Behind the Bastards - Cracktoberfest Part Five: How the CIA and the L.A. Times Killed Gary Webb

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Robert and Prop finish out Cracktoberfest with the story of the journalist who broke the CIA / cocaine story.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's five in my part? It's part five. Look here, we saw five. That's right. Which is actually gang talk. Which is quite a stretch, but anyway. A little bit.

But this is our fifth part of what I am now calling Rack Week. CIA Week? I don't know. None of them are quite perfect, but that's what we're calling it in this episode. We'll see what titles we come up with. That's a very cash money of you, Robert. Thank you, Sophie. It's quite cash money of you to recognize that. We just got through with Iran Contra. While Iran Contra was spinning up, I want to get to another thing that's happening.

Also, if you're on here listening to this thinking it's part three, this is actually part five, and you need to go listen to the Hood Politics episodes, which you can find in this feed and the Hood Politics feed. That's right. If you're not finding it, then you're wrong. So, while all of the shit we just talked about in your show was happening, Ollie North is also doing more shit of his own, and he has moved on from Iranian money to finding a new way to fund his Contra buddies,

Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Now, Manuel had been a friend of the CIA's for a while. He and George H.W. Bush are good buddies. He had been running cocaine through his, obviously, Panama. Pretty good port, right? Pretty good port. Yes. Now, another cultural touch point here.

You guys know the Drink Champs podcast with DJ Envy and Norie, who is a legendary Queens rapper, right? Norie's name is Noriega. Right. He's referring to this dude. Yeah. Okay. Yes.

So, a little touch point here. Also, I think it's important as the listeners, if this feels a little like the way that this series went, a little like chaotic and kind of, you know, not very linear and you're hearing parts and pieces here and there. Imagine living it. This is exactly how it felt. Because all of this shit is breaking at different times.

Yes. For example, in 1986, June of 1986, The Times publishes an expose on the dictator's elicit money laundering and drug activities. They cite an unnamed White House source who claims, quote, the most significant drug running in Panama was being directed by General Noriega. Now, Manuel starts to face legal consequences after this point, including a ban on selling arms to the Panamanian Defense Forces, like an international ban.

So, while Iran Contra is breaking and all of this shit's going nuts and the Reagan administration is batting down, he sends a guy into Washington to try to get help. And I'm going to quote next from a write-up in the National Security Archive. Oliver North, who met with Noriega's representative, described the meeting in an August 23, 1986 email message to Reagan National Security Advisor John Poindexter. You will recall that over the years, Manuel Noriega in Panama

and I have developed a fairly good relationship. North writes before explaining Noriega's proposal. If U.S. officials can help clean up his image and lift the ban on arms sales to the Panamanian Defense Force, Noriega will take care of the Sandinista leadership for us. So, North is telling Poindexter that Noriega can assist with sabotaging the Sandinistas and carrying out assassination operations.

And his suggestion is we should pay Noriega, who's under an arms embargo by us, a million dollars from those project democracy funds raised by the sale of U.S. arms for Iran to get the Panamanian dictator's help destroying Nicaraguan economic installations. So this causes a big old debate within the Reagan inner circle. Highlights include Poindexter saying he has nothing against Noriega

other than his illegal activities. Poindexter's like, well, aside from the crimes, he's great. If he weren't doing all those crimes, we'd love him. I mean, he's pretty cool, except for the fact that he's a criminal. But besides that, I mean, cool. Now, Alan Fears, who's one of the CIA agents who's heavily involved in everything happening in Latin America is against the idea of arming one of the biggest drug lords

in the area with illegal arm steel cash. And Fears actually may be one of these guys who's kind of kept in the dark specifically, so he'll say the right thing when he gets questioned later and seem honest, right? Like that's one of the guys Fears is, I think. But everyone ignores. So Fears does say like, I don't think giving Noriega

a million dollars is good. He is ignored. Nobody follows his advice. North meets with Noriega in London with the support of Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, and George Schultz. So Schultz, who's not on board Iran Contra so much, but giving a million dollars to Manuel Noriega

sounds like a great plan. It seems a little cleaner. I'm going to go do this. Yeah. Schultz is like, this is a little cleaner. Now we've got two little too many moving parts. I'm not against paying foreign people to murder and get drugs.

I'm not against that. I'm just saying you're too complicated. Let's be smarter about it. I am George Schultz. Yeah. This is the call that Schultz makes right before deciding to one day become the board of directors for a fake blood testing company.

Fucking George Schultz. Schultz. Noriega. Fizzling out, man. Yeah. Like you were just running, you were running contraband across multiple continents. Yeah.

Bro, come on, man. You should have retired and ablaze a glory. So Noriega agrees to attack airports, electric and telephone systems in Nicaragua on the Contra's behalf. And again, part of the deal is that he's going to get some cash money. Part of the deal is that everyone's going to be chill

about his continuing moving cocaine through his ports, right? So, but then the things are going great for all of this until in November of 1986, we get the actual Iran Contra story breaks, right? And everything that we talked about at the end there happens. Yeah. And one of the things that's happening, like kind of in the wake of this,

obviously the big deal, as we've talked about earlier, the big deal is that the United States was illegally selling missiles to Iran in exchange for hostages and then lied about it, right? That's the big deal, right? Yes. That's what people get in fucking trouble for. Yes.

But the other thing that's happening is the Iran Contra deal is tied to everything else that Ali and the CIA and the NSE are doing in Nicaragua and all this cocaine that keeps getting into the fucking United States. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but Ronald Reagan makes a bit of an impact for himself as an anti-drug crusader, right?

That's kind of his thing. So, there are some people, you would think that this would have been a bigger deal, but the fact that missiles are involved, that's the sexier thing, the ayatoll is involved, right? So that's what gets all the attention. But there is a little bit of understanding at the time from some people in the media that like,

kind of seems like the bigger story here is all the fucking cocaine you guys were letting into the country, right? And it seems like that might be a real big goddamn deal. Kind of like, there's a lot of leads here. I feel like you might be burying one of them. Yeah. You guys, the missiles and stuff is important. You guys work on that. I'm going to ask these questions.

And there's a guy, a journalist who does decide during a press conference to ask like, hey, are there any connections between these contras that you were apparently funding with missile money and drug smuggling? People bring a cocaine in the United States? And this guy gets screamed down, not by the press secretary,

but by the New York Times correspondent standing next to him who says, why don't you ask a serious question? Bro. Bro. If you're on the New York Times keeps coming up in this. Yo, if you're on the lectern and the New York time and that somebody loves that question and then someone else in the audience shuts it down like that,

the relief that must shoot over your body at that moment, like, oh my God, that's, that is, I don't know if there's a better example of dodging a bullet. You know? Yeah. And like, like, you're just thinking, bro, if this fool knew I would, I would buy him whatever he wanted tonight.

Oh boy. The New York Times really got me out of a sticky one. You really got me out of this one, dog. I owe you a Rolex. Yeah. And homie. Yeah. They're, they're going to help out a lot with the,

the moral panic over the crack epidemic too. So they really, they really just work in hand and glove with, with our friends in the CIA. Well, kind of. So obviously there are some criticisms at the time about the fact that there are very clearly, and this is revealed by the stuff that comes out during Iran Contra.

One of the things that we get because of Iran Contra is Ollie North's diary where he's like, helped some cocaine get into the US today. Yeah. So I found a wonderful 1988 right up in the Middle East report by Jonathan Marshall, which is a contemporary. 88 is kind of the year. A lot of this is blowing up,

which summarizes, you know, we have the, the committee that investigates Iran Contra. Marshall in this is summarizing what the committee found and what it didn't quote. The most glaring operational embarrassment neglected by the report is the role of drug trafficking in financing the Contras and the logistic operation that supplied them. The only mention of drugs comes in a staff memo

reprinted in a report appendix that rejects media exploited allegations of contra drug trafficking as improbable and unverifiable. Yet other congressional investigators have condemned the memo as a fraudulent misrepresentation of the facts. Ample and convincing evidence points to the existence of a guns for drugs network that brought cocaine and marijuana into the United States as the price

of running arms down to Central America. The joint committee itself heard testimony from three government witnesses that a high-ranking Iran Contra leaders trafficked in cocaine. Indeed, the committee introduced into evidence a letter from Rob Owen, North's emissary to Central America, mentioning a Contra supply chain used at one time to run drugs and part of the crew that had criminal records.

Nice group of boys the CIA chose. I love it. The report's silence on the involvement of terrorists in North's project democracy is no less deafening. One of the logistics agents employed in the Contra cause was the Cuban exile and career CIA officer, Luis Posada. He came to Central America in 1985 after breaking out

of a Venezuelan jail where he had been held for conspiring to bomb a civilian Cuban jet in 1976. That act, the worst terrorist crime ever committed in the Western Hemisphere, killed all 73 passengers, including Cuba's national fencing team. Yet the report mentions Posada only in passing and then by his operational code name Ramon Medina. Just to give you an idea of the kind of folks

who's all he's running drugs with. Yeah. This guy who blew up a civilian airliner. Cool dude. Now, the Iran Contra investigation and report plunges the Reagan White House into its darkest hours. Public opinion falls through the fucking floor. And again, we talked about this a little bit,

but like, yeah, this is the first time he's dealing with like some serious shit. And a bunch of different stuff comes out of the fallout, which we've talked about in your episodes. But one of the things that happens is that while the Reagan White House is in disarray, his opponents in Congress start digging up other stuff too that's been going on during his two terms in office.

And one of the things they start to look at increasingly is this connection between CAA operations in Latin America and drugs. And one thing people who are interested in this find is a 1985 article by Associated Press Journalists Robert Perry and Brian Barger. Perry and Barger had published an investigation. This is the very first public evidence

that the Contras and the CIA were moving fucking drugs into the United States, which found that Contra groups had, quote, engaged in cocaine trafficking in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua. The article hadn't made much of a splash, because according to the Columbia Journalism Review, Reagan's people carried out a behind-the-scenes campaign to attack the professionalism of the AP reporters

and, quote, discredit all reporting on the Contras and drugs. That's what the CIA wrote at the time. Peter Cornblew writing for the Columbia Journalism Review notes that whether the campaign was the cause or not, coverage was minimal. So the fact that all this is happening is not like, pay attention to that the way they go after these journalists and the way their goal is, we have to discredit reporting on this.

Yeah. And also pay attention to the fact that when this first comes up in public in 88, it's a New York Times journalist who, as far as we know, without any CIA advocacy, shuts down a line of questioning on it. Yes. That's going to be relevant later. Yes.

So in 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, Senator John Kerry does a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee report. He's the guy running it. They publish a report on specifically how covert support for the Contras undermined the war on drugs. Right? So this does get looked into.

And I'm going to quote from the National Security Archive. The Kerry Subcommittee did not report that U.S. government officials ran drugs, but rather that Mr. North, then on the National Security Council staff at the White House and other senior officials, created a privatized Contra network that attracted drug traffickers looking for cover for their operations, then turned a blind eye to repeated reports of drug smuggling related to the Contras and actively worked with known drug smugglers

such as the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to assist the Contras. The report cited former Drug Enforcement Administration head John Lawn as testifying that Mr. North himself had prematurely leaked the DEA undercover operation, jeopardizing agents' lives for political advantage in an upcoming congressional vote on aid to the Contras. Yeah.

Awesome. All this shit. All of this. All of this stuff. It would be such a different story if the Reagan Administration didn't go so hard on violence, gangs, and drugs. Like, if y'all didn't go so hard about it, it wouldn't be such a gotcha.

You know what I'm saying? But I'm like, you didn't have to. I mean, you didn't have to create the DEA program and like, three strikes, well, they didn't create three strikes, but just all these different, just very punitive laws around drugs. Like, you ain't have to do that. And we wouldn't even thought it wouldn't have been so, like, salacious. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. If the fucking, if Congress had not been destroying huge numbers of people because they were caught with crack cocaine at the same time as they were bringing in the raw cocaine that gets turned into crack in order to fund right-wing death squads in other parts of the world, if that all wasn't happening at the same time. Yeah. It wouldn't seem like such a goddamn conspiracy.

Exactly. Because it's like, it's, yeah, if this didn't happen, we would be like, this is, yeah, we would be like oil on our head. Like, because of the amount of like, how many countries have gotten, when you add all, if this part five. So we, okay, add the countries together. The amount of countries involved in this, the amount of governments, street dudes, bureaucracies,

there's like nine countries involved. Yep. It's a big deal. Yes. As we've tried to unravel, quite complicated. Yes. So this report that Kerry is kind of the guy running does not establish that the CIA is responsible for bringing crack to the inner cities,

nor does it connect U.S. officials directly to drug dealers in the United States. However, as the report concluded, it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking. The supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations and elements of the Contras themselves, knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government

had information regarding the involvement, either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter. So, the report also quoted the chief of the CIA's Central America Task Force, who said, with respect to drug trafficking by the resistance forces, it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people. You can't do the bad apple, man. It's all y'all. This is all damning because we have talked about this in the context of Iran, Contra, and in the context of a bunch of other shit, years of shady dealings

that we know now, but at the time a lot of this was breaking and at the time that report comes out, a lot of that outside information is missing, right? So most Americans who see the headlines around this, the reasonable assumption to make is like, oh, some people we armed in an unpopular conflict. We're also moving cocaine, whatever. The subcommittee report is not big news.

That sounds pretty damning. People could not give less of a shit at the time when it comes up. That's 1988. Seven-ish years later, Gary Webb picks that thread back up and he does about a year of digging and he puts together this three-part article series for the Mercury, which blows the fucking lid off the world. In, like, a couple of days after this thing drops,

it becomes the biggest story in the country. And it's the first massive news story that's gone out primarily over the Internet. That's where this thing spreads. And in order to kind of talk about how that happens, I want to quote now from an article in the Columbia Journalism Review. The demographics of web traffic are unknown, but some media specialists believe that the rising numbers at Mercury Center

in part reflect what the Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist Clarence Page calls an emerging black cyber consciousness. Online newsletters and other net services made the series readily available to African-American students, newspapers, radio stations, and community organizations. Patricia Turner, author of I Heard It Through the Grapevine, the definitive study on how information travels through black America, suggests that this marked the, quote,

first time the Internet has electrified African-Americans in this way. The black telegraph, noted Jack Weill, a time magazine columnist referring to the informal word of mouth network used since the days of slavery, has moved into cyberspace. There is, like, I didn't know the specifics of what you're saying, but it is true. Like, I don't know how we get information that we get. You just find out through the homies.

Or your auntie. I don't know how it happens. It just does. But I will say, when this broke, this was our uncles who were like, see there? I tried to tell y'all. You know what I'm saying? That we thought was like, all right, man.

Like, you know, it hadn't been in jail a few times. You know, you didn't read a couple of books. You know, you come back and you're prison smart. You know what I'm saying? So like, and prison smart is a very specific type of smart, you know? And so they got all kind of information about the government and the CIA conspired against it. And we're thinking, OK, maybe, you know, but like you said,

it wasn't really big news. And it seems so far-fetched. But I have no reason to not believe my uncle. And then this happens. And it was like, that's a fact, Jack. We tried to tell y'all, you know, and all that started happening. And it was like, damn, it turns out uncle ain't crazy. Like he, oh my God, it really, you wouldn't lie.

It was you, uncle. You know what I'm saying? We believed you, but it was like, I don't know, man. Yeah, he's proud. Well, and it's, you know, again, one of the things people can use to discredit this is pick it like the edges of, because it is not literally, the CIA was not shipping crack directly into the city. Because that's not a very sensible way to go about doing that.

Just like Apple doesn't directly turn rare earth minerals into phones, right? Exactly. Because there's a distribution network. Exactly. But if you be like, yo, who the plug? Who's your plug? You'd be like, CIA. Yeah.

Like, no, it ain't the government. The government, I get the, I get the weight from the government. Like, you know, you don't. It's like, oh wait, yes you do. It's easy to see why people see this as a very concerted conspiracy. Honestly, there's a way in which it's much more, and I'm not going to say what happened or not, because I'm sure there's more we don't, what we know is damning.

Yeah. If it is as simple as the left hand didn't know what the right was doing, and nobody gave a shit about the impacts of these agencies and what they were doing in Latin America and how it might affect people, and nobody was watching them while people were like responding to this media circus the time created violently by destroying huge numbers of people's lives. And that's why all this happened, which is what the facts directly suggest. That's, like, that's enough to revolt over.

That's already, yeah. That's enough to, yeah. I don't feel like, anyway, let's keep telling the story, because there's more to revolt over. Yes. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

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I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth,

his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Gary Webb puts out this article. It moves through the black community by way of the Internet.

It also, a big part of this is black-oriented radio talk shows, which are huge today and really coming into their own in this period, the mid to late 90s, boost this phenomenon, and the way in which they spread the story is by reading out the website address on the air. Never happened before. Not a thing. Not a thing in mainstream... Wow.

...that like these big mainstream radio shows, drive time shit, as like reading out, as being like, you need to read this story. Here's a fucking web link, right? That's not how journalism got spread before, but it is now. These call-in programs also become a focal point of information and debate. African-American talk show hosts use their programs to address the allegations of CIA complicity in the crack epidemic,

and the public response is forceful. The power of talk radio is probably one of the best examples of how big this is, is Congresswoman Maxine Waters goes on a show in Baltimore in September, and she says that the Congressional Black Caucus is going to look into this shit, right? We're gonna do a fucking thing on this, and it's fucking massive.

And like the fact that Maxine Waters takes this up is like a big part of why this story blows out into the mainstream in a big way. Now, the CIA and the NSC, they're watching this shit happen, right? Yeah. They are like, everyone is on this, right? This is a massive problem,

and the agency, the first public thing they do when this starts to go viral is they announce, we're doing an internal investigation. We're gonna look into whether or not we did anything wrong. Don't worry, CIA is on the case. Yeah. You was the vice president, cause you was there. You were the vice ass president.

You were there. So ass up. It's awesome. Yeah. So the CIA is like, we're gonna look into ourselves and see if we're bad people. Don't worry, you can trust us, we're good people. Obviously.

Hey, me? Did I smuggle drugs? Yeah. Look, I don't want to speak for Black America here, but the evidence that I have suggests that this was not taken as overly comforting. No. I don't think I believe you, CIA.

There's a whole lot of gaspaces. It's just like, side eyes like, okay, you're gonna die. Here we go. We already know, though. So the Justice Department also launches an investigation. John Doit, who's the director of the CIA at this point, has to go down to Watts and do a town meeting

with concerned citizens to promise that his organization hadn't smuggled crack into inner cities to destroy the Black community. He has to actually sit down in front of people. You gotta go to Watts. Talk him out of this. Now, that is not precisely what Gary Webb's article had said. Gary Webb had not made those exact claims.

What he was saying is that what we've talked about, the CIA is making things easier for these guys who are moving cocaine into the country and then separately, Webb's articles dealt with how the crack epidemic and things like mandatory minimums had hurt the Black community, right? And how racially disparate the charging was. But a lot of people interpreted as, oh, the CIA,

there's allegations that the CIA smuggled crack into the Black community. And that becomes kind of the popular shorthand for the revelations. Representative Cynthia McKinney calls the CIA the central intoxication agency on the floor of Congress. This is a PR disaster. It is a real threat to the agency's funding.

They're worried about another church committee, right? They're worried that, like, Congress has got to really fuck them up over this. And there's also a possibility that some people might get criminal charges who would work for the agency. That's a thing they're concerned about because of how big a brush fire this starts. I don't know, man.

You think they should get some criminal charges? I might suggest if anyone belongs in prison, it's a lot of these CIA guys in Mr. Holly Knight. I was like, they hold up. You should sit right next to the other drug smugglers. That's what you did. The agency spins up a reaction to what they internally call a crisis.

But before they can really do anything, a savior appeared. You want to know who the savior is? You want to know who pulls the CIA's fat out of the fire? Who is that? I'll give you a hint. It's the same people who did it in 88. It's the legacy news media.

All right. See, as we've talked about. A surprise villain here. You know what I'm saying? Well... Is it a surprise? Yeah. Is it a surprise given the rest of these episodes?

Or maybe it's the one we didn't expect. Yeah. It's John Cena. Not John Cena. It's a stone cold coming out from the back. Oh, my God. The New York Times has a folding chair. Yes.

Yeah. And that's who wrote... Well, it's actually the Los Angeles Times is a big part of this, too. Anyway, as I've talked about a bunch, Web Story is the first earth-shattering piece of investigative journalism in the U.S. that came from something that wasn't a major paper of record.

This isn't blowing up in this period of time, at least. This isn't blowing up in the places it's supposed to come out of. Yeah. So the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, three of the really the biggest legacy... Longest.

Yeah. They're fucking angry. They're not angry because they don't want this information out. They're angry that they got fucking scooped. They got scooped, yep. And they're angry that in interviews, Gary Webb is saying stuff like, what should be the New York Times or the Washington Post

to bust a national story anymore? Now, Gary was well ahead of the time. Yeah. Because we know he's right, right? That's what happens. Washington Post and the New York Times, big as they are, not wear a lot of shit busts anymore.

A whole lot of stuff comes up from the ground these days. Yeah. And oftentimes, the New York Times and the Post these days make their money kind of paying editorial writers to comment on shit. This is the start of that. So the people who are going to like go after them,

who are going to go apeshit, a lot of them are kind of editorial writers. But the Intercept does a good job of kind of summing up what happens next here in an article they wrote, quote, Newspapers like the Times and the Post seem to spend far more time trying to poke holes in the series than in following up on the underreported scandal at its heart,

the involvement of a U.S.-backed proxy forces in international drug trafficking. Los Angeles Times was especially aggressive. Scooped in its own backyard, the California paper assigned no fewer than 17 reporters to pick apart Web's reporting. While employees denied an outright effort to attack the Mercury News,

one of the 17 referred to it as the Get Gary Web team. Another said at the time, we're going to take away that guy's Pulitzer, according to Cornbluth's C.I.J.R. piece. Within two weeks of the publication of Dark Alliance, the L.A. Times devoted more words to dismantling its competitor's breakout hit than comprised the series itself.

It's just... So they throw down. Guys, you're totally missing the point here, man. You're missing the bigger story. You're missing the bigger story here, dude, because you're salty somebody got there first. We have to acknowledge... Gary Web's reporting is imperfect.

Number one, any story this big, there's going to be some errors. Of course. But especially, Gary doesn't have a big editorial team. There's not a huge team of fact-checkers. It is a newer reporter. It is a newer outlet, and there are some problems with it. And some of them are pretty basic errors. And these errors are not the result of him

trying to cook something up or lie. They're the result of writing for a small publisher without a strong editorial team. One of the examples of a fuck-up that Web did make is he never called the CIA for Comet. That may sound silly, but that is a thing that you do. When you are writing an article like this, after you've got things nailed down, you go for Comet.

That is, when I would write articles about militias and shit, like Jason Wilson and I would wind up ringing up these fucking militia leaders and shit to ask them questions about things they'd said online. What you do, you give people a chance to respond when possible. You don't have to wait for them to respond to publish the article, but you do have to give them a chance to respond. Web claims that he did reach out and they never responded.

The CIA denies that he ever reached out. We just actually don't know who's telling the truth here. But the thing that he fucks up is he never writes in the story, I reached out to the CIA for Comet and they didn't give it, right? That is an issue. Now, a fair-minded person would say, well, that doesn't mean anything about the veracity of his reporting. Yeah, the rest of it.

But the legacy papers pounce on this shit. That sucks, man. There are other issues as well. The specific drug dealer's web had hung his story on, absolutely did sell Coke, and absolutely did use proceeds from these sales to fund the Contras. But they were tiny. We're talking the guys who are directly tied to the Contras

that he talks about in a story. They're talking about $200. They got the Contras, something like that, right? Not a lot of money. From the guys he's focusing on in his article, there's not enough to say that the CIA, or that the funding of the Contras, is making a big dent on the Contras or on the cracked, right?

He's using this small case and he's assuming there's more, and he is right. There was a shit load more. But he is also kind of quoting some stuff out of context that makes his case seem stronger than it is. evidence that like there is something really damning here to look at and it ties into these other fucked up things that have been done around sentencing and these other disparities. And it's possible there's a real like, if he had, like it's one of those things, if

it were a better article, there would have been some softening of the language, a good editor would have softened some of the language and good legacy media journalists in a responsible media environment would have seen what he was saying, even if they'd seen in a responsible environment, even seeing the articles that went out, they would have been like, well, what he's claiming that the CIA brought was responsible for helping to bring cocaine during the crack epidemic into the United States. What he's saying isn't entirely supported by the case of these two guys because these guys are kind of small fry.

But it's interesting that there's that much evidence and I wonder if there's more and they would have looked into that article that came out in 1985 and got clamped down on by the CIA. Right. There would have found other stuff, including shit in that 1988 report. There was stuff they could have just found that would have been that was already out already reported, already something that the government had said was true and put that with what Web had and been like, oh, shit, there's a lot here.

And then they would have looked in the more and then they would have fucking found more. That's not what the legacy media does. Instead, they pounce on the shortcomings and web series. And when they start trying to tell the other side of the story, which is how it gets framed, the CIA. Not available for comment earlier. Suddenly. Yeah, we'll talk to you about this.

For sure. Come on in, New York Times. We love giving people access. We're the CIA. So we know about their efforts and their surprised elation at the willingness of mainstream news outlets to attack Web out of spite because they wrote about all of this and internal documents that are now declassified. Yeah, they wrote shit down.

There it is. Yeah, they wrote about how happy they were about what the fucking the LA Times and shit we're doing in a piece called Managing a Nightmare written by a CIA fellow named Jumevik. And I'm going to quote from the intercept again here. The CIA watched these developments closely, collaborating where it could with outlets who wanted to challenge web's reporting. Media inquiries had started almost immediately following the publication of Dark Alliance and Jumevik in Managing a Nightmare cites the CIA's success in discouraging one major

news affiliate from covering the story. He also boasts that the agency effectively departed from its own longstanding policies in order to discredit the series. For example, in order to help a journalist working on a story that would undermine the Mercury News allegations, public affairs was able to deny any affiliation of a particular individual, which is a rare exception to the general policy that the CIA does not comment on any individual's alleged CIA ties. Word.

Now, the document chronicles the shift in public opinion as it moves from like, oh my god, what has the government been doing to in favor of the CIA's angle, which is like, nah, Gary Webb's full of shit. Yeah. This trend starts about a month and a half after the series is published. Quote, that third week in September was a turning point in media coverage of this story, Jumevik wrote, and he cites respected columnists, including prominent blacks, along with the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, the Weekly Standard and the Washington Post.

So that's pretty cool, huh? Yeah. Yeah. That's it's pretty perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Didn't even didn't even need to do anything. They got it.

They got it. The CIA is back again. They got us. Don't worry about it. We're on the lectern. The collective sigh of like, oh, oh, oh, yeah, no, yeah, yeah, no, that's what these fools said. No, there's a grand conspiracy and everything is connected being like, well, okay, the CIA

is doing all this shady shit to bring cocaine in and then the New York Times plays a major role in hyping up fears of a crack epidemic, which is used to justify arresting a shitload of black men and breaking up a bunch of families. And then as soon as the allegations come out that the CIA was the one that brought in the cocaine, well, all of these same media organizations who had pushed up the crack epidemic act to crack down on the story and and the journalists who had like broken the story that they done this. Well, yeah, that does kind of seem like a fucking conspiracy.

It really does. Again, all of this actually what I think all of this is is a mix of different conspiracies, reckless and callous disregard for what is happening in black America and for who gets hurt by this. Racist policing and racist trends in law enforcement. And the fact that the media is also pretty racist, always searching for like a story and do not care as much about whether or not the story is true as whether or not you can scare people.

Yeah. And just, yeah, the fact that they mostly hire a bunch of fucking upper class white people from fancy schools who don't know anything about what's going on in the black community, who get scared by this kind of coverage and write racist bullshit and who are always going to act to defend other dudes who went to Yale and just happened to wind up in the CIA instead of the New York Times fucking editorial desk. For sure. Cool stuff.

Good times. It's wonderful. Great system. Yeah. I think you nailed it in the sense that you have all these sort of concentric circles, these forces, you know, pressing down on the community that whether it's police, law, you know, law enforcement, you know, unfair sentencing, war on drugs, the drugs coming in, the CIA, the DEA, all these things all falling, not to mention like, you know, discriminatory

housing and just all these things all happening. It's like you're anybody would think are all these people sitting around one table and kind of deciding, you know what I'm saying? That's that's when you get into the crazy because they're not like a plan and it doesn't know it doesn't have to be a bunch of shit. That's really bad is the result of a bunch of different gnarly trends and conspiracy. Again, it's not that there's no conspiracies. All we've been talking about this week is conspiracies.

They're just not the Illuminati. They're not. Well, yeah, it's not one big thing that all sprout from it's all these little dudes that just happen to have, yeah, overlapping interests and whether it's and it's it's this weird like this weird power thing to where it's like it's not so much. I'm doing everything in my power to make sure you suffer. It's more your success don't matter to me. Yeah.

You know what I'm saying? And that's like and that's the thing that like it's it's it's what as as a I mean, sometimes it is when you're just an out and out, you know, Nazi white supremacist to where you're like, I am doing everything in my power to make you suffer versus you're just inconsequential and your success doesn't matter to me. You're not a part of the country. I think. And there are some people who are like, no, I'm actually just super racist and I run a

police union that funds, you know, a number of campaign. I want to push for mandatory minimums because I'm racist, but other people are pushing for mandatory minimums because their their voters got scared by the New York Times who did it because it was a good story and they're very credible in their kind of races, too. And all of this, all of this feeds together anyway. Let's continue. But first, you know what isn't a conspiracy prop. Sure.

Straight up plans, baby. That's right. Not a conspiracy is the products and services that support this podcast. The products and services that support this podcast do meet around a big table and they do secretly run the world, but they're cool. So it's fine. They got nice shoes. They got great shoes.

Incredible shoes. Anyway, during the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We just got back from the secret table where our sponsors run the world and I can't confirm sneaker game next level. And yeah, now I want to say don't revolt and burn things down. Don't do that.

Prop, you want to take the jet skis out? I want to see if the ones that are plated gold work as well as the ones with a platinum coating on them. Man, I think in Aspen, they work best, but Swiss Alps. But not the Aspen, our listeners know, the secret Aspen that exists on Mars for members of the conspiracy. There's a Europa Aspen. Space Aspen.

Yeah, there's a Europa Aspen that y'all don't know. That's even nicer. So dope. It's incredible. The fucking shrimp cocktails. Also better shrimp than you get. You would even know that space ocean. Like the vein of poop in the shrimp that we eat, it's just gold.

It's just gold instead of poop. But yeah, you know, burn down the system. Anyway. Anyway, so we're talking about the media response to all of this shit and how they shut it down. One of the most useful papers in terms of putting the kibosh on people getting angry about Dark Alliance was the Washington Post. And I want to quote now again from the CIA. Because of the Post's national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by

other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a firestorm of reaction against the San Jose Mercury News. Now, about a month or so after of this follows kind of of critical media coverage of the series. And by the end of that first month, the quote unquote balanced reporting just attacking Gary Webb in his article outnumbers the stories that are actually taking what he's talking about seriously. And in their write up of this, the CIA credits all of this to the Washington Post, The New

York Times, quote, and especially the Los Angeles Times, Webb's editors start to distance themselves and abandon their reporter by the end of October, two months after the publication of Dark Alliance, quote, the tone of the entire CIA drug story had changed. Jumevik was pleased to report, quote, most press coverage included as a routine matter that now widespread criticism of the Mercury News allegations. I can bet now I don't I'm not I wasn't an adult during this time, but I can bet that the tone among whatever plugged in or tapped in like black people in this professional space that would be knowing all this stuff is like, you know, this is all the confirmation

we need. The fact that you go after this man so much and makes us be like, oh, so he's today. So he's right. Oh, OK. Got it. Thanks, guys. OK. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying. I was wondering. Yeah. But now that y'all going through all this to stop him. Now I know. Yeah.

Yeah. And that is how a lot of people react. And we have now learned to a point of certainty with all of the stuff that's come out since that's been declassified. It's been reported on Gary Webb was right. The claim that he made was that the CIA deliberately enabled the cocaine trade to fund the contras. That was absolutely true. His central thesis, his central thing that he was trying to show was real.

Now he didn't have all of the information that we have in order to prove it. And that is a flaw in the article. Yeah. But all of the journalism, quote unquote, journalism that was done to attack Webb's work was deeply flawed itself as the Columbia Journalism Review makes clear. All three papers ignored evidence from declassified National Security Council email messages and the New York Times and the Washington Post ignored evidence from Oliver North's notebooks, which lend support to the underlying premise of the Mercury News series that U.S. officials

would both condone and protect drug traffickers if doing so advanced the contra cause. The October 21st New York Times piece didn't even mention the Kerry Committee report. A decade ago, the national media lowballed the contra drug story David Korn observed in the nation. Now it's been there done that. On October 23rd, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held its first hearing on the controversy surrounding the new contra drug allegations. Jack Bloom, former lead investigator for the Kerry Committee, was lead witness. Bloom testified that his investigators had found no evidence whatsoever that the African-American

community was a particular target of a plot to sell crack cocaine or that high U.S. official had a policy of supporting the Contras through drug sales, which is not what Webb had alleged. Webb does not allege a plot. Webb says that the CIA is helping Coke move into the country, which is true. And Bloom testifies further, quote, if you ask whether the United States government ignored the drug problem and subverted law enforcement to prevent embarrassment and to reward our allies in the Contra war, the answer is yes, which you might recognize as saying Gary Webb was right.

Yes, right. Exactly. Well, the CIA found, of course, no intent to smuggle cocaine into the United States or to enable drug smugglers to do the same. Instead, they blamed all the extremely documented cases of Contras smuggling Coke into the U.S. as something their agents had just missed because, like, gee, shucks, the CIA forgot to mandate that CIA agents had to report evidence of drug smuggling by their contacts, right? That's literally the excuse, like, well, they missed it because they weren't told to report

it. So they just didn't notice it. They just missed all this blow, right? Because it was their job to spot it, right? Listen, like I said, I'm here for the lobsters. I'm not here for the beef. Yeah, I don't even see those cows. I don't even see those. I don't even see what you're talking about. I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm here for this. Yeah. I'm going to quote from PBS again.

In the winter of 1982, as the United States was plotting how to overthrow the Sandinista government that came to power in Nicaragua, a letter, a memorandum of understanding MOU was being drafted in Washington, D.C. The presumptive author was the U.S. Attorney General, the late William French Smith. The recipient was the Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey. The subject was a list of offenses that CIA field officers in the field were required to report if they witnessed or became aware of a crime, particularly if it involved an informant or someone the CIA officer wanted to recruit as an agent. The letter of understanding listed all kinds of crimes from murder to passport fraud, but it omitted narcotics violations.

Because we know. Yeah, if he's killing people, we want to know. But if he's moving blow into the country, we don't really give a shit. That's literally that's what it's saying, right? Yeah. Now, this is too glaring of an oversight to have left without comment. And weeks later, there's a follow up letter based on internal discussion in the Justice Department that gets sent to the CIA. Quote, I have been advised that a question arose regarding the need to add all narcotics violations to the list of not employee claims. This is something Smith

writes to Casey in 1982, February. So, you know, that sounds good, but this actually doesn't add drugs to the list of things that have to be reported. Because Smith, instead of adding it to the list, just cites existing federal policy on narcotics enforcement and writes, quote, in light of these provisions and in view of the fine cooperation of the drug enforcement administration has received from the CIA, no formal requirement regarding the reporting of narcotics violations has been included in these procedures. So basically, we're already working so good together, federal employees are already required to talk about this stuff. Yeah.

So we don't need to add we can keep narcotics exempted from the things CIA agents have to report because we know they will, right? Yeah, which we know they weren't. Yeah. Now, inspector CIA inspector general Fred hits tells the PBS when he's questioned that because they're asking like, what do you make of this CIA inspector general? It seems shady. And he's like, well, it's it best a mixed message, right? These now. Listen, that's a mixed message. Yes. Mixed. These dudes may not be good at crime and but they are good at excuses. They're incredible at excuses. Yeah. And it's there. What had happened with him was game. Yeah. He's ridiculous. It hits very. This is very funny. Claims that he to PBS, he doesn't believe

CIA agents would have enabled drug traffic to allow the Contras to fund themselves because that would have been bad PR. Now, you and I know prop that the Reagan administration in the CIA actively worked to discredit journalists reporting on the CIA for doing just that. Yes. When the agency took any action to crack down on the drug trade, it was purely for show. In 1987, acting CIA director Robert Gates and a memorandum to the CIA deputy director demanding that CIA officers cease relationships with Contras, even suspected of trafficking narcotics. Here's PBS again. Gates's memorandum instructed George to vet names of air crews, air services, employees and subcontractors with the DEA US Customs and the FBI to ensure

that none of the contractors used by the CIA were involved in narcotics. For some reason, this memorandum, quote, was not issued in any form that would advise agency employees generally of this policy. It's stated in his report. It never got to the field agents who were supposed to use it as a guide. So it's just like, look, we recognize the problem and we made it a rule that they had to run everything by the FBI and the DEA. They had to check on these guys and vet them to make sure they're not moving drugs. We noticed there was a problem and we took action. What did you tell anyone whose job it was to vet these people that they had to do that? Well, no, we forgot to. I love it. Fuck that went

up. We really fucked that went up. Oopsie doodles. Hey, homie, that's that's clerical, bro. Listen, listen, charge it to my head, not my heart. Yeah, I'm saying not a big deal. We tried to do the right thing. It just got fucked up for reasons that were completely unavoidable. Guys, guys, you're looking at the locker room. Guys, listen, when the team comes in, just make sure they know that they got to stop grabbing asses. Okay. Yeah, you got to stop grabbing asses, guys. Look, everybody's mad at us. So when you see a juicy ass, you can't grab it. Okay. All right. All right. Here come the guys. It's just silence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we don't need to say any more than that.

I said it. Yeah. I said it at some point. It's in the book. You guys saw me say it. We put it in the rule book. Now, they're not required to read the rule book. In fact, they're not allowed to. We didn't give it to them. The rule books are held on the top of a mountain in eastern fucking Turkmenistan, and none of them can get to it, but it's in the rule book. Listen, yes. What else do you want for us? You want me to track down these agents and put a paper in their hands? Yeah. I told them they can't do it, man. Yeah. They're honorable men. You know, they won't do it. They're going to do it anyway. Yeah. So as the years have gone on and all this has come out, it has become

clear that Gary Webb was guilty of being sloppy, right? It's not perfect or even ideal reporting. There's issues with it. His conclusions and allegations, while not supported by the text of his article, though, are supported by the facts that we know now and the facts that have emerged since. And a number of the facts that Gary didn't bring up, but were available then and that the Washington Post and the New York Times and the LA Times should have brought up like the shit from the Kerry report, like the shit from the AP report in 85. Yes. Of course, the fact that Gary has been vindicated by time did not mean anything for Gary Webb. The damage had been done to his career. He was disgraced and the CIA crack epidemic story

had gone from a mainstream outrage to a conspiracy theory that was widely mocked. The Washington Post even published one of the things they do in this period is they put on an article like a warning about the black community's susceptibility to conspiracy theories. Where's the Washington Post? We got to let you know. We've noticed a troubling trend, which is black people are sharing conspiracy theories. Look, you got a good book. You got to watch your say around them because, you know, they kind of believe anything. They really think the whole government's out to get them and the media. What a silly group of people. Yeah. Can you believe it? Yeah. What evidence do they have that that might be happening? Yeah.

It's like, yeah, it's like fucking hitting your friend in the head with a hammer and being like, yeah, his real susceptible to getting hit in the head with a hammer. Boy, that guy's head can't stop catching hammers. Am I right? Hey, man. Jesus. Jesus can't do anything around this guy, man. He might get a hammer to his head. Can't bring a hammer out. He keeps getting hit with him. Yeah. Webb's career never recovered. On December 10th, 2004, he shot himself in the head with a 38. Oh, my God. 10 years later, David Carr, writing for The New York Times, wrote an article that serves as the closest we'll get to an apology from the great lady. We've quoted from it a couple of times here. There's widespread

recognition that it was pretty fucked up. Although you can still find articles in mainstream says Gary Webb was, you know, really fucked up and like we weren't wrong to go after him and to ignore all of these problems and act as cover for the CIA. Like it's it's all fucked up prop. But that's the story. That's all the story. Oh man. So it was like seven seven countries involved, mad moving parts, people at the highest level of government, a journalist breaks it, tells the truth, pokes his head up, the rest of the journalism community goes to suicide. And then the dude kills himself because he makes him feel like he's taking crazy pills. It's one of those things. There's a meme spreading around. That's like the the

people the award for the CIA Award for Exiglance and Journalism and it's a bullet. And that is an accurate joke in like parts of Latin America, right? Yes. In Latin America, the CIA is ass. It was either directly did or threw there. And in other parts of the world, the CIA has assassinated a lot of journalists. They don't have to do that. You don't have to send a guy with a silenced weapon to kill Gary Webb. Yeah. New York Times has got your back. They're just going to hound him to suicide because they got scooped. We're good, baby. Damn. Saves us the bullet money. That's that's that's see, I didn't know that one because Bud McFarland killed himself too. He sure did. And I'm sure there's yeah. Um, boy, yeah,

I don't want to get into other. It's totally understandable if you're feeling conspiratorial after this. And I'm not going to say much more than that because it's cool and fine. Yeah. Prop. You got anything to plug? Well, this has been a phenomenal piece of art we've put together that. Yeah. So up over to her politics pod, man, you know, where hopefully if you had part five of this one, you know that the pieces that this was all together was how come I can't talk? You didn't warn me out. And I and this was my and this was my idea to do to do this series. And you didn't warn me out. Uh, but yeah, nah, um, her politics pod and, uh, what upcoming topics do you have on her politics? Oh man, besides the other

parts of this, I have, uh, did we talk about the queen already? We already talked about the queen. We got tapping in or it's up like lessons on how you need to tap in before you talk to people. Uh, I got a book reading list where we can get your weight up, talk about a little bit of things like that. Um, yeah, it's a lot going on over there. Check out hood politics and get a props cold brew tear form, get my cold brew and his book, tear form. Yes. It's all there. Yeah. And, uh, and the, um, your music. Yeah. There's new music. Yeah. All all named to tear form because what's your, what's your website again? It's is it prop hip hop.com. Yes, it is. Thank you, Sophie. Prop hip hop.com for all the things

prop hip hop.com tear reform. Check it all out. Uh, you can find me, uh, it with my novel, which you should read called after the revolution. Yeah. Go to any place that sells books, any website that sells books, type it in after the revolution. You can buy a copy, the home books, paperback, all that. You can also type in after the revolution, AK books, and you'll find it there. Talk to the homies. Skullfucker Mike. Yeah. You can learn the, the, the ballot of Skullfucker Mike, uh, and more to come in the sequel. He needs a, yeah. I was like, Skullfucker needs his own, uh, side story. You're gonna learn a lot more about Skullfucker Mike, but let's all fuck our own skulls right now to chill out after being sad. Thank you

prop. What a great week. Yes. Alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him,

he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.