I hoped that as president, John Kerry would bring justice and closure in the Iran-Contra, CIA, Cocaine, BCCI complex of scandals. Starting in 1986, Sen. Kerry investigated criminal activity going on in the White House. Congressional bans on providing military assistance to the Contras and selling arms to Iran were being circumvented.

Col. Oliver North, a White House Aide with headquarters in the basement sold arms to Iran to raise funds for the Contras. Sen. Kerry’s methodical and persistent pursuit resulted in substantial exposure of this dark chapter. Along with North’s operation, the CIA and Justice Department were implicated. CIA planes were transporting arms and supplies to the Nicaraguan Contras and Justice was ignoring the situation.

To hide the Iran/Contra crimes, the CIA and North were soon blackmailed into ignoring Contra drug trafficking. Profits from drugs helped fund and equip the Contra’s war. Shipments of drugs came into the U.S. on CIA planes. The laundered money was being sent to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Much of the 1980s’ crack cocaine epidemic is traceable to this set of lies and deceptions.

On Dec. 10, 2004, a key investigator of that sordid bit of history, Gary Webb, died. Webb, a Pulitzer prize winner, had reopened the investigation into the CIA’s role in the drug trafficking. Webb’s three-part series was published in the San Jose Mercury News Aug. 22 and 23 and on Oct. 3, 1996.

As reward for his courageous investigatory journalism, Webb was forced out of his job. Major news media went out of their way to disparage and discredit his work. His editors abandoned him, published a retraction and distanced the paper from Webb’s establishment-shaking findings. His marriage ended and he lost his house.

His work, however, precipitated an internal investigation by the CIA’s inspector Gen. Frederick Hitz. Hitz published Vol. 1 of his findings Jan. 19, 1998, which confirmed nearly all of Webb’s findings. Vol. 2 by Hitz and a Justice Department report followed in October 1998.

Validated, Webb wrote a compilation, Dark Alliance in 1999.

Recently, Webb was interviewed for a book profiling 18 journalists who found themselves discredited. Let his own words be a more fitting epitaph than the hack-job Los Angeles Times obituary. In his words: “If we had met five years ago, you wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry … and then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job, the truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.” – Gary Webb, R.I.P.

He was found dead – suicide according to the coroner – shot twice in the head.

JEROME ARNOLD

Cannon Beach