(1)
David Corn, Blond Ghost: The Shackley and the CIA's Crusades
(1994)
Shackley
kept a tight rein on the PM squad. He demanded to be informed of
all the details of a mission. He ordered the station's cowboys to
submit detailed operational plans. Case officers dreaded the time
when they had to brief Shackley on a proposed action. Rocky Farnsworth,
chief of covert operations, resented the intrusions of Shackley,
who had no experience in this field. After a short time of wrangling
with Shackley over specifics of various missions, Farnsworth dropped
an ultimatum: if you don't quit interfering, I'm out of here. Shackley
responded, you're out now. He replaced Farnsworth with Dave Morales,
a large, mean-talking veteran of the CIA's coup in Guatemala. Morales
was devoutly loyal to Shackley. "He would do anything, even
work with the Mafia," Tom Clines recalled. Morales hated communists,
and years later bragged to an Agency colleague how he had once in
South America parachuted out of an airplane with men he suspected
of being communists. Before they all leaped, the story went, Morales
sabotaged the parachute packs of the Reds. He had the pleasure of
waving good-bye to them, as they plummeted to death.
A nearly
impossible job for Shackley was counterintelligence (CI). There
were hundreds of Castro agents milling about Miami. "The exile
community was penetrated to the fullest degree," said Al Tarabochia,
an officer in the Dade County sheriffs intelligence unit. Shackley
was desperate to improve CI. He introduced tougher psychological
and polygraph tests for potential agents. He demanded that the reports
of agents be double-checked. If an agent said he visited a certain
town during an infiltration, Shackley wanted someone to be able
to tell him that the agent showed up there. No longer were weapons
and supplies personally delivered to a resistance group on the island.
If JMWAVE had to ferry arms to Cuba, one of Grayston Lynch's team
went in, cached the munitions and left. Then the station notified
the recipients where they could find the materiel. This lessened
the threat of ambush. Shackley ordered station case officers not
to use assets affiliated with the exile groups. As much as possible,
he wanted unilateral agents, people who answered only to the Agency.
Despite all these efforts, Havana remained well aware of JMWAVE
and its activities.
"Always be forward-leaning" - that was a Shackley pet
phrase.
(2)
David
Corn, Dark
Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion,
Washington Post (8th August, 1998)
In the
1980s, the CIA-backed contra rebels in Central America hobnobbed
with drug-dealers, and the Agency and the Reagan administration,
obsessed with ousting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua,
looked the other way. This is absolutely undeniable. In this past
March, Frederick Hitz, then the inspector general of the CIA, testified
publicly to Congress that the CIA did not "cut off relationships
with individuals supporting the contra program who (were) alleged
to have engaged in drug trafficking." Yet his startling admission
received practically no notice from official Washington and the
national media, which instead were consumed with details (real and
imagined) of L'Affaire Monica.
But when
the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 ran a three-part series exposing
links between contra associates and the Los Angeles crack trade
in the 1980s, the major media did pay attention; they assaulted
the articles written by reporter Gary Webb. The New York Times,
The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times each ran pieces critical
of Webb's work. The Webb stories were hard to ignore, for they had
ignited a firestorm. On black talk radio, hosts and callers decried
a supposed conspiracy in which the CIA midwifed the birth of the
crack industry. On Capital Hill, members of the Congressional Black
Caucus called for investigation. The Mercury News web site, on which
the series had been posted, received millions of hits. Webb had
begat a national media event.
It had all
begun in the summer of 1995, when Webb received a tip from the girlfriend
of a drug dealer. Her honey was being tried, and a chief government
witness against him was Danilo Blandon, a Nicaraguan who managed
his own cocaine ring in California. In court proceedings, Blandon
had claimed he had gotten into the coke business to raise money
for the contras. Webb started investigating. He soon had evidence
that Blandon and his partner Norwin Meneses - a prominent contra
supporter in California with an extensive criminal past in Nicaragua
- had supplied cocaine to "Freeway" Ricky Ross, a pioneering
crack kingpin.
The lead
paragraph in the Webb series was a shocker: A Bay Area drug ring
had "funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American
guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency."
Webb noted that the contras were in league with "Uzi-toting
'gangstas' of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles" and that
the drug dealers "met with CIA agents" while raising money
for the contras via drug sales. The articles implied that Blandon
was directly wired to the CIA and that Blandon and Meneses had been
protected from prosecution because of their usefulness to the CIA.
Webb had
a helluva story. But he botched parts of it. He produced little
evidence that the Blandon-Meneses ring raised "millions"
for the contras or that Blandon was linked to Langley. Consequently,
newspapers that had neglected the contra-drug story in the 1980s
now devoted much space to debunking Webb. Eventually, the editor
of the Mercury News ran a column widely seen as a retraction, and
Webb left the paper.
But Webb
had committed a highly useful act. He had kicked open an old trunk
and discovered it full of worms - real worms, ugly and nasty. He
kept on investigating and produced a book that reflects the positives
and negatives of the original series. In Dark Alliance, he fleshes
out the drug operations of Blandon and Meneses, and he provides
more evidence of their close association to the contras. (Meneses,
for example, paid for early contra support events in California.)
Webb also places this ring alongside other well-substantiated examples
of contra-drug connections: a Honduran general convicted of selling
cocaine to finance a murder plot who was supported by Oliver North
and other Reagan officials; drug dealers winning U.S. government
contracts to supply the contras; the National Security Council plotting
with Manuel Noriega, the drugged-up strongman of Panama; the CIA
interfering with a major drug prosecution that could reveal contra
drug-dealing and embarrass the agency.
Webb reminds
us that the Reagan-approved contra program attracted lowlifes and
thugs the way manure draws flies. He guides the reader through a
netherworld of dope-dealers, gunrunners, and freelance security
consultants, which on occasion overlapped with the U.S. government.
He entertainingly details the honor, dishonor and deals among thieves.
(Sometimes the book reads like a hard-to-follow Russian novel, with
a large cast of characters in a series of intricate episodes.) All
in all, it's a disgraceful picture - one that should permanently
taint the happy-face hues of the Reagan years.
Again Webb
has trouble chasing the money and fails to thoroughly document how
much dirty cash Blandon and Meneses steered to the contras. Was
it as little as $80,000 or so, as CIA investigators claim Blandon
told them? Or was it millions that were instrumental to the survival
of the contras, as Webb implies but does not prove? Was Blandon's
drug business originally set up as a cash-for-contras enterprise,
as Webb depicts it? That's what Blandon has asserted. But there
is evidence, as Webb notes, that Blandon may have been a drug entrepreneur
years before he hooked up with Meneses. If so, that would cast doubt
on his I-did-it-for-the-contras tale and make that claim sound more
like an after-the-fact justification.
There are
other problems with Webb's account. His threshold of proof is on
the low side. In one instance, he passes on - seemingly with a straight
face - the allegations of a drug dealer who claimed Vice President
George Bush met with (and posed for a photo with) Colombian dealers
to craft an agreement under which the traffickers could smuggle
coke into America if they supplied weapons to the contras. And Webb
is indiscriminating in his use of the term "CIA agent,"
making it appear as if Blandon and Meneses were dealing with James
Bond-like officials of the CIA, when actually their contacts were
Nicaraguan contras on the Agency payroll.
This may
seem like hairsplitting. But it's important when evaluating the
CIA's culpability. Webb demonstrates that the Agency collaborated
with contras and contra supporters suspected of smuggling narcotics.
But were Blandon and Meneses in cahoots with the Agency? The evidence
only shows they were part of a dark community with which the CIA
was merrily doing business. Another fuzzy point in the story is
how Blandon and Meneses both ended up on the government payroll
as snitches. Webb strongly hints this was due to their contra work.
But, again,
the picture is too murky to come to any firm conclusions other than
there was something funny about the government's relationship to
this pair.
The book
has flaws, but Webb deserves credit for pursuing an important piece
of recent history and forcing the CIA and the Justice Department
to investigate the contra-drug connection. Alas, the Justice Department
has been sitting on its report for months. The CIA released one
volume that maintained the Agency was not connected to Blandon and
Meneses. But the report confirmed there had been a symbiotic relationship
between drug dealers and the contras and that the CIA had ignored
that. A second volume - one with a broader view of the contra-drug
mess - is now being suppressed by the Agency.
With this
book, Webb advances his newspaper series and supplies more muck
to make a decent citizen cringe. While exploring this covert territory,
Webb took a few wrong turns. But he succeeded in pushing a sleazy
piece of the CIA's past into public light. The gang at Langley is
still resisting coming clean, and these unholy alliances remain
in the dark.
(3)
David Corn, Gary
Webb is Dead, The Nation (14th
December, 2004)
He was
the journalist who wrote a famous - or infamous - 1996 series for
the San Jose Mercury News that maintained a CIA-supported drug ring
based in Los Angeles had triggered the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
On Friday, the 49-year-old Webb, who won a Pulitzer Prize for other
work, apparently shot himself. His "Dark Alliances" articles
spurred outrage and controversy. Leaders of the African-American
community demanded investigations. Mainstream newspapers - including
The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times
- questioned his findings. And nearly a year after the pieces appeared,
the Mercury News published a criticism of the series; Webb was demoted
and soon left the newspaper. Two years later, he published a book
based on the series.
Webb's tale
is a sad one. He was on to something but botched part of how he
handled it. He then was blasted and ostracized. He was wrong on
some important details but he was, in a way, closer to the truth
than many of his establishment media critics who neglected the story
of the real CIA-contra-cocaine connection. In 1998, a CIA inspector
general's report acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with
suspected drugrunners while supporting the contras. A Senator named
John Kerry had investigated these links years earlier, and the media
had mostly ignored his findings. After Webb published his articles,
the media spent more time crushing Webb than pursuing the full story.
It is only because of Webb's work - as flawed as it was - that the
CIA IG inquiry happened. So, then, it is only because of Webb that
US citizens have confirmation from the CIA that it partnered up
with suspected drug traffickers in the just-say-no years and that
the Reagan Administration, consumed with a desire to overthrow the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua, allied itself with drug thugs.
As the news
of Webb's death circulated across the Internet, some of his fans
took the opportunity to demand that I issue a posthumous apology
to him. Why? Because I had been critical of his series and book.
But my criticism was different from that of the mainstream press.
I maintained he had overstated the case and had not proven his more
cinematic allegations. But I also credited him for forcing the issue
and prodding the CIA to come clean. No one at the Times (New York
or Los Angeles) or the Post managed to do that. And though there
were problems with Webb's work, it is a pity that he was so brutally
hounded.
His death
is a dark end to a dark story.
