Nineteen Years Ago Today, Journalist Gary Webb Was... https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/12/10/ninetee...
CovertAction Magazine
Exposing Covert Action Since 1978
Nineteen Years Ago Today,
Journalist Gary Webb Was
Murdered After Exposing CIA
Drug Trafficking
By - December 10, 2023
Gary Webb with his exposé about the CIA and crack. [Source: educateinspirechange.org]
O
n December 10, 2004, the body of journalist Gary Webb, 49,
was discovered in his home near Sacramento after a moving
company worker found a note posted to his front door that
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Nineteen Years Ago Today, Journalist Gary Webb Was... https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/12/10/ninetee...
read: “Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance.”
Webb’s death was listed as a suicide, but Webb was found with two bullet
holes in the head, indicating that he was executed.[1]
In the days leading up to his death, Webb had told friends that he was
receiving death threats, being regularly followed by what he thought were
government agents, and that he was concerned about strange individuals who
were seen breaking into and leaving his house.
Artwork that accompanied the original
Dark Alliance series published in the San
José Mercury News. [Source:
theintercept.com] [Source: amazon.com]
In the late 1990s, Webb had written a series of stories for the San José
Mercury News, which provided the basis for his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA,
the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press,
1998).
In it, Webb detailed how the explosion of crack cocaine in South Central Los
Angeles during the 1980s was sparked by two Nicaraguan émigrés, Danilo
Blandón and Norwin Meneses, who sold huge amounts of cocaine to raise
funds for a CIA-backed rebel army—the Contras.
Webb was a Pulitzer Prize winner whose “Dark Alliance” series went viral in
the early days of the internet. It caused a �restorm that led to the resignation
of CIA Director John Deutch after he was grilled by angry Black activists at a
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meeting in L.A.[2]
Maxine Waters (D-CA) pushed for an
investigation of Webb’s explosive
revelations. [Source:
John Deutch [Source: wikipedia.org] allthatsinteresting.com]
Webb’s story had traced how cocaine was shipped into San Francisco and
distributed in L.A. after Blandón and Meneses sold it to a street dealer from
South Central named “Freeway” Ricky Ross.
Danilo Blandón [Source: Norwin Meneses [Source:
historyvshollywood.com] historyvshollywood.com]
Through this connection, “Freeway Rick” became a crack kingpin, using his
contacts with L.A.’s Crips and Blood street gangs to help distribute crack to
many other cities across the country.
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“Freeway” Ricky Ross [Source: latimes.com]
Webb had �rst heard about the story after receiving a tip from the girlfriend of
a drug dealer against whom Blandón was testifying.
Gary Webb in 1997. [Source: nytimes.com]
In his lead paragraph, Webb wrote that “a Bay Area drug ring had funneled
millions in drug pro�ts to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency” which was in league with “Uzi-toting ‘gangstas’ of
Compton and South-Central L.A.”
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The thrust of Webb’s research was con�rmed in 1998 when a CIA inspector
general’s report acknowledged that the CIA had worked with suspected
drugrunners while supporting the Contras in Nicaragua. [3]
[Source: narconews.com]
The corruption Webb exposed led all the way to the White House and
President Reagan via his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who was
coordinating, under Reagan’s orders, the illegal supplying to the Contras of
weapons that were purchased with pro�ts from the cocaine being smuggled
into the U.S. and distributed around the country by criminals in league with the
CIA.
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Oliver North [Source: politico.com]
Because of the far-reaching implications, Webb became the target of what
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair called “one of the most venomous
and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in
living memory.”
The assault was spearheaded by the CIA in collaboration with the major
agenda-setting media like The New York Times, The Washington Post and Los
Angeles Times—which put some 17 reporters on the assignment to destroy
Webb.[4]
The Mercury News’s top editor, Jerry Ceppos, ultimately buckled, and threw
Webb to the wolves, deleting the website and penning a letter of apology to
the readers for the “Dark Alliance” series.[5]
Jerry Ceppos [Source: mercurynews.com]
Webb was in turn banished to a small Mercury News bureau in Cupertino,
California, south of San Francisco—125 miles from his home and family in
Sacramento—and forced to write stories normally assigned to cub reporters.
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His career was effectively destroyed and he would never again get a job with a
daily newspaper.
Pentagon video game warriors. [Source: newsreview.com]
Webb stood by his research, nevertheless, and continued to expose corruption
as a freelance journalist. His �nal publication unearthed the strategic use of
video games by the Pentagon as a method of indoctrination and recruitment
of teenage boys.
In a tribute to Webb, Robert Parry, the founder of Consortium News, wrote that
Webb’s death marked “an exclamation point” on a “sorry era of journalism that
began with the rise of Ronald Reagan and saw the gradual retreat—under
right-wing �re—of what had once been Washington’s Watergate/Pentagon
Papers watchdog press corps.”
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Robert Parry [Source: thenation.com]
Since these words were written, things have only gotten worse, with the media
helping to advance the Russia Gate conspiracy theory while promoting
scurrilous allegations against Russia that have helped mobilize public support
for the war in Ukraine.
All the more reason to honor Webb and the uncompromising journalistic
integrity that he stood for.
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1. Webb’s friends said that there is no way he would have taken his own life:
He loved life and loved his kids. His cause of death was changed to “single
gunshot wound” when people began to question how or why a man would
shoot himself in the face twice. This represented a concentrated effort to
cover up the nature of Webb’s death. After Webb died, he was immediately
cremated thereby destroying forensic evidence of the gunshot wounds.
2. Webb’s book was endorsed by Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA)
who said that “the time I spent investigating the allegations of the Dark
Alliance series led me to the undeniable conclusion that the CIA, DEA, DIA
and FBI knew about drug tra�cking in South Central Los Angeles. They
were either part of the tra�cking or turned a blind eye to it, in an effort to
fund the contra war. . . . This book is the �nal chapter on this sordid tale
and brings to light one of the worst o�cial abuses in our nation’s history.”
↑
3. Associated Press journalists Robert Parry and Brian Barger had earlier
reported that Contra groups had “engaged in cocaine tra�cking, in part to
help �nance their war against Nicaragua.” ↑
4. Alexander Cockburn wrote at CounterPunch that “squadrons of hacks,
some of them with career-long ties to the CIA, sprayed thousands of words
of vitriol over Webb and his paper, the San Jose Mercury News, for
besmirching the Agency’s �ne name by charging it with complicity in the
importing of cocaine into the U.S.” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell characteristically
branded Webb’s story as a “conspiracy theory.” ↑
5. Ceppos went on to receive an award from the Society of Professional
Journalists for his “superior ethical conduct” in handling the aftermath of
the series and, in 1999, was promoted to vice president for news at Knight-
Ridder. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of
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CovertAction Magazine.
He is the author of �ve books on U.S. foreign
policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The
Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review
Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy
Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press,
2023).
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