American award-winning investigative journalist who in 1996 uncovered a CIA link to cocaine trafficking in the 1980s in the Iran-Contra case.
Webb said that he became an investigative journalist “because I am an idealist basically. I am probably one of the few reporters left who still believes that a journalist’s job is to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’ as the old saying goes. I was heavily influenced by the work of Lincoln Steffens and I. F. Stone, who devoted their lives and careers to providing vital information about government malfeasance to people who would otherwise not have had the access to the inner workings of our political system.”
Webb co-founded “City Lights of Indianapolis” in 1975 and concurrently worked at the News-Journal as a reporter and photographer from 1975-76. From 1978-83, he worked as an investigative reporter for the “Kentucky Post” and covered the State House in Ohio from 1983-88 for the “Plain Dealer.” He moved to California landing a position as investigative reporter at the Sacramento bureau of the San Jose Mercury News where he worked from 1988-97. Webb shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his coverage of the 1989 earthquake in California, and he was awarded several other awards during his nearly 20-career. He is the author of “Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion,” his three-part series that caused an uproar in his field.
His work exposed the CIA’s practices under the Reagan administration of dealing with cocaine traffickers in the Iran-contra affair. The series was ill-received. His own editor in May 1997 claimed that the series “fell short of my standards” and that Webb’s work “strongly implied CIA knowledge” of contra connections to US drug dealers when “we did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship.” Webb was harshly criticized by fellow journalists, was demoted at the Mercury News which caught him to quit his job there, and saw his marriage dissolve. However, his work caused the government to initiate internal investigations into the CIA and the Justice Department that confirmed the connection between the contras and the drug trade.
After he left the San Jose paper in 1997 he had a difficult time finding work. In subsequent years, most if not all of his charges about CIA practices were proven to be true.
He married on 10 February 1979 and divorced on 10 June 1999. He and his wife had three children.
He was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head on 10 December 2004 at age 49 in Carmichael, California. Although it was reported as an apparent suicide, there was speculation that he was murdered.
Link to Wikipedia biography