When I hung up, I wasn't sure that the Mercury News would really press ahead with the story, considering how the big national news outlets had dismissed and ridiculed the notion that President Reagan's Contras had included a large number of drug traffickers.
It never seemed to matter how much evidence there was. It was much easier -- and safer, career-wise -- for Washington journalists to reject incriminating testimony from other drug traffickers and disgruntled Contras. Even U.S. law-enforcement officials who discovered evidence could be dismissed as overzealous or congressional investigators could be painted as partisan.
In 1985, as we were preparing our first story on this topic, Barger and I knew that the evidence of Contra-cocaine involvement was overwhelming. We had a broad range of sources both inside the Contra movement and within the U.S. government, people with no apparent ax to grind who had described the cocaine-smuggling problem.
One source was a field agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); another was a senior official on Reagan's National Security Council (NSC) who told me that he had read a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report about how a Contra unit based in Costa Rica had used cocaine profits to buy a helicopter.
However, after our AP story was published in December 1985, we came under attack from the right-wing Washington Times. That was followed by dismissive stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The notion that the Contras, whom President Reagan had likened to freedom fighters on par with the Founding Fathers, could be implicated in the drug trade was simply unthinkable.
Yet, it was always odd to me that many of the same newspapers had no problem accepting the fact that the CIA-backed Afghan mujahedeen were involved in the heroin trade, but bristled at the thought that the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras might be cut from the same cloth.
A key difference, which I learned both from personal experience and from documents that surfaced during the Iran-Contra scandal, was that Reagan had assigned a young group of ambitious intellectuals such as Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan to oversee the Contra war.
These neoconservatives worked with old-line anticommunists from the Cuban-American community, such as Otto Reich, and CIA propagandists, such as Walter Raymond Jr., to aggressively protect the Contras' image.
And, unlike the Afghan rebels who had strong congressional support, the Nicaraguan Contras were always on the edge between getting congressional funding or having it cut off, with many Democrats opposed to the Contra war and many Republicans fighting furiously to secure additional money.
That combination -- the propaganda skills of Reagan's Contra-support team and the fragile consensus for continuing Reagan's pet Contra war -- meant that any negative publicity about the Contras would be met with a fierce counterattack.
Going to Editors
The neoconservatives were also proving adept at ingratiating themselves with senior editors at major news outlets. The neocons were bright, well-schooled, and facile in their manipulation of language and information, a process they privately called "perception management."
By the mid-1980s, these patterns had become entrenched in Washington. If a journalist dug up a story that put the Contras in a negative light, he or she could expect the Reagan administration's propaganda team to make contact with a senior editor or bureau chief and lodge a complaint, apply some pressure, and often offer up some dirt about the offending journalist.
Also, many news executives in that time
frame were sympathetic toward Reagan's hard-line foreign policy,
especially after the humiliations of the Vietnam War and the Iranian
revolution. Supporting U.S. initiatives abroad -- or at least not
allowing your reporters to undercut those policies -- was seen as
patriotic.
At AP, general manager Keith Fuller was known to be a strong Reagan supporter. At the New York Times, executive editor Abe Rosenthal was one of the news media's most influential neoconservatives. At the Washington Post and Newsweek (where I went to work in 1987), there was also a strong sense that Reagan-era scandals should not reach the president.
The operative phrase was "we don't want another Watergate," that is, another scandal where investigative journalism might take down another Republican president and thus create even more anger on the Right. It was considered "good for the country" -- a phrase favored by Newsweek's executive editor Maynard Parker -- for editors to exercise discretion in handling "scandal" stories that had impeachment potential.
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