See also tran­scripts from Gary Webb’s orig­i­nal San Jose Mer­cury News series:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

Date: Jan­u­ary 16, 1999
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Loca­tion: First United Methodist Church, 1376 Olive St., Eugene, Oregon

Gary Webb: I look like an idiot up here with all these mikes, the CIA agents are prob­a­bly behind one or the other... [laugh­ter from the audi­ence]. It’s really nice to be in Eugene — I’ve been in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin talk­ing about this, I’ve been in Berke­ley, I’ve been in Santa Mon­ica, and these are sort of like islands of san­ity in this world today, so it’s great to be on one of those islands.

One of the things that is weird about this whole thing, though, is that I’ve been a daily news reporter for about twenty years, and I’ve done prob­a­bly a thou­sand inter­views with peo­ple, and the strangest thing is being on the other side of the table now and hav­ing reporters ask me ques­tions. One of them asked me about a week ago — I was on a radio show — and the host asked me, “Why did you get into news­pa­per report­ing, of all the media? Why did you pick news­pa­pers?” And I really had to admit that I was stumped. Because I thought about it — I’d been doing news­pa­per report­ing since I was four­teen or fif­teen years old — and I really didn’t have an answer.

So I went back to my clip books — you know, most reporters keep all their old clips — and I started dig­ging around try­ing to fig­ure out if there was one story that I had writ­ten that had really tipped the bal­ance. And I found it. And I wanted to tell you this story, because it sort of fits into the theme that we’re going to talk about tonight.

I think I was fif­teen, I was work­ing for my high school paper, and I was writ­ing edi­to­ri­als. This sounds silly now that I think about it, but I had writ­ten an edi­to­r­ial against the drill team that we had for the high school games, for the foot­ball games. This was ’71 or ’72, at the height of the protests against the Viet­nam War, and I was in school then in sub­ur­ban Indi­anapo­lis — Dan Quayle coun­try. So, you get the idea of the fla­vor of the school sys­tem. They thought it was a cool idea to dress women up in mil­i­tary uni­forms and send them out there to twirl rifles and bat­tle flags at half­time. And I thought this was sort of out­ra­geous, and I wrote an edi­to­r­ial say­ing I thought it was one of the sil­li­est things I’d ever seen. And my news­pa­per advi­sor called me the next day and said, “Gosh, that edi­to­r­ial you wrote has really prompted a response.” And I said, “Great, that’s the idea, isn’t it?” And she said, “Well, it’s not so great, they want you to apol­o­gize for it.” [Laugh­ter from the audience.]

I said, “Apol­o­gize for what?” And she said, “Well, the girls were very offended.” And I said, “Well, I’m not apol­o­giz­ing because they don’t want my opin­ion. You’ll have to come up with a bet­ter rea­son than that.” And they said, “Well, if you don’t apol­o­gize, we’re not going to let you in Quill & Scroll,” which is the high school jour­nal­ism soci­ety. And I said, “Well, I don’t want to be in that orga­ni­za­tion if I have to apol­o­gize to get into it.” [More laugh­ter from the audi­ence, scat­tered applause.]

They were sort of pow­er­less at that point, and they said, “Look, why don’t you just come down and the cheer­lead­ers are going to come in, and they want to talk to you and tell you what they think,” and I said okay. So I went down to the news­pa­per office, and there were about fif­teen of them sit­ting around this table, and they all went around one by one telling me what a scum­bag I was, and what a ter­ri­ble guy I was, and how I’d ruined their dates, ruined their com­plex­ions, and all sorts of things... [Laugh­ter and groans from the audi­ence.] ...and at that moment, I decided, “Man, this is what I want to do for a liv­ing.” [Roar of laugh­ter from the audi­ence.] And I wish I could say that it was because I was infused with this sense of the First Amend­ment, and think­ing great thoughts about John Peter Zenger and I.F. Stone... but what I was really think­ing was, “Man, this is a great way to meet women!” [More laughter.]

And that’s a true story, but the rea­son I tell you that is because it’s often those kinds of weird moti­va­tions and unthink­ing con­se­quences that lead us to do things, that lead us to events that we have absolutely no con­cept how they’re going to turn out. Lit­tle did I know that twenty-five years later, I’d be writ­ing a story about the CIA’s wrong­do­ings because I wanted to meet women by writ­ing edi­to­ri­als about cheerleaders.

But that’s really the way life and that’s really the way his­tory works a lot of times. You know, when you think back on your own lives, from the van­tage point of time, you can see it. I mean, think back to the deci­sions you’ve made in your life­times that brought you to where you are tonight, think about how close you came to never meet­ing your wife or your hus­band, how eas­ily you could have been doing some­thing else for a liv­ing if it hadn’t been for a deci­sion that you made or some­one made that you had absolutely no con­trol over. And it’s really kind of scary when you think about how capri­cious life is some­times. That’s a theme I try to bring to my book, Dark Alliance, which was about the crack cocaine explo­sion in the 1980s.

So for the record, let me just say this right now. I do not believe — and I have never believed — that the crack cocaine explo­sion was a con­scious CIA con­spir­acy, or anybody’s con­spir­acy, to dec­i­mate black Amer­ica. I’ve never believed that South Cen­tral Los Ange­les was tar­geted by the U.S. gov­ern­ment to become the crack capi­tol of the world. But that isn’t to say that the CIA’s hands or the U.S. government’s hands are clean in this mat­ter. Actu­ally, far from it. After spend­ing three years of my life look­ing into this, I am more con­vinced than ever that the U.S. government’s respon­si­bil­ity for the drug prob­lems in South Cen­tral Los Ange­les and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.

But it’s impor­tant to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between malign intent and gross neg­li­gence. And that’s an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion, because it’s what makes pre­med­i­tated mur­der dif­fer­ent from manslaugh­ter. That said, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got a body on the floor, and that’s what I want to talk about tonight, the body.

Many years ago, there was a great series on PBS — I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remem­ber this — it was called Con­nec­tions. And it was by a British his­to­rian named James Burke. If you don’t remem­ber it, it was a mar­velous show, very influ­en­tial on me. And he would take a seem­ingly incon­se­quen­tial event in his­tory, and fol­low it through the ages to see what it spawned as a result. The one show I remem­ber the most clearly was the one he did on how the scarcity of fire­wood in thirteenth-century Europe led to the devel­op­ment of the steam engine. And you would think, “Well, these things aren’t con­nected at all,” and he would show very con­vinc­ingly that they were.
/>In the first chap­ter of the book on which the series is based, Burke wrote that “His­tory is not, as we are so often led to believe, a mat­ter of great men and lonely geniuses point­ing the way to the future from their ivory tow­ers. At some point, every mem­ber of soci­ety is involved in that process by which inno­va­tion and change come about. The key to why things change is the key to everything.”

What I’ve attempted to demon­strate in my book was how the col­lapse of a bru­tal, pro-American dic­ta­tor­ship in Latin Amer­ica, com­bined with a deci­sion by cor­rupt CIA agents to raise money for a resis­tance move­ment by any means nec­es­sary, led to he for­ma­tion of the nation’s first major crack mar­ket in South Cen­tral Los Ange­les, which led to the arm­ing and the empow­er­ment of LA’s street gangs, which led to the spread of crack to black neigh­bor­hoods across the coun­try, and to the pas­sage of racially dis­crim­i­na­tory sen­tenc­ing laws that are lock­ing up thou­sands of young black men today behind bars for most of their lives.

But it’s not so much a con­spir­acy as a chain reac­tion. And that’s what my whole book is about, this chain reac­tion. So let me explain the links in this chain a lit­tle better.

The first link is this fel­low Anas­ta­sio Somoza, who was an American-educated tyrant, one of our bud­dies nat­u­rally, and his fam­ily ruled Nicaragua for forty years — thanks to the Nicaraguan National Guard, which we sup­plied, armed, and funded, because we thought they were, you know, anti-communists.

Well, in 1979, the peo­ple of Nicaragua got tired of liv­ing under this dic­ta­tor­ship, and they rose up and over­threw it. And a lot of Somoza’s friends and rel­a­tives and busi­ness part­ners came to the United States, because we had been their allies all these years, includ­ing two men whose fam­i­lies had been very close to the dic­ta­tor­ship. And these two guys are sort of two of the three main char­ac­ters in my book — a fel­low named Danilo Blandón, and a fel­low named Nor­win Meneses.

They came to the United States in 1979, along with a flood of other Nicaraguan immi­grants, most of them middle-class peo­ple, most of them for­mer bankers, for­mer insur­ance sales­men — sort of a cap­i­tal­ist exo­dus from Nicaragua. And they got involved when they got here, and they decided they were going to take the coun­try back, they didn’t like the fact that they’d been forced out of their coun­try. So they formed these resis­tance orga­ni­za­tions here in the United States, and they began plot­ting how they were going to kick the San­danistas out.

At this point in time, Jimmy Carter was pres­i­dent, and Carter wasn’t all that inter­ested in help­ing these folks out. The CIA was, how­ever. And that’s where we start get­ting into this murky world of, you know, who really runs the United States. Is it the pres­i­dent? Is it the bureau­cracy? Is it the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity? At dif­fer­ent points in time you get dif­fer­ent answers. Like today, the idea that Clin­ton runs the United States is nuts. The idea that Jimmy Carter ran the coun­try is nuts.

In 1979 and 1980, the CIA secretly began vis­it­ing these groups that were set­ting up here in the United States, sup­ply­ing them with a lit­tle bit of money, and telling them to hold on, wait for a lit­tle while, don’t give up. And Ronald Rea­gan came to town. And Rea­gan had a very dif­fer­ent out­look on Cen­tral Amer­ica than Carter did. Rea­gan saw what hap­pened in Nicaragua not as a pop­ulist upris­ing, as most of the rest of the world did. He saw it as this band of com­mu­nists down there, there was going to be another Fidel Cas­tro, and he was going to have another Cuba in his back­yard. Which fit in very well with the CIA’s think­ing. So, the CIA under Rea­gan got it together, and they said, “We’re going to help these guys out.” They autho­rized $19 mil­lion to fund a covert war to desta­bi­lize the gov­ern­ment in Nicaragua and help get their old bud­dies back in power.

Soon after the CIA took over this oper­a­tion, these two drug traf­fick­ers, who had come from Nicaragua and set­tled in Cal­i­for­nia, were called down to Hon­duras. And they met with a CIA agent named Enrique Bermúdez, who was one of Somoza’s mil­i­tary offi­cials, and the man the CIA picked to run this new orga­ni­za­tion they were form­ing. And both traf­fick­ers had said — one of them said, the other one wrote, and it’s never been con­tra­dicted — that when they met with the CIA agent, he told them, “We need money for this oper­a­tion. Your guy’s job is to go to Cal­i­for­nia and raise money, and not to worry about how you did it. And what he said was — and I think this had been used to jus­tify just about every crime against human­ity that we’ve known — “the ends jus­tify the means.”

Now, this is a very impor­tant link in this chain reac­tion, because the means they selected was cocaine traf­fick­ing, which is sort of what you’d expect when you ask cocaine traf­fick­ers to go out and raise money for you. You shouldn’t at all be sur­prised when they go out and sell drugs. Espe­cially when you pick peo­ple who are like pio­neers of the cocaine traf­fick­ing busi­ness, which Nor­win Mene­ses cer­tainly was.

There was a CIA cable from I believe 1984, which called him the “king­pin of nar­cotics traf­fick­ing” in Cen­tral Amer­ica. He was sort of like the Al Capone of Nicaragua. So after get­ting these fundrais­ing instruc­tions from this CIA agent, these two men go back to Cal­i­for­nia, and they begin sell­ing cocaine. This time not exclu­sively for them­selves — this time in fur­ther­ance of U.S. for­eign pol­icy. And they began sell­ing it in Los Ange­les, and they began sell­ing it in San Francisco.

Some­time in 1982, Danilo Blandón, who had been given the LA mar­ket, started sell­ing his cocaine to a young drug dealer named Ricky Ross, who later became known as “Free­way” Rick. In 1994, the LA Times would describe him as the mas­ter mar­keter most respon­si­ble for flood­ing the streets of Los Ange­les with cocaine. In 1979, he was noth­ing. He was noth­ing before he met these Nicaraguans. He was a high school dropout. He was a kid who wanted to be a ten­nis star, who was try­ing to get a ten­nis schol­ar­ship, but he found out that in order to get a schol­ar­ship you needed to read and write, and he couldn’t. So he drifted out of school and wound up sell­ing stolen car parts, and then he met these Nicaraguans, who had this cheap cocaine that they wanted to unload. And he proved to be very good at that.

Now, he lived in South Cen­tral Los Ange­les, which was home to some street gangs known as the Crips and the Bloods. And back in 1981–82, hardly any­body knew who they were. They were mainly neigh­bor­hood kids — they’d beat each other up, they’d steal leather coats, they’d steal cars, but they were really noth­ing back then. But what they gained through this orga­ni­za­tion, and what they gained through Ricky Ross, was a built-in dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work through­out the neigh­bor­hood. The Crips and the Bloods were already sell­ing mar­i­juana, they were already sell­ing PCP, so it wasn’t much of a stretch for them to sell some­thing new, which is what these Nicaraguans were bring­ing in, which was cocaine.

This is where these forces of his­tory come out of nowhere and col­lide. Right about the time the con­tras got to South Cen­tral Los Ange­les, hooked up with “Free­way” Rick, and started sell­ing pow­der cocaine, the peo­ple Rick was sell­ing his pow­der to started ask­ing him if he knew how to make it into this stuff called “rock” that they were hear­ing about. This obvi­ously was crack cocaine, and it was already on its way to the United States by then — it started in Peru in ’74 and was work­ing its way upward, and it was bound to get here sooner or later. In 1981 it got to Los Ange­les, and peo­ple started fig­ur­ing out how to take this very expen­sive pow­dered cocaine and cook it up on the stove and turn it into stuff you could smoke.

When Ricky went out and he started talk­ing to his cus­tomers, and they started ask­ing him how to make this stuff, you know, Rick was a smart guy — he still is a smart guy — and he fig­ured, this is some­thing new. This is cus­tomer demand. If I want
to progress in this busi­ness, I bet­ter meet this demand. So he started switch­ing from sell­ing pow­der to mak­ing rock him­self, and sell­ing it already made. He called this new inven­tion his “Ready Rock.” And he told me the sce­nario, he said it was a sit­u­a­tion where he’d go to a guy’s house, he would say, “Oh man, I want to get high, I’m on my way to work, I don’t have time to go into the kitchen and cook this stuff up. Can’t you cook it up for me and just bring it to me already made?” And he said, “Yeah, I can do that.” So he started doing it.

So by the time crack got a hold of South Cen­tral, which took a cou­ple of years, Rick had posi­tioned him­self on top of the crack mar­ket in South Cen­tral. And by 1984, crack sales had sup­planted mar­i­juana and PCP sales as sources of income for the gangs and drug deal­ers of South Cen­tral. And sud­denly these guys had more money than they knew what to do with. Because what hap­pened with crack, it democ­ra­tized the drug. When you were buy­ing it in pow­dered form, you were hav­ing to lay out a hun­dred bucks for a gram, or a hun­dred and fifty bucks for a gram. Now all you needed was ten bucks, or five bucks, or a dol­lar — they were sell­ing “dol­lar rocks” at one point. So any­body who had money and wanted to get high could get some of this stuff. You didn’t need to be a middle-class or wealthy drug user anymore.

Sud­denly the mar­ket for this very expen­sive drug expanded geo­met­ri­cally. And now these deal­ers, who were mak­ing a hun­dred bucks a day on a good day, were now mak­ing five or six thou­sand dol­lars a day on a good day. And the gangs started set­ting up fran­chises — they started fran­chis­ing rock houses in South Cen­tral, just like McDonald’s. And you’d go on the streets, and there’d be five or six rock houses owned by one guy, and five or six rock houses owned by another guy, and sud­denly they started mak­ing even more money.

And now they’ve got all this money, and they felt ner­vous. You get $100,000 or $200,000 in cash in your house, and you start get­ting kind of antsy about it. So now they wanted weapons to guard their money with, and to guard their rock houses, which other peo­ple were start­ing to knock off. And lo and behold, you had weapons. The con­tras. They were sell­ing weapons. They were buy­ing weapons. And they started sell­ing weapons to the gangs in Los Ange­les. They started sell­ing them AR-15s, they started sell­ing them Uzis, they started sell­ing them Israeli-made pis­tols with laser sights, just about any­thing. Because that was part of the process here. They were not just drug deal­ers, they were tak­ing the drug money and buy­ing weapons with it to send down to Cen­tral Amer­ica with the assis­tance of a great num­ber of spooky CIA folks, who were get­ting them [audio glitch — “across the bor­der”?] and that sort of thing, so they could get weapons in and out of the coun­try. So, not only does South Cen­tral sud­denly have a drug prob­lem, they have a weapons prob­lem that they never had before. And you started see­ing things like drive-by shoot­ings and gang bangers with Uzis.

By 1985, the LA crack mar­ket had become sat­u­rated. There was so much dope going into South Cen­tral, dope that the CIA, we now know, knew of, and they knew the ori­gins of — the FBI knew the ori­gins of it; the DEA knew the ori­gins of it; and nobody did any­thing about it. (We’ll get into that in a bit.)

But what hap­pened was, there were so many peo­ple sell­ing crack that the deal­ers were jostling each other on the cor­ners. And the smaller ones decided, we’re going to take this show on the road. So they started going to other cities. They started going to Bak­ers­field, they started going to Fresno, they started going to San Fran­cisco and Oak­land, where they didn’t have crack mar­kets, and nobody knew what this stuff was, and they had wide open mar­kets for them­selves. And sud­denly crack started show­ing up in city after city after city, and often­times it was Crips and Bloods from Los Ange­les who were start­ing these mar­kets. By 1986, it was all up and down the east coast, and by 1989, it was nationwide.

Today, for­tu­nately, crack use is on a down­ward trend, but that’s some­thing that isn’t due to any great progress we’ve made in the so-called “War on Drugs,” it’s the nat­ural cycle of things. Drug epi­demics gen­er­ally run from 10 to 15 years. Heroin is now the lat­est drug on the upswing.

Now, a lot of peo­ple dis­agreed with this sce­nario. The New York Times, the LA Times and the Wash­ing­ton Post all came out and said, oh, no, that’s not so. They said this couldn’t have hap­pened that way, because crack would have hap­pened any­way. Which is true, some­what. As I pointed out in the first chap­ter of my book, crack was on its way here. But whether it would have hap­pened the same way, whether it would have hap­pened in South Cen­tral, whether it would have hap­pened in Los Ange­les at all first, is a very dif­fer­ent story. If it had hap­pened in Eugene, Ore­gon first, it might not have gone any­where. [Rest­less shuf­fling and the sounds of throats being cleared among the audi­ence.] No offense, but you folks aren’t exactly trend set­ters up here when it comes to drug deal­ers and drug fads. LA is, how­ever. [Soft laugh­ter and mur­mur­ing among the audience.]

You can play “what if” games all you like, but it doesn’t change the real­ity. And the real­ity is that this CIA-connected drug ring played a very crit­i­cal role in the early 1980s in open­ing up South Cen­tral to a crack epi­demic that was unmatched in its sever­ity and influ­ence any­where in the U.S.

One ques­tion that I ask peo­ple who say, “Oh, I don’t believe this,” is, okay, tell me this: why did crack appear in black neigh­bor­hoods first? Why did crack dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works leapfrog from one black neigh­bor­hood to other black neigh­bor­hoods and bypass white neigh­bor­hoods and bypass His­panic neigh­bor­hoods and Asian neigh­bor­hoods? Our gov­ern­ment and the main­stream media have given us vary­ing expla­na­tions for this phe­nom­e­non over the years, and they are nice, com­fort­ing, gen­eral expla­na­tions which absolve any­one of any respon­si­bil­ity for why crack is so eth­ni­cally spe­cific. One of the rea­sons we’re told is that, well, it’s poverty. As if the only poor neigh­bor­hoods in this coun­try were black neigh­bor­hoods. And we’re told it’s high teenage unem­ploy­ment; these kids gotta have jobs. As if the hills and hol­lows of Appalachia don’t have teenage unem­ploy­ment rates that are ten times higher than inner city Los Ange­les. And then we’re told that it’s loose fam­ily struc­ture — you know, pre­sum­ing that there are no white sin­gle moth­ers out there try­ing to raise kids on low-paying jobs or wel­fare and food stamps. And then we’re told, well, it’s because crack is so cheap — because it sells for a lower price in South Cen­tral than it sells any­where else. But twenty bucks is twenty bucks, no mat­ter where you go in the country.

So once you have elim­i­nated these sort of non-sensical expla­na­tions, you are left with two the­o­ries which are far less com­fort­able. The first the­ory — which is not some­thing I per­son­ally sub­scribe to, but it’s out there — is that there’s some­thing about black neigh­bor­hoods which causes them to be genet­i­cally pre­dis­posed to drug traf­fick­ing. That’s a racist argu­ment that no one in their right mind is advanc­ing pub­licly, although I tell you, when I was read­ing a lot of the sto­ries in the Wash­ing­ton Post and the New York Times, they were talk­ing about black Amer­i­cans being more sus­cep­ti­ble to “con­spir­acy the­o­ries” than white Amer­i­cans, which is why they believe the story more. I think that was sort of the under­ly­ing cur­rent there. On the other hand, I didn’t see any sto­ries about all the white peo­ple who think Elvis is alive still, or that Hitler’s brain is pre­served down in Brazil to await the Fourth Reich... [laugh­ter from the audi­ence] ...which is a par­tic­u­larly white con­spir­acy the­ory, I didn’t see any sto­ries in the New York Times about that...

The other more palat­able rea­son which in my mind comes closer to the truth, is that some­one started bring­ing cheap cocaine into black neigh­bor­hoods right at the
time when drug users began fig­ur­ing out how to turn it into crack. And this allowed black drug deal­ers to get a head start on every other eth­nic group in terms of set­ting up dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems and traf­fick­ing systems.

Now, one thing I’ve learned about the drug busi­ness while research­ing this is that in many ways it is the epit­ome of cap­i­tal­ism. It is the purest form of cap­i­tal­ism. You have no gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion, a wide-open mar­ket, a buyer’s mar­ket — any­thing goes. But these things don’t spring out of the ground fully formed. It’s like any busi­ness. It takes time to grow them. It takes time to set up net­works. So once these dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works got set up and estab­lished in pri­mar­ily South Cen­tral Los Ange­les, pri­mar­ily black neigh­bor­hoods, they spread it along eth­nic and cul­tural lines. You had black deal­ers from LA going to black neigh­bor­hoods in other cities, because they knew peo­ple there, they had friends there, and that’s why you saw these net­works pop up from one black neigh­bor­hood to another black neighborhood.

Now, exactly the same thing hap­pened on the east coast a cou­ple of years later. When crack first appeared on the east coast, it appeared in Caribbean neigh­bor­hoods in Miami — thanks largely to the Jamaicans, who were using their drug prof­its to fund polit­i­cal gains back home. It was almost the exact oppo­site of what hap­pened in LA in that the pol­i­tics were the oppo­site — but it was the same phe­nom­e­non. And once the Miami mar­ket was sat­u­rated, they moved to New York, they moved east, and they started bring­ing crack from the east coast towards the mid­dle of the country.

So it seems to me that if you’re look­ing for the root of your drug prob­lems in a neigh­bor­hood, noth­ing else mat­ters except the drugs, and where they’re com­ing from, and how they’re get­ting there. And all these other rea­sons I cited are used as expla­na­tions for how crack became pop­u­lar, but it doesn’t explain how the cocaine got there in the first place. And that’s where the con­tras came in.

One of the things which these news­pa­pers who dissed my story were say­ing was, we can’t believe that the CIA would know about drug traf­fick­ing and let it hap­pen. That this idea that this agency which gets $27 bil­lion a year to tell us what’s going on, and which was so inti­mately involved with the con­tras they were writ­ing their press releases for them, they wouldn’t know about this drug traf­fick­ing going on under their noses. But the Times and the Post all uncrit­i­cally reported their claims that the CIA didn’t know what was going on, and that it would never per­mit its hirelings to do any­thing like that, as unseemly as drug traf­fick­ing. You know, assas­si­na­tions and bomb­ings and that sort of thing, yeah, they’ll admit to right up front, but drug deal­ing, no, no, they don’t do that kind of stuff.

Unfor­tu­nately, though, it was true, and what has hap­pened since my series came out is that the CIA was forced to do an inter­nal review, the DEA and Jus­tice Depart­ment were forced to do inter­nal reviews, and these agen­cies that released these reports, you prob­a­bly didn’t read about them, because they con­tra­dicted every­thing else these other news­pa­pers had been writ­ing for the last cou­ple of years, but let me just read you this one excerpt. This is from a 1987 DEA report. And this is about this drug ring in Los Ange­les that I wrote about. In 1987, the DEA sent under­cover infor­mants inside this drug oper­a­tion, and they inter­viewed one of the prin­ci­pals of this orga­ni­za­tion, namely Ivan Tor­res. And this is what he said. He told the informant:

“The CIA wants to know about drug traf­fick­ing, but only for their own pur­poses, and not nec­es­sar­ily for the use of law enforce­ment agen­cies. Tor­res told DEA Con­fi­den­tial Infor­mant 1 that CIA rep­re­sen­ta­tives are aware of his drug-related activ­i­ties, and that they don’t mind. He said they had gone so far as to encour­age cocaine traf­fick­ing by mem­bers of the con­tras, because they know it’s a good source of income. Some of this money has gone into num­bered accounts in Europe and Panama, as does the money that goes to Man­agua from cocaine traf­fick­ing. Tor­res told the infor­mant about receiv­ing coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence train­ing from the CIA, and had avowed that the CIA looks the other way and in essence allows them to engage in nar­cotics trafficking.”

This is a DEA report that was writ­ten in 1987, when this oper­a­tion was still going on. Another mem­ber of this orga­ni­za­tion who was affil­i­ated with the San Fran­cisco end of it, said that in 1985 — and this was to the CIA — “Cabezas claimed that the con­tra cocaine oper­ated with the knowl­edge of, and under the super­vi­sion of, the CIA. Cabezas claimed that this drug enter­prise was run with the knowl­edge of CIA agent Ivan Gómez.”

Now, this is one of the sto­ries that I tried to do at the Mer­cury News was who this man Ivan Gómez was. This was after my orig­i­nal series came out, and after the con­tro­versy started. I went back to Cen­tral Amer­ica, and I found this fel­low Cabezas and he told me all about Ivan Gómez. And I came back, I cor­rob­o­rated it with three for­mer con­tra offi­cials. Mer­cury News wouldn’t put it in the news­pa­per. And they said, “We have no evi­dence this man even exists.”

Well, the CIA Inspec­tor General’s report came out in Octo­ber, and there was a whole chap­ter on Ivan Gómez. And the amaz­ing thing was that Ivan Gómez admit­ted in a CIA-administered poly­graph test that he had been engaged in laun­der­ing drug money the same month that this man told me he had been engaged in it. CIA knew about it, and what did they do? Noth­ing. They said okay, go back to work. And they cov­ered it up for fif­teen years.

So, the one thing that I’ve learned from this whole expe­ri­ence is, first of all, you can’t believe the gov­ern­ment — on any­thing. And you espe­cially can’t believe them when they’re talk­ing about impor­tant stuff, like this stuff. The other thing is that the media will believe the gov­ern­ment before they believe anything.

This has been the most amaz­ing thing to me. You had a sit­u­a­tion where you had another news­pa­per who reported this infor­ma­tion. The major news orga­ni­za­tions in this coun­try went to the CIA, they went to the Jus­tice Depart­ment, and they said, what about it? And they said, oh, no, it’s not true. Take our word for it. And they went back and put it in the news­pa­per! Now, I try to imag­ine what would hap­pen had reporters come back to their edi­tors and said, look, I know the CIA is involved in drug traf­fick­ing. And I know the FBI knows about it, and I’ve got a con­fi­den­tial source that’s telling me that. Can I write a story about that? What do you think the answer would have been? [Mur­murs of “no” from the audi­ence.] Get back down to the obit desk. Start crank­ing out those sports scores. But, if they go to the gov­ern­ment and the gov­ern­ment denies some­thing like that, they’ll put it in the paper with no cor­rob­o­ra­tion whatsoever.

And it’s only since the gov­ern­ment has admit­ted it that now the media is will­ing to con­sider that there might be a story here after all. The New York Times, after the CIA report that came out, ran a story on its front page say­ing, gosh, the con­tras were involved in drugs after all, and gosh, the CIA knew about it.

Now you would think — at least I would think — that some­thing like that would war­rant Con­gres­sional inves­ti­ga­tion. We’re spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars to find out how many times Bill Clin­ton had sex with Mon­ica Lewin­sky. Why aren’t we inter­ested in how much the CIA knew about drug traf­fic? Who was prof­it­ing from this drug traf­fic? Who else knew about it? And why did it take some guy from a Cal­i­for­nia news­pa­per by acci­dent stum­bling over this stuff ten years later in order for it to be impor­tant? I mean, what the hell is going on here? I’ve been a reporter for almost twenty years. To me, this is a nat­ural story. The CIA is involved in drug traf­fick­ing? Let’s know about it. Let’s find out about it. Let’s do some­thing about it. Nobody wants to touch this thing.

And the other thing that came out just recently,
which nobody seems to know about, because it hasn’t been reported — the CIA Inspec­tor Gen­eral went before Con­gress in March and tes­ti­fied that yes, they knew about it. They found some doc­u­ments that indi­cated that they knew about it, yeah. I was there, and this was funny to watch, because these Con­gress­men were up there, and they were ready to hear the abso­lu­tion, right? “We had no evi­dence that this was going on...” And this guy sort of threw ‘em a curve ball and admit­ted that it had happened.

One of the peo­ple said, well geez, what was the CIA’s respon­si­bil­ity when they found out about this? What were you guys sup­posed to do? And the Inspec­tor Gen­eral sort of looked around ner­vously, cleared his throat and said, “Well... that’s kind of an odd his­tory there.” And Nor­man Dix from Wash­ing­ton, bless his heart, didn’t let it go at that. He said, “Explain what you mean by that?” And the Inspec­tor Gen­eral said, well, we were look­ing around and we found this doc­u­ment, and accord­ing to the doc­u­ment, we didn’t have to report this to any­body. And they said, “How come?” And the IG said, we don’t know exactly, but there was an agree­ment made in 1982 between Bill Casey — a fine Amer­i­can, as we all know [laugh­ter from the audi­ence] — and William French Smith, who was then the Attor­ney Gen­eral of the United States. And they reached an agree­ment that said if there is drug traf­fick­ing involved by CIA agents, we don’t have to tell the Jus­tice Depart­ment. Hon­est to God. Hon­est to God. Actu­ally, this is now a pub­lic record, this doc­u­ment. Max­ine Waters just got copies of it, she’s putting it on the Con­gres­sional Record. It is now on the CIA’s web site, if you care to jour­ney into that area. If you do, check out the CIA Web Site for Kids, it’s great, I love it. [Laugher from the audi­ence.] I kid you not, they’ve actu­ally got a web page for kids.

The other thing about this agree­ment was, this wasn’t just like a thirty-day agree­ment — this thing stayed in effect from 1982 until 1995. So all these years, these agen­cies had a gentleman’s agree­ment that if CIA assets or CIA agents were involved in drug traf­fick­ing, it did not need to be reported to the Jus­tice Department.

So I think that elim­i­nates any ques­tions that drug traf­fick­ing by the con­tras was an acci­dent, or was a mat­ter of just a few rot­ten apples. I think what this said was that it was antic­i­pated by the Jus­tice Depart­ment, it was antic­i­pated by the CIA, and steps were taken to ensure that there was a loop­hole in the law, so that if it ever became pub­lic knowl­edge, nobody would be pros­e­cuted for it.

The other thing is, when George Bush par­doned — remem­ber those Christ­mas par­dons that he handed out when he was on his way out the door a few years ago? The media focused on old Cas­par Wein­berger, got par­doned, it was ter­ri­ble. Well, if you looked down the list of names at the other par­dons he handed out, there was a guy named Claire George, there was a guy named Al Fiers, there was another guy named Joe Fer­nán­dez. And these sto­ries sort of brushed them off and said, well, they were CIA offi­cials, we’re not going to say much more about it. These were the CIA offi­cials who were respon­si­ble for the con­tra war. These were the men who were run­ning the con­tra oper­a­tion. And the text of Bush’s par­don not only par­dons them for the crimes of Iran-contra, it par­dons them for every­thing. So, now that we know about it, we can’t even do any­thing about it. They all received pres­i­den­tial pardons.

So where does that leave us? Well, I think it sort of leaves us to rely on the judg­ment of his­tory. But that is a dan­ger­ous step. We didn’t know about this stuff two years ago; we know about it now. We’ve got Con­gress­men who are no longer will­ing to believe that CIA agents are “hon­or­able men,” as William Colby called them. And we’ve got approx­i­mately a thou­sand pages of evi­dence of CIA drug traf­fick­ing on the pub­lic record finally.

That said, let me tell you, there are thou­sands of pages more that we still don’t know about. The CIA report that came out in Octo­ber was orig­i­nally 600 pages; by the time we got ahold of it, it was only 300 pages.

One last thing I want to men­tion — Bob Parry, who is a fine inves­tiga­tive reporter, he runs a mag­a­zine in Wash­ing­ton called I.F. Mag­a­zine, and he’s got a great web­site, check it out — he did a story about two weeks ago about some of the stuff that was con­tained in the CIA report that we didn’t get to see. And one of the sto­ries he wrote was about how there was a sec­ond CIA drug ring in South Cen­tral Los Ange­les that ran from 1988 to 1991. This was not even the one I wrote about. There was another one there. This was classified.

The inter­est­ing thing is, it was run by a CIA agent who had par­tic­i­pated in the con­tra war, and the rea­son it was clas­si­fied is because it is under inves­ti­ga­tion by the CIA. I doubt very seri­ously that we’ll ever hear another word about that.

But the one thing that we can do, and the one thing that Max­ine Waters is try­ing to do, is force the House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee to hold hear­ings on this. This is sup­posed to be the over­sight com­mit­tee of the CIA. They have held one hear­ing, and after they found out there was this deal that they didn’t have to report drug traf­fick­ing, they all ran out of the room, they haven’t con­vened since.

So if you’re inter­ested in pur­su­ing this, the thing I would sug­gest you do is, call up the House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee in Wash­ing­ton and ask them when we’re going to have another CIA/contra/crack hear­ing. Believe me, it’ll drive them crazy. Send them email, just ask them, make sure — they think everybody’s for­got­ten about this. I mean, if you look around the room tonight, I don’t think it’s been for­got­ten. They want us to for­get about it. They want us to con­cen­trate on sex crimes, because, yeah, it’s tit­il­lat­ing. It keeps us occu­pied. It keeps us diverted. Don’t let them do it.

Thanks very much for your atten­tion, I appre­ci­ate it. We’ll do ques­tions and answers now for as long as you want.

[Robust applause.]

Ques­tion and Answer Session

Gary Webb: I’ve been instructed to repeat the ques­tion, so...

Voice From the Audi­ence: You talked about George Bush par­don­ing peo­ple. Given George Bush’s his­tory with the CIA, do you know when he first knew about this, and what he knew?

Gary Webb: Well, I didn’t at the time I wrote the book, I do now. The ques­tion was, when did George Bush first know about this? The CIA, in its lat­est report, said that they had pre­pared a detailed brief­ing for the vice pres­i­dent — I think it was 1985? — on all these alle­ga­tions of con­tra drug traf­fick­ing and deliv­ered it to him per­son­ally. So, it’s hard for George to say he was out of the loop on this one.

I’ll tell you another thing, one of the most amaz­ing things I found in the National Archives was a report that had been writ­ten by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa — I believe it was 1987. They had just busted a Colom­bian drug traf­ficker named Allen Rudd, and they were using him as a coop­er­at­ing wit­ness. Rudd agreed to go under­cover and set up other drug traf­fick­ers, and they were debrief­ing him.

Now, let me set the stage for you. When you are being debriefed by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment for use as an infor­mant, you’re not going to go in there and tell them crazy-sounding sto­ries, because they’re not going to believe you, they’re going to slap you in jail, right? What Rudd told them was, that he was involved in a meet­ing with Pablo Esco­bar, who was then the head of the Medel­lín car­tel. They were work­ing out arrange­ments to set up cocaine ship­ments into South Florida. He said Esco­bar started rant­ing and rav­ing about that damned George Bush, and now he’s got that South Florida Drug Task Force set up which has really been mak­ing things dif­fi­cult, and the man’s a trai­tor. And he used to deal with us, but now he wants to be pres­i­dent and thinks that he’s double-crossing us. And Rudd said, well, what are you talk­ing about? And Esco­bar said, we made a deal
with that guy, that we were going to ship weapons to the con­tras, they were in there fly­ing weapons down to Colum­bia, we were unload­ing weapons, we were get­ting them to the con­tras, and the deal was, we were sup­posed to get our stuff to the United States with­out any prob­lems. And that was the deal that we made. And now he double-crossed us.

So the U.S. Attor­ney heard this, and he wrote this pan­icky memo to Wash­ing­ton say­ing, you know, this man has been very reli­able so far, every­thing he’s told us has checked out, and now he’s say­ing that the Vice Pres­i­dent of the United States is involved with drug traf­fick­ers. We might want to check this out. And it went all the way up — the funny thing about gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments is, when­ever it passes over somebody’s desk, they have to ini­tial it. And this thing was like a lad­der, it went all the way up and all the way up, and it got up to the head of the Crim­i­nal Divi­sion at the Jus­tice Depart­ment, and he looked at it and said, looks like a job for Lawrence Walsh! And so he sent it over to Walsh, the Iran-contra pros­e­cu­tor, and he said, here, you take it, you deal with this. And Walsh’s office — I inter­viewed Walsh, and he said, we didn’t have the author­ity to deal with that. We were look­ing at Ollie North. So I said, did any­body inves­ti­gate this? And the answer was, “no.” And that thing sat in the National Archives for ten years, nobody ever looked at it.

Voice From the Audi­ence: Is that in your book?

Gary Webb: Yeah.

Voice From the Audi­ence: Thank you.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #1: Well, first of all, I’d like to thank you for pur­su­ing this story, you have a lot of guts to do it.

[Applause from the audience.]

Gary Webb: This is what reporters are sup­posed to do. This is what reporters are sup­posed to do. I don’t think I was doing any­thing special.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #1: Still, there’s not too many guys like you that are doing it.

Gary Webb: That’s true, they’ve all still got jobs.

[Laugh­ter, scat­tered applause.]

Audi­ence Mem­ber #1: I just had a cou­ple of ques­tions, the first one is, I fol­lowed the story on the web site, and I thought it was a really great story, it was really well done. And I noticed that the San Jose Mer­cury News seemed to sup­port you for a while, and then all the sud­den that sup­port col­lapsed. So I was won­der­ing what your rela­tion­ship is with your edi­tor there, and how that all played out, and when they all pulled out the rug from under you.

Gary Webb: Well, the sup­port col­lapsed prob­a­bly after the LA Times... The Wash­ing­ton [Post] came out first, the New York Times came out sec­ond, and the LA Times came out third, and they started get­ting ner­vous. There’s a phe­nom­e­non in the media we all know, it’s called “pil­ing on,” and they started see­ing them­selves get­ting piled on. They sent me back down to Cen­tral Amer­ica two more times to do more report­ing and I came back with sto­ries that were even more out­ra­geous than what they printed in the news­pa­per the first time. And they were faced with a sit­u­a­tion of, now we’re accus­ing Oliver North of being involved in drug traf­fick­ing. Now we’re accus­ing the Jus­tice Depart­ment of being part and par­cel to this. Geez, if we get beat up over accus­ing a cou­ple of CIA agents of being involved in this, what the hell is going to hap­pen now? And they actu­ally said, I had memos say­ing, you know, if we run these sto­ries, there is going to be a firestorm of criticism.

So, I think they took the easy way out. The easy way out was not to go ahead and do the story. It was to back off the story. But they had a prob­lem, because the story was true. And it isn’t every day that you’re con­fronted with how to take a dive on a true story.

They spent sev­eral months — hon­estly, lit­er­ally, because I was get­ting these drafts back and forth — try­ing to fig­ure out how to say, we don’t sup­port this story, even though it’s true. And if you go back and you read the editor’s col­umn, you’ll see that the great dif­fi­culty that he had try­ing to take a dive on this thing. And he ended up talk­ing about “gray areas” that should have been explored a lit­tle more and “sub­tleties” that we should have not brushed over so lightly, with­out dis­clos­ing the fact that the series had orig­i­nally been four parts and they cut it to three parts, because “nobody reads four part series’ any­more.” So, that was one reason.

The other rea­son was, you know, one of the things you learn very quickly when you get into jour­nal­ism is that there’s safety in num­bers. Edi­tors don’t like being out there on a limb all by them­selves. I remem­ber very clearly going to press con­fer­ences, com­ing back, writ­ing a story, send­ing it in, and my edi­tor call­ing up and say­ing, well gee, this isn’t what AP wrote. Or, the Chron­i­cle just ran their story, and that’s not what the Chron­i­cle wrote. And I’d say, “Fine. Good.” And they said, no, we’ve got to make it the same, we don’t want to be dif­fer­ent. We don’t want our story to be dif­fer­ent from every­body else’s.

And so what they were see­ing at the Mer­cury was, the Big Three news­pa­pers were sit­ting on one side of the fence, and they were out there by them­selves, and that just pan­icked the hell out of them. So, you have to under­stand news­pa­per men­tal­ity to under­stand it a lit­tle bit, but it’s not too hard to under­stand cow­ardice, either. I think a lot of that was that they were just scared as hell to go ahead with the story.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #1: Were they able to look you in the eye, and...

Gary Webb: No. They didn’t, they just did this over the phone. I went to Sacramento.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #1: When did you find out about it, and what did you...

Gary Webb: Oh, they called me up at home, two months after I turned in my last four sto­ries, and said, we’re going to write a col­umn say­ing, you know, we’re not going ahead with this. And that’s when I jumped in the car and drove up there and said, what the hell’s going on? And I got all these mealy-mouthed answers, you know, geez, gray areas, sub­tleties, one thing or another... But I said, tell me one thing that’s wrong with the story, and nobody could ever point to any­thing. And today, to this day, nobody has ever said there was a fac­tual error in that story.

[Inaudi­ble ques­tion from the audience.]

Gary Webb: The ques­tion was, the edi­tors are one thing, what about the read­ers? Um... who cares about the read­ers? Hon­estly. The reader’s don’t run the newspaper.

[Another inaudi­ble ques­tion from the audi­ence regard­ing let­ters to the edi­tor and boy­cotts of the newspaper.]

Gary Webb: Well, a num­ber of them did, and believe me, the news­pa­per office was flooded with calls and emails. And the news­pa­per, to their credit, printed a bunch of them, call­ing it the most cow­ardly thing they’d ever seen. But in the long run, the read­ers, you know, don’t run the place. And that’s the thing about news­pa­per mar­kets these days. You folks really don’t have any choice! What else are you going to read? And the edi­tors know this.

When I started in this busi­ness, we had two news­pa­pers in town where I worked in Cincin­nati. And we were deathly afraid that if we sat on a story for 24 hours, the Cincin­nati Inquirer was going to put it in the paper, and we were going to look like dopes. We were going to look like we were cov­er­ing stuff up, we were going to look like we were pro­tect­ing some­body. So we were putting stuff in the paper with­out think­ing about it some­times, but we got it in the paper. Now, we can sit on stuff for months, who’s going to find out about it? And even if some­body found out about it, what are they going to do? That’s the big dan­ger that every­body has sort of missed. These one-newspaper towns, you’ve got no choice. You’ve got no choice. And tele­vi­sion? Television’s not going to do it. I mean, they’re down film­ing ani­mals at the zoo!

[Laugh­ter and applause.]

Audi­ence Mem­ber #2: I assume you have talked to John Cum­mings, the one that wrote Com­pro­mised, that book?
<
br />Gary Webb: I talked to Terry Reed, who was the prin­ci­pal author on that, yeah.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #2: Well, that was a well-documented book, and I had just fin­ished read­ing this when I hap­pened to look down and see the head­lines on the Sun­day paper. And he stated that Oliver North told him per­son­ally that he was a CIA asset that man­u­fac­tured weapons.

Gary Webb: Right.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #2: When he dis­cov­ered that they were import­ing cocaine, he got out of there. And they chased him with his fam­ily across coun­try for two years try­ing to catch him. But he had said in that book that Oliver North told him that Vice Pres­i­dent Bush told Oliver North to dirty Clinton’s men with the drug money. Which I assumed was what White­wa­ter was all about, was find­ing the laun­der­ing and try­ing to find some­thing on Clin­ton. Do you know any­thing about that?

Gary Webb: Yeah, let me sum up your ques­tion. Essen­tially, you’re ask­ing about the goings-on in Mena, Arkansas, because of the drug oper­a­tions going on at this lit­tle air base in Arkansas while Clin­ton was gov­er­nor down there. The fel­low you referred to, Terry Reed, wrote a book called Com­pro­mised which talked about his role in this cor­po­rate oper­a­tion in Mena which was ini­tially designed to train con­tra pilots — Reed was a pilot — and it was also designed after the Boland Amend­ment went into effect to get weapons parts to the con­tras, because the CIA couldn’t pro­vide them any­more. And as Reed got into this weapons parts busi­ness, he dis­cov­ered that the CIA was ship­ping cocaine back through these weapons crates that were com­ing back into the United States. And when he blew the whis­tle on it, he was sort of sent on this long odyssey of crim­i­nal charges being filed against him, etcetera etcetera etcetera. A lot of what Reed wrote is accu­rate as far as I can tell, and a lot of it was documented.

There is a House Bank­ing Com­mit­tee inves­ti­ga­tion that has been going on now for about three years, look­ing specif­i­cally at Mena, Arkansas, look­ing specif­i­cally at a drug traf­ficker named Barry Seal, who was one of the biggest cocaine and mar­i­juana importers in the south side of the United States dur­ing the 1980s. Seal was also, coin­ci­den­tally, work­ing for the CIA, and was work­ing for the Drug Enforce­ment Administration.

I don’t know how many of you remem­ber this, but one night Ron­nie Rea­gan got on TV and held up a grainy pic­ture, and said, here’s proof that the San­danistas are deal­ing drugs. Look, here’s Pablo Esco­bar, and they’re all load­ing cocaine into a plane, and this was taken in Nicaragua. This was the eve of a vote on the con­tra aid. That pho­to­graph was set up by Barry Seal. The plane that was used was Seal’s plane, and it was the same plane that was shot down over Nicaragua a cou­ple of years later that Eugene Hasen­fus was in, that broke open the whole Iran-contra scandal.

The Bank­ing Com­mit­tee is sup­posed to be com­ing out with a report in the next cou­ple of months look­ing at the rela­tion­ship between Barry Seal, the U.S. gov­ern­ment and Clinton’s folks. Alex Cock­burn has done a num­ber of sto­ries on this com­pany called Park-On Meter down in Rus­sel­lville, Arkansas, that’s hooked up with Clinton’s fam­ily, hooked up with Hillary’s law firm, that sort of thing. To me, that’s a story peo­ple ought to be look­ing at. I never thought White­wa­ter was much of a story, frankly. What I thought the story was about was Clinton’s buddy Dan Lasater, the bond bro­ker down there who was a con­victed cocaine traf­ficker. Clin­ton par­doned him on his way to Wash­ing­ton. Lasater was a major drug traf­ficker, and Terry Reed’s book claims Lasater was part and par­cel with this whole thing.

Voice From the Audi­ence: Cockburn’s newslet­ter is called Coun­ter­punch, and he’s done a good job of defend­ing you in it.

Gary Webb: Yeah, Cock­burn has also writ­ten a book called White­out, which is a very inter­est­ing look at the his­tory of CIA drug traf­fick­ing. Actu­ally, I think it’s sell­ing pretty well itself. The New York Times hated it, of course, but what else is new?

Audi­ence Mem­ber #2: Well I just wanted to men­tion that he states also — I guess it was Terry Reed who was actu­ally doing the work — he said Bush was run­ning the whole thing as vice president.

Gary Webb: I think that George Bush’s role in this whole thing is one of the large unex­plored areas of it.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #2: Which is why I think Rea­gan put him in as vice pres­i­dent, because of his posi­tion with the CIA.

Gary Webb: Well, you know, that whole South Florida Drug Task Force was full of CIA oper­a­tives. Full of them. This was sup­posed to be our van­guard in the war against cocaine car­tels, and if those Colom­bians are to be believed, this was the vehi­cle that we were using to ship arms and allow cocaine into the coun­try, this Drug Task Force. Nobody’s looked at that. But there are lots of clues that there’s a lot to be dug out.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #3: Thank you, Gary. I lost my fea­ture colum­nist posi­tion at my col­lege paper for writ­ing a satire of Chris­tian­ity some years ago, and...

Gary Webb: That’ll do it, yeah. [Laugh­ter from the audience.]

Audi­ence Mem­ber #3: And I lost my job twice in the last five years because of my activism in the com­mu­nity, but I got a job [inaudi­ble]. But my ques­tion is, I knew some­one in the mid-‘80s who said that he was in the Navy, and that he had infor­ma­tion that the Navy was involved in deliv­er­ing cocaine to this coun­try. Another kind of bomb­shell, I’d like to have you com­ment on it, I saw a video some years ago that said the UFO research that’s being done down in the south­west is being funded by drug money and cocaine deal­ings by the CIA, and that there are 25 top secret lev­els of gov­ern­ment above the Top Secret cat­e­gory, and that there are some lev­els that even the pres­i­dent doesn’t know about. So there’s another topic for another book, I just wanted to have you comment...

Gary Webb: A num­ber of top­ics for another book. [Laugh­ter from the audi­ence.] I don’t know about the UFO research, but I do know you’re right that we have very lit­tle idea how vast the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity in this coun­try is, or what they’re up to. I think there’s a great story brew­ing — it’s called the ECHELON pro­gram, and it involves the shar­ing of eaves­dropped emails and cell phone com­mu­ni­ca­tions, because it is ille­gal for them to do it in this coun­try. So they’ve been going to New Zealand and Aus­tralia and Canada and hav­ing those gov­ern­ments eaves­drop on our con­ver­sa­tions and tell us about it. I’ve read a cou­ple of sto­ries about it in the Eng­lish press, and I read a cou­ple of sto­ries about it in the Cana­dian press, but I’ve seen pre­cious lit­tle in the Amer­i­can press. But there’s stuff on the Inter­net that cir­cu­lates about that, if you’re inter­ested in the topic. I think it’s called the ECHELON program.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #4: I’m glad you brought up James Burke and his Con­nec­tions, because there are a lot of con­nec­tions here. One I didn’t hear too much about, and I know you’ve done a lot of research on, was how com­put­ers and high tech was used by the Crips and Bloods early on. I lived in south LA prior to this, knew some of these peo­ple, and you’re right, they had vir­tu­ally no edu­ca­tion. And to sud­denly have an oper­a­tion that’s com­puter lit­er­ate, rid­ing out of Bak­ers­field, Fresno, on north and then east in a very quick period — I’m still learn­ing the com­puter, I’m prob­a­bly as old as you are, or older — so I’d like to hear some­thing on that. The whole dis­lo­ca­tion of south LA that occurred — the Watts Fes­ti­val, the whole empow­er­ment of the black com­mu­nity was occur­ring begin­ning in the late ‘60s and into the early ‘70s and mid-‘70s, and then col­lapses into a sea of flip­ping demo­graph­ics, and sud­denly by 1990 it is El Salvadoran-dominated. And that’s another curi­ous part of this equa­tion as we talk about drugs.

Gary Webb: Well, that’s quite a bevy of things there. As far as the sophis­ti­ca­tion of the Crips and the Bloods, the one thing that I prob­a­bly should have men­tioned was that
when Danilo Blandón went down to South Cen­tral to start sell­ing this dope, he had an M.B.A. in mar­ket­ing. So he knew what he was doing. His job for the Somoza gov­ern­ment was set­ting up whole­sale mar­kets for agri­cul­tural prod­ucts. He’d received an M.B.A. thanks to us, actu­ally — we helped finance him, we helped send him to the Uni­ver­sity of Bogata to get his M.B.A. so he could go back to Nicaragua, and he actu­ally came to the United States to sell dope to the gangs. So this was a very sophis­ti­cated operation.

One of the money laun­der­ers from this group was a macro-economist — his uncle, Orlando Murillo, was on the Cen­tral Bank of Nicaragua. The weapons advi­sor they had was a guy who’d been a cop for fif­teen years. They had another weapons advi­sor who had been a Navy SEAL. You don’t get these kinds of peo­ple by putting ads in the paper. This is not a drug ring that just sort of falls together by chance. This is like an all-star game. Which is why I sus­pect more and more that this thing was set up by a higher author­ity than a cou­ple of drug dealers.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #5: Hi Gary, I just want to thank you for going against the traf­fic on this whole deal. I’m in the jour­nal­ism school up at U. of O., and I’m inter­ested in the story behind the story. I was hop­ing you could share some anec­dotes about the kind of activ­ity that you engaged in to get the story. For exam­ple, when you get off a plane in Nicaragua, what do you do? Where do you start? How do you talk to “Free­way” Ricky? How do you go against a gov­ern­ment stonewall?

Gary Webb: The ques­tion is, how do you do a story like this, essen­tially. Well, thing I’ve always found is, if you go knock on somebody’s door, they’re a lot less apt to slam it in your face than if you call them up on the tele­phone. So, the rea­son I went down to Nicaragua was to go knock on doors. I didn’t go down there and just step off a plane — I found a fel­low down in Nicaragua and we hired him as a stringer, a fel­low named George Hidell who is a mar­velous inves­tiga­tive reporter, he knew all sorts of gov­ern­ment offi­cials down there. And I speak no Span­ish, which was another hand­i­cap. George speaks like four lan­guages. So, you find peo­ple like that to help you out.

With these drug deal­ers, you know, it’s amaz­ing how will­ing they are to talk. I did a series while I was in Ken­tucky on orga­nized crime in the coal indus­try. And it was about this mass of stock swindlers who had looted Wall Street back in the ‘60s and moved down to Ken­tucky in the ‘70s while the coal boom was going on, dur­ing the energy short­age. The les­son I learned in that thing — I thought these guys would never talk to me, I fig­ured they’d be crazy to talk to a reporter about the scams they were pulling. But they were happy to talk about it, they were flat­tered that you would come to them and say, hey, tell me about what you do. Tell me your great­est knock-off. Those guys would go on for­ever! So, you know, every­body, no mat­ter what they do, they sort of have pride in their work... [Laugh­ter from the audi­ence.] And, you know, I found that when you appeared inter­ested, they would be happy to tell you.

The peo­ple who lied to me, the peo­ple who slammed doors in my face, were the DEA and the FBI. The DEA called me down — I wrote about this in the book — they had a meet­ing, and they were telling me that if I wrote this story, I was going to help drug traf­fick­ers bring drugs into the coun­try, and I was going to get DEA agents killed, and this, that and the other thing, all of which was utterly bull­shit. So that’s the thing — just ask. There’s really no secret to it.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #6: I’d like to ask a cou­ple of ques­tions very quickly. The first one is, if you wouldn’t mind being a ref­er­ence librar­ian for a moment — there was the Golden Tri­an­gle. I was just won­der­ing if you’ve ever, in your curios­ity about this, touched on that — the drug rings and the heroin trade out of South­east Asia. And the sec­ond one is about the fel­low from the Hous­ton Chron­i­cle, I don’t remem­ber his name right off, but you know who I’m talk­ing about, if you could just touch on that a lit­tle bit...

Gary Webb: Yes. The first ques­tion was about whether I ever touched on what was going on in the Golden Tri­an­gle. For­tu­nately, I didn’t have to — there’s a great book called The Pol­i­tics of Heroin in South­east Asia, by Alfred McCoy, which is sort of a clas­sic in CIA drug traf­fick­ing lore. I don’t think you can get any bet­ter than that. That’s a great ref­er­ence in the library, you can go check it out. McCoy was a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin who went to Laos dur­ing the time that the secret war in Laos was going on, and he wrote about how the CIA was fly­ing heroin out on Air Amer­ica. That’s the thing that really sur­prised me about the reac­tion to my story was, it’s not like I invented this stuff. There’s a long, long his­tory of CIA involve­ment in drug traf­fic which Cock­burn gets into in Whiteout.

And the sec­ond ques­tion was about Pete Brew­ton — there was a reporter in Hous­ton for the Hous­ton Post named Pete Brew­ton who did the series — I think it was ’91 or ’92 — on the strange con­nec­tions between the S&L col­lapses, par­tic­u­larly in Texas, and CIA agents. And his the­ory was that a lot of these col­lapses were not mis­man­age­ment, they were inten­tional. These things were looted, with the idea that a lot of the money was siphoned off to fund covert oper­a­tions over­seas. And Brew­ton wrote this series, and it was funny, because after all hell broke loose on my story, I called him up, and he said, “Well, I was wait­ing for this to hap­pen to you.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “I was exactly like you are. I’d been in this busi­ness for twenty years, I’d won all sorts of awards, I’d lec­tured in col­lege jour­nal­ism courses, and I wrote a series that had these three lit­tle let­ters C-I-A in it. And sud­denly I was unre­li­able, and I couldn’t be trusted, and Reed Irvine at Accu­racy In Media was writ­ing nasty things about me, and my edi­tor had lost con­fi­dence in me, so I quit the busi­ness and went to law school.”

Brew­ton wrote a book called George Bush, CIA and the Mafia. It’s hard to find, but it’s worth look­ing up if you can find it. It’s all there, it’s all doc­u­mented. See, the dif­fer­ence between his story and my story was, we put ours out on the web, and it got out. Brewton’s story is sort of con­fined to the printed page, and I think the Wash­ing­ton Jour­nal­ism Review actu­ally wrote a story about, how come nobody’s writ­ing about this, nobody’s pick­ing up this story. Nobody touched this story, it just sort of died. And the same thing would have hap­pened with my series, had we not had this amaz­ing web page. Thank God we did, or this thing would have just slipped under­neath the waves, and nobody would have ever heard about it.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #7: I’m glad you’re here. I guess the CIA, there was some­thing I read in the paper a cou­ple of years ago, that said the CIA is actu­ally mur­der­ing peo­ple, and they admit­ted it, they don’t usu­ally do that.

Gary Webb: It’s a new burst of hon­esty from the new CIA.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #7: They’ll mur­der us with kind­ness. In the Chicago police force, there were about 10 offi­cers who were kicked off the police force for doing drugs or sell­ing drugs, and George Bush or some­thing... I heard that he had a buddy who had a lot of money in drug test­ing equip­ment, so that’s one rea­son every­body has to pee in a cup now... [Laugh­ter from the audi­ence.] The other thing I found, there was a meth lab close to here, and some­body who wasn’t even involved with it, he was par­a­lyzed... And as you know, we have the “Just Say No to Drugs” deal... What do you think we can do to stop us, the Peo­ple, from being hyp­no­tized once again from all these shenani­gans, doing other peo­ple injury in terms of these kinds of mes­sages, at the same time they’re sell­ing. Because all this money is being spent for all this...

Gary Webb: I guess the ques­tion is, what could you do to keep from being hyp­no­tized by the media mes­sage, specif­i­cally on the Drug War? Is
that what you’re talk­ing about?

Audi­ence Mem­ber #7: Yeah, or all the funds... like, there’s another thing here with the meth lab, they say we’ll kind of turn peo­ple in...

Gary Webb: Oh yeah, the nation of informers.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #7: Yeah.

Gary Webb: That’s some­thing I have to laugh about — up until I think ’75 or ’76, prob­a­bly even later than that, you could go to your doc­tor and get metham­phet­a­mine. I mean, there were house­wives by the hun­dreds of thou­sands across the United States who were tak­ing it every day to lose weight, and now all the sud­den it was the worst thing on the face of the earth. That’s one thing I got into in the book, was the sort of crack hys­te­ria in 1986 that prompted all these crazy laws that are still on the books today, and the 100:1 sen­tenc­ing ratio... I don’t know how many of you saw, on PBS a cou­ple of nights back, there was a great show on infor­mants called “Snitch.” [Mur­murs of recog­ni­tion from the audi­ence.] Yeah, on Front­line. That was very heart­en­ing to see, because I don’t think ten years ago that it would have stood a chance in hell of get­ting on the air.

What I’m see­ing now is that a lot of peo­ple are finally wak­ing up to the idea that this “drug war” has been a fraud since the get-go. My per­sonal opin­ion is, I think the main pur­pose of this whole drug war was to sort of erode civil lib­er­ties, very slowly and very grad­u­ally, and sort of put us down into a police state. [Robust burst of applause from the audi­ence.] And we’re pretty close to that. I’ve got to hand it to them, they’ve done a good job. We have no Fourth Amend­ment left any­more, we’re all pee­ing in cups, and we’re all doing all sorts of things that our par­ents prob­a­bly would have marched in the streets about.

The solu­tion to that is to read some­thing other than the daily news­pa­per, and turn off the TV news. I mean, I’m sorry, I hate to say that, but that’s mind-rot. You’ve got to find alter­na­tive sources of infor­ma­tion. [Robust applause.]

Voice From the Audi­ence: How can you say that it was all a chain reac­tion, that it was not done delib­er­ately, and on the other hand say it has at the same time delib­er­ately eroded our rights?

Gary Webb: Well, the ques­tion was, how can I say on one hand it was a chain reac­tion, and on the other hand say the drug war was set up delib­er­ately to erode our rights. I mean, you’re talk­ing about sort of macro ver­sus micro. And I do not give the CIA that much credit, that they could plan these vast con­spir­a­cies down through the ages and have them work — most of them don’t.

What I’m say­ing is, you have police groups, you have police lob­by­ing groups, you have prison guard groups — they seize oppor­tu­ni­ties when they come along. The Drug War has given them a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ties to say, okay, now let’s lengthen prison sen­tences. Why? Well, because if you keep peo­ple in jail longer, you need more prison guards. Let’s build more pris­ons. Why? Well, peo­ple get jobs, prison guards get jobs. The police stay in busi­ness. We need to fund more of them. We need to give big­ger bud­gets to the cor­rec­tional facil­i­ties. This is all very con­scious, but I don’t think any­body sat in a room in 1974 and said, okay, by 1995, we’re going to have X num­ber of Amer­i­cans locked up or under parole super­vi­sion. I don’t think they mind — you know, I think they like that. But I don’t think it was a con­scious effort. I think it was just one bad idea, after another bad idea, com­pounded with a stu­pid idea, com­pounded with a really stu­pid idea. And here we are. So I don’t know if that answers your ques­tion or not...

Audi­ence Mem­ber #8: To me, the Iran-contra story was one of the most inter­est­ing and totally frus­trat­ing things. And the more infor­ma­tion, the more about it I heard — we don’t know any­thing about it, I mean, if you look for any offi­cial data, they deny every­thing. And to see Ollie North, the upstand­ing blue-eyed Amer­i­can, stand­ing there lying through his teeth, and we knew it... [Inaudi­ble com­ment, “before Con­gress and the Pres­i­dent”?] What galls me is that these peo­ple who are guilty of high crimes and mis­de­meanors are now get­ting these enor­mous pen­sions, and we have to pay for these bums. It sick­ens me!

Gary Webb: Right.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #8: And I actu­ally have a ques­tion — this is my ques­tion, by the way, I know you have a thou­sand other ques­tions [laugh­ter from the audi­ence] — but the one that stays with me, and has always both­ered me, was the Chris­tic Insti­tute, and I thought it was fan­tas­tic. And they were hit with this enor­mous law­suit, and they had to bail out. This needs to be [“rehired”?] because they knew what they were doing, they had all the right answers, and they were run out of office, so to say, in dis­grace, because of this lawsuit.

Gary Webb: The ques­tion was about the Chris­tic Insti­tute, and about how the Iran-contra con­tro­versy is prob­a­bly one of the worst scan­dals. I agree with you, I think the Iran-contra scan­dal was worse than Water­gate, far worse than this non­sense we’re doing now. But I’ll tell you, I think the press played a very big part in down­play­ing that scan­dal. One of the peo­ple I inter­viewed for the book was a woman named Pam Naughton, who was one of the best pros­e­cu­tors that the Iran-contra com­mit­tee had. And I asked her, why — you know, it was also the first scan­dal that was tele­vised, and I remem­ber watch­ing them at night. I would go to work and I’d set the VCR, and I’d come home at night and I’d watch the hear­ings. Then I’d pick up the paper the next morn­ing, and it was com­pletely dif­fer­ent! And I couldn’t fig­ure it out, and this has both­ered me all these years.

So when I got Pam Naughton on the phone, I said, what the hell hap­pened to the press corps in Wash­ing­ton dur­ing the Iran-contra scan­dal? And she said, well, I can tell you what I saw. She said, every day, we would come out at the start of this hear­ings, and we would lay out a stack of doc­u­ments — all the exhibits we were going to intro­duce — stuff that she thought was extremely incrim­i­nat­ing, front page story after front page story, and they’d sit them on a table. And she said, every day the press corps would come in, and they’d say hi, how’re you doing, blah blah blah, and they’d go sit down in the front row and start talk­ing about, you know, did you see the ball game last night, and what they saw on Johnny Car­son. And she said one or two reporters would go up and get their stack of doc­u­ments and go back and write about it, and every­body else sat in the front row, and they would sit and say, okay, what’s our story today? And they would all agree what the story was, and they’d go back and write it. Most of them never even looked at the exhibits.

And that’s why I say it was the press’s fault, because there was so much stuff that came out of those hear­ings. That used to just drive me crazy, you would never see it in the news­pa­per. And I don’t think it’s a con­spir­acy — if any­thing, it’s a con­spir­acy of stu­pid­ity and lazi­ness. I talked to Bob Parry about this — when he was work­ing for Newsweek cov­er­ing Iran-contra, they weren’t even let­ting him go to the hear­ings. He had to get tran­scripts mes­sen­gered to him at his house secretly, so his edi­tors wouldn’t find out he was actu­ally read­ing the tran­scripts, because he was writ­ing sto­ries that were so dif­fer­ent from every­body else’s.

Bob Parry tells a story of being at a din­ner party with Bobby Inman from the CIA, the edi­tor of Newsweek, and all the muckity-mucks — this was his big intro­duc­tion into Wash­ing­ton soci­ety. And they were sit­ting at the din­ner table in the midst of the Iran-contra thing, talk­ing about every­thing but Iran-contra. And Bob said he had the bad taste of bring­ing up the Iran-contra hear­ing and men­tion­ing one par­tic­u­larly bad aspect of it. And he said, the edi­tor of Newsweek looked at him and said, “You know, Bob, there are just some things that it’s bet­ter the coun­try just doesn’t know about.” And all these admi­rals and gen­er­als sit­ting around the table all nod­ded their heads in agree­ment, and
they wanted to talk about some­thing else.

That’s the atti­tude. That’s the atti­tude in Wash­ing­ton. And that’s the atti­tude of the Wash­ing­ton press corps, and nowa­days it’s even worse than that, because now, if you play the game right, you get a TV show. Now you’ve got the McLaugh­lin Group. Now you get your mug on CNN. You know. And that’s how they keep them in line. If you’re a rab­ble rouser, and a shit-stirrer, they don’t want your type on tele­vi­sion. They want the pundits.

The other ques­tion was about the Chris­tic Insti­tute. They had it all fig­ured out. The Chris­tic Insti­tute had this thing fig­ured out. They filed suit in May of 1986, alleg­ing that the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, the CIA, this sort of par­al­lel gov­ern­ment was going on. Oliver North was involved in it, you had the Bay of Pigs Cubans that were involved in it down in Costa Rica, they had names, they had dates, and they got mur­dered. And the Rea­gan administration’s line was, they’re a bunch of left-wing lib­eral cra­zies, this was con­spir­acy the­ory. If you want to see what they really thought, go to Oliver North’s diaries, which are pub­lic — the National Secu­rity Archive has got them, you can get them — all he was writ­ing about, after the Chris­tic Institute’s suit was filed, was how we’ve got to shut this thing down, how we have to dis­credit these wit­nesses, how we’ve got to get this guy set up, how we’ve got to get this guy out of the coun­try... They knew that the Chris­tic Insti­tute was right, and they were deathly afraid that the Amer­i­can pub­lic was going to find out about it.

I am con­vinced that the judge who was hear­ing the case was part and par­cel to the prob­lem. He threw the case out of court and fined the Chris­tic Insti­tute, I think it was $1.3 mil­lion, for even bring­ing the law­suit. It was deemed “friv­o­lous lit­i­ga­tion.” And it finally bank­rupted them. And they went away.

But that’s the prob­lem when you try to take on the gov­ern­ment in its own arena, and the fed­eral courts are def­i­nitely part of its own arena. They make the rules. And in cases like that, you don’t stand a chance in hell, it won’t happen.

Voice From the Audi­ence: But if you can­not get the truth in the courts, if you can­not write it in the papers, then what do you do?

Gary Webb: You do it your­self. You do it your­self. You’ve got to start rebuild­ing an infor­ma­tion sys­tem on your own. And that’s what’s going on. It’s very small, but it’s hap­pen­ing. Peo­ple are talk­ing to each other through news­groups on the Inter­net. Peo­ple are doing Inter­net newsletters.

Voice From the Audi­ence: Do you have a website?

Emcee: Let’s use the mike, let’s use the mike.

Gary Webb: The ques­tion is, do I have a web­site. No, I don’t, but I’m build­ing one.

[Inaudi­ble ques­tion from the audience.]

Gary Webb: Well, let’s let these peo­ple who have been stand­ing in line...

[Com­mo­tion, mur­mur­ing. Some­one calls out, “Please use the mike.”]

Audi­ence Mem­ber #9: When you men­tioned pris­ons a moment ago, I couldn’t help but remem­ber that it is America’s fastest-growing indus­try, the “prison indus­try” — which is a hell of a phrase unto itself. But it seems that the CIA had peo­ple aligned through­out Cen­tral Amer­ica at one point, and El Sal­vador, with the con­tras, and in Hon­duras and Nicaragua, and in Panama, Manuel Noriega...

Gary Webb: Our “man in Panama,” that’s right.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #9: Yeah. But some­thing went wrong with him, and he got pinched in pub­lic. And I’m inter­ested to know what you think about that.

Gary Webb: The ques­tion is about Manuel Nor­iega, who was our “man in Panama” for so many years. What hap­pened to Nor­iega is that — I don’t think it had any­thing to do with the fact that he was a drug traf­ficker, because we knew that for years. What it had to do with was what is going to hap­pen at the end of this year, which is when con­trol of the Panama Canal goes over to the Pana­ma­ni­ans. If you read the New York Times story that Sey­mour Hersh wrote back in June of 1986 that exposed Nor­iega pub­licly as a drug traf­ficker and money laun­derer, there were some very telling phrases in it. All unsourced, nat­u­rally, you know — unat­trib­uted com­ments from high-ranking gov­ern­ment offi­cials — but they talked about how they were ner­vous that Nor­iega had become unre­li­able. And with con­trol of the Panama Canal revert­ing to the Pana­man­ian gov­ern­ment, they were very ner­vous at the idea of hav­ing some­body as “unsta­ble” as Nor­iega run­ning the coun­try at that point. And I think that was a well-founded fear. You’ve got a major drug traf­ficker con­trol­ling a major mar­itime thor­ough­way. I can see the CIA being ner­vous about being cut out of the busi­ness. [Laugh­ter from the audience.]

But I think that’s what the whole thing with Nor­iega was about — they wanted him out of there, because they wanted some­body that they could con­trol a lit­tle more closely in power in Panama for when the canal gets reverted back to them.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #9: Was there much of a profit dif­fer­ence between Nicaragua and Panama as far as the drugs went?

Gary Webb: Well, what Nor­iega had done was sort of cre­ate an inter­na­tional bank­ing cen­ter for drug money. That was his part of it. Nicaragua was noth­ing ever than just a trans-shipment point. Cen­tral Amer­ica was never any­thing more than a trans-shipment point. Colum­bia Peru and Bolivia were the pro­duc­ers, and the planes needed a place to refuel, and that’s all that Cen­tral Amer­ica ever was. The bank­ing was all done in Panama.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #10: You talk about how they sat on their sto­ries, the news­pa­pers? Why did they sud­denly decide to pur­sue the stories?

Gary Webb: Which sto­ries are these?

Audi­ence Mem­ber #10: The sto­ries about the crack deal­ing and the CIA. Why did they sud­denly decide that, well, actually...

Gary Webb: The ques­tion was — cor­rect me if I’m wrong — the ques­tion raised the fact that the other news­pa­pers didn’t do any­thing about this story for a while, and then after I wrote it they came after me. Is that what you’re asking?

Audi­ence Mem­ber #10: Well, yeah, and then even­tu­ally the CIA admit­ted it... and I mean, why are peo­ple ask­ing, it sat for a long time, and then sud­denly every­one was on it. What was the turn­ing point that made them decide to pur­sue it?

Gary Webb: The turn­ing point that made them decide to pur­sue the story was the fact that it had got­ten out over the Inter­net, and peo­ple were call­ing them up say­ing, why don’t you have the story in your news­pa­per? You know, I don’t think the sub­ject mat­ter fright­ened the major media as much as the fact that a lit­tle news­pa­per in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia was able to set the national agenda for once. And peo­ple were march­ing in the streets, peo­ple were hold­ing hear­ings in Wash­ing­ton, they were demand­ing Con­gres­sional hear­ings, you had John Deutch, the CIA direc­tor, go down on that sur­real trip down to South Cen­tral to con­vince every­one that every­thing was okay... [Laugh­ter from the audi­ence.] And all of this was hap­pen­ing with­out the big media being involved in it at all. And the rea­son that hap­pened was because we had an out­let — we had the web. And the peo­ple at the Mer­cury News did a fan­tas­tic job on this website.

And so, news was march­ing on with­out them. There’s a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin who’s done a paper on the whole “Dark Alliance” thing, and her the­sis is that this story was shut down more because of how it got out than for what it actu­ally said. That it was an attempt by the major media to regain con­trol of the Inter­net, and to sug­gest that unless they’re the ones who are putting it out, it’s unre­li­able. Which I think you see in a lot of sto­ries. The main­stream press gladly pro­motes the idea that you can’t believe any­thing you read on the Inter­net, it’s all kooks, it’s all con­spir­acy the­o­rists... And there are, I mean, I admit, there are a lot of them out there, but it’s not all false. But the idea that we’re being taught is, unless it’s got our name on it, you
can’t believe it. So they can retain con­trol of the means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion anyway.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #11: You men­tioned Iran-contra, which was pri­vate for­eign pol­icy in defi­ance of Con­gress, which means it was a high crime. From there, we get more drugs, we get ero­sion of civil lib­er­ties and the loss of the Fourth Amend­ment, which you men­tioned. And we have to get that back, because with­out it, we’re just com­modi­ties to one another. So what I’d like to ask you is, what are you work­ing on now? And do you have your own jour­nal­is­tic chain of reac­tion? Are you going to be doing some­thing that con­nects back to this?

Gary Webb: The ques­tion is what am I doing now — believe it or not, I’m work­ing for the gov­ern­ment. [Laugh­ter from the audi­ence.] I work for the Cal­i­for­nia leg­is­la­ture, and I do inves­ti­ga­tions of state agen­cies. I just wrote a piece for Esquire mag­a­zine which should be out in April on another fab­u­lous DEA pro­gram that they’re run­ning. Actu­ally, part of it’s based here in Ore­gon, called Oper­a­tion Pipeline. That story is com­ing out in April, and Esquire told me they want me to write more stuff for them, they want me to do some inves­tiga­tive report­ing for them, so I’ll be work­ing for them. And I’m putting together another book pro­posal, and a cou­ple of other things. I’m not going to work for news­pa­pers any more, I learned my lesson.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #12: A year ago the edi­tor of your news­pa­per was here to speak, spon­sored by the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon School of Jour­nal­ism. Before I got up here, I took a casual look around — I don’t know all of the mem­bers of the jour­nal­ism fac­ulty, but I didn’t rec­og­nize any. We did have a stu­dent here who got up and asked a ques­tion. That leads to this ques­tion: I’d like, if you don’t mind, to ask if there is some­one from the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon jour­nal­ism fac­ulty here, would they mind being acknowl­edged and rais­ing their hand?

Gary Webb: All right, there’s one back there.

Audi­ence Mem­ber #12: There is one. Okay. [Applause from the audi­ence.] I’m pleased to see it. There is that one per­son. My point is, I think much of what you’ve said this evening con­sti­tutes an indict­ment — and a valid indict­ment — of the uni­ver­sity jour­nal­ism pro­grams in this coun­try. [Applause.] Most Amer­i­cans and I believe — and I’m inter­ested in your reac­tion — that it rein­forces that indict­ment when we see, to that person’s credit, that she is the only fac­ulty mem­ber from our school of jour­nal­ism to hear you tonight.

Gary Webb: I think the gen­eral ques­tion was about the state of the jour­nal­ism schools. The one thing jour­nal­ism schools don’t teach, by and large, is inves­tiga­tive report­ing. They teach stenog­ra­phy very well. That’s why I con­sider most of jour­nal­ism today to be stenog­ra­phy. You go to a press con­fer­ence, you write down the quotes accu­rately, you come back, you don’t pro­vide any con­text, you don’t pro­vide any per­spec­tive, because that gets into analy­sis, and heav­ens knows, we don’t want any analy­sis in our newspapers.

But you report things accu­rately, you report things fairly, and even if it’s a lie you put it in the news­pa­per, and that’s con­sid­ered jour­nal­ism. I don’t con­sider that jour­nal­ism, I con­sider that stenog­ra­phy. And that is the way they teach jour­nal­ism in school, that’s the way I was taught. Unless you go to a very dif­fer­ent jour­nal­ism school from the kinds that most kids go to, that’s what you’re taught. Now, there are spe­cial­ized jour­nal­ism schools, there are master’s pro­grams like the Kiplinger Pro­gram at Ohio State, that’s very good.

So, I’m not say­ing that all jour­nal­ism schools are bad, but they don’t teach you to be jour­nal­ists. They dis­cour­age you from doing that, by and large. And I don’t think it’s the fault of the jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sors, I just think that’s the way things have been taught in this coun­try for so long, that they just do it auto­mat­i­cally. I’d be inter­ested in hear­ing the professor’s thoughts about it, but that’s sort of the way I look at things. I spent way too many years in jour­nal­ism school. I kind of got shed of those notions after I got out in the real world.

[End of transcript.]

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Tran­scrip­tions from the orig­i­nal San Jose Mer­cury News series:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7