Robert Parry

Robert Parry was born June 24, 1949. He worked as a reporter at the Associated Press in the early 1980s, where he broke early stories on Contra drug trafficking and helped expose Iran-Contra, and subsequently at Newsweek. He founded Consortium News in 1995 after finding mainstream news organizations unwilling to continue investigating government secrecy, intelligence abuses, and the October Surprise allegation. He died January 27, 2018.¹

Iran-Contra Reporting

As an AP reporter in the mid-1980s, Parry broke early stories on Contra drug trafficking, but his editors sat on his reporting for weeks, edited it heavily, and ultimately spiked it -- a suppression that foreshadowed the treatment of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series a decade later. When Webb was forced out of the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, Parry wrote to him: "Something very bad happened to the news media in the 1980s. By the 1990s, the media had become the monster."²

At Newsweek, Parry continued Iran-Contra reporting but found similar institutional resistance. He produced two investigative documentaries for Frontline examining the arms-for-hostages deals of the Iran-Contra Affair. In 1993, he co-authored a PBS Frontline documentary on the Bush administration's handling of the October Surprise record.¹

Contra Drug Trafficking and the CIA-Justice Agreement

As editor of I.F. Magazine, Parry argued that the secret 1982 Memorandum of Understanding between CIA Director William J. Casey and Attorney General William French Smith -- which exempted CIA assets from drug crimes reporting -- "smacks of premeditation." He argued: "That could only have been done for one purpose. They were anticipating involvement with narcotics traffickers." His analysis was later vindicated when CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz confirmed the agreement's existence in 1998 congressional testimony.²

October Surprise Investigation

Parry produced the most sustained documentary investigation of the October Surprise allegation of any journalist. His key discoveries included:

A U.S. Embassy cable from Madrid, withheld from the House October Surprise Task Force by Bush administration officials, indicating that William J. Casey was in Madrid in summer 1980 "for purposes unknown." A 1991 internal memo by Deputy White House counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. documented that a State Department legal adviser had disclosed the cable's existence to White House officials, who did not pass it to the Task Force. This cable was not discovered until Parry obtained information from sources inside the Task Force's raw files.³

A Russian intelligence report submitted to the House Task Force in January 1993 -- after the Task Force had already closed its investigation -- stating that Casey met Iranian representatives in Madrid and Paris in 1980 and that George H.W. Bush participated in the Paris meeting. The report was buried in raw files and not reflected in the Task Force's public conclusions.³

Parry also reported that Task Force chief counsel E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr. had requested a three-month extension of the investigation as substantial new evidence arrived near its close, a request that co-chair Lee Hamilton declined. Parry characterized Henry Hyde's role as that of a cover-protection operative for Republicans.³

He founded Consortium News specifically to maintain this reporting after mainstream outlets showed no interest. His archives were used by Craig Unger in Den of Spies (2024) as a primary source.

Ben-Menashe Letters

Parry confirmed the authenticity of letters of recommendation for Ari Ben-Menashe with their signatories, letters that were used in Ben-Menashe's trial to counter the Israeli government's denial of his intelligence employment.¹