Gary Webb: Susan Bell: a shameful secret history
Tim Murphy
The Independent
www.independent.co.uk
Susan Bell: a shameful secret history
In 1996, the award-winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered CIA links to Los
Angeles drug dealers. It was an amazing scoop - but one that would ruin his
career and drive him to suicide. His widow, Susan Bell, looks back on a
shameful secret history
By
Robert Chalmers
When the big story arrives, Susan Bell recalls her late husband saying, "it
will be like a bullet with your name on it. You won't even hear it coming."
It was a remark that Gary Webb overheard early in his career, from an older
reporter, and would repeat, ironically, to the point that the phrase "It's
the Big One" became a standing joke on his news desk. And yet for Webb, the
idea that a journalist could be killed by his own story turned out to be no
laughing matter. The only difference in Gary Webb's case was that his life
was ended not by one bullet, but two.
We are in the living room of Bell's house just outside Sacramento,
California. A perceptive, engaging woman of 48, she has turned an adjoining
study into a small shrine to her late husband, who would have celebrated his
50th birthday five weeks ago. The room is decorated with his trophies: a
Pulitzer prize hangs next to his HL Mencken award; also on the wall is a
framed advertisement for The Kentucky Post. It reads: "There should be no
fetters on reporters, nor must they tamper with the truth, but give light so
the people will find their own way." When Webb's body was discovered last
December, Bell says, this last item had been dumped in the trash.
Webb, one of the boldest and most outstanding reporters of his generation,
was the journalist who, in 1996, established the connection between the CIA
and major drug dealers in Los Angeles, some of whose profits had been
channelled to fund the Contra guerrilla movement in Nicaragua. The link
between drug-running and the Reagan regime's support for the right-wing
terrorist group throughout the 1980s had been public knowledge for over a
decade. What was new about Webb's reports, published under the title "Dark
Alliance" in the Californian paper the San Jose Mercury News, was that for
the first time it brought the story back home. Webb's pieces were not
dealing with nameless peasants slaughtered in some distant republic, but
demonstrated a clear link between the CIA and the suppliers of the gangs
delivering crack to the ghetto of Watts, in South Central Los Angeles.
His series of articles - which prompted the distinguished reporter and
former Newsweek Washington correspondent Robert Parry to describe Webb as
"an American hero" - incited fury among the African-American community, many
of whom took his investigation as proof that the White House saw crack as a
way of bringing genocide to the ghetto. Webb's reports prompted three
official investigations, including one by the CIA itself which -
astonishingly for an organisation rarely praised for its transparency -
confirmed the substance of his findings (published at length in Webb's 1998
book, also entitled Dark Alliance). "Because of Gary Webb's work," said
Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of
connections to drug runners. That wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been
willing to stand up and risk it all."
This emotive last phrase refers to Webb's experience in the immediate
aftermath of publication of his three lengthy articles, in the summer of
1996. The Mercury News reporter came under sustained attack from the
weightier US newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and,
especially, the Los Angeles Times, infuriated at being scooped, on its own
patch, by what it saw as a small-town paper.
When Webb pressed the Mercury News to allow him to investigate the LA
connection further, his own newspaper issued a retraction which earned its
editor, Jerry Ceppos, wide praise from rival publications, but effectively
disowned Webb, who then suffered the kind of corporate lynching that
reporters are usually expected to dispense rather than endure.
By 1997, Bell tells me, Webb - whose 30-year career had earned him more
awards than there is room for in her study - had been reassigned to the
Mercury News's office in Cupertino.
"They had him writing obituaries," she said. "The first story he had to file
was about a police horse which had died of constipation."
Webb, whose plans to become a journalist had begun when he was 13, but never
included equine death notices, resigned from the Mercury News a few months
later. Depressed, he became increasingly unpredictable in his behaviour and
embarked on a series of affairs; he was divorced from Bell in 2000, though
he remained close to her throughout his life and lived in a house in nearby
Carmichael. Unable to get work from any major US newspaper, he spent the
four months before his death writing for * a free-sheet covering the
Sacramento area. To pay off his mounting debts, Webb sold the Carmichael
property, where he was living alone, and arranged to move in with his
mother.
When removal men arrived, on the morning of 10 December 2004, they found a
sign on his front door, which read: ''Please do not enter. Call 911 for
assistance. Thank you." Webb's corpse was found in the bedroom, with two
gunshot wounds to the head.
When I first heard the news, I tell Bell, I was inclined to believe the
conspiracy theories that still proliferate on the internet, suggesting that
Webb had been assassinated - either by one of the drug dealers he'd met
while writing Dark Alliance, or by the intelligence services who were
supposed to police them.
She shakes her head.
"Looking back," she says, "I think Gary had been obsessed with suicide for
some time. And when he got something in his head, he was determined to do
it. That was just the way he was."
Webb, Bell explains, had written four letters explaining what he was about
to do - one to her, one to each of their three children - and mailed them
immediately before he killed himself.
"Why were there two bullet wounds?"
His former wife, her voice lowered to a whisper, explains that Webb missed
with the first shot (which exited through his left cheek).
"The second bullet," adds Bell, who has worked for more than 20 years in the
area of respiratory therapy, "struck his carotid artery."
"After Gary died," she says, "a reporter from the LA Times came here. I felt
weak and distressed; the whole thing was so fresh. She kept crying about how
terrible it all was - by which I mean that she was, physically, crying. The
story they printed was just awful. I felt she really trashed me. She said
the paper wanted to make up for what it had done in the past. As it turned
out," she adds, "that was not their intent."
Gary Webb was at his desk in the Mercury News's Sacramento office, in July
1995, when he received a message to call Coral Baca, a Hispanic woman from
the San Francisco Bay area, allegedly connected to a Colombian drug cartel.
Baca claimed that a drug dealer with close links to the CIA had framed her
boyfriend, who was also in the cocaine business.
"Gary didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always
getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. So he blew her off. When
she got indignant," she adds, "he went to meet her."
While police were preparing the case against her boyfriend, Baca alleged,
officers had disclosed documents which revealed that one of her lover's
associates had been working for the Contras. Webb began to shift from
cynicism to curiosity. With Baca's encouragement, he started to investigate
a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine dealer named Oscar Danilo Blandsn.
Webb was an assertive figure who drove fast cars and powerful motorcycles,
hung heavy metal posters in his office and, at certain times in his life,
smoked a fair amount of cannabis. Some editors regarded him as stubborn to
the point of insolence. In and out of work, he had a reputation for taking
risks. And yet, for all his Easy Rider tendencies, he was also a dedicated
family man with an extraordinary appetite for researching minutiae.
Born in Corona, California, son of a conservatively minded Marine, he met
Bell, whose father was a university lecturer, at high school in
Indianapolis. When they married, she was aged just 21. Her husband began his
career on The Kentucky Post, and rapidly proved himself to be the sort of
character who can be a secretive agency's worst nightmare: a full-blooded
provocateur who liked to put the hours in at the library.
Webb joined the Mercury News in 1988, via the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In the
six years he worked at its Sacramento office, he won the HL Mencken award,
for a story exposing corruption in California's drug enforcement agency, and
his Pulitzer prize - won jointly, as part of a Mercury News team covering
the 1990 Loma Prieta earthquake.
According to Walt Bogdanich, a former colleague on the Plain Dealer who has
won two Pulitzers and now works for The New York Times, Webb was the best
retriever of information from public records he has ever seen. Webb followed
up Baca's leads at the California State Library, examining Congressional
records and FBI reports. What he found, he wrote later, "nearly knocked me
off my chair".
"He walked in one day," Bell recalls, "and said, 'You are not going to
believe what I just found out.' When he told me, I said it sounded crazy. He
said: 'No. The drugs went to South Central LA. There is a CIA connection and
I can demonstrate it.'"
Webb put in a call to Robert Parry. Parry, the first reporter to write about
the US authorities' drug-running on behalf of the Contras, had survived a
campaign by the White House to discredit first his story, then his
reputation.
"I had to warn Gary that what he was looking at was probably true, but that
he would run very big risks," Parry recalls. "He thought I was being
cowardly. I'm glad that I didn't dissuade him, because it was important to
get the truth out... but for Gary Webb, there was a very high price to pay."
Webb's research took a year, in the course of which he received death
threats.
I first heard about Webb eight years ago, I tell Bell, from the Paris-based
journalist Paul Moreira. Moreira - a senior news producer for Canal Plus -
has established a reputation for courage and independence of mind in his own
foreign reporting, and was recently described by Le Monde as "the Che
Guevara of news media". Shortly before I left for Sacramento, Moreira, who
knew Webb, had shown me unbroadcast footage which shows the French reporter
making a phone call to a media commentator in the US, asking him about
Webb's death.
"I told Gary not to go near this story," his source replies, in an emotional
voice. "You do not understand the power of these people," he adds, referring
to the US intelligence services. "Do not quote me. Do not quote me on
anything."
"You sound very scared," Moreira remarks.
"I am scared," the voice replies. "Look at what happened to Gary Webb. Do
something else with your life," the voice urges. "Like enjoy it."
By the time Webb began researching Dark Alliance, Bell was 38 and they had
three children. Some might consider it an inappropriate assignment for a man
with responsibilities.
"People told me that," she says. "But Gary thought that if something was
true, it should be told. He also had this inherent belief that the truth
could not harm him. He really did believe that," she says. "Back then."
She pauses: "That said, he did sleep with a gun under his bed."
'Dark Alliance' - both as journalism and as a book - is a convoluted
narrative, but the crucial link it establishes is between the "agricultural
salesman" Oscar Danilo Blandsn, a Contra sympathiser with close CIA links,
and his best customer, an LA drug dealer known as "Freeway" Ricky Ross.
Ross, currently serving life, was already infamous; he had been profiled in
the LA Times in December 1994, by writer Jesse Katz, at a time when Ross was
at liberty and in penitent mood.
"If there was an eye to the storm," Katz wrote, "if there was a mastermind
behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw most responsible
for flooding LA's streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway
Rick.
"Ross," his report went on, dealt "on a scale never before conceived," with
"a staggering turnover" of "50 to 100 kilos of cocaine a day".
Webb established incontrovertible links * between Ricky Ross and Blandsn
who, two years later, would betray Ross to the authorities.
By the late spring of 1996, Webb was ready to publish. Cuts and amendments
were made at the request of Ceppos, executive editor of the Mercury News,
and Webb's immediate editor Dawn Garcia, among others. Then, in August the
same year, the first of three instalments of "Dark Alliance" appeared.
"For the better part of a decade," it began, "a San Francisco drug ring sold
tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and
funnelled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by
the US Central Intelligence Agency."
The story had little immediate impact. But "Dark Alliance" was also posted
on the Mercury News's website, with the image of a crack smoker superimposed
on the CIA badge. Within weeks, the site was attracting up to 1.3m hits per
day. The story was picked up by black talk-radio stations. The legendary
civil-rights activist Dick Gregory was arrested while he protested outside
the CIA's headquarters; Gregory began referring to the organisation as
"Crack in America". Webb - whose article had never alleged that the CIA
deliberately targeted any ethnic group - became a national celebrity.
In an unprecedented move, the then CIA director John Deutch was dispatched
to address community leaders in the Watts district of LA. Film of this
encounter survives. "This is an appalling charge," says a tense-looking
Deutch. "It says the CIA helped introduce poison into our children. Nobody
who heads a government agency can let such an allegation stand."
"Allow Gary Webb to be there [in the CIA investigation]," a heckler shouts.
Deutch declines the invitation.
Webb undeniably made mistakes of detail and emphasis in the newspaper
version of "Dark Alliance". The consensus, insofar as one exists, is that he
probably overstated both the amount of drug money made by Ross and Blandsn,
and the percentage of those profits diverted to the Contras. Although
Blandsn's cartel was undoubtedly one of the first to bring crack to LA, Webb
was almost certainly suffering a rush of blood when he described the group
as "the first pipeline" into the city.
But his central thesis - that the CIA, having participated in narcotics
trafficking in central America, had, at best, turned a blind eye to the
activities of drug dealers in LA - has never been in question.
Jack Blum, who was the lead investigator for Senator John Kerry's
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, which
produced a highly damning 1989 report on drug-smuggling in the guise of
national security, is one of several commentators to have questioned aspects
of Webb's original reporting.
"But that," pointed out Blum, who is now a Washington attorney, "in no way -
in no way - diminishes the wrongness of what these bastards did. And the
importance of exposing them. Work with a bunch of drug dealers to run guns?
I mean - please."
The response from the American press took two months to arrive. When it did,
beginning with The Washington Post, it shocked Webb's critics as much as his
many admirers.
Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the George Washington University's
National Security Archive, was one of the first to suggest that Webb had
overplayed his hand in the Mercury News version of "Dark Alliance". He
recently told the American Journalism Review (whose scrupulously researched
piece, by Susan Paterno, is the only serious documentation of the Webb case
I could find anywhere in the orthodox American media) that Webb's critics in
rival newspapers, "quoted these CIA guys - who had a tremendous amount to
hide - as though they were telling the truth. Gary Webb became, quite
unfairly, the victim of one of the most extraordinary examples of piling on
by the mainstream press, ever."
Going to the CIA to ask if they've ever profited from drug sales in Los
Angeles, I suggested to Kornbluh, is rather like asking Fagin if he has ever
picked a pocket.
"Exactly," replied Kornbluh, who - referring specifically to the LA Times,
said he is "baffled as to how they could be so gullible. I remain astounded
by the editorial decisions they made."
The first effect of the onslaught was to ease the pressure on the CIA. One
instalment of the LA Times's 18,000-word rebuttal of Webb's piece, published
in October 1996, sought to minimise the importance of his key witness, Ricky
Ross. It was written by Jesse Katz, the same reporter who, less than two
years earlier, had described Ross's conglomerate as "the Wal-Mart of crack
dealing".
"Although Ross had become a millionaire by 1984," Katz now wrote, "the
market was so huge by then that even a dealer of his stature could seem
dwarfed... How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level," he
continues, "had nothing to do with Ross".
If the antagonism of competing publications was predictable, what happened
to Webb within his own newspaper was not. The normal process is, or should
be, that a reporter files a story and is robustly challenged by his paper's
lawyers and editors - who, if satisfied that the report is accurate -
publish, then defend the writer to the hilt. Should these editors
subsequently deem the story to have been fatally flawed, they take the
consequences. This did not happen in Webb's case.
Gary Webb, friends say, was a far more combative character than either the
Mercury News's executive editor Ceppos or page editor Garcia. Ceppos
initially defended Webb, and reportedly showed up at an in-house party
wearing a military helmet. But once the flak really started to fly, from the
nation's grandest newspapers, Ceppos - having come under exactly what form
of pressure it is difficult to know - printed a retraction which Webb
dismissed as spineless. Both sides were left angry and disappointed.
"Gary was given the choice of relocating either to San Jose," says Bell, "or
to Cupertino". Working in San Jose would have meant daily contact with what
Bell describes as "people he did not want to be with". Webb chose the second
option. By the autumn of 1997, on medication for clinical depression, he was
given leave of absence from the paper. Then, on 10 December, he resigned.
Webb took a modestly paid, low-profile job as an investigator with the
California State Legislature. His erstwhile editors on the Mercury News,
meanwhile, saw their careers thrive. In 1997 Ceppos was awarded the US
Society of Professional Journalists' National Ethics Award. Two years later,
he was promoted to Vice President of Knight Ridder, the Mercury News's
parent company; he retired from this position last month. Garcia is deputy
director of the John S Knight Fellowships in Journalism at Stanford
University.
Ceppos and Garcia have long since lost any taste for public discussion of
"Dark Alliance". Ceppos failed to reply to one phone message and six emails.
Garcia responded by email but declined to speak on the record about the
editing process of Webb's series.
The CIA Inspector General's report, commissioned in response to the
allegations in "Dark Alliance", was published in the autumn of 1998. It
found that CIA officials ignored information about possible Contra drug
dealing; that they continued to work with Contra supporters despite
allegations that they were trafficking drugs, and further asserted that
officials from the CIA instructed Drug Enforcement Agency officers to
refrain from investigating alleged dealers connected with the Contras.
By a fortunate coincidence of timing, the report was released on a day when
the Monica Lewinsky scandal dominated every front page in the country. As a
result, some major US newspapers ignored its findings completely, while
others relegated a brief summary to their inside pages.
"I think the behaviour of the media in all of this has been amazing," says
Bell. "I believe that Americans, as a nation, are mainly concerned with
living their happy little lives. And this is not a happy story - or," she
adds, "a little one."
Webb's experience came as no surprise to Jack Blum, senior prosecutor for
the Kerry Committee. For two years, Blum and Kerry supervised the
interrogation of dozens of witnesses who described CIA-related drug deals in
central America. Their explosive report, which appeared in 1989, was either
ignored, or marginalised, by the American press.
"They tried to make us look like crazies," says Blum. "And to an extent,
they succeeded."
"It was like someone had made a terrible noise, or a terrible smell, in a
small room," recalls Jonathan Winer, Kerry's chief senate staff investigator
. "Everyone got out and left the person who had made the noise - issued the
report - alone. But the report was correct. It was truthful. It was
accurate. And it was ignored by the US media, for all of those reasons. We
were dismissed as a bunch of nuts." Newsweek called Kerry a "randy
conspiracy buff".
"I think Kerry learnt a lesson from all this," reporter Robert Parry says.
"Which was that, if he wanted a future within the political establishment of
the United States, then he should concentrate on other aspects of life."
Webb, unlike Blum or Kerry, had to face his difficulties alone. His was the
story of a man who gains information of wrongdoing, then, attempting to act
in the public interest, seeks protection from his superiors, and the forces
of law, and does not receive it. The whole business, I suggested to Blum,
has echoes of a classic Alfred Hitchcock plot.
"That's right," says Blum. "Gary Webb was left to fend for himself. We had
been here before." He cites the case of Alfred McCoy, now Professor of South
East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin.
"As a PhD student, McCoy went to Vietnam and built an absolutely damning
case about the CIA's involvement with trafficking heroin. * The agency's
response was to try to prevent him from getting his doctorate, then block
his advancement in the academic world. They failed because the climate was
more sceptical then. But you say - dear God. Can these things possibly be?"
The significant legacy of the Webb case, "the reason this whole affair
remains so significant today," Blum says, "is this: the knowledge that, if
one individual dares raise such serious issues, they risk confronting a
tremendous apparatus that is prepared to whack them hard, and there is very
little they can expect by way of support. Look at the way the US press
reports on Iraq. The complete lack of desire to ask the difficult questions
makes me want to scream."
As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look
out, when the big dog gets off the porch."
Webb, according to Bell, was a man who, more than most, found that his mood
and self-esteem fluctuated in accordance with his professional fortunes. In
February last year he was laid off by the State Legislature.
"He rang me up that day. It would have been our 25th wedding anniversary,"
Bell recalls. "He was crying. He kept saying that he would never get another
job in journalism."
Bell and her children helped Webb prepare 50 packages containing cuttings
and his CV which they sent out to newspapers all over the US. By this stage,
he was prepared to work as a jobbing reporter. There were no offers. Webb
had become, as somebody put it, "radioactive".
In the final few months of his life, Bell says, Webb became increasingly
withdrawn. Relationships with other women ended badly. He stayed home,
playing computer games, and began smoking cannabis heavily. When his medical
insurance expired, he stopped taking his antidepressants.
"He told me, not long before he died, that he didn't want to get up in the
mornings," she says. "He definitely was depressed. But the biggest loss he
had was the writing. He made that very clear. He told me: 'If I can't do
what I want to do, what's the point?' "
Webb's condition exacerbated his natural recklessness.
"He started having motorcycle crashes," Bell says. "He had six in a short
period of time." On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and
split his helmet open. "He told the guys with him he was fine," she recalls,
"got back on the bike, then passed out, half an hour later. He crashed and
shredded his clothes, face and body on a barbed-wire fence." He was taken to
hospital by air ambulance.
With hindsight, Bell says, "the signs were there. One time he called me and
he said: 'I have this plan that will benefit us both.' I realise now he was
thinking about suicide."
On the last day Webb was alive, his motorbike broke down while he was moving
to his mother's house. A passing motorist - a heavily tattooed young man -
gave him a lift home, then returned and stole the motorcycle, which police
recovered from him three days after Webb's death.
"It sounds crazy," says Bell, "but having his motorbike stolen was the last
straw. He was so depressed. It was just more than he could take."
Webb came home and put his belongings in order, dropping his Kentucky Post
poster in the bin. He placed his keys and ID cards on the kitchen table,
together with a cremation certificate he had purchased for himself. He went
into the bedroom, and picked up a .38 that had belonged to his father. When
his body was found, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was on the DVD machine,
and his favourite CD, Ian Hunter's live album Welcome to the Club, was in
the CD player. His death was especially traumatic to the family since - as
the coroner said - it could not be established whether he died instantly, or
bled to death.
His corpse was discovered on the seventh anniversary of his resignation from
the Mercury News. "Do you think that a part of him did this out of revenge?"
I ask Bell. "To get back at his editors?"
"Not revenge," she says. "Despair."
At the commemorative service for Webb, held at the Doubletree Hotel in
Sacramento, Bell read out the letter Webb had written to his son Eric, now
17.
"If I had one dream for you," he wrote, "it was that you would go into
journalism and carry on the kind of work I did - fighting, with all your
might, the oppression and bigotry and stupidity and greed that surrounds
us."
Webb had already been cremated and his ashes scattered in the bay off Santa
Cruz two weeks before. There was no coffin, casket or tombstone. If he could
have chosen his own epitaph, it might have been a line from the letter he
posted to Bell, immediately before he killed himself: "I do not regret,"
Webb told her, "anything that I have written." *
'Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion' is
published in the UK by Seven Stories Press, priced #11.99
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article317908.ece
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