Kill the Messenger Page 2

  That afternoon, Sue met Kurt at the coroner’s office. “They took us into a room and the coroner came in and told us that Gary had shot himself and what gun he had used,” she says. “It was his dad’s gun that he had found when he was a security guard at a hospital in Cincinnati. Some patient had left it there and his dad had kept it. He used to keep it under the bed. I’d get mad because we had kids and he’d stick it in the closet.”

  Kurt asked the coroner if he was certain it was a suicide. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” he answered. He added that sometimes, people who shoot themselves have bruises on their fingers from squeezing the trigger. Apparently the will to live is so strong that suicide victims often grip the gun so tightly and for so long they lose blood circulation in their hands. “Gary had bruises on his fingers,” Sue says.

  A few days later, four letters arrived at Sue’s house, one each for her and the three kids. Webb had mailed them before he died. He sent a separate letter to his mother, and a last will and testament to his brother Kurt. He told his children that he loved them, that Ian would make a woman happy someday, and that he didn’t want his death to dissuade Eric from considering a career in journalism. His will divided his assets, including his just-sold house, between his wife and children. His only additional wish was that his ashes be spread in the ocean so he could “bodysurf for eternity.”

  WHILE IT WAS Gary Webb who pulled the trigger, the bullet that ended his life was a mere afterthought to the tragic unraveling of one of the most controversial and misunderstood journalists in recent American history. A college dropout with twenty years of reporting experience and a Pulitzer Prize on his resume, Webb broke the biggest story of his career in August 1996, when he published “Dark Alliance,” a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that linked the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to America’s crack-cocaine explosion.

  Webb spent more than a year uncovering the shady connection between the CIA and drug trafficking through the agency’s relationship with the Nicaraguan contras, a right-wing army that aimed to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government during the 1980s. The Sandinistas were Marxist rebels who came to power in 1979 after the collapse of decades of U.S.-backed dictatorship at the hands of the Somoza family. President Reagan called the contras “freedom fighters” and compared them to America’s founding fathers. Even as Reagan uttered those words, the CIA was aware that the many of the contras’ supporters were deeply involved in cocaine smuggling, and were using the money to fund their army, or, as more often proved the case, to line their own pockets.

  Many reporters had written about the CIA’s collusion with contra drug smugglers, but nobody had ever discovered where those drugs ended up once they reached American soil. “Dark Alliance” provided the first dramatic answer to that mystery by profiling the relationship between a pair of contra sympathizers in California, Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses, and “Freeway” Ricky Ross, the most notorious crack dealer in the history of South Central’s crack trade.

  “Dark Alliance” created history in another way: it was the first major news exposé to be published simultaneously in print and on the Internet. Ignored by the mainstream media at first, the story nonetheless spread like wildfire through cyberspace and talk radio. It sparked angry protests around the country by African-Americans who had long suspected the government had allowed drugs into their communities. Their anger was fueled by the fact that “Dark Alliance” didn’t just show that the contras had supplied a major crack dealer with cocaine, or that the cash had been used to fund the CIA’s army in Central America—but also strongly implied that this activity had been critical to the nationwide explosion of crack cocaine that had taken place in America during the 1980s.

  It was an explosive charge, although a careful reading of the story showed that Webb had never actually stated that the CIA had intentionally started the crack epidemic. In fact, Webb never believed the CIA had conspired to addict anybody to drugs. Rather, he believed that the agency had known that the contras were dealing cocaine, and hadn’t lifted a finger to stop them. He was right, and the controversy over “Dark Alliance”—which many consider to be the biggest media scandal of the 1990s—would ultimately force the CIA to admit it had lied for years about what it knew and when it knew it.

  But by the time that happened, Webb’s career as a journalist would be over. Just two months after his story appeared, the most powerful newspapers in the country had published massive rebuttals to “Dark Alliance.” Webb increasingly became a focus of those attacks, as the mainstream media began digging through his twenty-year career, looking for evidence of bias that would bolster their attacks on his credibility. In less than a year, the San Jose Mercury News would back away from the story, forcing Webb to a tiny regional bureau of the paper. He quit his job and never worked for a major newspaper again.

  The attacks continued even after Webb’s death. The L.A. Times published an obituary that ran in newspapers across the country which summed up his life by claiming he was author of “discredited” stories about the CIA. The paper would later publish a lengthy feature story revealing that Webb had suffered from clinical depression for more than a decade—even before he wrote “Dark Alliance.” Titled “Written in Pain,” it painted Webb as a troubled, manic-depressive man who had repeatedly cheated on his wife, and a reckless “cowboy” of a journalist.

  Such a portrait offers only a misleading caricature of a much more complicated man. Interviews with dozens of Webb’s friends, family members and colleagues reveal that Webb was an idealistic, passionate, and meticulous journalist, not a cowboy. Those who knew him before “Dark Alliance” made him famous and then infamous say he was happy until he lost his career. His colleagues, with the exception of some reporters and editors at the Mercury News who found him arrogant and self-promoting, almost universally loved, respected and even revered him.

  As this book will show, the controversy over “Dark Alliance” was the central event in Webb’s life, and the critical element in his eventual depression and suicide. His big story, despite major flaws of hyperbole abetted and even encouraged by his editors, remains one of the most important works of investigative journalism in recent American history. The connection Webb uncovered between the CIA, the contras and L.A.’s crack trade was real—and radioactive. Webb was hardly the first American journalist to lose his job after taking on the country’s most secretive government agency in print. Every serious reporter or politician that tried to unravel the connection between the CIA, the Nicaraguan contras and cocaine, had lived to regret it.

  Senator John Kerry investigated it through congressional hearings that were stonewalled by the Reagan administration and for this, he was alternatively ridiculed and ignored in the media. Journalists like the AP’s Bob Parry quit their jobs after being repeatedly shut down by their editors. Some reporters, working on the ground in Central America, had even been subjected to police harassment and death threats for pursuing it. Webb was simply the most widely and maliciously maligned of these reporters to literally die for the story.

  The recent history of American journalism is full of media scandals, from the fabulist fabrications of The New Republic’s Stephen Glass and the New York Times’ Jayson Blair to Judith Miller’s credulous and entirely discredited reporting on Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction for the New York Times, which helped pave the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Webb, despite his stubborn refusal to admit his own errors, hardly deserves to be held in such company. What truly distinguishes his fate is his how he was abandoned by his own employer in the face of unprecedented and ferocious attacks by the nation’s major newspapers, the likes of which had never been seen before or occurred since.

  The controversy over “Dark Alliance” forced Webb from journalism and ultimately led him to take his own life. Besides Webb, however, nobody else lost a job over the story—nobody at the CIA certainly, and not even any of Webb’s editors, who happily published his work only
to back away from it under withering media attacks before getting on with their lives and receiving promotions. Gary Webb’s tragic fate, and the role of America’s most powerful newspapers in ending his career, raises an important question about American journalism in an era where much of the public perceives the fourth estate as an industry in decline, a feckless broadcaster of White House leaks with a penchant for sensationalized, consumer-driven tabloid sex scandals.

  Webb spent two decades uncovering corruption at all levels of power, at the hands of public officials representing all ideological facets of the political spectrum. Indeed, his very fearlessness in taking on powerful institutions and officials was an ultimately fatal character trait that nonetheless embodies the very sort of journalistic ethic that should be rewarded and celebrated in any healthy democratic society. In 2002, Webb reflected on his fall from grace in the book Into the Buzzsaw, a compendium of first-person accounts by journalists whose controversial stories ultimately pushed them from their chosen profession. His words are worth remembering now more than ever.

  “If we had met five years ago, you wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me,” Webb concluded. “And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job . . . The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.”

  TWO

  Guns and Girls

  BORN ON AUGUST 31, 1955, at the apex of America’s post-war economic boom to a nomadic household centered on his father’s career as a Marine Corps sergeant, Gary Webb enjoyed an adventuresome if peripatetic childhood as a military brat. His father, William Webb, served as a Navy frogman in the Korean War and almost perished from a mine explosion while swimming to a submarine after an operation above the 38th parallel. After recovering from his wounds, he returned to Korea, serving in the air wing. A few months after the war’s end, he found himself at a restaurant in San Francisco, where he met his future wife Anita, an Italian-American who had followed her brother, then serving in the Coast Guard, from Brooklyn to California.

  Because the Marine Corps didn’t have an adequate hospital in Hawaii, Anita Webb gave birth to her first-born son alone at a military hospital in Corona, California. Two months later, Webb’s father rejoined the family when he was transferred to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County, California. The family lived in nearby Los Alamitos until 1957, shortly after Webb’s younger brother Kurt was born, when Bill was transferred again, first to Florida, then North Carolina and finally to Huntington Beach, California. A year later, Bill got his orders to transfer to Hawaii, where he was attached to a radio battalion.

  “Gary was a strange child,” Anita says. “He was very serious. He had big eyes and kept looking and looking, but didn’t talk. He was very peculiar. But once he started talking, it never stopped.” When Webb was two years old, he told his mother he had a headache. “Oh Gary,” she said. “You’re a hypochondriac. When she explained what the word meant, it became Webb’s favorite word. “He ran around telling anyone who would listen that he was a hypochondriac.”

  In Hawaii, she insists, Gary spent the happiest years of his life. “We found a nice house up in the hills in Kaneohe and the kids started playing with the Hawaiian kids. It was good for them. Bill and I were water lovers. We were always near the beach. And this stereotype of a Marine Corps father—forget about it. He was always playing with the kids, teaching them how to swim and bodysurf.”

  Now a lawyer who works for defense contractors in San Jose, Kurt Webb recalls one of he and Gary’s favorite pastimes was collecting shells—not from the beach but the Marine Corps gunnery range. “We had a lot of independence and would run around until evening, going to the beach, building tree forts, popping Portuguese man-o-wars or having snail fights.”

  “Gary was very sensitive,” Anita says. “I remember my brother came to visit when we were in Hawaii and took the kids out to the beach. My brother walked along the ocean with them and told them stories about the man who lived in the ocean and all these fairy tales. And then he picked up this tiny blue plastic soldier and told them this story about how this soldier had conquered all these lands. Well, one day, I’m cleaning Gary’s drawers years later when he was in college, and there’s the soldier. Gary was very sensitive about these things.”

  While still in grade school, Gary showed early talent in what would later become a passion for poring over complex documents—the hallmark of a true investigative reporter. “One time, he went to the PX and bought a book on the stock market,” Anita says. Soon thereafter, Webb began to read the business section of the newspaper each morning and built a spreadsheet for tracking stock prices. One day, he told his parents he wanted to purchase stock in the Xerox Corporation. “His father and I were totally stupid on stocks,” Anita says. “We didn’t have tons of money. And his father said, ‘You can’t: it costs a lot of money to go into the stock market.’ And Gary never forgave his father because he said he could have made a lot of money from buying stock in Xerox. He was an amazing young man.”

  When Webb was in seventh grade, the family left Hawaii. By then, his father had spent twenty years in the military and was ready to retire. “We talked about it, and at first we wanted to move to California,” Anita says. “But my mother said ‘Don’t move to California: they’re smoking pot and doing all sorts of horrible things.’ Haight-Ashbury was going on. It was the ’60s. We made the decision that Indianapolis was a safe place to raise children.”

  The family moved to Lawrence, Indiana, just outside the city. There, Anita recalls, “little girls looked like little girls and not hookers.” Their house was located in a good school district, and the real estate agent told the Webbs that local kids won more college scholarships there than students at any other district in the city. “It was a good decision,” Anita says. “The boys got a great education.”

  In Indianapolis, Bill Webb found a job as a security guard at a hospital. Faded family photographs show a typical suburban nuclear family: Bill a patriarch of ramrod-straight military bearing, Anita, a cheerful, checkered-blouse housewife, and Gary and Kurt slouching mischievously in striped T-shirts and sunglasses. Although thousands of miles from the ocean, the family still spent vacations on the water, either on a houseboat they’d moor on the Indiana River or at a beach cottage at the Outer Banks in North Carolina. But the most important family time transpired around the dinner table, where politics were openly discussed.

  Although Anita was a staunch Republican, Bill was a Democrat, and by the late 1960s, both were adamantly opposed to the Vietnam War. “We always listened to the news and discussed politics around the dinner table,” Anita says. “In the beginning, my husband believed in the Domino Theory. Over time he changed. And even though I was a Republican, I was against it. But Gary was always apolitical. During the Vietnam War, Gary used to sit there reading the newspaper. He was in the sixth grade, and he’d keep track of the body counts from the war. Gary kept a running calculation of how many Vietnamese died and one day he said ‘Well, we’ve killed the whole of Vietnam.”

  At Lawrence Central High School, Gary and his brother drifted apart. “Every time we moved, we’d go off together and explore,” Kurt says. “Prior to junior high, we always had the same friends and did things together in the neighborhood. But in high school we separated and had our own friends. We had sibling rivalry; it was our competitive nature. He’d beat me up sometimes, because he was bigger, but I got my revenge. Gary was a thickheaded individual. He always wanted things his way. He always used to read stuff and absorb it and have all this knowledge in his head. He could sit down and read and suck all this knowledge out of stuff.”

  “He was just a goofy guy,” says Greg Wolf, a lifelong friend who first met Webb at Belzer Junior High. “He was a horny teenager like the rest of us. There w
as no soccer or ballet or any of that crap. We just rode our bicycles and sat around. He and I used to go down to Madison, Indiana, a little town on the Indiana River where I had an aunt and we’d shoot guns and camp out. One day we went to a river and there was a dock there with a bunch of houseboats. They were all empty because it was winter. He gets off the dock, goes on one of these boats and starts snooping inside. He wasn’t going to steal anything, but property rights never occurred to him. He wasn’t afraid of anything.”

  Another high school friend, Mike Crosby, recalls that despite his later reputation as a leftist reporter, Webb loved shooting guns. “We’d camp out, a dozen of us, on this unimproved property down in Jefferson County, and shoot guns,” he says. “Rifles, handguns, whatever people had. Gary would say, ‘I’m not one of those anti-gun people. I’m a member of the Greenpeace Liberation Front. We shoot hunters.’”

  Gary’s fearlessness as a reporter surfaced in his first work of journalism, in a story that convinced him he had found his true calling. It was 1970, Richard Nixon was in the White House, the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War was still raging, but Webb wasn’t out in the streets protesting. Given that his interests ranged from cars and bikes to guns and girls, it’s not surprising that his first story combined guns and girls. In a 1999 speech in Eugene, Oregon, Webb recalled how he got his start in journalism with a piece he wrote for his school paper about the high school’s militaristic cheerleading squad.

  “I think I was fifteen,” he said. “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.’”