[NYTr] The Contras, the CIA and Drugs: Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Consortium News - Dec 11, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/121007.html

Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy

By Robert Parry

Three years ago, I walked into my home in Arlington, Virginia, and
checked my phone messages. One was from a Los Angeles Times reporter
who was looking for a comment from me about Gary Webb’s suicide on the
night of Dec. 9, 2004. It was the first I had heard of the news.

After I recovered from the shock, I called the reporter back to get
more details. I also told him he would have a hard time writing a
decent obituary on Webb because the L.A. Times had never acknowledged
that Webb was substantially correct in his reporting about the
Nicaraguan contras' role in smuggling cocaine into the United States in
the 1980s.

Though Los Angeles had been hit hard by the “crack epidemic” and the
L.A. Times had devoted front-page space to trash Webb’s contra-cocaine
reporting in 1996, the newspaper never ran a story detailing the CIA
inspector general’s 1998 findings, which confirmed much of what Webb
had alleged – and more.

The CIA inspector general found that not only had the contras helped
the cocaine cartels get their goods into the United States, but that
the CIA and the Reagan administration had helped cover up the evidence.

However, to have written that story in 1998, the L.A. Times editors
would have had to admit they had wronged Webb two years earlier when
they bought into the ongoing government cover stories about the
innocence of the Reagan administration and the CIA.

It was much easier for the L.A. Times to ignore the findings of the
CIA's own inspector general and to maintain the fiction that Webb was
just a reckless reporter who had gotten the contra-cocaine story all
wrong.

That decision by the L.A. Times – when combined with the abusive
treatment Webb received from other major news outlets and his betrayal
by his own editors at the San Jose Mercury News – had sent Webb’s life
into a downward spiral that ended with him shooting himself with his
father’s handgun.

On Dec. 10, 2004, I told the L.A. Times reporter that since his
newspaper had never reported on the CIA’s admissions, he could not put
Webb’s death in any honest context. So, I was not surprised the next
day when the L.A. Times published a nasty obituary that treated Webb as
if he had been a common criminal rather than a fellow journalist.

The Washington Post republished the graceless L.A. Times obit – and it
quickly hardened into the official judgment on Gary Webb.

Yet, today, when trying to understand how the United States ended up
with a national press corps that so eagerly passed on government
propaganda about Iraq’s WMD and other lies, it is worth recalling the
story of Gary Webb and the contra-cocaine scandal.

Dark Alliance

Webb’s death in 2004 had its roots in his fateful decision eight years
earlier to write a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that
challenged a potent conventional wisdom shared by the elite U.S. news
organizations – that one of the most shocking scandals of the 1980s
just couldn’t be true.

Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series, published in August 1996, revived the
decade-old allegations that the Reagan administration in the 1980s had
tolerated and protected cocaine smuggling by its client army of
Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras.

Though substantial evidence of the contra crimes had surfaced in the
mid-1980s (initially in an article that Brian Barger and I wrote for
the Associated Press in December 1985 and later at hearings conducted
by Sen. John Kerry), the major news outlets had bent to pressure from
the Reagan administration and refused to take the disclosures seriously.

Reflecting the dominant attitude toward Kerry and his work on the
contra-cocaine scandal, Newsweek even dubbed the Massachusetts senator
a “randy conspiracy buff.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s
“Kerry’s Contra-Cocaine Chapter” or Robert Parry’s Lost History:
Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]

Thus, the ugly reality of the contra-cocaine scandal was left in that
netherworld of uncertainty, largely proven with documents and testimony
but never accepted by Official Washington, including its premier news
organizations, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

But Webb’s series thrust the scandal back into prominence by connecting
the contra-cocaine trafficking to the spread of crack that ravaged Los
Angeles and other American urban centers in the 1980s. For that reason,
African-American communities were up in arms as were their elected
representatives in the Congressional Black Caucus.

So, Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series offered a unique opportunity for the
major news outlets to finally give the contra-cocaine scandal the
attention it deserved.

But that would have required some painful self-criticism among
Washington journalists whose careers had advanced in part because they
had not offended Reagan supporters who had made an art out of punishing
out-of-step reporters for pursuing controversies like the
contra-cocaine scandal.

Also, by the mid-1990s, a powerful right-wing news media had taken
shape and was in no mood to accept the notion that many of President
Reagan’s beloved contras were drug traffickers. That recognition would
have cast a shadow over the Reagan Legacy, which the Right was busy
elevating into mythic status.

There was the turf issue, too. Since Webb’s stories coincided with the
emergence of the Internet as an alternate source for news and the San
Jose Mercury News was at the center of Silicon Valley, the big
newspapers saw a threat to their historic dominance as the nation’s
gatekeepers for what information should be taken seriously.

Plus, the major media’s focus in the mid-1990s was on scandals swirling
around Bill Clinton, such as some firings at the White House Travel
Office and convoluted questions about his old Whitewater real-estate
deal.

In other words, there was little appetite to revisit scandals from the
Reagan years and there was strong motive to disparage what Webb had
written.

Rev. Moon’s Newspaper

It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Washington Times to begin
the counterattack. The Washington Times turned to some ex-CIA
officials, who had participated in the contra war, to refute the drug
charges.

Then – in a pattern that would repeat itself over the next decade – the
Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind
the right-wing press. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a
front-page article knocking down Webb’s story, although acknowledging
that some contra operatives did help the cocaine cartels.

The Post’s approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine
allegations as old news – “even CIA personnel testified to Congress
they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers,” the
Post sniffed – and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one
contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted – that it had not
“played a major role in the emergence of crack.”

A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to
“conspiracy fears.”

Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling
on against Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA’s
internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 – almost a decade earlier – that
supposedly had cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine
smuggling.

But the CIA’s decade-old cover-up began to weaken on Oct. 24, 1996,
when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz conceded before the Senate
Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12
days, the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.

Nevertheless, Webb was becoming the target of media ridicule.
Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a
book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the contra war
was primarily a business to its participants.

“Oliver Stone, check your voice mail,” Kurtz smirked. [Washington Post,
Oct. 28, 1996]

Webb’s suspicion was not unfounded, however. Indeed, White House aide
Oliver North’s chief contra emissary Rob Owen had made the same point
in a March 17, 1986, message about the contra leadership.

“Few of the so-called leaders of the movement … really care about the
boys in the field,” Owen wrote. “THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY
OF THEM.” [Capitalization in the original.]

Mercury News Retreat

Kurtz and other big-name journalists may have been ignorant of key
facts about the contra war, but that didn’t stop them from pillorying
Gary Webb. The ridicule also had a predictable effect on the executives
of the Mercury News. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos was
in retreat.

On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series
“fell short of my standards.” He criticized the stories because they
“strongly implied CIA knowledge” of contra connections to U.S. drug
dealers who were manufacturing crack-cocaine. “We did not have proof
that top CIA officials knew of the relationship,” Ceppos wrote.

The big newspapers celebrated Ceppos’s retreat as vindication of their
own dismissal of the contra-cocaine stories. Ceppos next pulled the
plug on the Mercury News’ continuing contra-cocaine investigation and
reassigned Webb to a small office in Cupertino, California, far from
his family. Webb resigned the paper in disgrace.

For undercutting Webb and other Mercury News reporters working on the
contra investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism
Review and was given the 1997 national “Ethics in Journalism Award” by
the Society of Professional Journalists.

While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his
marriage break up.

Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations
that would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan
administration had conducted the contra war.

The CIA published the first part of Inspector General Hitz’s findings
on Jan. 29, 1998. Despite a largely exculpatory press release, Hitz’s
Volume One admitted that not only were many of Webb’s allegations true
but that he actually understated the seriousness of the contra-drug
crimes and the CIA’s knowledge.

Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early
role in the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to
block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San
Francisco-based drug ring with suspected ties to the contras, the
so-called “Frogman Case.”

On May 7, 1998, another disclosure shook the earlier presumptions of
the Reagan administration’s innocence. Rep. Maxine Waters, a California
Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982,
letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department.

The letter, which had been requested by CIA Director William Casey,
freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug
smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan
contras and Afghan rebels who were fighting a Soviet-supported regime
in Afghanistan and who were implicated in heroin trafficking.

Justice Report

The next break in the cover-up was a report by the Justice Department’s
inspector general Michael Bromwich. Given the hostile climate
surrounding Webb’s series, Bromwich’s report opened with criticism of
Webb. But, like the CIA’s Volume One, the contents revealed new details
about government wrongdoing.

According to evidence cited by Bromwich, the Reagan administration knew
almost from the outset of the contra war that cocaine traffickers
permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next
to nothing to expose or stop the crimes.

Bromwich’s report revealed example after example of leads not followed,
corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement
investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of
drug traffickers.

The report showed that the contras and their supporters ran several
parallel drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of
Webb’s series. The report also found that the CIA shared little of its
information about contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on
three occasions disrupted cocaine-trafficking investigations that
threatened the contras.

Though depicting a more widespread contra-drug operation than Webb had
understood, the Justice report also provided some important
corroboration about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was
a key figure in Webb’s series.

Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed
information about Meneses’s operation and his financial assistance to
the contras. For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for
Meneses, said that in the early 1980s, the CIA allowed the contras to
fly drugs into the United States, sell them and keep the proceeds.

Pena, who was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed
FDN contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the contras by
the inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance.

The Justice report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S.
embassies in Central America discouraging Drug Enforcement
Administration investigations, including one into contra-cocaine
shipments moving through the international airport in El Salvador.

Inspector General Bromwich said secrecy trumped all. “We have no doubt
that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to
pursue its investigation at the airport,” he wrote.

Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big
newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases.

Cocaine Crimes & Monica

By fall 1998, Official Washington was obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky
sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning
contra-cocaine disclosures in the CIA’s Volume Two.

In Volume Two, published Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General Hitz
identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated
in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had
protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations
throughout the 1980s.

According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its contra
clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua’s leftist
Sandinista government. The earliest contra force, called ADREN or the
15th of September Legion, had chosen “to stoop to criminal activities
in order to feed and clothe their cadre,” according to a June 1981
draft CIA field report.

ADREN also employed terrorist methods, including the bombing of
Nicaraguan civilian planes and hijackings, to disrupt the Sandinista
government, the CIA knew. Cocaine smuggling was also in the picture.

According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN
members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981.

ADREN's leaders included Enrique Bermudez and other early contras who
would later direct the major contra army, the CIA-organized FDN.
Throughout the war, Bermudez remained the top contra military commander.

The CIA later corroborated the allegations about ADREN’s cocaine
trafficking, but insisted that Bermudez had opposed the drug shipments
to the United States which went ahead nonetheless.

Ends and Means

The truth about Bermudez’s supposed objections to drug trafficking,
however, was less clear. According to Volume One, Bermudez enlisted
Norwin Meneses, a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler, to raise
money and buy supplies for the contras.

Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan
trafficker named Danilo Blandon, who told Hitz’s investigators that he
and Meneses flew to Honduras to meet with Bermudez in 1982.

At the time, Meneses’s criminal activities were well known in the
Nicaraguan exile community. But Bermudez told the cocaine smugglers
that “the ends justify the means” in raising money for the contras.

After the Bermudez meeting, contra soldiers helped Meneses and Blandon
get past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking
suspicions. After their release, Blandon and Meneses traveled on to
Bolivia to complete a cocaine transaction.

There were other indications of Bermudez’s drug-smuggling tolerance. In
February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade
accused Bermudez of narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz’s report.

After the contra war ended, Bermudez returned to Managua, where he was
shot to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved.

Along the Southern Front, in Costa Rica, the drug evidence centered on
the forces of Eden Pastora, another leading contra commander. But Hitz
discovered that the U.S. government may have made matters worse.

Hitz revealed that the CIA put an admitted drug operative – known by
his CIA pseudonym “Ivan Gomez” – in a supervisory position over
Pastora. Hitz reported that the CIA discovered Gomez’s drug history in
1987 when Gomez failed a security review on drug-trafficking questions.

In internal CIA interviews, Gomez admitted that in March or April 1982,
he helped family members who were engaged in drug trafficking and money
laundering. In one case, Gomez said he assisted his brother and
brother-in-law in transporting cash from New York City to Miami. He
admitted that he “knew this act was illegal.”

Later, Gomez expanded on his admission, describing how his family
members had fallen $2 million into debt and had gone to Miami to run a
money-laundering center for drug traffickers. Gomez said “his brother
had many visitors whom [Gomez] assumed to be in the drug trafficking
business.”

Gomez’s brother was arrested on drug charges in June 1982. Three months
later, in September 1982, Gomez started his CIA assignment in Costa
Rica. Years later, convicted drug trafficker Carlos Cabezas alleged
that in the early 1980s, Ivan Gomez was the CIA agent in Costa Rica who
was overseeing drug-money donations to the contras.

Gomez “was to make sure the money was given to the right people [the
contras] and nobody was taking ... profit they weren’t supposed to,”
Cabezas stated publicly.

But the CIA sought to discredit Cabezas at the time because he had
trouble identifying Gomez’s picture and put Gomez at one meeting in
early 1982 before Gomez started his CIA assignment.

While the CIA was able to fend off Cabezas’s allegations by pointing to
these discrepancies, Hitz’s report revealed that the CIA was
nevertheless aware of Gomez’s direct role in drug-money laundering, a
fact the agency hid from Sen. Kerry’s investigation in 1987.

The Bolivian Connection

There also was more about Gomez. In November 1985, the FBI learned from
an informant that Gomez’s two brothers had been large-scale cocaine
importers, with one brother arranging shipments from Bolivia’s infamous
drug kingpin Roberto Suarez.

Suarez already was known as a financier of right-wing causes. In 1980,
with the support of Argentine’s hard-line anti-communist military
regime, Suarez bankrolled a coup in Bolivia that ousted the elected
left-of-center government.

The violent putsch became known as the Cocaine Coup because it made
Bolivia the region's first narco-state. Bolivia’s government-protected
cocaine shipments helped transform the Medellin cartel from a
struggling local operation into a giant corporate-style business for
delivering cocaine to the U.S. market.

Some of those profits allegedly found their way into contra coffers.
Flush with cash in the early 1980s, Suarez invested more than $30
million in various right-wing paramilitary operations, including the
contra forces in Central America, according to U.S. Senate testimony by
an Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse.

In 1987, Sanchez-Reisse said the Suarez drug money was laundered
through front companies in Miami before going to Central America.
There, other Argentine intelligence officers – veterans of the Bolivian
coup – trained the contras.

CIA Inspector General Hitz added another piece to the mystery of the
Bolivian-contra connection. One contra fund-raiser, Jose Orlando
Bolanos, boasted that the Argentine government was supporting his
anti-Sandinista activities, according to a May 1982 cable to CIA
headquarters.

Bolanos made the statement during a meeting with undercover DEA agents
in Florida. He even offered to introduce them to his Bolivian cocaine
supplier.

Containing the Scandal

Despite all this suspicious drug activity around Ivan Gomez and the
contras, the CIA insisted that it did not unmask Gomez until 1987, when
he failed a security check and confessed his role in his family’s drug
business.

The CIA official who interviewed Gomez concluded that “Gomez directly
participated in illegal drug transactions, concealed participation in
illegal drug transactions, and concealed information about involvement
in illegal drug activity," Hitz wrote.

But senior CIA officials still protected Gomez. They refused to refer
the Gomez case to the Justice Department, citing the 1982 DOJ-CIA
agreement that spared the CIA from a legal obligation to report
narcotics crimes by non-employees.

Instead, the CIA eased Gomez, an independent contractor, out of the
agency in February 1988, without alerting law enforcement or the
congressional oversight committees.

When questioned about the case nearly a decade later, one senior CIA
official who had supported the gentle treatment of Gomez had second
thoughts.

“It is a striking commentary on me and everyone that this guy’s
involvement in narcotics didn’t weigh more heavily on me or the
system,” the official acknowledged.

A Medellin drug connection arose in another section of Hitz’s report,
when he revealed evidence suggesting that some contra trafficking may
have been sanctioned by Reagan's National Security Council.

The protagonist for this part of the contra-cocaine mystery was Moises
Nunez, a Cuban-American who worked for Oliver North’s NSC
contra-support operation and for two drug-connected seafood importers,
Ocean Hunter in Miami and Frigorificos de Puntarenas in Costa Rica.

Frigorificos de Puntarenas was created in the early 1980s as a cover
for drug-money laundering, according to sworn testimony by two of the
firm’s principals – Carlos Soto and Medellin cartel accountant Ramon
Milian Rodriguez.

Drug allegations were swirling around Moises Nunez by the mid-1980s. At
the AP, his operation was one of the targets of our investigation.

Finally reacting to these suspicions, the CIA questioned Nunez on March
25, 1987, about his alleged cocaine trafficking. He responded by
pointing the finger at his NSC superiors.

“Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine
relationship with the National Security Council,” Hitz reported, adding:

“Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but
indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his
involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he
had performed at the direction of the NSC. Nunez refused to identify
the NSC officials with whom he had been involved.”

After this first round of questioning, CIA headquarters authorized an
additional session, but then senior CIA officials reversed the
decision. There would be no further efforts at “debriefing Nunez.”

Hitz noted that “the cable [from headquarters] offered no explanation
for the decision” to stop the Nunez interrogation.

But the CIA’s Central American task force chief Alan Fiers said the
Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued “because of the NSC connection and
the possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private
Benefactor program [the contra money handled by North]. A decision was
made not to pursue this matter.”

Joseph Fernandez, who had been the CIA’s station chief in Costa Rica,
later confirmed to congressional Iran-Contra investigators that Nunez
“was involved in a very sensitive operation” for North’s “Enterprise.”
The exact nature of that NSC-authorized activity has never been
divulged.

At the time of the Nunez-NSC drug admissions and his truncated
interrogation, the CIA’s acting director was Robert M. Gates, who is
now President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense.

Miami Vice

The CIA also worked directly with other drug-connected Cuban-Americans
on the contra project, Hitz found.

One of Nunez’s Cuban-American associates, Felipe Vidal, had a criminal
record as a narcotics trafficker in the 1970s. But the CIA still hired
him to serve as a logistics coordinator for the contras, Hitz reported.

The CIA also learned that Vidal’s drug connections were not only in the
past. A December 1984 cable to CIA headquarters revealed Vidal’s ties
to Rene Corvo, another Cuban-American suspected of drug trafficking.
Corvo was working with anti-communist Cuban Frank Castro, who was
viewed as a Medellin cartel representative within the contra movement.

There were other narcotics links to Vidal. In January 1986, the DEA in
Miami seized 414 pounds of cocaine concealed in a shipment of yucca
that was going from a contra operative in Costa Rica to Ocean Hunter,
the company where Vidal worked.

Despite the evidence, Vidal remained a CIA employee as he collaborated
with Frank Castro’s assistant, Rene Corvo, in raising money for the
contras, according to a CIA memo in June 1986.

By fall 1986, Sen. Kerry had heard enough rumors about Vidal to demand
information about him as part of a congressional inquiry into contra
drugs. But the CIA withheld the derogatory information.

On Oct. 15, 1986, Kerry received a briefing from Alan Fiers, who didn’t
mention Vidal’s drug arrests and conviction in the 1970s.

But Vidal was not yet in the clear. In 1987, the U.S. attorney in Miami
began investigating Vidal, Ocean Hunter and other contra-connected
entities.

This prosecutorial attention worried the CIA. The CIA’s Latin American
division felt it was time for a security review of Vidal. But on Aug.
5, 1987, the CIA’s security office blocked the review for fear that the
Vidal drug information “could be exposed during any future litigation.”

As expected, the U.S. Attorney did request documents about
“contra-related activities” by Vidal, Ocean Hunter and 16 other
entities. The CIA advised the prosecutor that “no information had been
found regarding Ocean Hunter,” a statement that was clearly false.

The CIA continued Vidal’s employment as an adviser to the contra
movement until 1990, virtually the end of the contra war.

Honduras Trafficking

Hitz revealed that drugs also tainted the highest levels of the
Honduran-based FDN, the largest contra army.

Hitz found that Juan Rivas, a contra commander who rose to be chief of
staff, admitted that he had been a cocaine trafficker in Colombia
before the war. The CIA asked Rivas, known as El Quiche, about his
background after the DEA began suspecting that Rivas might be an
escaped convict from a Colombian prison.

In interviews with CIA officers, Rivas acknowledged that he had been
arrested and convicted of packaging and transporting cocaine for the
drug trade in Barranquilla, Colombia. After several months in prison,
Rivas said, he escaped and moved to Central America where he joined the
contras.

Defending Rivas, CIA officials insisted that there was no evidence that
Rivas engaged in trafficking while with the contras. But one CIA cable
noted that he lived an expensive lifestyle, even keeping a $100,000
thoroughbred horse at the contra camp.

Contra military commander Bermudez later attributed Rivas’s wealth to
his ex-girlfriend’s rich family. But a CIA cable in March 1989 added
that “some in the FDN may have suspected at the time that the
father-in-law was engaged in drug trafficking.”

Still, the CIA moved quickly to protect Rivas from exposure and
possible extradition to Colombia. In February 1989, CIA headquarters
asked that DEA take no action “in view of the serious political damage
to the U.S. Government that could occur should the information about
Rivas become public.”

Rivas was eased out of the contra leadership with an explanation of
poor health. With U.S. government help, he was allowed to resettle in
Miami. Colombia was not informed about his fugitive status.

Another senior FDN official implicated in the drug trade was its chief
spokesman in Honduras, Arnoldo Jose “Frank” Arana.

The drug allegations against Arana dated back to 1983 when a federal
narcotics task force put him under criminal investigation because of
plans “to smuggle 100 kilograms of cocaine into the United States from
South America.”

On Jan. 23, 1986, the FBI reported that Arana and his brothers were
involved in a drug-smuggling enterprise, although Arana was not charged.

Arana sought to clear up another set of drug suspicions in 1989 by
visiting the DEA in Honduras with a business associate, Jose Perez.
Arana’s association with Perez, however, only raised new alarms.

If “Arana is mixed up with the Perez brothers, he is probably dirty,”
the DEA responded.

Through their ownership of an air services company called SETCO, the
Perez brothers were associated with Juan Matta Ballesteros, a major
cocaine kingpin connected to the murder of a DEA agent, according to
reports by the DEA and U.S. Customs.

Hitz reported that someone at the CIA scribbled a note on the DEA cable
about Arana stating: “Arnold Arana ... still active and working, we
[CIA] may have a problem.”

Despite its drug ties to Matta Ballesteros, SETCO emerged as the
principal company for ferrying supplies to the contras in Honduras.

During congressional Iran-Contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo
Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by
Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department
for ferrying supplies to the contras in 1986.

Drug Flights

Hitz found that other air transport companies, which were used by the
contras, also were implicated in the cocaine trade. Even FDN leaders
suspected that they were shipping supplies to Central America aboard
planes that might be returning with drugs.

Mario Calero, Adolfo Calero’s brother and the chief of contra
logistics, grew so uneasy about one air-freight company that he
notified U.S. law enforcement that the FDN only chartered the planes
for the flights south, not the return flights north.

Hitz found that some drug pilots simply rotated from one sector of the
contra operation to another. Donaldo Frixone, who had a drug record in
the Dominican Republic, was hired by the CIA to fly contra missions
from 1983-85.

In September 1986, however, Frixone was implicated in smuggling 19,000
pounds of marijuana into the United States. In late 1986 or early 1987,
he went to work for Vortex, another U.S.-paid contra supply company
linked to the drug trade.

By the time that Hitz’s Volume Two was published in fall 1998, the
CIA’s defense against Webb’s series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the
CIA did not conspire with the contras to raise money through cocaine
trafficking.

But Hitz made clear that the contra war took precedence over law
enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of contra crimes from
the Justice Department, the Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical
division.

Besides tracing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking through the
decade-long contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA
officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the contra-drug
problem but didn’t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to
overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the
Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the
various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent
effective implementation of the contra program.”

One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done,
get the support and win the war.”

Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations
officers handling the contras hid evidence of contra-drug trafficking
even from the CIA’s analysts.

Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly
concluded in the mid-1980s that “only a handful of contras might have
been involved in drug trafficking.” That false assessment was passed on
to Congress and the major news organizations – serving as an important
basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his series in 1996.

See No Evil

Although Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional
guilt by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big American
newspapers. [For more details on the report, see Parry’s Lost History.]

On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz’s Volume Two was posted at the
CIA’s Internet site, the New York Times published a brief article that
continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the contra-drug problem may
have been worse than earlier understood.

Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly
superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on
the release of Volume Two.

To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-cocaine story
has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, some of them rose
to become top executives at their news organizations. On the other
hand, Gary Webb’s career never recovered.

Unable to find decent-paying work in a profession where his past awards
included a Pulitzer Prize, Webb grew despondent. His marriage broke up.
By December 2004, he found himself forced to move out of his rented
house near Sacramento.

Instead, Webb decided to end his life.

On the night of Dec. 9, 2004, Webb typed out four suicide notes for his
family, laid out a certificate for his cremation, put a note on the
door suggesting a call to 911, and removed his father’s handgun from a
box.

The 49-year-old Webb, a father of three, then raised the gun and shot
himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once
more.

His body was found the next day after movers, who were scheduled to
clear out Webb’s rental house, arrived and followed the instructions
from the note on the door.

A Last Chance

Webb’s suicide offered the New York Times, the Washington Post and the
L.A. Times one more chance to set matters right, to revisit the CIA’s
admissions in 1998 and to exact some accountability from the Reagan-era
officials implicated in the contra crimes.

But all that followed Gary Webb’s death was more trashing of Gary Webb.

The L.A. Times ran its mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of
the admissions in the CIA’s Volume Two. The Times obituary was
republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post.

No one reading this obit would understand the profound debt that
American history owed to Gary Webb, who deserved the lion’s share of
the credit for forcing the CIA to make its extraordinary admissions.

Though a personal tragedy, the destruction of Gary Webb had a larger
meaning, too. Gary Webb was a kind of canary in the mine shaft, whose
fate represented a warning about the dangers that can befall a nation
whose journalists care more about their salaries and status than the
truth and the public’s right to know.

Today, when Americans look at the mounting death toll in Iraq, the
collapse of the U.S. dollar on international markets, and their
nation’s loss of prestige around the world, they should recall what
happened to Gary Webb when he tried to shed some light amid the shadows
of corrupt and covert government actions.

Webb’s career destruction in the 1990s and his desperate act of suicide
in 2004 were warnings to the American people that they must demand much
more from their existing news outlets – or they must build honest new
ones. That understanding may be Gary Webb's enduring legacy.


[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com ]