I was also hired by PBS Frontline to investigate whether there had been a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal -- whether those arms-for-hostage deals in the mid-1980s had been preceded by contacts between Reagan's 1980 campaign staff and Iran, which was then holding 52 Americans hostage and essentially destroying Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes. [For more on that topic, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege and America's Stolen Narrative.]
Finding New Ways
In 1995, frustrated by the growing triviality of American journalism -- and acting on the advice of and with the assistance of my oldest son Sam -- I turned to a new medium and launched the Internet's first investigative news magazine, known as Consortiumnews.com. The Website became a way for me to put out well-reported stories that my former mainstream colleagues ignored or mocked.
So, when Gary Webb called me in 1996 to talk about the Contra-cocaine story, I explained some of this tortured history and urged him to make sure that his editors were firmly behind him. He sounded perplexed at my advice and assured me that he had the solid support of his editors.
When Webb's "Dark Alliance" series finally appeared in late August 1996, it initially drew little attention. The major national news outlets applied their usual studied indifference to a topic that they had already judged unworthy of serious attention.
But Webb's story proved hard to ignore. First, unlike the work that Barger and I did for AP in the mid-1980s, Webb's series wasn't just a story about drug traffickers in Central America and their protectors in Washington. It was about the on-the-ground consequences, inside the United States, of that drug trafficking, how the lives of Americans were blighted and destroyed as the collateral damage of a U.S. foreign policy initiative.
In other words, there were real-life American victims, and they were concentrated in African-American communities. That meant the ever-sensitive issue of race had been injected into the controversy. Anger from black communities spread quickly to the Congressional Black Caucus, which started demanding answers.
Secondly, the San Jose Mercury-News, which was the local newspaper for Silicon Valley, had posted documents and audio on its state-of-the-art Internet site. That way, readers could examine much of the documentary support for the series.
It also meant that the traditional "gatekeeper" role of the major newspapers -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times -- was under assault. If a regional paper like the Mercury-News could finance a major journalistic investigation like this one, and circumvent the judgments of the editorial boards at the Big Three, then there might be a tectonic shift in the power relations of the U.S. news media. There could be a breakdown of the established order.
This combination of factors led to the next phase of the Contra-cocaine battle: the "get-Gary-Webb" counterattack. Soon, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times were lining up like some tag-team wrestlers taking turns pummeling Webb and his story.
On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb's series, although acknowledging that some Contra operatives did help the cocaine cartels. The Post's approach fit with the Big Media's cognitive dissonance on the topic: first, the Post called the Contra-cocaine allegations old news -- "even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers," the Post said -- and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one Contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted in his series, saying it had not "played a major role in the emergence of crack."
To add to the smug hoo-hah treatment that was enveloping Webb and his story, the Post published a sidebar story dismissing African-Americans as prone to "conspiracy fears."
Next, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times weighed in with lengthy articles castigating Webb and "Dark Alliance." 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 any role in Contra-cocaine smuggling.
But the first ominous sign for the CIA's cover-up emerged 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, and the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.
Mocking Webb
But Webb had already crossed over from being treated as a serious journalist to becoming a target of ridicule. Influential Washington 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.
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