The Webb Story And The Efforts To Rebut It

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[New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about 10 CIA officials were provided Times cover...[as] part of a general Times policy ... to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible."
The situation at the Washington Post was hardly different. In 1988, the paper’s owner, Katharine Graham, said in a speech at the CIA’s Headquarters: "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
Graham’s words came amid six years of extraordinary efforts by the Post to first suppress, and then contain, the explosive Contra-drug story. I was myself a witness in a secret Congressional hearing, of which the Post falsely reported the Chair as saying that "none of the witnesses gave any evidence that would show the Contra leadership was involved in ...

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to the Contras). (The issues raised by Webb had been of CIA knowledge and protection of the traffickers, not initiation of the project.)
More deviously, Pincus wrote that "Although Nicaraguans took part in the drug trade of that era, most of the cocaine trade then can be attributed to Colombian and Mexican smugglers… the Nicaraguans accounted for only a small portion of the nation’s cocaine trade....Blandon’s own accounts and law enforcement estimates say Blandon only handled a total of about five tons of cocaine during a decade-long career. That...is a fraction of the nationwide trade of the 1980s, when more than 250 tons of the drug were distributed every year."
Both in detail ...

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