I just had to give Walter Pincus a piece of my mind today when I saw him pretending to lecture fellow journalists about courage. Here’s what I sent him:

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Dear Mr. Pincus,

I laughed out loud today when I read your post at Neiman Watchdog in which you stated the following:

“Courage in journalism today takes all the obvious, traditional forms — reporting from a war zone or from a totalitarian country where a reporter’s life or safety are issues. In Washington, D.C., where I work, it’s a far less dramatic form of courage if a journalist stands up to a government official or a politician who he or she has reason to believe is not telling the truth or living up to his or her responsibilities.

“But I believe a new kind of courage is needed in journalism….”

Whoa. Back up. Before you talk about a “new kind of courage” – where was your “far less dramatic form of courage” when the CIA told you Gary Webb’s allegations did not hold water?

You were the journalist who showed no courage at all when Gary Webb did his dramatic expose in the San Jose Mercury linking gang drug money to the CIA’s Contra support effort. Webb’s courage was evident. But you just parroted back the CIA’s excuses, and never corrected the record for the public even when the Hitz report showed otherwise. (Presumably, you never even bothered to read it, so certain were you that your CIA friends would never lie to you, especially since you, as you so broadly touted in a headline in 1967, “traveled abroad on CIA subsidy.”)

Journalist, heal thyself. You have no business talking to your fellow newsmen about courage until you show the ability to challenge your own sources and look beyond the surface to what’s really going on. That’s why I laughed today. Seeing you talk about courage is indeed laughable.

I didn’t laugh when Gary Webb died. I cried, deeply, for weeks. The country lost one of its finest, a true journalist, when he died.

You killed him.

You killed him by killing any hope he had of having the only career he had ever desired, one he had thoroughly earned. That you never bothered to learn how right he was explains why your own passing will draw not similar grief.

It’s not too late. You can yet redeem yourself. You have the pulpit. But do you have the intelligence, the curiosity to find out what’s really going on under your nose there in DC, and report on it accurately? Do YOU have the courage you ask others to show?

I’m not holding my breath. And I doubt I’ll shed any tears at your passing. But I’d love you to prove me wrong. I’m a big believer in redemption. Tell us something that matters, something important. Something as big as what Gary Webb told us. And stand by it when your associates turn on you with the same sneering vituperativeness you showered on Webb.

Then, and only then, can you talk to us of courage. Otherwise, you’re just embarrassing yourself, and your profession.

A longtime reader, but not a fan,

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I was the one who first told Gary Webb about the CIA and the media, and specifically about Walter Pincus’s article.

I had dug it out of Mae Brussell’s amazing files, and had the article sitting on my desk for a year, wondering when I’d use this juicy bit of info.

When I read Gary’s stories, and Pincus’s opening salvo, I found Gary’s email address, and sent him the info. I also got his snail mail address and sent him a copy of Bernstein’s landmark Rolling Stones piece on the CIA and the Media. (It evidently hit home, as he later contributed an essay on the CIA and the media in the context of his own experiences for Kristina Borjesson’s book, “Into the Buzzsaw.”)

I met Gary a couple of times, and he told me a funny story. When I first sent him the note about the Pincus article, which, ironically, had run in his own paper due to its affiliation with the Post, he thought it was too good to be true.

He called the archives at the paper and they looked it up and said yeah, that’s real, we ran that story.

He STILL didn’t believe it and finally went to his local library and looked up old issues of the Mercury News on microfilm.

When he saw it with his own eyes, he was amazed. And then, he started to put together the coordinated attack against him, which he wrote about in his book “Dark Alliance” and in this article. I am the “woman in Southern California” referenced herein:

About 2 a.m. Jerry Ceppos called. The Washington Post had just moved a story on the wires. It would be in the morning edition, and it was highly critical of the series. He asked me to take a look at it and give him my reaction.

“What did they say was wrong?” I asked.

“They don’t say any of the facts are wrong,” Ceppos said. “They just don’t agree with our conclusions. <…> I’ll send you a fax of it, and we can talk in the morning.”

They story was headlined “The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged Plot.” I laughed. What plot?

The reporters, Walter Pincus and Roberto Suro, wrote that their investigation “does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed Contras — or Nicaraguans in general — played a major role in the emergence of crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States. Instead, the available data from arrest records, hospitals, drug treatment centers and drug-user surveys point to a rise in crack as a broad-based phenomenon driven in numerous places by players of different nationalities, races and ethnic groups.” <…>

Overall, it was a cleverly crafted piece of disinformation that would set the stage for the attacks to follow. <…>

I wrote Ceppos a memo pointing out the holes in the Post’s story. “The Pincus piece,” I wrote, “is just silly. It’s the kind of story you’d expect from someone who spent three weeks working on a story, as opposed to 16 months.” The fact that the Post’s unnamed “experts” would reject a scenario “out of hand,” I wrote, was the whole problem. “None of them — whoever they are — has ever studied this before.”

To his credit, Ceppos fired off a blistering letter to the Post, pointing out the factual errors in the piece and calling Pincus’ claims of a “racially charged allegation” a “complete and total mischaracterization.” <…>

Ceppos posted the letter on the staff bulletin board, along with a memo defending the series. “We strongly support the conclusions the series drew and will until someone proves them wrong. What is even more remarkable is that four experienced Post reporters, re-reporting our series, could not find a single factual error. The Post’s conclusions are very different — and I believe, flawed — but the major facts aren’t. I’m not sure how many of us could sustain such a microscopic examination of our work, and I believe Gary Webb deserves recognition for surviving unscathed.”

The Post held Ceppos’ letter for weeks, ordered him to rewrite it, and then refused to print it.

Shortly afterward I got an email message from a woman in Southern California. There was a story in the Mercury’s archives that I needed to see, she wrote, and provided a date and a page number. I sent it to our library and got a photocopy of the story in the mail a day later. It had run on Feb. 18, 1967.”

“How I Traveled Abroad on CIA Subsidy” was the headline. The author was Walter Pincus of the Washington Post.

After disclosures of CIA infiltration of American student associations had exploded that year, Pincus had written a long, smug confessional of how, posing as an American student representative, he’d traveled to several international youth conferences in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, secretly gathering information for the CIA and smuggling in anti-Communist propoganda. A CIA recruiter had approached him, he wrote, and he’d agreed to spy not only on the student delegations from other countries but on his American colleagues as well. “I had been briefed in Washington on each of them,” Pincus wrote. “None was remotely aware of CIA’s interest.”

This just cannot be true, I thought. The Washington Post’s veteran national security reporter — a former CIA operative and propogandist? Unwilling to believe this piece of information until I dug it up for myself, I went to the state library and got out the microfilm. The story was there. This was the man who was questioning my ethics for giving [Ross’s attorney] Alan Fenster questions to ask a government witness about the Contras and drugs? Jesus, I’d certainly never spied on American citizens.

So maybe now you can understand why I don’t share the same respect for Pincus that some of the underinformed do. Robert Parry, Kristina Borjesson, Gary Webb – these people told stories so important they lost their careers over them.

Parry exposed the Reagan-Bush October Surprise dealings in what must be the only issue of Newsweek ever recalled from the newsstands.

Borjesson lost her job as CBS producer when she insisted that all the evidence she found pointed to a missile having brought down TWA Flight 800.

Has Pincus ever written a story that put his career on the line? Never. In other words, he hasn’t told us anything important enough to be fired over yet.