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 were strong motives 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 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.]
In other words, Webb had been right and Kurtz had been wrong.
Mercury News Retreat
Still, although Kurtz and other big-name journalists may have been ignorant of key facts about the contra war, they still pilloried Gary Webb.
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