


   
      October 21, 1996
      
     
Tale of CIA and Drugs Has Life of Its Own

     
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     [LINK] [LINK] Related Articles
     
     Pivotal Figures of Newspaper Cocaine Series May Be Bit Players
     
     Inquiry Ordered Into Reports of Contra Cocaine Sales in U.S. (Sept
     21)
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      By TIM GOLDEN
      
     
     
     
     
     C OMPTON, Calif. -- Over the years that Beverly Carr has lived in
     south-central Los Angeles, she has seen crack cocaine rage through
     her neighborhood like a violent storm, littering the streets with
     young bodies, battering schools and homes, tearing families from
     their hinges.
     
     But it was only after a series of articles in The San Jose Mercury
     News that Mrs. Carr found what she took to be proof of an unseen
     force behind the devastation. That the force was said to be the U.S.
     government surprised her not at all. That the plot supposedly
     involved associates of the CIA selling drugs in black neighborhoods
     to finance an anti-Communist crusade in Central America made perfect
     sense.
     
     "Everybody my age or older has always known that something like this
     was going on," the 48-year-old caterer said. "Who down here in Watts
     or Compton has planes or boats to get these drugs up here? They're
     targeting the young black men. It's just ruining a whole
     generation."
     
     Mrs. Carr came upon the story in a conventional way: a local
     newspaper reprinted the series that The Mercury News published two
     months ago. But, propelled by newer technology, the San Jose paper's
     tantalizing assertion of a possible CIA role in the spread of crack
     through America's inner cities has now traveled much farther,
     reaching millions of people over the Internet, talk radio and cable
     television, setting off a flurry of federal investigation and
     confirming the suspicions of many, African-Americans in particular,
     about a government role in the drug trade.
     
     The story's trajectory through the body politic is itself a
     remarkable tale. While the paper's assertions might owe their widest
     dissemination to the World Wide Web, they owe much of their power to
     the longstanding, insular network of newspapers, radio stations and
     word of mouth that informs and connects blacks in America. By its
     disparate impact, the story has also underscored both the profound
     mistrust of government that history has engendered among many blacks
     and the difficulty that many whites have in understanding their
     views.
     
     "What makes it so believable to me is that there is just abounding
     circumstantial evidence," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of many
     black political leaders who have publicly lent credence to the
     account in The Mercury News. "There is the weight of a lot of
     experiences with our government operating in adverse or
     conspiratorial ways against black people. The context is what's
     driving the story."
     
     The force of the Mercury News account, however, appears to have
     relatively little to do with the quality of the evidence that it
     marshals to its case.
     
     The series did raise some new questions about the government's
     treatment of a pair of mid-level Nicaraguan drug traffickers in
     California who supported the Contra rebels in their fight against
     the Sandinista government that ruled their country from 1979 to
     1990. But court documents, past investigations and interviews with
     more than two dozen current and former rebels, CIA officials and
     narcotics agents, as well as other law-enforcement officials and
     experts on the drug trade, all indicate that there is scant proof to
     support the paper's contention that Nicaraguan rebel officials
     linked to the CIA played a central role in spreading crack through
     Los Angeles and other cities.
     
     One of the traffickers, Oscar Danilo Blandon, has said he sent the
     rebels a pickup truck and some supplies. The other, Juan Norwin
     Meneses Canterero, appears to have given them some money and may
     have been involved in shipping them weapons on at least one
     occasion, government officials with access to intelligence reports
     on his activities said.
     
     B ut neither of the two ever held an official position in any of the
     Nicaraguan groups, many former Contra and U.S. government officials
     insist. Neither of them, government officials say, worked for or had
     any discernable, direct contact with agents of the CIA.
     
     Nor is there any proof of a connection between the two Nicaraguans'
     support for the rebels fighting in Central America and the money
     that was generated during the long trafficking relationship that
     Blandon maintained with perhaps the most infamous crack merchant in
     Los Angeles, Ricky Donnell Ross, a 36-year-old Texas native
     convicted in San Diego on federal narcotics charges.
     
     In a sentencing memorandum filed last month, the assistant U.S.
     attorney who prosecuted Ross, L.J. O'Neale, suggested that if there
     was a conspiracy afoot to do something other than sell drugs, it
     involved the cooperative relationship between the Mercury News
     reporter who wrote the series, Gary Webb, and Ross' lawyer, Alan
     Fenster.
     
     Webb has acknowledged that he suggested questions to the defense for
     Blandon, a paid informer for the Drug Enforcement Administration who
     was the star witness against Ross, so that his articles might draw
     on the Nicaraguan's testimony about his ties to the Contras. Based
     on Blandon's statements, Fenster then centered his defense in part
     on the notion that his client was the victim of a CIA plot to flood
     the black community with cocaine.
     
     "These articles uncritically swallow the Ross version of events
     hook, line and sinker, often ignoring or wrenching out of context
     the evidence that proves Ross wrong," O'Neale argued. "Ross then
     waves the articles aloft as 'proof' that he was right."
     
     Webb defended his contacts with Fenster in an unusual dissection of
     his reporting that was printed by his own newspaper last Sunday, and
     the paper's executive editor, Jerry Ceppos, echoed the defense. "I
     may be blind, but I believe it was legitimate and fair and
     absolutely ethical," Ceppos said in a telephone interview.
     
     The reporter's cooperation with the defense lawyer was only one of
     many aspects of the Mercury News series that has come under attack
     by media analysts and journalists. For the most part, the critics
     have accused the paper of taking a good, newsworthy story about the
     relationship between a right-wing Nicaraguan cocaine broker and a
     legendary Los Angeles drug dealer and inflating it, without much
     substantiation, into an account that strongly suggests that the CIA
     had a significant, if indirect, role in creating the crack epidemic.
     
     
     
     
     But the series owes its impact to more than the shocking "alliance"
     it describes between Nicaraguan rebel officials and gang members
     from south-central. The newspaper, which closely covers the
     information-technology industry that is centered in the area and
     prides itself on maintaining one of the newspaper world's most
     sophisticated Web sites, went to unprecedented lengths to repackage
     the series for the Internet.
     
     By the time the first installment of the series was hitting
     doorsteps in San Jose, 44 miles southeast of San Francisco, on Aug.
     18, the paper's Internet site, the Mercury Center, was offering
     ancillary material that included transcripts of relevant court
     records, photographs of the protagonists, diagrams, biographies and
     even audio recordings of trial testimony -- all a mouse click away
     from the main text. Even earlier, the on-line service had begun
     announcing the series in messages to popular Internet news groups
     focused on subjects like drugs, the CIA and conspiracy theories.
     
     For a regional newspaper with an audited daily circulation last year
     of less than 300,000, the Net offered a readership it could only
     have imagined a few years ago. Almost immediately, the newspaper's
     electronic site began receiving as many as 860,000 "hits" a day,
     well above the roughly 600,000 to 700,000 it had been getting
     before, said Bob Ryan, the director of the paper's on-line service.
     
     As public awareness of the series grew, the paper began promoting it
     more aggressively. For readers wanting more, the Mercury Center
     carried a separate Gary Webb page, with a daily update of the
     reporter's appearances on a slew of radio and television programs.
     
     Interest in the series was also fueled by more traditional means.
     
     Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from the San Francisco Bay area who
     had assailed the Reagan administration 10 years ago over another
     local newspaper's reports on the Contra connections of Meneses,
     wrote the director of central intelligence, John Deutch, on Aug. 29
     to demand an explanation of the CIA's possible involvement in the
     matter.
     
     No sooner had Senator Boxer's letter made headlines than the state's
     other senator, Dianne Feinstein, also a Democrat, followed with a
     letter to Attorney General Janet Reno. Maxine Waters, a Democratic
     congresswoman who represents part of south-central Los Angeles,
     fired off her own letters to Deutch, Ms. Reno and the chairman of
     the House Judiciary Committee, Rep.Henry Hyde of Illinois.
     Investigations were begun by the CIA, the Justice Department and the
     House Intelligence Committee.
     
     Of the many politicians who have voiced their outrage over the CIA's
     purported role in the drug trade, none have been more vigorous than
     Representative Waters, who has held news conferences, given
     speeches, churned out handbills and led a demonstration over the
     reports. "The impact and the implications of the
     Meneses/Blandon/Ross/Contra/CIA crack cocaine connection cannot be
     understated," the congresswoman wrote to Deutch.
     
     T he Mercury News series resounded just as powerfully among other
     members of the Congressional Black Caucus and among many
     African-Americans throughout the country.
     
     Curtis Harris, a young investment banker on Wall Street and a
     graduate of West Point, learned of the reports from BOBC, or
     Black-on-Black Communications, an on-line newsletter that describes
     itself as a source of "useful information by blacks for blacks."
     
     "I immediately wanted to know more," recalled Harris, who took off
     on the Net and kept going until he landed at the Mercury Center.
     
     Jon Katz, the media critic for HotWired, the electronic sister of
     Wired magazine, said the Mercury News series had ricocheted around
     the hundreds of mostly small, black-oriented newsgroups on the Web,
     not only reaching students, professionals and others with access to
     the Internet, but also facilitating quick delivery of the series to
     black newspapers, radio stations and community groups.
     
     "Just as the gulf war established cable news as a medium, I think
     this story will dramatically raise African-American consciousness of
     the digital culture, which is now an overwhelmingly white medium,"
     Katz said.
     
     On WBAI Radio in New York, announcers read excerpts of the stories
     on the air each night for weeks after they were printed. At Styles,
     a New York City hair salon catering to an African-American and
     Hispanic clientele, a printout of the series sits in the magazine
     rack, alongside copies Ebony and Essence magazines.
     
     "The established press ignored the story until they found out that
     black folks weren't going to just let this one be swept under the
     rug," said Don Middleton, 33, a jazz musician in Washington who read
     the series on the Internet. "The white press is pointing fingers at
     the black community, saying we're paranoid and quick to see
     conspiracy at every turn of the corner. Where have they been for the
     last 30 years? Can I just mention the Tuskegee syphilis study,
     Cointelpro, Watergate, Iran-Contra. Hello, America?"
     
     Black intellectuals said that if African-Americans were quicker than
     whites to believe in the possibility of CIA involvement in the
     spread of crack, it was largely a product of bitter history, like
     the episodes touched on by Middleton: a scientific study in which
     652 black men suffering from syphilis went untreated; secret
     campaigns of the 1960s and early 70s by the FBI that sought to spy
     on and discredit the Black Panther movement, Martin Luther King Jr.
     and other black leaders; the FBI sting operation that captured Mayor
     Marion Barry of Washington smoking crack in a hotel room.
     
     The country's biggest newspapers, to the extent that they have
     covered the story, have for the most part done so skeptically.
     Earlier this month, The Washington Post devoted most of two pages to
     a repudiation of the claims by The Mercury News. On Sunday, The Los
     Angeles Times ran the first of three articles on the subject, saying
     that the Nicaraguan traffickers were not instrumental in starting
     the crack epidemic. But the San Jose stories nonetheless found
     fertile ground.
     
     In 1990, long before any major media had connected crack and the
     CIA, a telephone poll conducted for The New York Times and WCBS-TV
     found that a quarter of the 1,047 black New Yorkers surveyed
     believed that the government "deliberately makes sure that drugs are
     easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black
     people." Another third of those polled said that might possibly be
     true.
     
     
     
     Similarly, the poll showed that blacks were more likely than whites
     to believe that the AIDS virus was created to infect black people,
     and that the government persecutes black elected officials.
     
     "This plays into a longstanding feeling that blacks have that the
     government is up to no good with regard to them," Alvin Poussaint, a
     clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, said
     of the Mercury News reports. "I think this would have caught on even
     if you didn't have an Internet."
     
     Poussaint said the suspicions were also fed by contemporary
     evidence. Among other recent events, he cited the CIA's involvement
     with the former Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega, the
     revelations of the Iran-Contra scandal, and the frequent disparities
     in sentencing between whites who deal in powdered cocaine and blacks
     who sell crack.
     
     Yet as the uproar over the Mercury News series has continued, even
     the newspaper has seemed to have second thoughts.
     
     "Were there things I would have done differently in retrospect?"
     Ceppos, the paper's chief editor, asked. "Yes. The principal thing I
     would have is one paragraph very high saying what we didn't find. We
     got to the door of the CIA. We did not get inside the CIA."
     
     
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     Other Places of Interest on the Web
     
     Dark Alliance: San Jose Mercury News series
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