Contras in Dixie

By Eric Guthey

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 1-6

In 1984 an assassin’s bomb intended for Contra leader Eden Pastora killed eight people, including an American journalist, at the Contra outpost of La Penca on the southern front of the U.S.-sponsored war against Nicaragua.

Four years later, the shock waves of that explosion still reverberate along the southern front of another, even more secret war being waged against the democratic principles of the U.S. Constitution and the will of the American people.

Revelations of illegal activities in support of the U.S.-backed Contras continue to crop up in local communities around the South. The revelations contribute to the case that the Christic Institute, a Washington-based public interest law firm and policy center, has mounted in a Miami federal court against members of the criminal conspiracy it believes was behind the La Penca bombing, behind an extensive guns-for-drugs campaign, and behind the rest of the untold story surrounding the Iran-Contra affair.

* In Miami in 1986, convicted drug pilot Michael Tolliver landed a plane carrying 25,000 pounds of marijuana at the Homestead U.S. Air Force Base. Tolliver has testified before Congress that his action was part of a massive guns-for-drugs operation to resupply the U.S.-backed Contras.

* In Mena, Ark., local law enforcement officials are trying to shed light on a drug smuggling and Contra supply airstrip which they were told not to investigate because it was an official covert operation of the CIA.

* In Marietta, Ga., alleged arms merchant Gary Best continued until very recently to run the company he took over from local toymaker Robert Fletcher to use as a front for his illicit dealings. Fletcher says that Best, who has close ties to former major general and indicted Iran-Contra co-conspirator John Singlaub, threatened his

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(Fletcher’s) life and forced him out of the company after he refused to become involved in arms smuggling to Angola.

* And in nearby Atlanta, Fulton County Chief of Detectives E.E. Nixon testified in early May concerning his aborted 1984 investigation into a warehouse allegedly containing C-4, the same type of plastic explosive that killed American journalist Linda Frazier at La Penca in the spring of that year. According to the Chicago-based weekly IN THESE TIMES, Nixon called off his investigation at the request of former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North.

These and many other equally lurid goings-on point to the extent of the Iran-Contra affair–corruption which has penetrated local communities across the South and around the nation with drastic and lasting consequences. Largely glossed over by the President’s Tower Commission, by the Congressional Iran-Contra Committees, and even by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, the pattern of subversion and illegal activity that resulted in “Contragate” has been reduced in the public eye to little more than a problem of executive management style, an aberration on the part of otherwise well-intentioned “national heros.”

Christic Institute Challenges the Whitewash

Although still ignored for the most part by the mainstream press, the Christic Institute has been digging up the real story behind the Iran-Contra affair for over three years. Christic filed its federal civil lawsuit against several of the key figures in the scandal a full six months before Attorney General Ed Meese reluctantly released the story to the public.

The Christic Institute’s staff has since swelled from fifteen to over sixty members, all of whom work for no more than $15,000 per year. Christic’s main office in Washington, with a budget of more than $80,000 per week, now works exclusively on the Contragate suit. Christic funds its operations through private donations, through support from national church and peace groups, and through national foundation grants.

“When we filed the suit in May of 1986, a lot of people thought we were crazy,” says Sara Nelson, the Institute’s executive director. “They didn’t know these names, and they couldn’t imagine that there was this massive illegal military supply operation to the Contras.”

“Six months later the [Eugene] Hasenfus plane went down in Nicaragua,” Nelson recalls. “Our defendants’ names surfaced in Hasenfus’s business cards and telephone records. The press came to our office to find out what we knew. Then the Iran-Contra scandal broke, and there were more of our defendants–Albert Hakim, Richard Secord–in the middle of the Iran weapons sale.”

Christic has discovered that all of the principals in the Iran-Contra scandal also worked for the “Secret Team” or “Enterprise,” a covert, privately-funded, anti-communist organization made up of present and former U.S. military and CIA officials. According to Christic, members of the Secret Team, “acting both officially and on their own, have waged secret wars, toppled governments, trafficked in drugs, assassinated political enemies, stolen from the U.S. government, and subverted the will of the Constitution, the Congress, and the American people” for the past twenty five years.

“These are people who believe that they are above the

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law, who are perfectly willing to lie to protect their programs, who think that their agenda is so important that our representatives do not matter and neither do we,” says Nelson. “We never voted for death squads. We never thought that this is what they were doing in our name. We believed them when they said ‘We are spreading democracy. We are fighting for freedom.’ But that is not what has been going on.”

La Penca and the Contragate Lawsuit

Christic filed its $17 million civil lawsuit against twenty-nine members of the Secret Team on behalf of American journalist Tony Avirgan and his wife and fellow journalist, Martha Honey. In 1984, Avirgan had been covering Eden Pastora’s La Penca press conference for ABC News when he was severely injured by the failed attempt to assassinate the Contra leader. On a recent, nationally televised episode of the PBS series, FRONTLINE, Avirgan recounted how the wounded Pastora was spirited away in the only boat available at the remote river outpost, and how the rest of the victims of the attack lay on the floor for a full nine hours before help arrived. That same night, the U.S. Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, falsely reported that no Americans had been injured in the bombing, and refused to offer any assistance. FRONTLINE quoted George Jones, the deputy in charge of the embassy, as elating at the time, “We are not in the rescue business.”

After Avirgan recovered from his injuries, he and Honey began to investigate the bombing, fully expecting to find that it had been carried out by the Sandinistas. But every piece of information they uncovered led them to believe that the operation had been launched from the Costa Rican ranch of American millionaire John Hull, an alleged member of the Secret Team and now a defendant in the Christic lawsuit. Honey and Avirgan discovered that the Secret Team had decided to eliminate Pastora because he refused to follow CIA directives or to associate himself with other Contras who had been part of Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard, members of which had murdered Pastora’a father.

Honey and Avirgan also uncovered substantial evidence that Hull’s ranch was being used as a trans-shipment point for cocaine entering the U.S. and arms coming back to the Contras.

In 1985, after Honey and Avirgan published their findings, Hull sued them for criminal libel in a Costa Rican court. According to a sworn affadavit [sic] from Christic Institute general counsel Daniel Sheehan, who defended Honey and Avirgan, several witnesses for the defense were kid-

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napped and tortured on Hull’s ranch. According to a member of the Costa Rican Rural Guard, one of their key witnesses wee executed there as well. A Costa Rican judge threw Hull’s case out of court.

The allegations by Honey and Avirgan about Hull’s drug smuggling and arms dealing activities in support of the Contras have recently received independent confirmation from Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) during hearings on the Contra-drug connection. On Frontline, Hull still denied any wrongdoing but said, “If it were within my power, people like [Senator Ted] Kennedy and Kerry would be lined up and shot tomorrow.”

Other defendants in the Christic lawsuit include retired general Richard Secord; Robert Owen, Oliver North’s private courier; Contra leader Adolfo Calero; and Thomas Posey, head of Civilian Materiel Assistance (formerly “Civilian Military Assistance”), an ultra-right wing group involved in supplying the Contras out of Decatur, Ala. Christic asserts that the Secret Team is headed by defendant Theodore Shackley, who served as CIA Deputy Director in charge of worldwide covert operations under the agency’s former director, George Bush.

Christic has refrained from naming any present members of the U.S. government in its suit in order not to bring the Justice Department into the case on the aide of the defendants.

In testimony before the Iran-Contra committees, Robert Owen called the charges against him “scurrilous.” In an article in the ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, Shackley called members of the Christic Institute “practitioners of character assassination through legal terrorism” whose charges amounted to “rubbish.”

But defendants in the Christic lawsuit participate in character assassination of their own. During the Iran-Contra hearings, former CIA operative Glenn Robinette testified that Richard Secord paid him more than $60,000 in funds diverted from the Iranian arms sales to carry out a smear campaign against the Christic Institute.

In the December 1987 issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine, retired major general John Singlaub said in a funding appeal, “If I were back in Vietnam in a firefight, then I’d ask for an airstrike to blow the bastards away. But to win this fight we need money. To fight the damned Christic Institute lawsuit takes money.”

Christic’s lawsuit charges the twenty-nine defendants with violating the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act. Under the statute, Christic’s lawyers must prove that each defendant committed two offenses contributing to the conspiracy within a ten-year period. But Christic asserts that the Secret Team has been committing terrorist acts from positions both within and outside the government for the last twenty-five years.

Christic Focuses on the South

Although the Christic Institute wants to see the members of the Secret Team brought to justice, it also views the lawsuit as an opportunity to inform the American people of the crimes being committed in the name of their country. “If we don’t speak out and say we want to know about all this–as long as they can keep these things covert–then we can’t begin to correct the injustice and the immorality that is going on under our noses,” says Sara Nelson. For this reason the Christic Institute devotee half of its efforts to getting out the word about their lawsuit and about the illegal dealings of the Secret Team.

We can uncover the facts and conclude them in a court of law and resolve the debate about what is true and what is not,” Nelson says. “But it is going to take a massive public education and organizing campaign if we are going to develop a groundswell of pressure on our institutions to get them to do their part in solving these problems.”

Recently, Christic has stepped up its public education and organizing campaign in the South. “We hope that we can bring out some of this information here

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and that other groups will continue to work with it,” says Christic’s Director of Southern Outreach, Tennessee native Jenny Yancey.

“The biggest issue here in the South is moving people to feel that they have the power to do something,” says Yancey. “And this information is power.”

The Christic Institute has a strong history of legal action on behalf of local communities and individuals in the South. Dr. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Council sits on the Christic board of advisors. Christic conducted the investigation and successful lawsuit against the Kerr-McGee nuclear power plant in Oklahoma on behalf of Karen Silkwood, who died mysteriously while trying to go public about her massive exposure to radiation at the plant. In 1985, Christic won a verdict against four Klansmen, two members of the American Nazi Party and two members of the Greensboro, N. C., Police Department for the murder of five anti-Klan demonstrators.

Christic also successfully defended Stacey Lynn Merkt of Brownsville, Texas, the first Sanctuary Movement worker arrested for harboring Savadoran refugees, and Eddie Carthan, the first black mayor elected in the Mississippi Delta since the Reconstruction, who had been falsely accused of murder. Christic attorneys worked on behalf of defendants in the Reagan Justice Department’s unsuccessful prosecution of civil rights activists in the Alabama Black Belt [see SOUTHERN CHANGES, May/June, 1985]. Most recently, Christic South’s office in Durham, N.C., provided legal and organizing services to the residents of Keyesville, Ga., where a fifty-year ban on self-government had left black residents with out such basic services as plumbing, sewers, a fire department or a school. In elections held last January, Keyesville residents elected their own town council and installed Emma Gresham, a black retired school teacher, as mayor.

In April, Nelson and Yancey traveled to Atlanta for four days of speaking engagements and organizing meetings. On Wednesday, April 21, Nelson spoke at a service at the Cathedral of Faith, a black Pentecostal church in south Atlanta. A few weeks before a six-year-old child had been shot in both legs in south Atlanta, caught in the crossfire of a crack-related shootout. Nelson emphasized that the Reagan administration’s obsession with the Contras has severely aggravated the drug problem in America’s inner cities, because administration officials have been at the very least looking the other way so that drug money could be used to fund the Contras. Dr. Jonathan Greer, pastor at the Cathedral of Faith, drove the point home in a rousing sermon.

“It’s not the folks out here that are the problem,” Greer said of the increased drug-related crime in Atlanta and other cities. “It’s the folks in Washington. They speak out against drugs, but they’re just playing a game. They tell us ‘Just Say No’–but they say ‘yes’ behind the scene because the money’s right!

“All the politicians come in here saying ‘We’re going to beef up our protection and round up the dealers.’ Well, I say start downtown! START IN WASHINGTON! Because if you can get that cleaned up, you won’t have to worry about down here!”

Nelson also spoke at a conference on theology, peace and politics held at Emory University and the Carter Presidential Center, and participated in a panel at the conference of the National Alliance of Third World Journalists at Clark College. She and her husband, Christic’s general counsel Daniel Sheehan, met with television executive Ted Turner to discuss the progress of their lawsuit and its coverage in the media.

Meanwhile, Yancey discussed with local organizers strategies for spreading the message about the Christic lawsuit. Yancey, fellow Christic staffer Eva Berkham, and the small group of organizers, which included representatives from area churches, a student Central America network, Pledge of Resistance, and Clergy and Laity Concerned, discussed advertisements, petition, leaflet and letter-writing campaigns, contacting local politicians for support, and a possible vigil in front of the Federal Building. Christic and the various Atlanta groups will try to coordinate their activities around the week of May 30, the fourth anniversary of the La Penca bombing.

Christic efforts come at a crucial time. Judge Lawrence King in Miami has placed certain severe restrictions on Christic’s lawyers, setting an early June 29 trial date and stipulating that Christic must prove ten years of illegal activity on the basis of only a four-year discovery period.

An obvious reason for Christic’s interest in Atlanta is the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Christic’s members see the election year as an opportunity to encourage voters to press for the kinds of change that might put an end to the state-sanctioned terrorism carried out by the Secret Team. “We want to keep working with people between now and the elections to raise these questions and get them into the debates so that the candidates are forced to come to grips with this,” says Nelson.

“It’s important that we don’t blow this year,” says Georgia Robeson, one of the Atlanta organizers working with Christic. “It’s essential that George Bush does not become the leader of this country–because he does know more about all of this than he has admitted.” Indeed, press reports continue to indicate that Bush’s chief advisers met with members of the Secret Team on several occasions. These reports, along with all of the other evidence that has come out about the Iran-Contra scandal, push the “plausible deniablity” of Bush, Reagan, and other top administration officials ever further into the realm of fiction.

Local groups in New Orleans also plan to make the Christic message heard during the Republican National

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Convention later this summer. “There are many things in the planning stage–including major demonstrations–and certainly the Iran-Contra drug connection will be an important part of the issues raised,” says Ted Quant of the Institute of Human Relations at Loyola University in New Orleans. Quant is particularly concerned about the Christic Institute’s evidence that the Secret Team and the CIA have been involved in drug running to benefit the Contras.

There’s been a tremendous drug problem, particularly among the young people in our community,” says Quant. “Then we learn through Christic that a tremendous amount of the drugs in our community were actually flown in by the CIA. That means our kids are being used as cannon fodder for the Administration policy of trying to overthrow another country that is trying to establish a decent life for its children as well.”

The South presents “fertile ground” for “the type of paramilitary program that you see with the Iran-Contra affair,” Quant says. “The South has a history of support for this sort of paramilitary behavior going back at least to the Ku Klux Klan–and the role of extra-legal terror has continued until recent times. We know for example that the Klan has often traded its white robes for paramilitary garb to allign [sic] itself with the fight against Communism.”

Quant has witnessed first-hand the disastrous effects that the successful exploitation of this right-wing brand of Southern nationalism has had in the New Orleans community. “In a way the South has been treated as sort of a second-rate colony by these people–a place where they can dump these drugs to finance this war.”

The Scandal of the Eighties

The Iran-Contra Committees brushed aside a horrifying story of state-sponsored terrorism by focusing on the question of whether the president knew what was going on. But as Noam Chomsky writes in his book THE CULTURE OF TERRORISM, Reagan is “largely a creation of the Public Relations Industry,” and the question of what he knew retains significance only “in the world of imagery and illusion in which ideologists must labor to maintain the pretense that the public determines policy guidelines by voting for the chief executive.” The scores of conflicting and erroneous statements that have come out of Ronald Reagan’s mouth about the Iran-Contra scandal serve to confirm his irrelevance to real issues in the real world. Whether or not Reagan knew what went on, it happened–a secret government waged wars, murdered at least one American citizen and many others abroad, flooded the country with drugs, and flouted the will of the American people. A president with any degree of competence would have to be held responsible.

The defense of choice around the White House these days adheres to the revised slogan “Just say I don’t know”–a defense in which Administration officials are proud of the fact that they kept themselves uninformed or, better still, that they haven’t been indicted yet. George Bush’s continued assertions that he stayed “out of the loop” as far as the Iran-Contra affair was concerned illustrate just how far the Reagan gang will go to insult the intelligence of the American people. Recent press reports indicate that Bush may try to manipulate the debates before the election in order to avoid being confronted with his complicity in the Iran-Contra scandal and the operations of the Secret Team. He must not be allowed to do so. And the Democratic candidates must be carefully questioned as well–to make sure that, if elected, they will put an end to such threats to the Constitution and to the people’s right to know how their country is being governed.

On May 2, Oliver North addressed the graduating class at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell likened North’s current legal trials to the sufferings of Christ, and the teary-eyed patriot said that he wore the accusations against him as “a badge of honor.” The heart of the Iran-Contra scandal is that very perversion of the American dream, where a U.S. marine can become a terrorist, and a terrorist can become a national hero of Christ-like proportions. Such a display of misplaced values thrives on ignorance–ignorance of what North did, ignorance of what those like him have been doing for years. By insisting that they just didn’t know, Reagan and Bush proudly uphold this ignorance as an example for the American people.

If Americans need to ask themselves whether patriotism means remaining ignorant of what goes on in their names, Southerners need to wonder why a figure like Oliver North receives such a sunny reception in Dixie. Capitalizing on traditional Southern support for quasi-religious nationalism and militarism, North depends upon Southerners to remain unaware of the facts, to buy into the slogans of gung-ho symbolism, to look the other way while right-wing ideologues conduct paramilitary operations in our own back yard.

For More Information

“Contragate Affidavit” by Daniel Sheehan, $10; LA PENCA REPORT by Avirgan and Honey, $8; Contragate Video: “The Shadow Government,” $20. Order from Christic Institute, 1324 N. Capitol St., NW., Washington, DC 20002.

Eric Guthey is a student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University.

Just a Little Guy Who Got Hit by the Arms Truck

By Eric Guthey

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, p. 3

I RAISED MY children according to the principle that if you see something that’s not right,” you report it, says Bob Fletcher, the former Marietta, Ga., toymaker who says his company was taken over by arms merchants with ties to the secret team.

Fletcher’s story begins in 1985, a full year and a half before the Iran contra story became public knowledge. “There’s no way that I could have dreamed this stuff up and and [sic] have it come true a year and a half later,” he now insists.

Fletcher recounts how Gary Best bought out his toy company and kept him on to run the business. Soon Fletcher started to notice Telex messages from locations like Angola and Pakistan. His new associate was forever flying to Geneva, Switzerland, and to other countries and never seemed to spend any time on the toy business. Eventually Fletcher confronted Best and asked how he made his money. “Without batting an eye, he said, ‘I sell armaments,'” Fletcher recalls.

Fletcher now believes that Best let him in on many of his dealing activities with the intent to recruit him. “All of these different covert actions–Angola, Pakistan, Nicaragua, POW/MIA missions, the Rambo-type stuff–all of this was being coordinated out of my company by Gary Best.”

At a certain point, retired Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, who has since been indicted in the Iran-Contra affair, became a consultant to the company. Bill Kenney, an associate of Oliver North, also came in and out frequently.

Finally, Best asked Fletcher to run courier missions to Angola–at a salary of $2,000 per trip. Fletcher says Best told him if he talked to the wrong people about the operation he would be killed. Fletcher declined the offer and Best forced him out of the company after he complained about the shady goings-on.

Fletcher eventually contacted the Congressional Iran-Contra committees to tell them about what he knew. But two of the committees’ investigators, Thomas Polgar and Bob Bermingham, seemed to have no interest in Fletcher’s story or in its relation to the Iran-Contra affair. “Polgar and Bermingham are old-time employees of (Thomas) Clines and (Edmund) Wilson, and of Singlaub and (Theodore) Shackley [all alleged members of the Secret Team and defendants in Christic’s lawsuit],” Fletcher points out.

Fletcher is committed to making his story heard. “I’m not a radical–I’m just a little guy that got run over by these bastards,” he says. “But people have to understand what is going on here. They lied to the Senate, they lied to the public, and they’re still doing whatever they please.”

Pursuing the Shadow Government

By Eric Guthey

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 5, 8-9

Last May, Southern Changes reported on the work of the Christic Institute, a Washington-based public interest law firm that has a strong history of legal activism throughout the South.

The Christic Institute had filed a civil suit in a Miami Federal court against twenty-nine alleged members of the “Secret Team” Christic believes to be behind the Iran Contra Affair, behind a massive guns-for-drugs campaign to fund the U.S.-backed Contras, and behind a whole litany of covert acts of right-wing terrorism stretching back over twenty-five years. The defendants included retired Major General Richard Secord, retired General John Singlaub, Oliver North’s aide Robert Owen, businessman Albert Hakim, former CIA operatives Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines, and Thomas Posey, a self-styled mercenary and head of the Alabama-based Civilian Materiel Assistance, a Contra-support group (Posey is currently under indictment in Miami on separate charges of violating the Neutrality Act).

The lawsuit held out the possibility of forcing key figures of the Iran/Contra affair to answer tough questions that had not even been asked by the mainstream press, by the Tower Commission, by the Congressional Iran/Contra Committees, or by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

But on June 23, just four days before the trial was to begin, Chief U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King threw the case out of court, maintaining that it wee based on hearsay and inadmissable evidence.

The Christic Institute had filed its $24 million suit under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization statute (RICO). Under the statute, the Christic Institute would have to prove that each of the defendants committed at least two acts contributing to a criminal conspiracy that also resulted in the injury of the Christic Institute’s client, journalist Tony Avirgan, during the 1984 assassination attempt against former Contra leader Eden Pastora (another alleged operation of the Secret Team). In 0a ruling, Judge King said that the “causation link” between the injury to Avirgan and the various criminal acts cited by the Christic Institute was missing.

Charging that Judge King’s ruling was “arbitrary” and full of “gross legal errors,” the Christic Institute immediately appealed the decision, and will bring its case before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta sometime later this year.

In a funding appeal mailed to supporters shortly after the decision, the Christic Institute suggested that political motives were behind the abrupt dismissal of their case. “Apparently, Judge King looked at this evidence and realized that his Miami

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courtroom was going to become center stage for a riveting political drama–right in the middle of the ’88 election campaign. So he stopped the trial,” the mailing said.

But Judge King is not the only one to question the Christic Institute’s “Secret Team” theory. In an article written before King’s decision but published just afterwards, David Corn of The Nation called the theory a “political device” intended to rally opposition to the national security apparatus as well as an “ambitious historical thesis that purports to explain much of U.S. foreign policy since 1959.” (“Is There Really a ‘Secret Team’?”, The Nation, July 2/9, 1988) According to Corn, the Christic Institute uses the Secret Team hypothesis to portray the secret war against Castro, the CIA assassination program in Vietnam, the covert war in Central America, and a whole slew of other covert operations as ventures of the Secret Team and therefore private, non-governmental acts. Said Com, “This lets the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and various administrations off the hook.”

Corn also noted that the Christic Institute emphasizes the “dark conspiracy” overtones of the Secret Team hypothesis because it is “easy to package and offers a highly visible target for the institute’s crusade.” (For example, the Christic Institute’s mailing that came out immediately after King dismissed the case stated, “We must continue to expose the Secret Team for who they are–private operatives of a “shadow government” that wages secret ware, assassinates innocent people and smuggles drugs to finance illegal foreign policy operations.” [Christie Institute’s emphasis]) Corn claimed, however, that the Secret Team hypothesis is merely a legal necessity which glosses over the historical reality of government covert activity in order to win a case in court. Corn therefore charged that the Christic Institute, “in pursuit of its educational and political mission, is offering this version of history to the public at $15 a copy” and is therefore placing a historically “problematic document” in the hands of its constituency.

Responding to Corn’s criticisms last month, Christic attorney Andrew Love said that the Christic Institute has always recognized a certain amount of tension between its litigation and public information efforts. “But, legally, we have to work within the constraints of the RICO statute,” he said.

Love said that for this very reason the public version of the Christic Institute’s legal declaration, which is entitled Inside the Shadow Government, includes an introduction which explains why RICO requires the Christic Institute to concentrate on the activity of the Secret Team. “We wish that David Corn had read that introduction more carefully,”

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Love said.

Love also reiterated that the legal focus of the case is not intended to deflect criticism away from the U.S. government, but rasher to expose connections between the Secret Team’s private operations and the government. “I don’t think we’ve ever said that the Secret Team is removed from the government,” he said. “But we’re not going to come out and say that everything they did was sanctioned by the government–because that could be interpreted as a defense for them.”

“We can’t take on the government–we would be thrown out of court right away,” Love explained further. “So we’ve taken on the next beat thing. The whole idea of going to trial is to expose what’s going on–and we assume that this process will expose connections with the government along the way.”

The Christic Institute’s investigation has indeed uncovered considerable evidence that a “shadow government” has been waging war in the name of the American people and without their knowledge or consent. But Christic’s focus on the Secret Team should not be taken to suggest that the shadow consists solely of a radical fringe of rogue operative I perpetuating such countersubversion outside of the government and outside of the law. Studied carefully and in the context of Reagan Administration policy, the evidence provided by the Christic Institute suggests that covert acts of a terrorist nature have become a legal commonplace within our system of government–and this conclusion can be supported by the findings of other investigations.

For example, investigative journalists Frank Snepp and Jonathan King recently reported in the New York Times that federal authorities knew of Tom Posey’s violations of the Neutrality Act for over three years, but did not move against him because his illegal activity served Administration purposes. King and Snepp maintain that the Justice Department felt compelled to take action against Posey and his associate, Jack Terrell, “only after Mr. Terrell soured on Administration policy and began criticizing it openly–and only after Congress began investigating.” (“Iran-Contra Folly,” New York Times, July 31,1988) Meanwhile, Snepp and King point out, government officials who encouraged Posey and Terrell or conducted similar operations of their own go unpunished, and the investigations of those former Administration officials who have been indicted (i.e., Oliver North and John Poindexter) are being deliberately hampered by federal intelligence agencies unwilling to release relevant documents.

Two recent books also reveal the extent to which the U.S. government is willing to mislead the public and subvert the legal system where Administration policy is concerned. In A Candid Inside Story of the Iran-Contra Hearings, Maine Senators George Mitchell and William Cohen (a Democrat and a Republican, respectively) assert that the Congressional Iran-Contra Committees on which they both eat failed to ask important questions or to follow up significant leads uncovered in the course of their hearings. And Jane Mayer’s and Doyle McManua’s new book, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988, made the headline, this month because it revealed that Administration officials actually discussed relieving President Reagan of his duties on the grounds of incompetence. But the not-so-surprising news about Reagan’s ineptitude is just the prologue to Landslide, which actually focuses more broadly on the Iran-Contra affair. Among other things, the authors conclude that George Bush had “laid before him in clear, unsparing terms” the Iran arms-for-hostages swap as early as July 1986, and that he did absolutely nothing about it. Bush has vigorously denied any knowledge of the initiative.

In such a state of affairs, when the agencies of government cannot be depended on to uphold the Constitution and when candidates for president are willing to lie repeatedly, any efforts to shed light on the shadow government–including the indirect efforts of the Christic Institute–deserve recognition and support.

Eric Guthey is a student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University.

The Press as Company Store, Atlanta Style

By Eric Guthey

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 8-10

To doubt the current charming presentations of Southern growth and prosperity is to bring anathema on one’s head. What! The South not prosperous. Impossible, they cry, and the individual who questions is an idiot.–Lewis Harvie Blair, The Prosperity of the South Dependent on the Elevation of the Negro (1889)

Although Harvie Blair, native Virginian and former Confederate soldier, wrote his description of such defensive, pro-Southern attitudes a hundred years ago, his words apply just as well to the South today. The survival of this mixture of the New South creed, corporate-expansive boosterism, and belligerent local patriotism is not breaking news. But when Bill Kovach abruptly resigned as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in November, the papers’ corporate managers who accepted his resignation and the community members opposed to it lined up on both sides of the myth and pushed it into the national headlines.

Atlantans who supported Kovach and liked what he had done with the papers during his two-year tenure claimed the corporate elite-who traditionally have promoted New South posturing and urban boosterism to bolster their own power-had forced out the former New York Times Washington bureau chief because of his tough coverage of the Atlanta business community. Publisher Jay Smith and David Easterly, president of the papers’ parent company, Cox Enterprises, denied that business pressure had anything to do with their acceptance of Kovach’s resignation. He had resigned and they had accepted because of a lack of “mutual trust,” they said.

But Smith and Easterly defended their actions against a barrage of national criticism by doing what all good New South boosters do-retreating to a stance of intense regionalism and denying any problem existed. In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Easterly responded to a comment from Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee by telling him to “stuff it.” Meanwhile, good ol’ boys like Journal-Constitution sportswriter Furman Bisher and columnist Lewis Grizzard, both of whom had been at the papers long before Kovach, gloated as the crowd they saw as “Northern invaders” from the New York Times lost the battle for the control of the papers. Said Bisher: “Maybe now we can get back to covering Dixie like the dew.”

To many, though, that meant the papers would return to the previous state of mediocrity which had chased serious Southern journalists away and allowed local talents like Bisher and Grizzard to thrive. “These papers have never attempted to excel,” said Dudley Clendinen, a former Timesman who had joined the papers in 1986 as Kovach’s assistant in charge of local news and who resigned two weeks after Kovach’s departure. “They’ve always been content to have to find their reputation in a single editor of conscience and great writing ability. But those editors always felt threatened: Ralph McGill spent every day afraid that he was going to be fired. Gene Patterson was forced out.”(In 1967, Constitution editor Eugene Patterson lost his job for running a column criticizing Georgia Power’s request for a rate hike).

“The [Cox] family takes the profits,” Clendinen said. “It doesn’t involve itself in the conduct of the paper, to see to it that they produce are cord of quality. That’s always been the case here in Atlanta, and because it has, people don’t know better. They’ve always lived here, always read these papers. If they’ve lived elsewhere they’d know better.” According to a recent ranking in Advertising Age, Cox Enterprises, an empire originally built around newspaper money from Dayton, Ohio, is the thirteenth largest media company in the world, and pulls in the ninth largest revenues from newspaper operations (over $710 million in 1987). According to the Forbes 400 listing, the sisters who control the family business, Anne Cox Chambers and Barbara Cox Anthony, together share the distinction of being the eighth richest people in the United States. Each is worth $2.25 billion.

Kovach joined the Journal-Constitition in 1986, reportedly after being passed over for the position of editor at the New York Times. The local community and the national media heralded his hiring as a signal the Cox sisters had decided to convert the Journal-Constitution from the haven for mediocrity and soft business coverage it had become into an institution that commanded national respect. Kovach himself declared that he intended to turn the Journal-Constitution into a world-class news organization.

As business institutions, large U.S. city newspapers at their best are never more than instruments of liberal reform, criticizing their business communities within certain “acceptable” limits. Bill Kovach tried to expand those limits at the Journal-Constitution, and his improvements were encouraging compared to the papers’ dismal record. Under Kovach, the papers ran lengthy investigative pieces exposing the Atlanta banking community’s discriminatory lending practices in black neighborhoods, the alleged bribing of Russian officials by Coca-Cola representatives, and Georgia Power management’s coercion of employees to make political contributions to the campaign of Public Service Commission candidate Bobby Rowan.

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The papers’ coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta last summer also drew national attention. In fact, even the papers’ senior management publicly praised Kovach as the man who had turned around the Journal-Constitution and likened him to the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Constitution editor Ralph McGill, under whom the papers were said to have had their best years. At a party in the newsroom on the convention’s last night, Smith stood atop a desk and declared: “These are no longer the newspapers of Ralph McGill. These are the newspapers of Bill Kovach.”

But five months later, Smith was explaining that he and Kovach had never been able to establish a relationship of “mutual trust.” In a November 12 editorial, Smith instated that the company had let Kovach go because he was impossible to work with. This very well may be the immediate reason why the papers’ management got rid of Kovach. Kovach himself conceded that direct pressure from the business community had nothing to do with his leaving. Some of Kovach’s own hirees admitted he had a hot temper, and may have threatened to quit one time too many.

Yet, it doesn’t matter if a corporate conspiracy to Iynch Kovach didn’t exist. New South boosterism does not work that way. Rather, it is a pervasive consciousness, a framework of attitudes within which serious analysis and criticism-especially of the New South’s booming capital-are just not welcome. Complaints from Atlanta business leaders over what they saw as Kovach’s unfair coverage merely reflected and contributed to that ethos. So did Kovach’s protracted arguments with Smith and Easterly, who wanted the papers to look more like USA Today, the shallow but highly successful paper replete with short stories, bright graphics, and a decidedly “up-beat” approach to the news. The Cox chain’s desire to emulate USA Today indicates that it places a higher premium on marketing strategies and revenue than on solid news coverage. All of these factors add up to a situation in which the Cox corporate managers find themselves predisposed to think that someone like Kovach would be difficult to work with.

“I no longer respect or believe in the ownership of the paper, or the corporate managers more particularly,” Clendinen said, adding he lamented Kovach’s departure in part because it signaled the end of an important experiment for the region. “There’s never been a great regional newspaper in the South,” he explained. “Serious editors and reporters have had to go North because there’s been nothing to aspire to. What we had here with Bill Kovach was an effort to create a paper that would report on and examine and reflect the culture of the South.”

Clendinen still bristles over the way he, Kovach and city editor Wendell “Sonny” Rawls, who also joined the papers in 1986, have been portrayed as an intrusive “New York Times Mafia” Kovach and Rawls are both from Tennessee and both worked at the Nashville Tennesseean before going to the Times. Clendinen is from Tampa, Fla., went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and his family’s roots are in Georgia, where his great-grandfather was surgeon general during the Civil War. “The foreign implant, if you will, are the five people from Dayton, Ohio, who now run the Cox corporation,” Clendinen said.

“This is representative of a tradition that has existed in the South since the Civil War: that is, much of the choices that have been made in the South have been given over to Northern, Midwestern industrial money,” Clendinen said. “The Dayton ownership, the Cox family ownership, has been happy to play to and to patronize Southern impulses, a set of impulses which has been true also since the War-this defensiveness, resistance to outside influence, ‘We’re just fine, thank you, just as we are.’ You know, the Lewis Grizzard line-if you don’t like it, Delta is ready when you are-that whole business…This was not an affectation, this was part of that dug-in Southernness. And the papers, owned by Ohio money, played on that fact.”

The real issue, though, Clendinen insisted, is the quality of the public record. “These papers, this ownership-we thought-had made that commitment, had joined the circle of the few who re really committed to the quality of the record as opposed to the size of their profits first. In retrospect, it most certainly seems a mistaken impression.”

At a protest rally held outside the papers’ downtown offices on November 12, one week after Kovach resigned, journalist Hodding Carter interpreted the incident in much the same way-as the latest battle in a war for the soul of American journalism. “Is it going to be packaging or the product? Is it going to be reality or is it going to be happy times? Is it going to be speaking truth to power or speaking power’s truth? And each time that question is asked today too often the answer comes back: packaging not product, happy time, not reality, power’s truth, not truth to power.”

Carter also stressed that the issue was important not just for Atlanta, but for the South and for the nation as well. “In a fight like this, in an issue like this, there aren’t really any outsiders at all. Because in the most basic way all of us, whether we’re in journalism or outside it, are being treated as outsiders by the fewer and fewer who own the more and more in this life called journalism.”

Also at the rally, novelist Pat Conroy attacked Lewis Grizzard, whom he saw as the premier representative of the insular Southern attitudes that had contributed to Kovach’s downfall. He read to the crowd of about 250 concerned community members and Journal and Constitution staffers the contents of an ad that Grizzard had considered taking out in the Constitution in which Grizzard said, “In fact, we might even benefit from

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[Kovach’s] departure, with apologies to those who enjoy exhaustive series on what’s doing in Africa.” Grizzard was referring to a series on the devastating famine in the Sudan.

Conroy responded to Grizzard, “Because I too am a redneck, I want to translate for all your readers and for the Cox chain what you meant… You wrote it in code but the translation is this: Atlanta doesn’t care if niggers starve.”

However accurate might be Conroy’s emotional indictment of the racism undergirding Grizzard’s attitude towards investigative journalism, it does not change the fact that the papers’ corporate management-not Grizzard and not its readers or its staff-retain the final say over what news in Atlanta will be like. In which direction they will lead the papers now that Kovach is gone is not clear. But there have been indications in recent weeks that the changes bode ill for the public’s need for more responsible coverage in Atlanta and throughout the region.

“The publisher and the corporate managers will now get the kind of paper that they want” says Dudley Clendinen. “It’s all a question of direction, emphasis, and aspiration. Look at the front page in the last three weeks-Christmas trees, Santa Clauses, warm, optimistic business stories and tender family stories. What you see is a reflection of the wishes of the corporate management. They want a marketing tool, as opposed to a record of quality.”

“USA Today has become the symbol of how you compete with people who are drawn to the images of television. You create a package, an information package, which is not so much a newspaper as it is a packaged digest of information bytes, like sound bytes. And that is the paper that Easterly likes to cite-I don’t think anyone would argue that it is a record of quality.”

Perhaps an even stronger indication of the Cox chain’s intentions is its choice of a successor for Kovach. Arnold Rosenfeld has been in the Cox chain since 1969. He will take over the papers for the next six months, search for another editor, and then move further up in the corporation. Rosenfeld most recently has served as the editor of the Cox chain’s Austin American-Statesman in Texas.

“He’s just another guy from Dayton,” says Clendinen. “So he knows what they want, which is not very much.”

Even though Rosenfeld will be directly in charge of the papers for only six months, his hiring sends out a definite signal. In the past few years, community members in Austin have complained about that paper’s blatant boosterism as well. And last spring, Rosenfeld’s Statesman fired reporter Kathleen Sullivan because, according to accounts in Texas Monthly and The Columbia Journalism Review, Sullivan had aggressively pursued stories on worker safety in high-tech industry while the city itself was trying to woo just such companies to the area. In other words, many believed that Sullivan was fired because she was “a skeptic, not a booster.”

The paper also offered Sullivan over $8,000 to sign a severance agreement which would have prevented her from criticizing the paper or running the story anywhere else. She refused.

Committed reporters and editors remain at the Atlanta papers who would refuse to bow to such pressure as well. But many say they no longer have any incentive to initiate potentially controversial articles or major investigative projects. If the papers’ management can get serious and find an editor equally as committed to the quality of the public record as Kovach was, then perhaps those staffers will stay on and continue to improve the papers. Otherwise, Harvie Blair’s characterization of defensive, New South boosterism will still to apply to the Coxes’ Journal-Constitution and to Atlanta another hundred years from now.

Eric Guthey is a student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta.