CIA DRUG STORY MEDIA BLITZ REINFORCES BLACKS' DISTRUST.

Byline: Tim Golden The New York Times

Over the years that Beverly Carr has lived in South Central Los Angeles, she has seen crack cocaine rage through her neighborhood like a violent storm, littering the streets with young bodies, battering schools and homes, tearing families from their hinges.

But it was only after a series of articles in San Jose Mercury News that Carr found what she took to be proof of an unseen force behind the devastation. That the force was said to be the U.S. government surprised her not at all. That the plot supposedly involved associates of the CIA selling drugs in African-American neighborhoods to finance an anti-Communist crusade in Central America made perfect sense.

``Everybody my age or older has always known that something like this was going on,'' the 48-year-old caterer said. ``Who down here in Watts or Compton has planes or boats to get these drugs up here? They're targeting the young black men. It's just ruining a whole generation.''

Carr came upon the story in a conventional way: a local newspaper reprinted the series that the Mercury News published two months ago. But, propelled by newer technology, the San Jose paper's tantalizing assertion of a possible CIA role in the spread of crack through America's inner cities has now traveled much farther, reaching millions of people over the Internet, talk radio and cable television, setting off a flurry of federal investigation and confirming the suspicions of many, African-Americans in particular, about a government role in the drug trade.

The story's trajectory through the body politic is itself a remarkable tale. While the paper's assertions might owe their widest dissemination to the World Wide Web, they owe much of their power to the longstanding, insular network of newspapers, radio stations and word of mouth that informs and connects African-Americans in America. By its disparate impact, the story has also underscored both the profound mistrust of government that history has engendered among many African-Americans and the difficulty that many whites have in understanding their views.

``What makes it so believable to me is that there is just abounding circumstantial evidence,'' said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of many African-American political leaders who have publicly lent credence to the account in the Mercury News. ``There is the weight of a lot of experiences with our government operating in adverse or conspiratorial ways against black people. The context is what's driving the story.''

The force of the Mercury News account, however, appears to have relatively little to do with the quality of the evidence that it marshals to its case.

The series did raise some new questions about the government's treatment of a pair of midlevel Nicaraguan drug traffickers in California who supported the Contra rebels in their fight against the Sandinista government that ruled their country from 1979 to 1990. But court documents, past investigations and interviews with more than two dozen current and former rebels, CIA officials and narcotics agents, as well as other law-enforcement officials and experts on the drug trade, all indicate that there is scant proof to support the paper's contention that Nicaraguan rebel officials linked to the CIA played a central role in spreading crack through Los Angeles and other cities.

One of the traffickers, Oscar Danilo Blandon, has said he sent the rebels a pickup truck and some supplies. The other, Juan Norwin Meneses Canterero, appears to have given them some money and may have been involved in shipping them weapons on at least one occasion, government officials with access to intelligence reports on his activities said.

But neither of the two ever held an official position in any of the Nicaraguan groups, many former Contra and U.S. government officials insist. Neither of them, government officials say, worked for or had any discernable, direct contact with agents of the CIA.

Nor is there any proof of a connection between the two Nicaraguans' support for the rebels fighting in Central America and the money that was generated during the long trafficking relationship that Blandon maintained with perhaps the most infamous crack merchant in Los Angeles, Ricky Donnell Ross, a 36-year-old Texas native convicted in San Diego on federal narcotics charges.

In a sentencing memorandum filed last month, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Ross, L.J. O'Neale, suggested that if there was a conspiracy afoot to do something other than sell drugs, it involved the cooperative relationship between the Mercury News reporter who wrote the series, Gary Webb, and Ross' lawyer, Alan Fenster.

Webb has acknowledged that he suggested questions to the defense for Blandon, a paid informer for the Drug Enforcement Administration who was the star witness against Ross, so that his articles might draw on the Nicaraguan's testimony about his ties to the Contras. Based on Blandon's statements, Fenster then centered his defense in part on the notion that his client was the victim of a CIA plot to flood the African-American community with cocaine.

``These articles uncritically swallow the Ross version of events hook, line and sinker, often ignoring or wrenching out of context the evidence that proves Ross wrong,'' O'Neale argued. ``Ross then waves the articles aloft as `proof' that he was right.''

Webb defended his contacts with Fenster in an unusual dissection of his reporting that was printed by his own newspaper last Sunday, and the paper's executive editor, Jerry Ceppos, echoed the defense. ``I may be blind, but I believe it was legitimate and fair and absolutely ethical,'' Ceppos said in a telephone interview.

The reporter's cooperation with the defense lawyer was only one of many aspects of the Mercury News series that has come under attack by media analysts and journalists. For the most part, the critics have accused the paper of taking a good, newsworthy story about the relationship between a right-wing Nicaraguan cocaine broker and a legendary Los Angeles drug dealer and inflating it, without much substantiation, into an account that strongly suggests that the CIA had a significant, if indirect, role in creating the crack epidemic.

But the series owes its impact to more than the shocking ``alliance'' it describes between Nicaraguan rebel officials and gang members from South Central. The newspaper, which closely covers the information-technology industry that is centered in the area and prides itself on maintaining one of the newspaper world's most sophisticated Web sites, went to unprecedented lengths to repackage the series for the Internet.

By the time the first installment of the series was hitting doorsteps in San Jose on Aug. 18, the paper's Internet site, the Mercury Center, was offering ancillary material that included transcripts of relevant court records, photographs of the protagonists, diagrams, biographies and even audio recordings of trial testimony - all a mouse click away from the main text. Even earlier, the on-line service had begun announcing the series in messages to popular Internet news groups focused on subjects like drugs, the CIA and conspiracy theories.

For a regional newspaper with an audited daily circulation last year of less than 300,000, the Net offered a readership it could only have imagined a few years ago. Almost immediately, the newspaper's electronic site began receiving as many as 860,000 ``hits'' a day, well above the roughly 600,000 to 700,000 it had been getting before, said Bob Ryan, the director of the paper's on-line service.

As public awareness of the series grew, the paper began promoting it more aggressively. For readers wanting more, the Mercury Center carried a separate Gary Webb page, with a daily update of the reporter's appearances on a slew of radio and television programs.

Interest in the series was also fueled by more traditional means.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from the San Francisco Bay Area who had assailed the Reagan administration 10 years ago over another local newspaper's reports on the Contra connections of Meneses, wrote the director of central intelligence, John Deutch, on Aug. 29 to demand an explanation of the CIA's possible involvement in the matter.

No sooner had Boxer's letter made headlines than the state's other senator, Dianne Feinstein, also a Democrat, followed with a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno. Maxine Waters, a Democratic congresswoman who represents part of south-central Los Angeles, fired off her own letters to Deutch, Reno and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois. Investigations were begun by the CIA, the Justice Department and the House Intelligence Committee.

Of the many politicians who have voiced their outrage over the CIA's purported role in the drug trade, none have been more vigorous than Waters, who has held news conferences, given speeches, churned out handbills and led a demonstration over the reports. ``The impact and the implications of the Meneses/Blandon/Ross/Contra/CIA crack cocaine connection cannot be understated,'' the congresswoman wrote to Deutch.

The Mercury News series resounded just as powerfully among other members of the Congressional Black Caucus and among many African-Americans throughout the country.

Curtis Harris, a young investment banker on Wall Street and a graduate of West Point, learned of the reports from BOBC, or Black-on-Black Communications, an on-line newsletter that describes itself as a source of ``useful information by blacks for blacks.''

``I immediately wanted to know more,'' recalled Harris, who took off on the Net and kept going until he landed at the Mercury Center.

Jon Katz, the media critic for HotWired, the electronic sister of Wired magazine, said the Mercury News series had ricocheted around the hundreds of mostly small, African-American-oriented news groups on the Web, not only reaching students, professionals and others with access to the Internet, but also facilitating quick delivery of the series to African-American newspapers, radio stations and community groups.

``Just as the Gulf War established cable news as a medium, I think this story will dramatically raise African-American consciousness of the digital culture, which is now an overwhelmingly white medium,'' Katz said.

On WBAI Radio in New York, announcers read excerpts of the stories on the air each night for weeks after they were printed. At Styles, a New York City hair salon catering to an African-American and Hispanic clientele, a printout of the series sits in the magazine rack, alongside copies of Ebony and Essence magazines.

``The established press ignored the story until they found out that black folks weren't going to just let this one be swept under the rug,'' said Don Middleton, 33, a jazz musician in Washington who read the series on the Internet. ``The white press is pointing fingers at the black community, saying we're paranoid and quick to see conspiracy at every turn of the corner. Where have they been for the last 30 years?