Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Parry received a B.A. in English from Colby College in Waterville, Maine in 1971, before beginning his career in journalism in Massachusetts. 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 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. 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 was shot down in Nicaragua in October 1986. After finding out that his boss had been "conferring with North on a regular basis", Parry left AP in 1987 to join Newsweek, which he left in 1990. In August 1990, PBS' Frontline asked Parry to work on the October Surprise conspiracy theory, leading to Parry making several documentaries for the program, broadcast in 1991 and 1992. In 1996, Salon wrote about his work on the theory, saying that "his continuing quest to unearth the facts of the alleged October Surprise has made him persona non grata among those who worship at the altar of conventional wisdom." When journalist Gary Webb published his newspaper series "Dark Alliance" in 1996 alleging that the Reagan administration had allowed the Contras to smuggle cocaine into the US to make money for their efforts, Parry supported Webb amidst heavy criticism from the media. In 1995, Parry founded the Consortium for Independent Journalism Inc. as a non-profit, US-based independent news service which publishes the website Consortiumnews. In October 2015, Parry was awarded the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, "for his career distinguished by meticulously researched investigations, intrepid questioning, and reporting that has challenged mainstream media.". In June 2017, Parry was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Parry died on January 27, 2018, after suffering several strokes caused by undiagnosed pancreatic cancer that he had been unknowingly living with for the previous four or five years.
Books
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, The Press & Project Truth
Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery
The October Surprise X-Files: The Hidden Origins of the Reagan-Bush Era
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq
Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush
America's Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes to Obama
