A Man for All Seasons

Journalist Brian Barger, 1953-2021

 

"In early October 1986, I remember coming out of an interview with a drug pilot at Miami Correctional Center and called Bob to go over what I’d learned. Bob interrupted and asked whether I’d heard the news: A U.S. plane ferrying weapons to the contras had been shot down, and there was a survivor."

"That afternoon Bob and I were on a flight to Managua, where we spent the night pouring over boxes of documents, IDs and flight logs that mapped out an elaborate air resupply operation flown out of El Salvador’s Ilopango air base. The operation was run by two CIA operatives: Felix Rodriguez, a close friend of CIA veteran Donald Gregg, then the chief of staff to Vice President George Bush, and Luis Posada Carriles, another CIA operative and veteran bomb-maker who had just escaped, with the help of the CIA and Rodriguez, from a Venezuelan prison where he was serving time for bombing a commercial airliner."

April 2018 Memorial for Outlier Journalist Bob Parry delivered by Brian Barger

Brian Barger at the memorial for Bob Parry (Photo: Doug Spiro)

An obituary in the newspaper. A quick read. The life of an extraordinary man, a kind of modern-day Renaissance Man. A man of wide curiosity, willing to adapt, to perform manual labour, to experience life to its fullest. Such a man with all his various down-to-earth experiences and level of interest would make a perfect journalist, interested in investigating his subject, prepared to tell the truth as it occurred, ready to take on the powers that be. Curiously, though he led a full life, a life of dignity and dedication to the craftsmanship of writing good journalism, he has a very small on-line presence.

Yet the details appearing in his obituary are intriguing, speaking volumes about the character of the man. This is a man who had, several years earlier, delivered a memorial on the death of a close friend, a fellow journalist who had taught him what good, responsible reportage was about, and how to go about getting the details of a series of events that linked their names in a startling revelatory story of illegal activities spurred and incited at the highest levels of U.S. administration under an American president in the Iran-Contra Affair.

Little might he know, as he delivered that heartfelt address on the death of Bob Parry whom he had known and collaborated with professionally for decades that before long he too would be dead. At age 68, following complications of a surgery. He had pancreatic cancer and in the end it killed  him however tangentially on February 22 in hospital, in New York. Born in Washington in 1952 to a Foreign Service Officer who took his son to various postings in Indonesia, Mexico and Tokyo, it is likely how Brian Barger's zest for travel took flight.

He was obviously a complex man of many interests. Before he worked for The Associated Press, CNN and The Washington Post along with other news groups, he travelled and took up a wide variety of occupations from bartending in Tokyo, driving logging trucks in Wyoming, a trash collector in Maryland, school bus driver, auto mechanic, taxi driver, carpenter, house painter, short-order cook, motorcycle messenger in Washington. 

Wait: He was also a farm worker in California, organizing protests against poor working conditions and low wages. An insurance claims adjuster, a social activist arrested on several occasions while protesting the Vietnam War. He co-founded a rape crisis and domestic violence counselling centre network in Mexico, influenced by a friendship with a Catholic nnn and missionary who had been abducted in 1989, raped and tortured by members of the Guatemalan military.

While working at The Associated Press, he partnered with Robert Parry and together they conducted extensive early reporting on drug trafficking by members of the Nicaraguan Contras. The same Contras with U.S. backing and ties to National Security Council member Marine Lt.Col.Oliver North whose favourite phrase was "Semper Fidelis", and who believed he was serving the United States faithfully and a president, Ronald Reagan, with whom he claimed to have had an intimate understanding.

Among his other talents he had a nose for news such that he would go to any ends, defy any authority to dig deep enough to unearth the truth, sometimes unsavoury and in some instances sensational for what it uncovered about the powerful; individuals and organizations, among them the CIA. He reported on Colombian drug cartels, covert CIA operations, international terrorism, money laundering, toxins in sea fish, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and of course the Iran-Contra Reagan Administration arms-for-hostage scandals.

"During the time Bob and I worked together at the Associated Press in the mid-1980s, we met a wall of resistance to our stories that didn’t make much sense. We turned in one story about the Oliver North network, citing more than two dozen sources, among them aides to North, contra leaders, and U.S. law enforcement officials. The story was sent back. “Can’t you get North to just confess?” the AP bureau chief asked."

"We turned in another story, nine months in the works, about contras involved in drug smuggling. The editing was excruciating, and even after our bureau chief edited out any references to CIA involvement, the story was killed. It was only published by accident on the Spanish-language wire before AP executives decided they couldn’t hold it any longer.

It was about this time that we learned that our bureau chief was meeting regularly with North; they each were point-persons in efforts to free AP reporter Terry Anderson, being held hostage in Lebanon."

"As sympathetic as Bob was to Terry Anderson’s plight, he thought there might be a conflict of interest, since our bureau chief had insisted on personally editing out stories about North."

Brian Barger, 1953 -2021