Robert Earle Parry (June 24, 1949 – January 27, 2018) was an American investigative journalist. He was known for his role in covering the Iran–Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek, including breaking the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare (CIA manual provided to the Nicaraguan contras) and the CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking in the U.S. scandal in 1985. He was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 and the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard's Nieman Foundation in 2015. Parry was the editor of (consortiumnews.com) from 1995 until his death in 2018. Life and career Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Parry received a B.A. in English from Colby College in Waterville, Maine in 1971 and began his career in journalism in Framingham, Massachusetts working for his father's newspaper The Middlesex Daily News. He joined the Associated Press in 1974, moving to its Washington, D.C. bureau in 1977. Following the 1980 presidential election he was assigned to its Special Assignment (investigative reporting) unit, where he began working on Central America. Parry was a finalist for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and received the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 for his work with the Associated Press on Iran-Contra, where he broke the story that the Central Intelligence Agency had provided an assassination manual to the Nicaraguan Contras (Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare). In mid-1985, he wrote the first article on Oliver North's involvement in the affair and, together with Brian Barger in late 1985, he broke the CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US scandal, helping to spark Senator John Kerry's interest in investigating Iran–Contra. The Associated Press had refused to publish the drug trafficking story, and only relented when its Spanish-language newswire service accidentally published a translation. Barger and Parry continued to press their investigation of North even as most of the media declined to follow it up, eventually publishing a story in mid-1986, based on 24 sources, which led to a Congressional committee asking questions of North. After North denied the allegations, Barger was pushed out of the Associated Press, and Parry was unable to publish any further follow-ups to the story until after Eugene Hasenfus' plane (Corporate Air Services HPF821) was shot down in Nicaragua in October 1986. After finding out that his boss had been "conferring with [Oliver] North on a regular basis", Parry