The_Info_Web/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Miami Herald.md

aliases	category	start	location	tags	summary	created	updated	relations
The Miami Herald Miami Herald	Private Organization	1903	Miami, Florida, USA	Organization Media Newspaper Miami KnightRidder CIAMediaRelations IranContra JeffreyEpstein Wackenhut	Miami newspaper named by Carl Bernstein as a CIA cover arrangement made by the Miami station, which published Alfonso Chardy's 1986 North network story and Julie K. Brown's 2018 Epstein series.	2026-10-05	2026-10-05	type with reverse role fn employed_by Julie K. Brown true investigative reporter 12 type with reverse role end fn employed_by Hank Messick true contract rackets writer 1966-12-13 5 type with reverse role fn employed_by Alfonso Chardy true reporter 9 type with role start fn participant_in Epstein non-prosecution agreement published the November 28, 2018 series that led to the Justice Department review of the agreement 2018-11-28 12

The Miami Herald is a daily of Miami that Gary Webb described in 1998 as the flagship paper of Knight-Ridder, the owner of the San Jose Mercury News. Its name appears in CIA files in connection with the Agency's Miami station and with a 1974 letter from William Colby to Bernard Barker; in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Wackenhut file; in the Senate record on the Contra supply network; and in the 2018 reporting on the Epstein non-prosecution agreement.

Cover arrangements at the Miami station

Carl Bernstein listed the Herald in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977 among news organizations with which, "according to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements," and wrote that "cover arrangements with the Herald, according to CIA officials, were unusual in that they were made 'on the ground by the CIA station in Miami, not from CIA headquarters.'" Earlier in the article he had included the Herald in a list of organizations that cooperated with the Agency, and quoted a former CIA official that the list was "just a small part."¹ The Church Committee stated in 1976 that the Agency had about 50 relationships with American journalists or media employees and that more than a dozen American news organizations and publishing houses "formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad," without naming them.²

Webb wrote in a note to Dark Alliance that after the Mercury News series he learned that Knight-Ridder "has a history of collaborating with the CIA," citing the December 26, 1977 New York Times series, and that his colleague Georg Hodel "discovered a CIA cable in a Miami court file suggesting that a longtime editor on the Latin American desk of Knight-Ridder's flagship paper, The Miami Herald, had an operational relationship with the CIA during the 1960s." Webb did not name the editor or reproduce the cable.³

A CIA letter of March 28, 1974, signed by Colby as Director, thanks Barker, one of the Watergate burglars, for his statement of March 16, 1974 "to the Miami Herald" and for "the favorable references you made to this Agency and to Richard Helms," and adds: "We are distressed that the incident which called for our apology occurred, and we appreciate your understanding of the matter." The letter was originated by John F. Blake, Acting Director of Security, on March 21, 1974. The incident is not described.⁴

Hank Messick and Wackenhut

An FBI memorandum written after the January 9, 1967 newspaper reports that Florida Governor Claude Kirk had appointed the Wackenhut Corporation as a private force for his "war on crime" records that the Bureau had "made available lead information to Hank Messick, veteran crime reporter of the 'Miami Herald,' whose articles on organized crime and corruption have brought about various grand jury probes in Dade and Broward Counties resulting in indictments of the sheriffs of these counties in 1966." The memorandum instructed that the Miami office be cautioned not to become involved with the venture.⁵ Messick, a contract rackets writer for the Herald, resigned on December 13, 1966 to join Wackenhut and later resigned from it, stating: "I have reluctantly concluded a cruel hoax is being perpetrated upon the people of Florida."⁶

Castle Bank, 1980

On April 19, 1980 the Herald reported under the headline "CIA May Have Ended Nassau Bank Probe" that, according to sources, the CIA "may have forced federal investigators in Miami to abandon" an inquiry, code-named Project Haven, into Castle Bank and Trust of Nassau, which "may have laundered CIA funds for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba" and moved CIA money for other Latin American operations. A former IRS investigator was quoted: "I've had suspicions for a long time that the CIA was involved." The article identified the Miami lawyer Paul Helliwell, who died in 1976 and represented the bank, as "a key link to the theory of CIA involvement."⁷ A clipping of the article is in the CIA's own reading-room files.

The Contra supply network, 1985 to 1987

The chronology in the 1988 report of the Senate subcommittee chaired by John Kerry cites the Herald repeatedly. On July 21, 1985 the Herald quoted the mercenaries Steven Carr and Peter Glibbery, who said they had flown weapons from Fort Lauderdale to the Contras; on July 28, 1985 FBI agent Kevin Currier opened a Neutrality Act investigation "on basis of reading July 21, 1985 article in Miami Herald." After the Herald wrote about the April 1986 embassy episode involving prosecutor Jeffrey Feldman in Costa Rica, an embassy official named Kotula told reporters that Feldman had lied. The chronology lists Herald articles of April 30, 1986 (that Oliver North's fundraising may have violated the Boland Amendment), May 14, 1986 (that Kerry's staff was examining charges of gunrunning and drug smuggling), and June 1, 1986, which quoted a Department of Justice official that the FBI and DEA had "run down each and every one" of the allegations and found "no credible or substantive evidence," and that congressional efforts "smacked of McCarthyism."⁸

On June 8, 1986 the Herald ran a front-page story by Alfonso Chardy reporting that the National Security Council and the CIA had managed the Contras during the Boland Amendment period through a network overseen by North, citing Robert Owen and John Singlaub among those who helped him and naming John Hull as one of Owen's contacts. The Associated Press story of Robert Parry and Brian Barger making similar allegations followed on June 10.⁹

The Kerry report also cites the Herald's articles headed "America's Cocaine Connection" of November 29 and December 2, 1987 on the Medellin Cartel, including the description of the Ochoa family ranch as "so huge it encompasses several towns inside its borders."¹⁰

Webb's notes to Dark Alliance cite Herald articles of 1984 to 1991 on Contra fundraising, the La Parrilla restaurant frequented by Contra supporters, and a Florida bank closed by state regulators in 1987, among them the Herald's 1993 obituary of Aristides Sanchez, which stated that he "became one of the Contras' top political and military strategists, plotting logistics, buying supplies and delivering weapons."¹¹

Epstein, 2018 to 2019

On November 28, 2018 Julie K. Brown published "Perversion of Justice" in the Herald on the 2007 agreement between Jeffrey Epstein and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida under Alexander Acosta. The Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility later summarized the series as reporting that Acosta "entered into an 'extraordinary' deal" that permitted Epstein to avoid federal prosecution, immunized co-conspirators and concealed the terms from victims, and that the report, which included interviews of eight victims and public documents, "painted a portrait of federal and state prosecutors who had ignored serious criminal conduct by a wealthy man with powerful and politically connected friends." On December 3, 2018 Senator Ben Sasse wrote to the office citing the Herald report and asking it to open an investigation; on February 6, 2019 the department told Sasse that it had.¹²

Footnotes

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1. Bernstein, Carl. "The CIA and the Media," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977 (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). Bernstein attributes the statements to unnamed CIA officials. ↩︎

2. U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence, S. Rept. 94-755, April 26, 1976, section "Covert Relationships with the United States Media." https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_I.pdf ↩︎

3. Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998, notes to chapter 27 ("Whether similar pressures were applied to Ceppos"). https://archive.org/details/dark-alliance-the-cia-the-con-gary-webb ↩︎

4. Colby, W. E., letter to Bernard L. Barker, ER 74-1109, March 28, 1974, CIA Reading Room document C01482054 (released January 18, 2017). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-01482054 ↩︎

5. Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Wackenhut Corporation," headquarters file, memorandum on the Florida "war on crime," January 1967, in the FBI file posted at https://archive.org/details/WackenhutCorporation (Wackenhut Corp.-HQ-1). ↩︎

6. "Wackenhut Aide Quits; 'Cruel Hoax,'" Associated Press, in the FBI Tampa file on Wackenhut (Wackenhut Corp.-Tampa-1), same archive item as note 5. ↩︎

7. "CIA May Have Ended Nassau Bank Probe," The Miami Herald, April 19, 1980, CIA Reading Room document CIA-RDP90-00806R000100200024-2. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00806r000100200024-2 ↩︎

8. U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy (December 1988), chronology entries for July 8 and 21 and 28, 1985, April 3, April 30, May 14 and June 1, 1986. https://archive.org/details/KerryCommitteeReport ↩︎

9. Kerry report chronology entries for June 8 and June 10, 1986 (same source as note 8). ↩︎

10. Kerry report, chapter on the Medellin cartel and notes 17 and 19 (same source as note 8). ↩︎

11. Webb, Dark Alliance, chapter 5 and notes (Marques Gonzalez, "Aristides Sanchez Dies," Miami Herald, 1993, and the other Herald articles listed there; Barry Cladden's 1987 remark to a Herald reporter). Same source as note 3. ↩︎

12. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility, "Investigation into the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida's Resolution of Its 2006-2008 Federal Criminal Investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and Its Interactions with Victims during the Investigation," Executive Summary, November 2020, pp. i-vi and n. 3. https://www.justice.gov/opr/page/file/1336471/dl ↩︎