Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency article, dated 2006-10-23 in the archive, was written by a Directorate of Intelligence officer. It reviews how CIA Public Affairs handled the 1996 San Jose Mercury-News "Dark Alliance" series by Gary Webb, which alleged CIA complicity in crack cocaine sales. The article concludes that good relations with journalists and a strong Public Affairs response kept the story from becoming a disaster. UFO coverups come up only once, as an example of fantastic allegations about CIA.
“The Iron Skeptic”1 page
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
at CIA's front gate when they insisted on personally delivering a letter to Director Deutch. This incident added momentum to the story. Overall coverage peaked over the next two weeks. Of particular concern to the CIA community was the fact that the majority of stories or commentaries in the press seemed to give credence—implicitly or explicitly—to the allegations of CIA complicity in drug smuggling. $ ^{7} $
This heightened media interest was accomplished by a surge in the number of calls by journalists to CIA Public Affairs. This reflects the fact that most journalists are professionals genuinely interested in getting the story right. By the middle of September, Public Affairs was fielding calls from a variety of reporters who were skeptical of the allegations and who were planning to write articles casting doubt on the Mercury-News series. But the more balanced media treatment was still days or weeks away.
Meanwhile, CIA continued to get hammered. Joe Madison made CIA's "leading role" in the inner-city crack epidemic a daily subject in his local talk show. One nationally syndicated columnist pointed to Director Deutch's "typical vague denial" and called for "an investigation that can wring the truth out of the CIA, where coverups and 'plausible denials' are standard operating procedures." Newsweek quoted Maxine Waters saying "I think it is unconscionable that...the CIA could think so little of people of color that they would be willing to destroy generations in order to win the war in Nicaragua." $ ^{8} $
The DCI addressed the charges on 19 September, when he testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). That same
# ... most journalists are professionals genuinely interested in getting the story right.
"
day, he met for an hour with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), members of which were denouncing CIA and seemed to be accepting the wider allegations—that CIA was part of an antiblack conspiracy-at face value. Wire services and others began to claim that the CIA's IG review came about because of pressure from the CBC. This connection was false; as noted earlier, the Director had ordered the IG review in early September.
## Spreading Skepticism
That third week in September was a turning point in media coverage of this story. Respected columnists, including prominent blacks, began to question the motives of those who uncritically accepted the idea that CIA was responsible for destroying black communities. Others took a hard look at the evidence provided by the Mercury-News—something Public Affairs encouraged from the beginning—and found it unconvincing. A New York Daily News reporter concluded the Mercury-News series "just doesn't say what everybody seems to think it says." The Baltimore Sun, after running articles giving credence to the allegations, reported that the series was "weak" in documentation; the Sun also quoted a CIA spokesman to the effect that the San Jose Mercury-News never called CIA for comment and should have called "in the interest of fair and balanced reporting." The Weekly Standard published a piece that discredited the Mercury-News
series. The Washington Post ran two articles by leading journalists that criticized the assumptions and connections made by the original series. Public Affairs made sure that reporters and news directors calling for information-as well as former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media-received copies of these more balanced stories. 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. $ ^{10} $
The Mercury-News soon found itself the target of so much media-generated criticism that it resorted to the unusual measure of scrutinizing its own series, addressing the criticism, and conceding the paper might have done some things differently, including calling the CIA, not using the CIA logo, clarifying its use of the term "CIA's army," and including a statement that the paper found no evidence that CIA ordered or sanctioned the drug trade. $ ^{11} $ One reporter of a major regional newspaper told Public Affairs that, because it had reprinted the Mercury-News stories in their entirety, his paper now had "egg on its face," in light of what other newspapers were saying.
By the end of September, the number of observed stories $ ^{12} $ in the print media that indicated skepticism of the Mercury-News series surpassed that of the negative coverage, which had already peaked. In fact, for three weeks the number of skeptical or positive pieces observed in the media constantly exceeded the number of negative treatments of CIA. After a brief surge in negative reporting in mid-October, the observed number of skeptical treatments of the alleged Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 6 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.