, so Hector fired off a summary of his telephone request. Agents were assigned, and Hector shipped every snippet of new information to this team. Nothing came of the investigation. The DEA team came out and debriefed him and some of his agents. And then, silence.

Hector's Camarena work had burrowed deep, very deep, inside the Mexican government and found endless rot. With the vote on NAFTA in the air in the fall of 1993, his investigation started to get pressure, then his budget was cut. By 1994, after Justice Department officials had been in Mexico City, he was told, "Don't report that crap anymore." It was clear to Hector that the Mexican government wanted this Camarena investigation reined in. In early 1995, he learned of his future in a curious way. One of Hector's informants in Mexico City called another one of his informants in Los Angeles and said, Hector's getting transferred to Washington. The guy in Los Angeles said, No, no Hector's still here. Two months later, in April 1995, Berrellez was transferred to Washington, D.C. Over the years, Hector had become used to a certain amount of duplicity in the DEA. Some of his fellow agents, he had come to believe, were actually members of the CIA. The DEA had been penetrated.

At headquarters, Hector sat in an office with nothing to do. "There ain't no fucking drug war," he says now. "I was even called un-American. Nobody cares about this shit." He started going a little crazy. Each day, he checked into a blank schedule. So he caught a lot of double features.

In September 1996, he retired. He had had enough. The most decorated soldier in the war on drugs kind of faded out at the movies.

IN THE NEWS BUSINESS, IF YOU HANG AROUND LONG enough, you get a chance to find out who you are. Gary Webb was determined not to find out he was something ugly.

"I became convinced," he remembers, "that we're going to look back on the whole war on drugs fifty years from now like we look back on the McCarthy era and say, How did we ever let this stuff get so out of hand? How come nobody ever stood up and said, This is bullshit? I thought I had an obligation because I had the power at that point to tell people, Don't believe what you're being told about this war on drugs, because it is a lie. Very few people were in the position I was in, where I was able to write shit and get it in the newspapers. It was a very rare privilege. The editors at the Mercury gave me a lot of freedom because I produced. Then I got into this thing."

In December 1995, Webb wrote out his project memo, and suddenly, "I realized what we were saying here. I'm sitting at home, and this e-mail comes from a friend at the Los Angeles Times. And I had told him vaguely about this interesting story I was working on. I told him that he had no idea what his fucking government is capable of "And I was depressed because this was so horrible. It was like some guy told me that he had gone through the looking glass and was in this nether world that 99 percent of the American public would never believe existed. That's where I felt I was. When I sat down and wrote the project memo and said, Here's what we're going to say, and we're going to be accusing the government of bringing drugs into the country, essentially, and we've spent billions of dollars and locked up Americans for selling shit that the government helps to come into the country -- is just...If you believe in democracy and you believe in justice, it's fucking awful."

For six weeks after his series came out, Webb waited in a kind of honeymoon. His e-mail was exploding, he recalls, "from ordinary people who said, 'This has restored my faith in newspapers.' It was from college students, housewives that heard me on the radio; it was really remarkable to think that journalism could have this kind of effect on people, that people were out marching in the streets because of something that had been hidden from us all these years. The thing that surprised me was that there was no response from the press, from the government. It was total silence."

Finally, in early October, The Washington Post ran a story by Robert Suro and Walter Pincus headlined, THE CIA AND CRACK: EVIDENCE IS LACKING OF ALLEGED PLOT. The story focused in part on the fact that Webb had given a defense attorney questions to ask Oscar Danilo Blandon about his CIA connections. It also quoted experts who denied that the crack epidemic originated in Los Angeles, disputed that Freeway Rick Ross and Blandon were significant national players in the cocaine trade of the eighties (pegging Blandon's coke business at five tons over the decade, whereas Webb had evidence that it was more like two to five tons per year). And, the article continued, there was no evidence that the black community had been deliberately targeted (the "plot" referred to in the headline and a claim never made by Webb), that the CIA knew about Blandon's drug deals (also a claim never made by Webb, who in the series merely connected Blandon to CIA agents), or that Blandon had ever kicked in more than $60,000 to the contra cause (the Post based this number on unnamed law-enforcement officials; Webb based his estimate of millions of dollars to the contras from dope sales on grand-jury testimony and court documents). Perhaps the best summary of the Post's retort to Webb came from the paper's own ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, some weeks later: "The Post...showed more passion for sniffing out the flaws in San Jose's answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves. They were stronger on how much less money was contributed to the contras by the Mercury News's villains that their series claimed, how much less cocaine was introduced into L.A., than on how significant it is that any of these assertions are true."

In late October, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times weighed in on consecutive days. The Los Angeles Times had two years before described Freeway Rick Ross vividly: "If there was an eye to the storm, if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles's streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick....Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices, and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived....While most other dealers toiled at the bottom rungs of the market, his coast-to-coast conglomerate was selling more than five hundred thousand rocks a day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars." In the 1996 response to Webb's series, the Los Angeles Times described Ross as one of many "interchangeable characters" and stated, "How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ross." Both stories were written by the same reporter, Jesse Katz, and the 1996 story failed to mention his earlier characterization. The long New York Times piece the following day quoted unnamed government officials, CIA personnel, drug agents, and contras, and noted that "officials said the CIA had no record of Mr. Blandon before he appeared as a central figure in the series in the Mercury News."

A common chord rang through the responses of all three papers: It never really happened, and if it did happen, it was on a small scale, and anyway it was old news, because both the Kerry report and a few wire stories in the eighties had touched on the contra-cocaine connection. What is missing from the press responses, despite their length, is a sense that anyone spent as much energy investigating Webb's case as attempting to refute it. The "Dark Alliance" series was passionate, not clinical. The headlines were tabloid, not restrained. But whatever sins were committed in the presentation of the series, they cannot honestly be used to dismiss its content. It is puzzling that The New York Times felt it could discredit the story by quoting anonymous intelligence officials (a tack hardly followed in publishing the Pentagon Papers). In contrast, what is striking in Webb's series is the copius citation of documents. (In the Mercury News's Web-site version-cgi.sjmercury.com/drugs/postscriptfeatures.htm -- are the hyperlinked facsimiles of documents that tug one into the dark world of drugs and agents.) But when Jerry Ceppos, the executive editor of the Mercury News, wrote a letter in response to the Post's knockdown, the paper refused to print it because a defense of Webb's work would have resulted in spreading more "misinformation."

Despite Ceppos's initial defense of the series, the Mercury News seemed to choke on these attacks, and Webb could sense a sea change, But he kept on working, building a a bigger base of facts, following its implications deeper into the government. When the Mercury News forced him to choose between a $600,000 movie offer and book deals and staying on the story, Webb picked the story. He kept discovering people who had flown suitcases full of money to Miami from dope sales for the contras. He documented Blandon's contra dope sales from '82 through '86. Gary Webb was on a tear; he was going to advance the story. Almost none of this was published by the Mercury News; the paper grudgingly ran (and buried) one last story on New Year's Eve 1996.

The paper had printed the story of the decade, the one with Pulitzer prize written all over it, and now was unmistakably backing off it. Webb entered a kind of Orwellian world where no one said anything, but there was this thing in the air. The Mercury News assigned one of its own reporters to review the series, using the stories of the L.A. Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post as the benchmark for what was fact.

Webb wouldn't admit it to himself, but he had become a dead man walking.

WHEN HECTOR BERRELLEZ SPENT HIS YEAR GOING TO MOVIES IN Washington, he knew he was finished in the DEA. One day in October 1996, a month after he retired, Hector Berrellez picked up a newspaper and read this big story about a guy named Gary Webb. Hector had lived in shadows, and talking to reporters had not been his style. "As I read, I thought, This shit is true," he says now. He hadn't a doubt about what Webb was saying. He saw the reporter as doomed. Webb hit a sensitive area, and for it he would be attacked and disbelieved. Hector knew all about the Big Dog and the Big Boy rules.

Hector's body aches from the weight of secrets. When we meet, he is in a white sport shirt, slacks, a blue blazer with brass buttons, and a shoulder-holstered 9mm with fifteen rounds in the clip and two more clips strapped under his right arm. He may be a little over-armed for his Los Angeles private-investigation agency (the Mayo Group, which handles the woes of figures in the entertainment industry -- that pesky stalker, that missing money -- for a fat fee up front and two hundred dollars an hour), but not for his history. For the rest of his life, Hector Berrellez will be sitting in nice hotels like this one with a cup of coffee in his hand, a 9mm under his jacket, and very quick eyes.

He saw a lot of things and remembers almost all of them. He wrote volumes of reports. In 1997, he was interviewed by Justice Department officials about those unseemly drug ledgers and contra materials he saw during the raid on the fourteen Blandon stash houses back in 1986. His interviewers wanted particularly to know whether anyone besides Hector had seen them. They then told Hector that they couldn't find the seized material anymore.

Before he retired, Hector was summoned to Washington to brief Attorney General Janet Reno on Mexican corruption. He talked to her at length about how the very officials she was dealing with in Mexico had direct links to drug cartels. He remembers that she asked very few questions. Now he sits in the nice lounge of the nice hotel, and he believes the CIA is in the dope business; he believes the agency ran camps in Mexico for the contras, with big planes flying in and out full of dope. He now knows in his bones what the hell he really saw on October 27, 1986, when he hit the door of that house in the Los Angeles area and was greeted with politeness and fresh coffee.

But he doesn't carry a smoking gun around. The photos, the ledgers, all the stuff the cops found that morning as they hit fourteen stash houses where all the occupants seemed to be expecting company, all that material went to Washington and seems to have vanished. All those reports he wrote for years while in Mexico and then later running the Camarena case, those detailed reports of how he kept stumbling into dope deals done by CIA assets, never produced any results or even a substantive response.

Hector Berrellez is a kind of freak. He is decorated; he is an official hero with a smiling Ed Meese standing next to him in an official White House photograph. He pulled twenty-four years and retired with honors. He is, at least for the moment, neither discredited nor smeared. Probably because until this moment, he's kept silent.

And Hector Berrellez thinks that if the blacks and the browns and the poor whites who are zombies on dope ever get a drift of what he found out, well, there is going to be blood in the streets, he figures -- there is going to be hell to pay. He tells me a story that kind of sums up the place he finally landed in, the place that Gary Webb finally landed in. The place where you wonder if you are kind of nuts, since no one else seems to think anything is wrong. An agent he knows was deep in therapy, kind of cracking up from the undercover life. And the agent's shrink decided the guy was delusional, was living in some nutcase world of weird fantasies. So the doctor talked to Hector about his patient, about whether all the bullshit this guy was claiming was true, about dead men and women and children, strange crap like that. And he made a list of his patient's delusions, and he ticked them off to Hector. And Hector listened to them one by one and said, "Oh, that one, that's true. This one, yeah, that happened also." It went on like that. And finally, Hector could tell the shrink wondered just who was nuts -- Hector, his patient, or himself.

ON SUNDAY, MAY 11, 1997, GARY WEBB WAS hanging wallpaper in his kitchen when the San Jose Mercury News published a column by executive editor Jerry Ceppos that was widely read as a repudiation of Webb's series. It was an odd composition that retracted nothing but apologized for everything. Ceppos wrote, "Although the members of the drug ring met with contra leaders paid by the CIA and Webb believes the relationship was a tight one, I feel we did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship." Fair enough, except that Webb never wrote that top CIA officials knew of the contra-cocaine connection. The national press wrote front-page stories saying that the San Jose Mercury News was backing off its notorious series about crack. The world had been restored to its proper order. Webb fell silent. He had to deal with his own nature. He is not good at being polite. "I'm just fucking stubborn," he says, "and that's all there was to it, because I knew this was a good story, and I knew it wasn't over yet, and I really had no idea of what else to do. What else was I going to do?"

What he did was have the Newspaper Guild represent him in arbitration with the Mercury News over the decision to ship him to the wasteland of Cupertino. "I'm going to go through arbitration, and I'm going to win the arbitration, and I'm going to go to work," he says. "I was just going to fight it out. This was what I did, this was me, I was a reporter. This was a calling; it was not something you do eight to five. People were not exactly beating down my door, saying, Well, okay, come work for us. I was...unreliable." So he went to Cupertino, and he wrote stories about constipated horses and refused to let his byline be printed. And then he went to his apartment and missed his wife and family and watched Caddyshack endlessly. He was a creature living a ghostly life. The only thing he didn't figure on was himself. Webb slid into depression. Every week, the 150-mile drive between his family in Sacramento and his job in Cupertino became harder. Every day, it was harder to get out of bed and go to work.

And he was very angry most of the time. He says, "I was going to live in my own house and see my own kids. At some point, I figured something was going to give." Finally, he couldn't make it to work and took vacation time. When that was used up in early August, he started calling in sick. After that, he went on medical leave. A doctor examined him and said, "You are under a great deal of stress," and diagnosed him as having severe depression. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't do much of anything. He decided to write a book about "Dark Alliance," but this time no one wanted it. His agent was turned down by twenty-five publishers before finding a small press, Seven Stories, that operates as a kind of New York court of last resort.

A job offer came from the California state legislature to conduct investigations for the government-oversight committee at about the same money he made for the Mercury News. His wife said, Take the job. Why hang around in this limbo? Webb thought about her words and told himself, What do I win even if I do win in arbitration? I get to go back to my office and get bullshitted the rest of my life. He watered his lawn, worked on the house, read more and more contra stuff. Drifted in a sea of depression. "I didn't know what to do if I couldn't be a reporter," he says. "So all of a sudden, I was standing there on the edge of the cliff, and I don't have what I was doing for the last twenty years -- I don't have that to do anymore. I felt it was like I was neutered. I called up the Guild and said, 'Let's see if they want to settle this case.' They sent me a letter of resignation that I had to sign."

Webb carried the letter with him from November 19 to December 10 of last year. Every day, he got up to sign the letter and mail it. Every night, he went to bed with the letter unsigned. His wife would ask, Have you signed it? Somebody from the Mercury kept calling the Guild and asking, Has he signed it yet? "I mean," he says softly, "writing my name on that thing meant the end of my career. I saw it as a sort of surrender. It was like signing," and here he hesitates for several seconds, "my death certificate."

But finally he signed, and now he is functionally banned from the business. He's the guy nobody wants, the one who fucked up, the one who said bad things. Officially, he is dead, the guy who wrote the discredited series, the one who questioned the moral authority of the United States government.

If Gary Webb could have talked to a Hector Berrellez in the fall of 1996, when his stories were being erased by the media, Hector would have been like a savior to him. "Because he would have shown what I was reporting was not an aberration," Webb says now, "that this was part of a pattern of CIA involvement with drugs. And he would have been believed." But Webb was not that lucky, and the Hectors of the world were not that ready to talk then. So Webb was left out there alone, one guy with a bunch of interviews and documents. One guy who answered a question no one wanted asked.

I CAN HEAR HECTOR BERRELLEZ TELLING ME that I will never find a smoking gun. I can hear the critics of Gary Webb explaining that all he has is circumstantial evidence. Like anyone who dips into the world of the CIA, I find myself questioning the plain facts I read and asking myself, Does this really mean what I think it means?

-- In 1982, the head of the CIA got a special exemption from the federal requirement to report dealings with drug traffickers. Why did the CIA need such an exemption? http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/cocaine/13.gif http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/cocaine/14.gif http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/cocaine/ex1.html http://www.house.gov/waters/ciareportwww.htm http://www.motherjones.com/sideshow/cia.html -- Courthouse documents attest to the fact that the Blandon drug organization moved tons of dope for years with impunity, shipped millions to be laundered in Florida, and then bought arms for the contras. Why are Gary Webb's detractors not looking at these documents and others instead of bashing Webb over the head?

-- The internal CIA report of contra cocaine activity has never been released. The Justice Department investigation of Webb's charges has never been released. The CIA has released a censored report on only one volume of Webb's charges. The contra war is over, yet this material is kept secret. Why aren't the major newspapers filing Freedom of Information [Act] requests for these studies?

-- The fifty-year history of CIA involvement with heroin traffickers and other drug connections is restricted to academic studies and fringe publications. Those journalists who find themselves covering the war on drugs should read Alfred McCoy's massive study, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, or Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall's Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America.

-- Following the release of "Dark Alliance," Senator John Kerry told The Washington Post, "There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, on the payroll of, and carrying the credentials of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking while involved in support of the contras." Why has the massive Kerry report been ignored to this day? http://www.thememoryhole.org/kerry/index.htm

-- On March 16, 1998, the CIA inspector general, Frederick P. Hitz, testified before the House Intelligence Committee. "Let me be frank," he said. "There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations."

Representative Norman Dicks of Washington then asked, "Did any of these allegations involve trafficking in the United States?"

"Yes," Hitz answered.

The question is why a mountain of evidence about the CIA and drugs is ignored and why the legitimate field of inquiry opened by Webb remains unpursued and has become journalistic taboo.

Maybe the CIA is great for America. But if it is, surely it can roll up its sleeves and show us its veins.

WEBB AND HIS WIFE, SUE, ARE STANDING IN the driveway with me after a Thai dinner in Sacramento. The night is fresh; spring is in the air. A frog croaks from the backyard on the quiet and safe suburban street. Sue has just finished rattling off details from one facet of the contra war, the CIA drug-airline operation run out of Ilopango airfield in El Salvador. She seems to have absorbed a library of material over the last three years of her husband's obsession. Before, he always worked like hell, she knows, but on this one he brought it home. He could not keep it separated from his wife and family and his weekly hockey games. So Sue, with her winning smile and cheerful ways, has become an authority on America's dark pages. And we stand there in the fine evening air, the rush of spring surging through the trees and grass and shrubs, talking about the endless details of this buried episode in the secret history.

And I wonder how Webb deals with it, with all the hard work done, with all the facts and documents devoured, and with all this diligent toil resulting in his personal ruin, depriving him of the only kind of work he has ever wanted in his life.

And I remember what he said earlier that day while he sat in his study, leaning toward me, his right hand gripping his left wrist: "The trail is littered with bodies. You go down the last ten years, and there is a skeleton here and a skeleton there of somebody that found out about it and wrote about it. I thought that this is the truth, and what can they do to you if you tell the truth? What can they do to you if you write the truth?"


(c)1998 by Hearst Communications, Inc. Printed in the USA.

Copyright © 1997-2004 by the Hearst Corporation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.6.206.163 (talk) 00:15, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] how is it possible to shoot yourself twice in the head?

wouldn't you lose consciousness/die on the first shot? Why would you even need two shots? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.65.182.168 (talk) 08:22, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

==== Someone should mention doubletapping. This is a standard police tactic to describe shooting someone twice to make sure that the person is dead or dying. Two shots to the head or torso/organs at close range and you have more than 99% chance of fatality. Shooting yourself twice in commission of a suicide is rare, not impossible, but double tapping is standard practice for shoot to kill orders.

[edit] This cannot be suicide, you cannot shoot yourself in the head one time after the other

I read the multiple gunshot suicide article but this is about gunshot wounds TO THE BODY, not the head. If you fire a shot through your head, you will be knocked unconscious whether you die or not. It will be like hitting someone in the head with a crowbar. You will not be in a position to fire again even if you survive the wound at first. You have to be conscious in order to release the trigger then pull it again. Please correct the text, it simply does not make sense. Write "apparent suicide" instead. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.92.26.25 (talk) 14:36, 19 May 2008 (UTC)