Pincus brushes off the battle over the Contra story. “Originally, I didn’t do anything about it because I checked it out and didn’t believe it to be true,” he told me. “If you go look at the chronology, I didn’t write about it until the Black Caucus took it up as a serious issue …. To be honest, I can’t remember talking to Doug at the time.”

“I think very highly of Doug Farah. I think he’s an outstanding reporter,” says Robert McCartney, who edited the story. “I don’t remember there being any issue at the time of sort of significant concern over discrepancies in the reporting.”

The Post hadn’t so much discredited Webb’s story about the specific connections between the Contras and Los Angeles dealers, but rather had gone after conclusions that others had drawn about CIA intentions. The two became one and the same and the Post took them both apart.

“This has been a long time, but if I remember correctly, the thesis of Webb’s story was that the CIA deliberately used the Contras to pump crack cocaine into African-American neighborhoods,” says McCartney. Webb hadn’t reported that, but it didn’t matter.

It gets stranger: Pincus says he didn’t actually disagree with Webb’s thesis—that the Contras were running drugs—but rather objected to the idea that the CIA was running drugs. Webb had reported, rather, that the Contras were a CIA-backed army but didn’t pin the trafficking on them directly. “To me, it was no great shock that some of the people the agency was dealing with were also drug dealers. But the idea that the agency was then running the drug program was totally different.”

Pincus’ front-page piece ran at more than 4,000 words and was headlined, “CIA and Crack: Evidence Is Lacking of Contra-Tied Plot.” The evidence, in fact, was not lacking. It was on the editing room floor. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times would also weigh in with stories purporting to debunk Webb’s scoop, but only the Post, as far as I know, did so with independent evidence that backed him up.

Webb’s editor, under pressure, eventually backed off the story. Webb was demoted and sent to a dustbin bureau 150 miles from San Jose. He resigned after settling an arbitration claim and went to work for a small alternative weekly. Over the next several years, his marriage fell apart and his meager wages were garnished for child support. On Dec. 10, 2004, Webb was discovered dead, shot twice in the head with his father’s .38. The local coroner declared the death a suicide.

In 1998, an in-depth investigation by a committee run by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) established that Webb and black Americans suspicious about government complicity in the drug trade, had been, in essence, correct all along.

Yet obituaries in the major papers still referred to his “discredited” series. The Los Angeles Times obit recalls his “widely criticized series linking the CIA to the explosion of crack cocaine in Los Angeles,” noting, “Major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post, wrote reports discrediting elements of Webb’s reporting.” The New York Times ran a five-paragraph Reuters obit that remembered Gary Webb as “a reporter who won national attention with a series of articles, later discredited,” making no mention of the fact that subsequent calls for an investigation were heeded, and that the investigation confirmed a great deal of Webb’s reporting.

“Web of Deception” sat atop media critic Howard Kurtz’s write-up in the Post. “There was a time when Gary Webb was at the center of a huge, racially charged national controversy. That was eight years ago, and it turned out badly for him,” Kurtz began. “The lesson,” he concluded, “is that just because a news outlet makes sensational charges doesn’t make them true, and just because the rest of the media challenge the charges doesn’t make them part of some cover-up.”

Farah, who’s now a consultant on the drug trade with the Department of Homeland Security, speculates that the Post’s proximity to the corridors of power made it beholden to whatever the official line was at the time. He said that he saw a “great deal of weight on what the official response was, whether it was Haiti or El Salvador death squads. There was so much Washington influence that it ends up dominating the story no matter what the reality on the ground was.”

“If you’re talking about our intelligence community tolerating—if not promoting—drugs to pay for black ops, it’s rather an uncomfortable thing to do [report on] when you’re an establishment paper like the Post,” Farah says. “If you were going to be directly rubbing up against the government, they wanted it more solid than it could probably ever be done.”

Ryan Grim is the author of This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America. He is the senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post.

An excerpt from the book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim.