Kill the Messenger (Gary Webb)
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Kill the Messenger is a film about journalist Gary Webb on which John Kiriakou served as script advisor.

When Kiriakou was arrested in January 2012, he was in the process of reviewing the second draft of the script. The FBI seized all of his electronics; when the material was eventually returned in discovery, Kiriakou says the script had been stamped "top secret" on the top, the bottom, and both sides of every one of its 120 pages. He objected to the Justice Department that it was an unclassified Hollywood script he had not written, and that its writers had no access to classified information, and he says he was never prosecuted over it.

The detail he got wrong

Kiriakou is consistent across tellings about what Webb missed, and about how small it was relative to what he got right. "There was one minor detail that he got wrong, and this is what the CIA has hung its hat on ever since", that there were two separate Contra groups, north and south, and that it was the southern group selling cocaine to arm itself while the United States armed the northern one. The agency's actual conduct was to allow the transshipment: "So, was it the CIA's cocaine? Not really. Not technically, but the CIA still allowed the cocaine to come into the United States. totally immoral and illegal."

The career that was ended

In his own long-form account, Kiriakou fills in what was destroyed. Webb "had a storied career in investigative journalism he was a a co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize he had done investigative journalism in Cincinnati Ohio in Cleveland in Columbus Ohio and then out to California where he made a real name for himself in San Jose." After resigning he freelanced, worked for the state for a few months, and moved to Denver to start over, "but depression overcame him."

On the death itself Kiriakou reports the finding and the doubt without resolving them: Webb "rented a cheap motel room and reportedly allegedly put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger a lot of people think that he actually didn't commit suicide his family does and the coroner did but there are questions surrounding his death." In a separate telling he compresses the same events and adds the coincidence he finds hardest to accept, that the Washington Post and the New York Times ran near-identical articles calling Webb a liar and a phony "on the very same day."

Who did it, and who admitted it

Kiriakou assigns responsibility jointly: "in the end it was the CIA the New York Times The Washington Post in the Los Angeles Times that ruined him." The unusual element is the confession, "there are reporters now who have retired from the LA Times who have spoken publicly about their effort to ruin Gary Webb and his career they express regret and they admit freely that that's exactly what they did they ruined his career and by ruining his career they ended his life."

See Dark Alliance for the reporting itself and Walter Pincus for the front-page rebuttal.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
