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Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

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I followed the "Dark Alliance" story from the time it was published in the San Jose Mercury News to the time it was ridiculed by the country's largest newspapers and Gary Webb was hung out to dry by his own paper. I picked up the book with an open mind but no expectation of being convinced.

I was not only convinced, I was stunned by the story from start to finish. Webb has assembled not shadowy sources leaking dark innuendos but a thorough reporting of facts taken from congressional testimony, court testimony, declassified documents and personal interviews. It's clear, at a minimum, that the US government was connected to the people responsible for a large piece of the cocaine trade. The only thing that remains uncertain is whether US officials actually participated in the drug trade directly with these people or simply forged a marriage of convenience and looked the other way. It's worth noting that a large amount of information comes from documents that are only partially declassified -- meaning that plenty of incriminating information remains to be disclosed. Years from now we'll finally see what is still being concealed, and I suspect we'll learn that the story goes beyond the basic verifiable information that Webb reports here.

For those who believed the NY Times' cursory dismissal of this story, please note the Times' record in the case of El Mozote as told in the book "The Massacre at El Mozote" by Mark Danner. The Times pulled its own Latin American correspondent off the story of a massacre by US-supported Salvadoran troops when the government went on the attack. Ten years later, the hundreds of bodies were found and the whole story was confirmed. The Times was left looking as if it had participated in the official coverup, and maybe it did. It would be no surprise to find out a similar story in this case.

How did this happen to Gary webb? A prize winning reporter,a middle of the road news reporter from a conservative stable backround suddenly becomes the pariah of the press? I read this book with great trepidition,seeing the JFK conspiracy folks running around ...well, i was surprised, shocked,horrified.Perhaps i shouldnt have been...Mr Webb ahs laid out, simply, forcibly a case so damning that most simply wont look.The case he sets forth is so damning infact, that if true, and I think it is, then we need to overhaul our entire system. The absurd "war on drugs'[which doesnt really exist,except in political newspeak]is shattered by Mr Webb in the first 100 pages. 3 administrations,and countless pols either ignored or knew what was happening. Oliver North comes off none too well, though he is an easy target, and not even close to one of the important folks here. This is a searing piece of journalism,and one wonders why My Webb has been consigned to the far left by the celebrated organs of media, THe NY TIMES, THE WASHINGTO POST and The LA TIMES?. When these 3 folks stand up to criticise at once, well, i smell soemthing...where is the uproar from the 'mainstream press' ?After all, I thought the war on drugs was a family values issue. One of the most disturbing books I have ever read.

This book takes us back to the 1980's, the dark days of Oliver North's "neat idea," Reagan's Freedom Fighters, and the crack cocaine explosion. The evidence is overwhelming that agencies of the U.S. government were complicit in the importation of cocaine, and Oliver North was even more deserving than I originally believed of a long-term stay in a prison cell (too bad Alcatraz is no longer a federal prison - it's where Ollie belongs!).

We probably can never know the extent of CIA involvement as then U.S. Attorney General William French Smith exempted the CIA on behalf of then CIA Director William Casey from having to report illegal drug activities. If you don't have to report it, you don't have to keep records - therefore, there are no records and the Inspector General's report can truthfully say - "We can find no records."

Thank you Gary Webb for writing this book. I am truly sorry this cost you your job at the San Jose Mercury News.

I am probably the only reviewer who was a clandestine case officer (three back to back tours), who participated in the Central American follies as both a field officer and a desk officer at CIA HQS, who is also very broadly read.

With great sadness, I must conclude that this book is truthful, accurate, and explosive.

The book lacks some context, for example, the liberal Saudi funding for the Contras that was provided to the National Security Council (NSC) as a back-door courtesy.

There are three core lessons in this book, supported by many books, some of which I list at the end of this review:

1) The US Government cannot be trusted by the people. The White House, the NSC, the CIA, even the Justice Department, and the Members of Congress associated with the Administration's party, are all liars. They use "national security" as a pretext for dealing drugs and screwing over the American people.

2) CIA has come to the end of its useful life. I remain proud to have been a clandestine case officer, but I see now that I was part of the "fake" CIA going through the motions, while extremely evil deeds were taking place in more limited channels.

3) In the eyes of the Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, and Honduran people, among many others, the US Government, as represented by the CIA and the dark side Ambassadors who are partisan appointees rather than true diplomats, is evil. It consorts with dictators, condones torture, helps loot the commonwealths of others, runs drugs, launders money, and is generally the bully on the block.

I have numerous notes on the book, and will list just a few here that are important "nuggets" from this great work:

1) The CIA connection to the crack pandemic could be the crime of the century. It certainly destroys the government's moral legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

2) The fact that entrepreneur Ricky Ross went to jail for life, while his supplier, Nicaraguan Blandon, was constantly protected by CIA and the Department of Justice, is a travesty.

3) Nicaragua, under Somoza, was the US Government's local enforcer, and CIA was his most important liaison element. As long as we consort with 44 dictators (see Ambassador Palmer's "The Real Axis of Evil," we should expect to be reviled by the broader populations.

4) I believe that beginning with Henry Kissinger, the NSC and the CIA have had a "eugenics" policy that considers the low-income blacks to be "expendable" as well as a nuisance, and hence worthy of being targeted as a market for drugs to pull out what income they do have.

5) I believe that CIA was unwitting of the implications of crack, but that Congress was not. The book compellingly describes the testimony provided to Congress in 1979 and again in 1982, about the forthcoming implications of making a cocaine derivative affordable by the lowest income people in our Nation.

6) The Administration and Congress, in close partnership with the "mainstream media," consistently lied, slandered witnesses to the truth, and generally made it impossible for the truth to be "heard."

7) The ignorance of the CIA managers about the "ground truth" in Nicaragua and Honduras, and their willingness to carry out evil on command from the White House, without actually understanding the context, the true feelings of the people, or even the hugely detrimental strategic import of what they were about to do to Los Angeles, simply blow me away. We need to start court-martialling government employees for being stupid on the people's payroll.

8) CIA officers should not be allowed to issue visas. When they are under official cover they are assigned duty officer positions, and the duty officer traditionally has access to the visa stamp safe for emergencies (because the real visa officers are too lazy to be called in for an emergency).

9) I recently supported a movie on Ricky Ross, one that immediately won three awards in 2006 for best feature-length documentary, and I have to say, on the basis of this book, that Rick Ross was clearly not a gang member; was a tennis star and all-around good guy, was trying to make school grades; was disciplined, professional, and entrepreneurial. He did not create the cocaine, he did not smuggle it into the country, he simply acted on the opportunity presented to him by the US Government and its agent Blandon.

10) There is a connection between CIA, the private sector prison managers in the US, and prisoners. This needs a more careful look.

11) Clinton's bodyguards (many of whom have died mysteriously since then) were fully witting of Bill and Hillary Clinton's full engagement in drug smuggling into the US via Arkansas, and CIA's related nefarious activities.

12) CIA not only provided post-arrest white washes for its drug dealers, but they also orchestrated tip-offs on planned raids.

13) Both local police departments, especially in California, and the US Government, appear to have a standard "loot and release" program where drug dealers caught with very large amounts of cash (multiple millions) are instantly freed in return for a quit claim on the money.

14) CIA Operations Officers (clandestine case officers) lied not just to the FBI and Justice, but to their own CIA lawyers.

15) DEA in Costa Rica was dirtier than most, skimming cash and protecting drug transports.

The book ends with a revelation and an observation.

The revelation: just prior to both the Contra drug deals and the CIA's ramping up in Afghanistan, which now provides 80% of the world's heroin under US administration, the CIA and Justice concluded a Memorandum of Understanding that gave CIA carte blanche in the drug business.. The author says this smacked of premeditation, and I agree.

The observation: here is a quote from page 452: " ...the real danger the CIA has always presented--unbridled criminal stupidity, clouded in a blanked of national security."

Shame on us all. It's time to clean house.

Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Updated edition
The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War : An Undercover Odyssey
Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb
The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA
From BCCI to ISI: The Saga of Entrapment Continues
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (Nation Books)

This is a remarkable book. My first inclination was to disregard it as another conspiracy theory. After reading it and checking some of the sources, however, I have concluded that it is accurate. Gary Webb traces the introduction of crack cocaine into Los Angeles in the early 1980's and followed its rise to a full blown epidemic by the mid to late 80's. Undoubtedly, agents of the CIA and DEA, and most certainly Oliver North and his Contra operation were aware of the source of the cocaine. Indeed, it is apparent that the White House knew and acted to protect the drug pipeline in order to keep the money flowing to the Contra organization. Ronald Reagan was clearly more interested in fighting the war on communism than the war on drugs. The hypocrisy of the Reagan administration is apparent when we realize that Reagan declared illicit drugs a national security issue and championed the most draconian drug laws written to that date. Would crack cocaine have become an epidemic without CIA support? Probably, Webb points out that the development of a similar drug in Latin America by the 1970's had been studied and scientists warned that a similar epidemic in the U.S. was imminent. Would it have happened as fast or been as bad without government protection? No one knows the answer to that question. Ultimately, there were two big losers. Inner city dwellers were hit hardest. Not only were they exposed to this incredibly addicting drug, but they bore the brunt of the government crack-down on illicit drugs. The other loser was Ronald Reagan, whose legacy of integrity and honor is destroyed in his ends justifies the means approach to government. Anyone who reads this book will never look at Ronald Reagan or Oliver North in quite the same way.

This is not your average light weekend reading. This book is meat and potatoes and should be approached seriously and methodically. Webb not only back every bit of this book with meticulous sourcing and research, the book itself is laid out in a logical and unfolding manner. If even half of the evidence were given the book would still be very strong case for how 'alternative' methods of funding the Contras were at best ignored by the CIA. This is even more infuriating because of the fact that few families, that I know, have been spared the scourge of crack.

It is most odd that Webb committed suicide by shooting himself in the head twice in late 2004. I am still trying to figure out how one does that.

[...]

The series, "Dark Alliances: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," was controversial almost from the start.

Even as newspapers nationwide carried versions of Mr. Webb's reporting and congressional leaders called for investigations, the CIA director at the time visited Los Angeles for an unprecedented town hall meeting with area residents at which he denied the allegations and was met with loud jeers.

Three of the nation's leading newspapers, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, followed up with reports questioning Mr. Webb's conclusions, and eventually his own newspaper turned on him.

In a letter to readers published in the Mercury News in May 1997, then-Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos told readers there had been problems with the series and that "we fell short at every step of our process - in the writing, editing and production of our work."

Within a month of that note's publication, Mr. Webb told the Washington Post that he had been pulled off the story, and his editors had told him they would not publish his follow-ups.

He also said he was fighting a transfer from the Sacramento bureau to a posting in Cupertino.

By then, however, his fate at the Mercury News was sealed, and he left the paper that year, eventually taking a job with the Assembly.

Mr. Webb later published a 548-page book based on his series, and in a 1998 interview with The Bee he said he still was befuddled over how he became notorious while the allegations in his stories were dismissed.

"That is an amazing phenomenon," he said. "I'm still not exactly sure how that happened."

It's a little muddled in parts. The writing, though at times vivid, turns into thesis work, densely written, overly annotated and much is often over-explained. In places, it reads like the author is defending himself from an onslaught of attacks hitting him from all sides, even from those who should be allies. In this case, all that would be true.

In spite Webb's need to follow Strunk and White's Rule 17 - "omit needless words" - you should obtain this work. It is most likely the final proof that a nearly extinct creature ever existed: the investigative journalist.

It's pretty much gone now, downsized out of newspaper budgets, kicked out of editorial staff boxes by the threat of costly lawsuits and otherwise ruled obsolet by a a medium still called "newspapers" run by people who think they are competing with television.

A creature like Gary Webb can't exist in newspapers anymore. They won't let him. While much of what is in his book has been said before by the likes of Michael Perenti and others, Webb used the detached sense of an investigative journalist to track down hundreds of sources on and off the record, stacks of documents and wrote a series of stories about how the CIA created the apparatus that allowed the easy flow of cocaine and crack into the United States.

The CIA denied it and most newspapers (going on the CIA's record of honesty I guess) took their word for it and ran editorials attacking Webb.The man was pushed out of a job he did better than anyone else. He eventually quit. The CIA, by and by, eventually released statements (carried in small blurbs inside many of those same papers) confirming that at least some of what Webb wrote about was true.

So, you should buy this book. it's the stuff your newspaper won't tell you. Apperently yourr government screwing over a large portion of its population isn't "sexy" enough to sell papers.

"Dark Alliance" is a mesmerizing and excellent attempt at telling the truth concerning CIA and US government complicity in the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Dismissed as the stuff of Afro-American conspiracy theorists, author Gary Webb explores most every angle in uncovering this despicable CIA/Contra collusion and governmental abuse of power.

"Dark Alliance" uncovers evidence that the US government conspired to bring tons and tons of cocaine into African-American communities; that US government officials knew of this conspiracy but did nothing to deter or stop it for political reasons. Webb explains how the Contras were shipping planeloads of cocaine into the US to make money to buy arms for the Contra war effort against the communist threat infliltrating their scared country.

One of the more fascinating chapters is how the crack cocaine was created, franchised and marketed like fast-food to African Americans. One of the darker themes in "Dark Alliance" is the complete and utter failure of the mainstream media to cover this subject. Any journalist with access to transcripts from government hearings would have been able to piece this story together. The timidity of the mainstream press in comparison to Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" is one of this book's strongest points. It demonstrates that a government's policies, and the illegal covert actions of those who purport to uphold those policies, can have devestating effects not only throughout the world but also within that very government's backyard.

Gary Webb received a Pulitzer Prize for writing about the thriving Silicon Valley computer industry as a reporter for the local San Jose Mercury-News. He received a call from a woman informing him of something that sounded so incredible that he was inclined to laugh her off as a crank.

The indignation of the young woman on the other end of the line after realizing what Webb was thinking about her prompted him to accept her offer to prove her startling claim. Her comment related to drug traficking by the Central Intelligence Agency. If he wanted to learn more, she told him, just be in court the following morning.

Webb met a beautiful young woman who filled him in on some details of what was happening, after which they stepped inside the courtroom, where her boyfriend, who was serving time for drug trafficking, was part of a hearing. As the pieces of the story began to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, Webb jumped on the back of the tiger and proceeded full speed ahead.

The book's foreword was written by Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a top member of the Black Caucus and representative of a South Los Angeles district. She cites her shock when she learns about the extent of gang violence and resulting death occurring in her district. Due to Gary Webb's courageous efforts she is able to learn more. Members of Nicaragua's Contras, referred to by President Reagan as "morally equivalent to our Founding Fathers," flocked into Los Angeles as well as San Francisco and launched a successful drug trade, sending proceeds back to Nicaragua for revolutionary purposes.

Webb peers into the network of the Contras and CIA, along with detailing the activities of White House revolutionary Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North. Webb's startling charges formed the working basis of much of Senator John Kerry's subsequent investigation and senatorial hearings.