I will tell you, Director Deutch,
as a former Los Angeles Police narcotics detective,
that the agency has dealt drugs throughout this country
for a long time.
For decades, the American government
has been accused of intentionally flooding the streets with hard drugs.
The CIA and law enforcement
have supposedly been funneling drugs into the inner cities,
and to the African-American community in particular,
as part of a covert effort to stop them attaining stability,
building wealth, and achieving political power.
It is aimed at African-Americans.
There’s no doubt about that whatsoever.
And for the other non-African people,
they should know that this directive will harm them too.
These ideas took particular hold in the 1980s
with the emergence of the so-called crack epidemic.
It’s easy to understand how people of color
may not believe that US authorities have their best interests at heart.
But do these particular drug charges stick?
Did the intelligence agencies
actually play a role in flooding American cities with cocaine?
In this episode, we’re exploring whether the CIA
was actually responsible for the crack epidemic
and how exactly this story gained so much traction.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[Did the CIA Sell Crack?]
The story of the CIA and crack cocaine
doesn’t actually begin on the streets of L.A. or Miami.
It begins in the jungles of Central America.
In 1979, the dictatorial government of Nicaragua
was overthrown by socialist revolutionaries
called the Sandinistas.
In response, right-wing groups known as the Contras
began a brutal paramilitary campaign,
receiving money and weapons from the CIA
as part of the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union.
If we cut off the freedom fighters,
we will be giving the Soviets a free hand in Central America,
handing them one of their greatest foreign policy victories
since World War Two.
But in 1982, Democrats in Congress
passed laws to cut off support for the Nicaraguan rebels.
So, the Contras and their CIA backers
had to find new ways of funding their struggle.
What they found was cocaine.
By the late 1970s,
more people in the US were snorting coke than ever before,
most of it imported from Colombia.
In the early 80s, smokable cocaine or crack
exploded across American cities.
This proved to be a goldmine for countless organized crime groups,
even those backed by the CIA.
Today, cocaine and marijuana are found throughout our society
from top to bottom,
and that means corruption top to bottom
and gang war violence.
The Contras were soon linked with Colombian cartels,
and in 1985, reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger
broke an almost unbelievable story.
They claimed Nicaraguan rebels were involved in cocaine trafficking
and that not only did the CIA know about these activities,
they allowed them to continue
in order to help fund the Contras’ war effort.
When Bob Parry and Brian Barger got a hold of a CIA report
revealing that they were working in the mid 1980s
with Contras fighting the Sandinista government,
they were warned by their editors that this was not something
that was going to make the people that own their newspapers very happy,
and both of them ended up losing their jobs.
At this point,
the CIA strongly denied that they were involved in the drug trade.
But on the streets, the rumors began to spread
that the government was either actively or passively
allowing crack to be sold.
These remained just rumors until 1996,
when a reporter with the San Jose Mercury News named Gary Webb
picked up the story from a new angle.
Webb investigated the case of Freeway Rick Ross,
who in the early 1980s was the most important kingpin
in L.A.’s crack scene
and probably America’s first-ever crack millionaire.
What’s the most money you ever made in a day?
Three million dollars.
[Audience:] Wow.
What Webb uncovered was that Ross’s main cocaine supplier
was a guy named Danilo Blandón, a Nicaraguan exile
who funneled tens of thousands of dollars in cocaine profits
back to the Contras through banks in Miami.
Blandón, in turn, worked for Norwin Meneses,
perhaps the biggest drug trafficker in Nicaragua,
who had deep ties to the Contra leadership
and was widely thought to benefit from CIA protection.
The DEA had always tried to arrest Norwin Meneses,
who was living openly and raising money for the Contras,
but had never been able to build a case against him
and felt like there was something about this guy
that must explain why they couldn’t do that,
that he was protected, in other words.
And when Gary Webb’s story came along,
he not only showed where the connection was
between Meneses and Blandón and Freeway Ricky Ross,
but he also went into all this history
and unveiled how there was a very large, well-documented
crack distribution ring that had operated for years
with the CIA turning a blind eye.
What’s the process you go through?
Like, OK, you’re the guy on top,
and where do you get your coke from?
I was getting my coke from a guy by the name of Oscar Danilo Blandón,
who also was my informant.
He’s the guy that set me up with the police.
When I went to trial,
we found out that he was what they call a Contra.
The Contras was backed by the CIA.
And it spawned this big investigation by this reporter called Gary Webb.
In August of 1996, The Mercury News published Webb’s reports
in a three-part series titled Dark Alliance.
The story grabbed attention across the US,
particularly amongst the African-American community,
which had been targeted by law enforcement
following the rise of crack.
Tell America what the story’s about.
It was about a cocaine ring
that operated along the West Coast of the United States
throughout most of the 80s.
And some of the money they were making was going to support
an army that the men who ran the cocaine ring worked for
called the FDN.
This was an army that the CIA started in 1981 and supported.
Better known to us, most of us who remember, as the Contras.
Nowhere in Dark Alliance did Webb explicitly assert
that the CIA was responsible for the crack epidemic,
let alone that they intentionally sold the drug.
But that was the narrative that got picked up in the popular imagination,
probably not helped by The Mercury News
illustrating the feature with an image of a guy
smoking a crack pipe superimposed on the CIA logo.
But the story took off not just due to his explosive claims,
but also because of another new and highly addictive force
that had begun to reshape American society—
the internet.
Dark Alliance was the first major piece of investigative journalism
to be published simultaneously in print and online.
The story went viral,
getting picked up by everyone from street protesters to talk radio hosts
and eventually politicians
looking to attack the Reagan and Bush administrations.
California Congresswoman Maxine Waters
became a particular champion of the piece.
As public elected officials,
all of us must be concerned that our government
could have any way been involved in drug trafficking.
The reaction to the story was so intense
that the CIA director took the unprecedented step
of defending the agency at a heated L.A. community meeting.
It is an appalling charge that goes to the heart of this country.
I will get to the bottom of it,
and I will let you know the results of what I found.
How are we supposed to trust the CIA official
to investigate themselves?
What was equally shocking, though,
was the reaction of America’s mainstream media.
Webb and the San Jose Mercury News often maintain that Dark Alliance
was intended as the beginning of an investigation
that larger newspapers with more resources could then continue.
But what actually happened was that instead of investigating the CIA,
major papers like the L.A. Times, Washington Post, and New York Times
all attacked Webb himself.
Webb was eventually hounded from his job
and found himself unable to work as a journalist.
He died by suicide in 2004.
All three major newspapers
felt completely caught off guard by this story,
so they fully attacked Gary Webb with a vengeance
unlike anything that had ever been seen before
and completely attempted to not only discredit his story
and frame it as a conspiracy theory
but pretty much ruin his entire reputation.
We saw a complete failure,
perhaps one of the most shameful examples of how the mainstream press
can operate in destroying a fellow journalist
for getting at an important story.
And Webb suffered mightily for this.
But as people got more and more lost
in the minutia of attacking or defending Webb’s journalism,
the focus on the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade began to get lost,
a fact that internal CIA documents
held up as a good example of managing a public relations nightmare.
But in 1998, the CIA’s own inspector general
released a report essentially admitting
that many elements of the Dark Alliance story were true,
that the agency had known that people linked with the Contras
were importing cocaine,
had done nothing to stop them,
and had even protected them from investigation.
So, you had the CIA finally coming to the table
and admitting that what we reported in the 80s
and what Webb reported in the 90s was in fact true.
Mr. Meneses was actually indicted in 1984.
He was known within-- Like, my own sources in the DEA
told me he was known as “El Rey del Drogas,”
the King of Drugs.
He was in more than 40 files and indicted mysteriously.
And people within the DEA say that it was CIA intervention
that kept this sealed indictment from ever being opened.
In one case detailed in the report,
when traffickers linked to the Nicaraguan King of Drugs,
Norwin Meneces, were busted in San Francisco in 1983,
the CIA even requested that tens of thousands of dollars
which had been seized be returned to the drug traffickers.
The CIA admitted that they knew that these guys were selling drugs
and had went to the attorney general
and asked the attorney general could they not report it
because the mission that they were trying to accomplish was so big,
it was a matter of US, what do they call it?
-National security? -National security.
So, the US, the CIA was allowing this just kind of to happen
the drugs to go in.
And they weren’t putting it there,
but they were allowing it to happen and funneling the money?
That’s what we believe.
This is a complex story,
but let’s try to answer the big questions.
Did the CIA actually sell crack?
On the evidence we’ve got, no.
There were no agents with sunglasses and earpieces
slinging rocks on the streets of Compton.
Did the CIA work with and protect major drug traffickers?
Yes, absolutely.
They’ve been forced to admit that publicly.
The real tragedy here is that as far as we know,
no one from the CIA or the mainstream media
even lost their jobs over this.
The only people who suffered for it
were the journalist who exposed the story
and the millions of people targeted by the unjust and racist laws
that were passed in response to the 1980s crack crisis.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.