Drugs, CIA, media.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency - Editorial

When the San Jose Mercury News apologized for Gary Webb's three-part series on the CIA contras, and crack cocaine, it earned a pat on the head and a doggie biscuit. "Courageous gesture," said The New York Times. "Commendable," said The Washington Post.

These were the same papers, along with the Los Angeles Times, that did all they could to undermine the series when it first appeared. "We're going to take away that guy's Pulitzer," one L.A. Times reporter said, according to an article by Peter Kornbluh in CJR (formerly Columbia Journalism Review). Kornbluh quoted another staffer saying he was "assigned to the `get Gary Webb team.'"

Well, they got their man. Webb has been pulled off his beat and exiled to a small suburban bureau 150 miles from his home. "I said things they didn't like," Webb told me. He said publicly that he found the paper's apology "nauseating," and he disputed the statement by Jerry Ceppos, the paper's executive editor, that Webb supplied only notes for follow-up stories, not the stories themselves.

Webb is not blameless in this episode. He may have overreached with some of his claims. For instance, as Ceppos noted, Webb did not know for a fact that "millions in profits" went to the contras. That was an estimate. And Webb appears to have exaggerated the extent to which the CIA connection played a pivotal role in the crack epidemic in the United States.

But the story did demonstrate, for the first time, that individuals connected with the CIA and the contras were selling illegal drugs in the United States. That's a huge story, and it deserved follow-up, not deep-sixing.

"The Washington news media has conducted its own cover-up," Robert Parry told me. And that cover-up goes back over a decade." Parry should know. He, along with Brian Barger, broke the story of the CIA and drugs in 1985 when they were working for the Associated Press.

But because of media hostility, their story didn't make much of a splash. "We faced relentless attacks by the Reagan Administration, and the Washington press corps aggressively did not want the truth," says Parry.

Parry now runs the Media Consortium, an investigative-reporting outfit, which has just launched a new magazine called I.F. In its premiere issue, Parry writes about the media's bungling of the story. Even though the media had a voluminous report from Senator John Kerry on the CIA's dirty drug hands, even though they had entries from Oliver North's diaries referring to drug trafficking...