Views » December 20, 2004

Gary Webb, Word Warrior

By Salim Muwakkil

In September 1998, Esquire ran an article chronicling the sad saga of investigative journalist Gary Webb, who had uncovered a story of government skullduggery that proved to be too vast for his own good. Webb’s big story was a three-part series arguing that the CIA was complicit with right-wing Nicaraguan Contras as they sold the cocaine that accelerated the crack-cocaine epidemic. One of the subheadlines of the Esquire article was “A Good Man Destroyed.”

Six years later, on December 10, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb died by a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.

Webb’s controversial series, which appeared in the San Jose Mercury News during August 1996, detailed how the Contras sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs and used the profits to finance their terrorist campaign against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. He provided a well-researched and powerfully written chronicle of how anti-communist fervor got our government involved in helping to propagate one of the most damaging drug epidemics in modern history.

The black community was particularly outraged by the information contained in Webb’s stories, which were widely circulated on the Internet. The crack-cocaine epidemic had spread across black America, wreaking devastation in its wake. Charges that both the FBI and CIA were out to get blacks have long circulated within the African-American community, and the Mercury News series alleging CIA involvement in this deadly epidemic resonated strongly.

Ever since a congressional investigation revealed the scope of the government’s COINTELPRO program, which was intended to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” black leaders across the political spectrum, black activist organizations have cast a wary eye toward federal intelligence agencies. And, in fact, some radical groups long had charged the government was proliferating drugs as a form of “chemical warfare,” to demobilize black activism. Webb’s series seemed to corroborate all of this and he was hailed as a hero by many in the black community. Webb told me that such adulation made him very uncomfortable.

Although some of the information he uncovered had been disclosed by Robert Parry and Brian Barger in a number of 1985 AP stories and in previous congressional probes, Webb’s series connected the dots in a way that was easily understandable. An energized movement of African-American black activists demanded the CIA come clean and insisted that their representatives initiate congressional investigations of Webb’s charges.

These strident demands for probes provoked a governmental counterattack. CIA director John Deutsch was even dispatched to South-Central Los Angeles to patch up the agency’s PR problem in the black community. The corporate media also began to weigh in with their skeptical accounts of Webb’s series.

The Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times all ganged up on Webb and forced his Mercury Times editor to withdraw support for the series in a front-page editorial. The editor then changed Webb’s status from investigative reporter and reassigned him to a distant bureau, miles away from his family. Webb quit the paper.

Much of the elite media’s zeal to debunk Webb was fueled by the need to justify their own journalistic malfeasance. Contra-cocaine connection stories were ignored by the mainstream news shops and even when Sen. John Kerry’s committee released a 1989 report condemning CIA-Contra-cocaine connections, the corporate media took a pass.

That’s not to say that Webb’s series was entirely without fault. It turned out he overestimated the impact of the Contras’ cocaine dealing on the crack epidemic and may have been a little loose with the term CIA agent. But his major point of CIA collusion with Contra drug dealers remained unblunted.

In fact, the CIA’s own Inspector General’s office published its investigation of the charges in a 1998 report that admitted the agency “continued to work with about two dozen Nicaraguan rebels and their supporters during the 1980s, despite allegations they were trafficking in drugs.” This report was prompted by Webb’s “Dark Alliance” newspaper series. Not surprisingly, this 1998 report was given short shrift in the corporate media.

Webb later wrote a book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, published in 1998 by Seven Stories Press and excerpted in In These Times, that consolidated much of his reportage and added important tidbits. The appearance of this book in tandem with the CIA Inspector General’s report was well timed; it was Webb’s dogged journalism that forced the CIA to investigate its own crimes, however feebly.

Were it not for this courageous word warrior, cocaine-peddling Contras would still be publicly dismissed as just another conspiracy theory purveyed by paranoids. Gary Webb, many thanks.

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 46% off the newsstand price!
• Or win a subscription to In These Times by taking this short survey!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

  What is 6 - 3?  

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  Salim, Why no mention of the allegations that Mr. Webb commited suicide with TWO .38 slugs delivered by a revolver? Just curious.  Ed Davis

  Posted by Dr.D on Dec 20, 2004 at 5:23 PM

  There is probably no mention of the TWO slugs because there is no reason to make mention other to state the fact that there WERE two. There is no “conspiracy” regarding Gary’s death please do not attempt to stir up a non existent controversy. Gary took his life by his own hand. Any allegations of death other than suicide citing some conspiracy should be halted.

  I was honored to work with Gary Webb at the California State Legislature. He was my friend and I shall miss him very much. Please do not dishonor his memory with talks of a conspiracy regarding his death. Please allow Gary to rest in the peace he desired. This was his choice. HIS choice.

  It’s too bad the attention that Gary’s death received was not given when he was alive.

  Posted by Charles Pattillo on Dec 20, 2004 at 10:21 PM

  Uh . .  . am I missing something here?  Unless one misses very badly with the first shot, how is it possible to fire twice in commiting suicide?

  Posted by Scott Semans on Dec 21, 2004 at 2:29 PM

  Mr. Pattillo, Please accept my condolences to you on the death of your friend, Mr. Webb. I also have lost friends through violent means( one of them was a suicide), and I believe that I can empathize with your current feelings. But Sir, if the circumstances surrounding this tragedy are true, shouldn’t a thorough investigation ensue? A terrible crime may have been committed. Ed Davis.

  Posted by Dr.D on Dec 21, 2004 at 4:50 PM

  Dear Mr. Muwakkil—Please accept my condolences.

  This obituary indeed suggests that the actions of the government in general and the CIA in general after the publication of Webb’s series of articles were tantamount to a cover-up. Do you think this is the case? Certainly were the CIA involved in drug trafficking—especially to American people—they would go great lengths to cover up any exposure; yet were the story unreliable, there would be the same denials, so how can we know for sure? On the other hand, the US government did conduct the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on unwitting black men suffering from syphilis well into the 1970s, so the introduction of crack cocaine to Los Angeles gangs in the 1980s is at least morally consistent with previous actions of the US government, particularly through its (ironically named) “intelligence” community.

  I think it is vital to know the truth because it appears to me that the forty-year Colombian Civil War is really a war between competing drug dealers in an incredibly high-stakes market. All politics in Colombia on the part of the FARC, the ELN, the AUC, and the Colombian and American governments are rhetorical: this war is not political but economic. Meanwhile the civilian toll is equal to one World Trade Center disaster per year in a country one-sixth the size of the US. Again, there is a precedent: if you read Alfred McCoy’s _The Politics of Heroin; CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade_ one learns a great deal about the motivation of the heroin trade in the American Vietnam war.

  —Mason West

  Posted by Mason West on Dec 22, 2004 at 12:47 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 15 posts.

Also featured Turning Strangers into Political Friends
American Christmas Card 2004
How Mercury-Tainted Tuna Damages Fetal Brains

Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!

Also by Salim Muwakkil

• Tavis Smiley and Al Sharpton Face Off
  Criticizing President Barack Obama is a hard sell in the black community. Even with the Great Recession wreaking havoc… morePosted on April 27, 2010
• On Air With Black America
  Chicago's only black-owned talk radio station gives voice to a complex people still struggling to be heard. morePosted on February 10, 2010
• Assassinated by the State
  The federally sanctioned murder of a Black Panther. morePosted on November 25, 2009
• The ‘Post-Racial’ President
  Barack Obama navigates a world where color still matters. morePosted on August 24, 2009
• Government-Assisted Terrorists
  On May 20, federal and New York City authorities arrested four men on charges of plotting domestic terrorist attacks.… morePosted on June 16, 2009