Kill the Messenger (13 page)

Webb's lead sentence provocatively evoked what he had spelled out in his original project memo months earlier: the Blandon-Meneses-Ross drug ring represented the first documentation of the long-rumored connection between the CIA's war in Nicaragua and the crack epidemic in urban America. “For the better part of a decade,” Webb wrote, “a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a
Mercury News
investigation has found.”

Although neither Webb nor his editors realized it at the time, that sentence was one of the most inflammatory introductions to a work of investigative reporting in the history of mainstream American daily journalism. Perhaps more than Webb's story itself, which was ultimately much more nuanced—some would say it failed to support its lead—this opening sentence would lead to an unprecedented explosion of public outrage and an unparalleled barrage of criticism from the nation's newspapers.

By late July, “Dark Alliance” had been edited and was scheduled to run on August 18. Webb knew that the story's controversial nature required an unconventional sales tactic. Working with a team of highly skilled technicians at the Mercury Center, the newspaper's online department, he arranged to have links on the
Mercury News
Web site to all the important documents cited in the story. The graphics team designed a logo for the story, as well as numerous maps showing how the Blandon-Meneses drug ring smuggled the cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

Scott Herhold, who had transferred out his job as state editor in 1990, spent the summer of 1996 overseeing the graphics department. He had no idea what Webb was doing at the time. “I remember Gary coming in and working with this artist,” Herhold recalls. “They had this big graphic with arrows all over the place. I knew something big was coming down.”

Meanwhile, however, Yarnold, the project's supervisor, had stopped paying any attention to the story. Garcia became suspicious when Yarnold stopped responding to her messages about “Dark Alliance.” She had no clue what was
going on until the paper announced that Yarnold had been promoted to a new corporate job with Knight Ridder's media arm. “I was all by myself,” she says.

Just as Webb readied himself for a long-scheduled summer vacation, timed to take place a few weeks before the story's publication date, Garcia called with the news that Yarnold was out of the picture. But she assured Webb that his replacement, Paul Van Slambrouck, had read the story and was excited about it. Unlike Yarnold, Van Slambrouck had a long resume as a reporter, including years as a foreign correspondent in South Africa.

Van Slambrouck didn't respond to interview requests, but Garcia says he rescued “Dark Alliance.” “He was taking on a new job, but generously spent a lot of time helping me corral this project into the paper,” she says. Van Slambrouck wanted “Dark Alliance” to run in three installments, which meant the story would have to be cut by sixty-five column inches. He also wanted more discussion of the CIA's role in the drug ring higher up in the story. Again, Webb protested, sending an email to Garcia saying if there was that much fat that could be trimmed, “we both ought to quit right now because we obviously aren't doing our job right.”

Meanwhile, Jerry Ceppos had only read parts of the story. And Jonathan Krim, the one person who many at the paper believed possessed the editing skills to inoculate the story against the criticism it later received was on vacation when it finally ran. “I was on vacation in Hawaii at the time, and read the excerpts that appeared in the Honolulu papers,” Krim says. “Our procedures changed after ‘Dark Alliance,' and then I vetted all project proposals and copy before
[stories] ran, even if I was not directly involved in editing the material.”

In the end, Webb relented. During his vacation at a beach house in North Carolina's Outer Banks, then in a motel room in Washington, D.C., and finally in the basement of Sue's parents' house in Indiana, he rewrote the series. “It was a mess,” Sue recalls, adding that the family was also in the process of moving houses. “Dawn wanted him to stay and keep writing, but Gary told her no—he was going on vacation. The whole time we were on vacation, he was writing.”

“It was horrible,” Webb later recalled. “I had no way of telling what was being cut back at the
Mercury
, what was being put back in, or what was being rewritten.” He was convinced his editors had no idea what they were doing. “Don't these people know what they're dealing with here?” he fumed. “Don't they realize the import of what we're printing?”

On August 17, the night before “Dark Alliance” appeared on newstands, Webb was at a party at the Indianapolis house of his high-school friend, Greg Wolf. At 2
AM
, when it was midnight in San Jose, Webb went to a bedroom and plugged his laptop into the Internet, dialing up the
Mercury News
' Web site. Instead of the paper's normally more subdued Web site, the entire screen filled up with the headline “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion” and an iconic image of a man smoking a crack pipe superimposed on the CIA seal.

Webb was aware that his story would be controversial. From his conversations with Bob Parry and Martha Honey, he knew what had happened to other reporters who had
written about the CIA's involvement with drugs. But as he scrolled down the computer screen, eagerly reading his story to see how it had finally turned out, he wasn't worried about the future.

The story looked solid after all—and it had the most impressive online graphics of any work of journalism ever published. There were links to his documents and sound files of Blandon testifying in court. “Dark Alliance” had finally been put to ink. Webb felt a huge rush of relief. He emailed his colleague, Goerg Hodel, still down in Nicaragua, to let him know the story was online. Then he turned off his computer, went back out to the party, and got drunk.

SEVEN

Crack in America

WHEN THE AUGUST
18, 1996, edition of the
San Jose Mercury News
arrived on doorsteps throughout Northern California, readers were greeted with the dark silhouette of a man smoking a crack pipe superimposed on the official seal of the CIA. In red and black lettering—the ominous, official style of type associated with top secret files—was the series' logo: “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion.” Beneath were the words, “Day One: How a cocaine-for-weapons trade supported U.S. policy and undermined black America,” and an even larger headline, “Crack Plague's Roots Are in Nicaraguan War.” Readers were thus introduced to the most explosive journalistic exposé since the end of the Cold War.

As implied by the headlines and logo—neither of which
were created by Webb, but copy desk editors at the
Mercury News
—“Dark Alliance” promised to provide disturbing revelations about the CIA's involvement in America's crack-cocaine explosion. The first sentence left no doubt the story didn't just involve drug dealers, but the Langley, Virginia-based spook house: “For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a
Mercury News
investigation has found.”

The following two sentences were even more sweeping. “This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack' capital of the world,” the article stated. “The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.”

Along with the image combining the CIA seal with the crack addict and the lead sentence's claim that “millions in drug profits” from “tons of cocaine” had gone to the CIA-backed contras, those two sentences contained assertions that would later come to haunt Webb. The idea that Blandon and Meneses had together formed the first coke pipeline to urban America, thus sparking the crack “explosion” in inner cities across the country, was something that Webb and his editors surely believed, but which “Dark Alliance” neither explicitly stated nor proved.

What the story did prove was that two Nicaraguan contra
sympathizers had supplied “Freeway” Ricky Ross, L.A.'s most notorious crack dealer, with enough cheap cocaine to keep him in business for years, and that at least some of the profits helped the CIA fight communism in Central America. The first installment of the three-part series told how Blandon and Meneses had met at a contra base in Honduras with CIA asset Enrique Bermudez, whom Webb misidentified as a “CIA agent,” before dealing coke to “Freeway” Ricky Ross—“a dope dealer of mythic proportions in the L.A. drug world” who “turned the cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the country.”

A sidebar to the story detailed how the drug ring had its own “little arsenal”—a steady supply of Uzis and other automatic weapons courtesy of Blandon's partner, Ronald Lister, the ex-Orange County cop who told Sheriff's Deputies raiding his home that he worked for the CIA. “We had our own little arsenal,” Ross observed. “Once [Blandon] tried to sell [my partner] a grenade launcher. I said, ‘Man, what [the fuck] do we need with a grenade launcher?' ”

In late 1986, Webb reported, FBI agents investigating the Iran-contra scandal interviewed Lister's former real estate agent, who said Lister paid cash for a $340,000 house in Mission Viejo. When the realtor asked Lister where the money came from, Lister had replied that he was involved in “CIA-approved” security work in Central America. Further evidence of Lister's “security” work came from Christopher Moore, who traveled to El Salvador in 1982 with Lister. Moore said that Lister was trying to provide security to a Salvadoran Air Force Base. “Lister always said he worked for the CIA,” Moore stated. “I didn't know whether to believe him or not.”

As if to explain why Lister would be pitching security work to a Salvadoran air base, Webb revealed that Blandon's partner Meneses was a friend of Marcos Aguado, a contra pilot who also worked for the Salvadoran Air Force. While flying weapons to the contras in Honduras, Aguado was stationed at the Ilopango Air Force Base. A covert area of the airport run by the Salvadoran military doubled as a major contra supply center. Ilopango was more than just a part of the contra weapons pipeline, however. According to Celerino Castillo, an ex-DEA agent then stationed in El Salvador, the base was also a locus of contra drug smuggling.

Castillo was a decorated Vietnam veteran and firm believer in the drug war. But when he tried to report his discoveries to his superiors, the DEA responded by opening an internal investigation of him, forcing him to resign his job. “Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they [DEA officials] were covering it up,” Castillo told Webb. “You can't get any simpler than that. It was a cover-up.”

The second installment of “Dark Alliance” told the story of Blandon's unlikely evolution from Ross' supplier to government informant and witness against “Freeway” Ricky Ross. The story also profiled Ross' equally unprobable rise from rural Texas to king of crack cocaine, and how his career ended shortly after his release from prison in Texas in 1994, when Blandon had asked for his help arranging a major drug deal. When Ross picked up the drugs, DEA agents arrested him. The final, and least controversial, installment of the of Webb's three-day series offered a dramatic critique of federal drug sentencing guidelines, and how stiffer penalties for crack as opposed to powder cocaine
users and dealers had filled the nation's prisons with young inner city residents, the overwhelming majority of whom were African Americans.

At its best, “Dark Alliance” was a vivid, convincing account of how three drug dealers had wreaked havoc on America's inner cities and how their activities were closely tied to the CIA's war in Central America. But that narrative relied primarily on occasionally conflicting statements by convicted drug dealers. Webb supported their claims by citing law enforcement records suggesting that Blandon, Meneses, and Lister were involved with the CIA and were laundering millions of dollars of drug proceeds to support the agency's war in Nicaragua.

Yet nowhere in “Dark Alliance” was there any direct proof that the CIA had either participated in the drug trafficking Webb had uncovered or that the agency had even known about it. The lack of proof of CIA complicity and Webb's reliance on relatively few sources—combined with the story's sensational claim that three men inadvertently ignited the crack explosion—would provide ample ammunition for the “debunking” of “Dark Alliance” and the ultimate undoing of Gary Webb.

The initial reaction to “Dark Alliance” among Webb's colleagues was decidedly mixed. “When it came out, there was a sense of pride in the newspaper,” says a former
Mercury News
reporter who requested anonymity. “It definitely caused a stir. My view was that, in a sense, it was an old story that had been ignored by the major newspapers. I had problems with some of the reporting, but thought it was basically right.”

“Most people who read it initially thought it was very
good,” says
Mercury News
assistant editor Bert Robinson. “But it was clear he had not tried very hard to get responses from the people he was criticizing. He hadn't really gone to the government—the CIA or anybody who was being shown up in this thing—to address the content of his reporting. Gary just thought that once you had the story, the people who were going to take the brunt of your reporting were just going to bullshit you, so it wasn't even worth bothering.”