By Glynn Wilson –
Surfing around on Netflix for something to watch during the holidays, it came to my attention that the film Kill the Messenger was available.
At the outset let me say that the Gary Webb story is one I’ve purposely avoided getting involved with for many years, even though I followed it at the time. It’s quite controversial and involves lots of dark and shady characters, people I try my best to avoid.
But it is based on the first major blockbuster of the Internet Era, so the more I think about it after watching the film, it does have some relevance to my book Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again.
The Second Edition was just released on Amazon Kindle and hit the best seller list in just two days. The new paperback edition is being uploaded as I write this.
Film Review
For the sake of the movie review part of this story, let’s just say the film is an American biographical crime thriller directed by Michael Cuesta, written by Peter Landesman. It was released in 2014 and is largely based on the book of the same name by Nick Schou, as well as the book Dark Alliance by Gary Webb.
He was the reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who broke the story that the CIA was involved with the Nicaraguan Contras to export cocaine to the United States and fund the so-called “freedom fighters” in Central America during the regimes of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the 1980s and into the 1990s. The story even extends into the Bill Clinton era in Arkansas, so this is a bi-partisan conspiracy.
The film stars Jeremy Renner in his first movie as a producer. It opens as Webb interviews a drug dealer named Ronny Quail, who is outraged that the U.S. government used civil asset forfeiture to take his house even after he was acquitted of drug smuggling charges. Webb’s article about abuses of forfeiture led to a major source for the bigger blockbuster, a woman named Coral who it turns out had grand jury documents accidentally released in discovery proving that the government sponsored cocaine sales in the U.S. in exchange for funding the Contras, who were in a war with the leftist Ortega brothers for control of Nicaragua in the ’80s.
Iran-Contra Affair
American news readers may recall a related scandal, the Iran-Contra Affair, a conspiracy that was proved showing that the Regan administration illegally sold arms to Iran in its war with Iraq at the time, a move that ran counter to Reagan’s public statements about the U.S. government not negotiating with terrorists and a ban on aid imposed by Congress. Some of the proceeds from arm sales to Iran went to fund the Contras.
In my book I talk about getting in on this story in a couple of ways back in the day. There was a story out of Decatur about a grocery store owner named Tommy Posey who was raising money and supplying the Contras with Army boots and medical supplies out of Alabama. He was hooked up with an anti-Castro Cuban who owned a pizzeria in town. We suspected him of running guns, but drug money never came up. He came under federal investigation after a ban on military aid was imposed by Democrats in Congress in 1984.
Looking for information out there on the web about Posey now turns up pages and stories about his connections to the Klu Klux Klan and the Koch brothers, even by the Washington Post and UPI. He had formed an anti-Communist group called Civilian Military Assistance that apparently turned into a right-wing militia group. He could have been funded by some of the drug money coming through Arkansas.
Yet no airstrip in Alabama was included in a graphic in the “Kill the Messenger” movie with arrows pointing to airstrips where cocaine was smuggled into California and Bill Clinton’s Arkansas.
Webb landed a much bigger scoop thanks to a source who dropped into his lap where he was in California, the girl friend of a drug dealer who saw Webb’s story on cops seizing peoples’ property — even if they were found not guilty of drug charges. I actually had a friend back then from Shelby County who had his life ruined in similar fashion.
Webb approaches the prosecutor in that drug case and lets him see the top secret grand jury transcript the woman had obtained accidentally, and lets him know he is a reporter investigating the story. As a result, the government drops the charges against Coral’s boyfriend to protect their main witness, Oscar Danilo Blandón, a CIA informant who was one of the drug kingpins involved with the smuggling operation.
While Webb is researching Blandón, he comes across the pending drug case against “Freeway” Rick Ross, allegedly the first big crack kingpin in L.A., who is stunned to learn while in prison about to go to trial that Blandón — who supplied him the cocaine — is not on his side, and is in fact a paid government informant against him. With Webb’s help, the defense attorney for Ross gets Blandón to admit the conspiracy under oath. He testifies that he worked for the CIA to smuggle cocaine into California and used some of the profits to benefit the Contras.
Keep in mind that when someone testifies under oath in a court trial that is considered an official source and is always considered newsworthy, no matter what comes out later. Gary Webb was totally in the right for reporting this, even though his reporting was not backed up later by big national news organizations.
Webb traveled to a prison in Managua and spoke to Blandón’s partner, Norwin Meneses, who confirms Oliver North’s involvement in the basic drug profits for gun money scheme to use proceeds from cocaine trafficking to fund the Contra war. In Washington, D.C., Webb tracks down Fred Weil, a National Security Council employee who was an investigator on the John Kerry Committee report, which later confirmed the basic charges in Webb’s reporting.
Weil warns Webb how dangerous the subject can be for him and his family. Then federal agents summon Webb to a meeting, where they warn him against continuing to pursue the investigation or publishing anything else about the conspiracy.
Dark Alliance
When the San Jose newspaper published Webb’s series of stories under the title “Dark Alliance” and posted it online, it became an immediate sensation. Humiliated by being scooped by a regional paper, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and New York Times all dug into Webb’s reporting.
Of course Webb views their follow-up reporting as being far too deferential to the U.S. government and the CIA, and eventually the big papers turn on him, using their long-established government and CIA sources to try to discredit Webb and his reporting. Apparently it was just too big a story that went against the paradigm of American government and democracy, and couldn’t be allowed to stand. Like so many who have gone before on big stories like this, Webb’s life is placed under a microscope.
Also like so many hourly employees at corporate chain newspapers who in the past have stumbled onto something just a little too big for their britches, the local newspaper management gets nervous in the wake of criticism from the establishment papers in New York, Washington and L.A. So instead of standing up for their reporter, they banish him to the newspaper’s Cupertino bureau to cover mundane local crime news and features. Instead of allowing him to finish the reporting he started, they leave him vulnerable to charges that his work was incomplete.
Not to be deterred, and risking his very life and that of his family, Webb continues to work on the investigation on his own time. One night in the film, he wakes up to find an operative named John Cullen in his hotel room, a CIA source with direct knowledge of the operation and the cover up. He warns Webb about the dangers of continuing to ask questions and work on the story, but Webb continues at great personal risk. The agent confirms that his reporting is basically accurate.
Webb’s reporting was initially lauded by many in the press as exactly the kind of “authentic journalism” America needed at the time, and he is set to be awarded the Society of Professional Journalists “Journalist of the Year” award at the group’s annual dinner. But just before he was to accept the award, the paper was prepared to publish a letter calling his reporting into question for being incomplete and not being sourced well enough, since he didn’t have anyone from the CIA “on the record.” To anyone who has ever worked in the news business and dealt with secretive agencies and sources, this should have been seen as absurd on the face of it.
So in his acceptance speech for the award, Webb announces his resignation from the paper and calls the whole thing “horse shit.” He goes on to free-lance as a journalist and investigator, and continues to work on a book about the story, which he published in 1998. It got scant attention in the media at the time, which was of course focused almost exclusively on a certain blow job received by an American president in the Oval Office from a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. This is the kind of sensational news that dominated in the 1990s, from the O.J. trial to the sexcapades of Michael Jackson, as I talk about in my book.
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion the book was based on Webb’s three-part investigative series published in the San Jose Mercury News and online in August, 1996 (link below).
A subplot of the story and book was that the timing of the CIA drug money for gun money arrangement just happened to coincide with the beginning of the crack epidemic in San Francisco and Los Angeles that spread across the country, mainly in the urban African American community. U.S. Representative Maxine Waters wrote an introduction to the book and led a campaign to bring the story to the attention of the American people and Congress.
Virtually every major news outlet and online encyclopedia in the land, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, L.A. Times and Wikipedia, report that Webb committed suicide. Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head from a .38. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner’s office.
But wait. It stretches credulity to say this. How can someone shoot themselves in the head, twice? Surely the first gunshot would have been enough. This sounds a little like the “magic bullet theory” the Warren Commission sold to the American people about the assassination of JFK.
Believe it? Or not?
More Reading
Searching around the web to see how this story has been handled since the movie came out, I found a bunch of basic information and quite a bit of garbage in the landfill that is the search engine results for news over the internet these days.
There are Wikipedia pages about this people can turn to for cursory information about Webb and the controversy.
The book is still out there, even on Google Books: Dark Alliance the Book.
While the original series is apparently no longer available on the newspaper’s website, it has been archived by others. You can see it here: Dark Alliance the Original Series (PDF).
The original supporting documents are saved here: Supporting Documents on the Internet Archive.
One of the best pieces defending Webb was published in Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept:
MANAGING A NIGHTMARE: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb
While the Huffington Post is certainly not a web publication I would put much stock in, especially now that it is owned by AOL, searches turn up their pro-Webb reporting fairly prominently.
Kill The Messenger: How The Media Destroyed Gary Webb
There are videos you can watch:
News Coverage Smearing Gary Webb
As far as I’m concerned, the takeaway from this cautionary tale for our readers is this.
I don’t know if it was just because they got scooped or just had to defend their friends and sources from Harvard and Yale at the CIA, or felt compelled to defend the U.S. government from such incendiary charges, but it is clear that instead of investigating the actual story of crack profits being used to fund an illegal war in Central America, the establishment “legacy” press in this country went after Gary Webb and tried to destroy him. And they are still trying to destroy his reputation and his big scoop by smearing him in the wake of the movie about him and his story.
Look who the Post has on the story, the guy who tried to break and cover the same story for the Miami Herald, Jeff Leen. I don’t care how many Pulitzer Prizes you win, since everybody who is anybody knows the Pulitzers are about as political as the Academy Awards.
Gary Webb was no journalism hero, despite what ‘Kill the Messenger’ says
The New York Times coverage is no better, and their coverage was largely handled by a guy who admittedly worked for the CIA and the NSA himself, James Adams.
My Related Story
Clearly there is a common thread here. You have a U.S. intelligence agency that is only supposed to operate on foreign soil to defend the interests of the United States government and democracy manipulating the press domestically. For those who may read my book and doubt what I say about being fired in 1992 by an admitted CIA agent, Google K. Lee Lerner and see what you turn up. After he screwed up our excellent political and environmental coverage in Gulf Shores in 1992, he disappeared and somehow got himself admitted to Harvard, and now claims to be living in France “writing about intelligence matters.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
Fake News
On a final note, let me point readers once again to the story that really set off the whole fake news controversy we are living with every day now, a mis-framed piece of clickbait in the Washington Post, the same newspaper that slammed Webb the most. The original piece tried to blame web publications on the left for colluding with Russia during the 2016 campaign, rather than putting the blame where it belonged, on fake news sites like Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News on the right.
There were all kinds of little dinky fake news sites, some of them designed and published right in the Facebook interface. But it’s doubtful they had any significant impact on the outcome of the presidential election. Our analysis of the numbers and insight about the electorate led us to predict that Trump would win anyway.
The source for this story was an alleged anonymous group of spies, described as “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds” called PropOrNot.
Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
At the time this story came out, the Washington Post was publishing puff pieces on Steve Bannon, since he helped Trump in his campaign and ended up chief strategist in the White House and on the National Security Council, at least for a couple of weeks.
It’s official: The chief of Breitbart News is headed to the West Wing
Can anyone inside or outside the White House stop Stephen Bannon?
I happen to have proof of the identity of one of the members of this group, who also worked as an attorney for George Soros. That should make your head spin. I won’t reveal his identity now. I will save that for another day.
But one thing should be clear now in all of this.
The American press is still being manipulated by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The good news is, going forward, we don’t have to totally depend on corporate, chain newspapers and corporate television news outlets for profit for our news anymore. Gary Webb’s expose was probably the first story published on the web that was the beginning of the end for the mass circulation daily newspaper. A few big ones in New York and Washington are still hanging on for dear life, mostly thanks to Trump and the fake news story.
This too shall pass. Once the Trump bump is over, we will get back to building a better web press online — or perish trying.
Whether we survive or not will be up to “the people.”
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Glynn Wilson is a web editor and publisher and long-time newspaper reporter and magazine writer, now author of Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again.
The sequel to this docu-drama is now underway on the US-Mexican border, where the caravans of human collateral damage arrive after decades of violent meddling from afar tear Central American nations apart. And a sub-plot unfolds in DC, where Oliver North, who orchestrated much of the Central American horrors, rose through the swamp to hold various key positions and arrive now as head of the NRA, which was key to funneling Russian money and tampering into the 2016 election, which installed Trump in the White House, which allowed him to cage and gas the Central American children arriving at the border–neatly completing the hideous circle.