The Tragedy of Gary Webb
Simon, Dan
The Tragedy of Gary Webb By Dan Simon I began working as Gary Webb's editor on Dark Alliance, the book, in July 1997, almost a year after his newspaper series of the same name broke so...
...Gary's star had never shone more brightly...
...But after that, the series was described frequently as "discredited...
...Two years later, the CIA's internal investigation would prove to be a vindication of Gary's work...
...The "Dark Alliance" story documented a network of collusion in the 1980s that joined together the crack cocaine explosion, the Contras, and the CIA...
...The drug ring was even bigger thanI had portrayed....And agents and officials of the DEA had protected the traffickers from arrest, something I'd not been allowedtoprint...
...The same can be said of what happened to Gary...
...But the community of his peers in corporate journalism never again embraced him...
...Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found...
...Gary had loved writing the Dark Alliance book, and together we relished presenting finished copies to the very same newspapers of record that had allowed themselves to be used as tools against Gary...
...As recently as one year earlier Gary Webb had been one of the nation's top investigative reporters...
...Gary was forced out of his job, even though the body of evidence supporting Gary's account was actually growing...
...Gary took solace in the historical significance of these findings, but shamelessly the mainstream press barely covered them, whereas the attacks on Gary had been page-one news...
...With characteristic irony and faith in the facts, Gary faulted himself only for not being ableto fathom initially the depthsof the CIA's complicity...
...The CIA launched its own internal investigation...
...Gary's editor switched sides and penned an apologia distancing the paper from the series...
...He could never quite get over their betrayal...
...But instead of launching their own investigations into whether the CIA had shielded drug traffickers, these papers went after Gary's reporting, although they "could not find a single significant factual error," as Gary's then-editor at The Mercury News, Jerry Ceppos, would write in an internal memo...
...What would turn out to be the biggest story of his life ran as a three-day series beginning on August 18, 1996...
...A monumental sadness remains...
...But by the time I met him, he'd already begun the spectacular fall that ended with his suicide several weeks ago, barely seven years later, at the age of forty-nine...
...Writing in 2002 fora book calledInto the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Gary said: "When the CIA and Justice Department finished their internal investigations two years later, the classified documents that were released showed...the CIA's knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I'd ever imagined...
...Now when I reread the opening sentence of the "Dark Alliance" series, I realize Gary had found the big story, the one about the betrayal of a people by its own government...
...But it might have vanished without a trace had the paper not chosen this story to create a splash for its website, complete with graphics and links to original source documents...
...The book was reviewed with high praise in two out of the three, and it was a strong seller...
...The alternative media, to its credit, honored Gary...
...His awards included a Pulitzer in 1990 as part of a team, and at least four other major prizes for his solo work...
...The mainstream print media was ominously silent until October and November 1996, when The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all finally picked up the story...
...The Tragedy of Gary Webb By Dan Simon I began working as Gary Webb's editor on Dark Alliance, the book, in July 1997, almost a year after his newspaper series of the same name broke so controversially in the San Jose Mercury News...
...Soon the story and Gary himself were spoiled goods...
...When you are an investigative reporter armed with the truth, the gun often fires backwards...
...Here's how it started: "For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army run by the U.S...
...Dan Simon is founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press...
...Talk radio picked it up off the Internet, and citizens' groups and media watchdogs soon followed...
...So would another internal investigation conducted by the Justice Department...
...It became, arguably, the first big Internet news story, with as many as 1.3 million hits on a single day...
...Gary once wrote about the "Dark Alliance" series, "It wasn't so much a conspiracy that I had outlined as it was a chain reaction...
Vol. 69 • February 2005 • No. 2
