The_Info_Web/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Los Angeles Times.md

aliases	category	start	location	tags	summary	created	updated	relations
The Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times L.A. Times LA Times	Private Organization	1881	Los Angeles, California, USA	Organization Media Newspaper TimesMirror CIAMediaRelations GlomarExplorer DarkAlliance ContraWar	Los Angeles newspaper that first published the Glomar Explorer story in 1975, ran a 1984 story on Sandinista cocaine trafficking drawn from officials, and in October 1996 published a three-day rebuttal of Dark Alliance.	2026-10-05	2026-10-05	type with reverse role fn employed_by Doyle McManus true Washington bureau chief 10 type with reverse role fn employed_by Jesse Katz true reporter 13 type with role start fn participant_in Project Azorian published the first press account of the Hughes Glomar Explorer project, February 1975 1975-02-07 4 type with role start fn participant_in Dark Alliance published the three-part rebuttal of October 20 to 22, 1996 1996-10-20 12

The Los Angeles Times appears in records of the Central Intelligence Agency as the paper of the 1975 first press leak on Project Azorian, as the paper that carried a July 1984 account of Nicaraguan officials and cocaine from United States intelligence sources, and as one of three national papers that answered the San Jose Mercury News "Dark Alliance" series in October 1996. Its parent, the Times Mirror company, had as its chairman one of the original members of President Richard Nixon's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Times Mirror and the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board

A Congressional Research Service history of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board lists the initial appointments of President Nixon under Executive Order 11460 of March 20, 1969: General Maxwell Taylor, Admiral George W. Anderson, William O. Baker of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Gordon Gray, Edwin Land of Polaroid Corporation, Franklin B. Lincoln, Jr., Robert D. Murphy, Franklin Pace, Jr., Nelson Rockefeller and "Franklin D. Murphy, chairman of the Board, Times-Mirror Corporation." The same document lists James Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as the Board's first chairman in 1956.¹

Jack Nelson, Hoover and the Media burglary

A review essay by Aryeh Neier in the New York Review of Books states that Jack Nelson, who became the Times's Washington bureau chief, published several articles critical of the FBI, that J. Edgar Hoover claimed Nelson was a drunkard and attempted to have the Times fire him, and that Nelson told the essayist that Hoover met with the Times's publisher Otis Chandler to demand it, which Chandler rebuffed. The same essay states that the copies of the documents from the 1971 Media FBI Office Break-In that were sent to Nelson "were apparently diverted and never reached him"; the Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger was the only recipient to pursue the story.²

Carl Bernstein's 1977 Rolling Stone article stated that Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times first disclosed some findings of CBS News president Richard Salant's 1976 in-house investigation of the network's dealings with the CIA, and quoted Stuart Loory, "former Los Angeles Times correspondent," in the Columbia Journalism Review on press cards held by informants.³

The Glomar Explorer leak, 1975

The CIA's internal history states that "the original press leak had occurred in the Los Angeles Times in February 1975"; that the Times story "was unspecific, and wrong in important facts, but it gradually developed into a widespread security problem for the program"; and that the leak "resulted from an improbable series of events following a break-in and robbery in June 1974 at Summa Corporation headquarters in Los Angeles," after which several persons involved in the investigation had to be briefed to protect a document that might have been among those stolen. It adds that "the source of the leak was never identified" and that "extraordinary efforts by DCI Colby and others were able to contain the spread of the story for a time."⁴ The history also records that the U.S. Government acknowledged in court "the actions of senior CIA officials in 1975 to attempt to persuade members of the media not to broadcast or publish reports concerning the project."⁵

The State Department's Foreign Relations series records that on March 19, 1975, the day after the columnist Jack Anderson mentioned the vessel on his radio show, the Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times published front-page accounts, and that Nelson reported on March 20 that William Colby, who had cancelled an interview, said: "at this point I have to stop talking. Honestly, we can have international problems and I have to be careful."⁶

The Agency's contacts with the paper

A note of November 4, 1982 from the Agency's Acting Director of External Affairs to the Director of Central Intelligence records that Robert Toth of the Times had renewed a request to interview the Director for an article on him and the Agency, that the Director had agreed to speak to the Times's Washington bureau at breakfast on November 17, and that in principle "we should stand down for a while."⁷ An undated memorandum to the Director from George V. Lauder, suggests an off-the-record session with the Times editorial board "because the paper is respected and has been critical of the Administration's and our role in Central America," at which "I hope you will enlighten and disabuse them appropriately."⁸

The July 1984 Sandinista cocaine story

A CIA Office of Legislative Liaison memorandum of July 26, 1984 records that the staff director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Thomas K. Latimer, had asked whether the CIA was "indeed involved" in a Times article of July 18, 1984 headed "U.S. Officials Link Sandinista Chiefs to Cocaine Traffic," and attaches the Times article of July 19, "3 Held, 3 Sought in Cocaine Case," by Ronald J. Ostrow. The July 19 article reported, from unnamed "U.S. officials," that DEA agents had arrested three people in Miami and obtained warrants for three others, including an aide to Interior Minister Tomas Borge, that the investigation began after the CIA provided information, and that intelligence sources had obtained a photograph of Borge beside Pablo Escobar at the Managua airport. It stated that the officials "refused to release or show the photograph," and noted that evidence of Nicaraguan involvement "could become a significant factor in the Reagan Administration's attempts to win new funding" for the Contras. The memorandum shows the Agency's own congressional liaison office asking other components to check "the validity of the articles."⁹

Gary Webb wrote that the July 18 article was by Doyle McManus, that Oliver North's notebooks recorded McManus calling the White House, and that "no such photograph has ever surfaced"; he described the story as "a hoax" and McManus as "a willing participant or a dupe." The Kerry subcommittee's 1988 report gave a different account of the same episode: that the DEA informant Barry Seal had photographed Federico Vaughn, whom United States authorities identified as a Nicaraguan government official, with Escobar loading drugs, that the operation "was disclosed prematurely by an administration official who leaked to the press evidence supposedly collected by Seal in an effort to influence a pending Congressional vote on Contra aid," and that law enforcement officials "were furious that their undercover operation was revealed and agents' lives jeopardized because one individual in the U.S. government, Lt. Col. Oliver North, decided to play politics with the issue." The report added that the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime found the telephone number Vaughn used in calls to Seal to be one controlled by the United States Embassy since 1985, and that the State Department's 1988 narcotics report said there was "no evidence" of drug shipments through Nicaragua "since the allegations made in 1984."¹⁰

Webb wrote that in early 1987 McManus and Ostrow wrote a front-page Times article headed "No Supporting Evidence, DEA Says" on the Senate committee's inquiry into Contra drug reports, that the Contra courier Carlos Cabezas wrote McManus from prison on February 27, 1987 that there was "indeed 'supporting evidence,' hidden by the government," and that McManus replied asking for documents and "any further information about Sandinista drug trafficking."¹¹

Dark Alliance, 1996 to 1998

The Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General recorded that the Times ran its own three-part investigation of October 20 to 22, 1996 after assigning "three editors and fourteen reporters," and that it found the evidence failed "to support any of those allegations."¹² According to Webb, the first part was written by Jesse Katz, who had referred to Ricky Ross since 1994 as the first and biggest crack dealer in South Central, "the master marketer whose activities were 'key'" to the spread of crack, and who now described Ross as of little importance; that the second day's story absolved the CIA of any connection with Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses on the word of former CIA director Robert Gates, former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro and Director John Deutch, and that the columnist Molly Ivins wrote: "Like good little boys and girls, the Times, the Washington Post et al., toddled off to the CIA and asked the agency if it had ever done such a thing. When the CIA said 'no' the papers solemnly printed it, just as though the CIA hadn't previously denied any number of illegal operations in which it was later caught red-handed"; that the story stated "no solid evidence has emerged that either Meneses or Blandon contributed any money to the rebels after 1984"; that unnamed sources put the amount at $50,000 or $60,000, which the Meneses distributor Rafael Cornejo answered: "Sixty thousand? You can raise that in an afternoon"; and that the story was bylined by McManus. Webb also wrote that the Times "printed nothing" when the New York Times reported the CIA Inspector General's second volume in July 1998.¹³

Footnotes

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1. Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, "The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board: An Historical Perspective (1955-1975)," 1975, sections on the Kennedy and Nixon boards, CIA Reading Room document CIA-RDP02T06251R000900290008-0. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp02t06251r000900290008-0 ↩︎

2. Neier, Aryeh. "The Burglars Who Exposed the FBI," review of Betty Medsger, The Burglary, The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014, and its note 3 citing Jack Nelson, Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter (University Press of Mississippi, 2013). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/23/burglars-who-exposed-fbi/ ↩︎

3. Bernstein, Carl. "The CIA and the Media," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, sections on CBS and on the "gray" cases (https://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php; read through the Internet Archive capture, https://web.archive.org/web/2012/http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php). ↩︎

4. Central Intelligence Agency, "Project AZORIAN: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," Studies in Intelligence, Fall 1985, CIA Reading Room document 0005301269 (declassified January 4, 2010), introductory summary. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-0005301269 ↩︎

5. Same document as note 4, note on information acknowledged in court. ↩︎

6. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. XXXV, document 197, editorial notes 2 and 3 (Jack Nelson, "Administration Won't Talk About Sub Raised by CIA," Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1975, pp. A1, A14-A16). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v35/d197 ↩︎

7. CIA, Acting Director, Office of External Affairs, note for the Director of Central Intelligence, November 4, 1982, CIA Reading Room document CIA-RDP84B00148R000100370026-8. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp84b00148r000100370026-8 ↩︎

8. Lauder, George V., memorandum for the DCI, "Meeting with the Los Angeles Times," undated, CIA Reading Room document CIA-RDP90-00845R000100660002-3. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00845r000100660002-3 ↩︎

9. CIA Office of Legislative Liaison, OLL 84-2588/1, July 26, 1984, with attached Los Angeles Times articles of July 18 and 19, 1984, CIA Reading Room document CIA-RDP90B01370R000400620011-8. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90b01370r000400620011-8 ↩︎

10. Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998, chapter 27 (https://archive.org/details/dark-alliance-the-cia-the-con-gary-webb); U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy (December 1988), sections "Barry Seal and the Cartel" and the Nicaragua chapter (https://archive.org/details/KerryCommitteeReport). Webb's characterization of the story as a hoax is his own; the Kerry report does not use the word. ↩︎

11. Webb, Dark Alliance, chapter 27 (same source as note 10). Sole source for the Cabezas letter and McManus's reply. ↩︎

12. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy (December 1997), chapter 1. https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/ch01p1.htm ↩︎

13. Webb, Dark Alliance, chapter 27 and epilogue (same source as note 10). Sole source for the passages so cited on Katz's earlier reporting, the named sources, Cornejo's remark and the 1998 coverage. ↩︎