However, the first major shot against Webb and his "Dark Alliance" series did not come from the Big Three but from the rapidly expanding right-wing news media, which was in no mood to accept the notion that some of President Reagan's beloved Contras were drug traffickers. That recognition also would have cast a shadow over the Reagan Legacy, which the Right was busy elevating into mythic status.
It fell to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's right-wing Washington Times to begin the anti-Webb vendetta. Moon, a South Korean theocrat who fancied himself the new Messiah, had founded his newspaper in 1982 partly to protect Ronald Reagan's political flanks and partly to ensure that he had powerful friends in high places.
In the so-called "Koreagate" scandal of the late 1970s, Moon's religious cult had been exposed as a money-laundering front for South Korean intelligence and other corrupt right-wing political forces in Asia (including some elements of organized crime).
As a result, Moon had been convicted of tax evasion and spent time in federal prison. He was determined to prevent a recurrence of those investigations and thus began pouring what came to total several billion dollars of his mysterious money into the Washington Times, creating a propaganda bulwark for the Republican Party and guaranteeing himself a phalanx of powerful defenders.
In the mid-1980s, the Washington Times even raised money to assist Reagan's Contra "freedom fighters."
Self-Interested Testimony
To refute Webb's three-part series, the Washington Times turned to some ex-CIA officials, who had participated in the Contra war, and quoted them denying the story. Soon, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times were lining up behind the Washington Times to trash Webb and his story.
On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb's series, although acknowledging that some Contra operatives did help the cocaine cartels.
The Post's approach was twofold, fitting with the national media's cognitive dissonance on the topic of Contra cocaine: first, the Post presented the Contra-cocaine allegations as old news -- "even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers," the Post sniffed -- and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one Contras smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted in his series, saying that it had not "played a major role in the emergence of crack."
A Post sidebar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to "conspiracy fears."
Next, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times weighed in with lengthy articles castigating Webb and "Dark Alliance." The big newspapers made much of the CIA's internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 -- almost a decade earlier -- that supposedly had cleared the spy agency of any role in Contra-cocaine smuggling.
But the CIA's cover-up began to weaken on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only12 days, and the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.
Mocking Webb
Webb, however, had already crossed over from being a serious journalist to a target of ridicule. Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the Contra war was primarily a business to its participants.
"Oliver Stone, check your voice mail," Kurtz chortled.
However, Webb's suspicion was no conspiracy theory. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North's chief Contra emissary, Robert Owen, had made the same point in a March 17, 1986, message about the Contras leadership. "Few of the so-called leaders of the movement. . .really care about the boys in the field," Owen wrote. "THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM." [Emphasis in original.]
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