[0:04]I will tell you Director Deutsch as a former Los Angeles Police narcotics detective that the agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.
[0:15]For decades, the American government has been accused of intentionally flooding the streets with hard drugs. The CIA and law enforcement had 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 in the African-American. There's no doubt about that whatsoever. And for the other non-African people, they should know that this directly 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 the 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.
[1:17]The story of the CIA and crack cocaine doesn't actually begin on the streets of LA 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 II. 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 gold mine 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. And Bob Perry 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 LA'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. 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 with 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 Nora Manessa, 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, um, like, okay, you're 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, um, also was my informant. He's a guy that set me up with the police. Uh, when I went to trial, we found out that he was what they call a Contra. Uh, the Contras was backed by the CIA, and it spurred 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. The story is 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 news, 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 a public elected officials, all of us must be concerned that our government could have anyway 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 LA 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 maintained 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 LA 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 ruined 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 minutiae 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 my own sources, the DEA told me he was known as the king of drugs. He was in more than 40 files and indicted mysteriously, and people within the DEA say that with CIA intervention that kept this sealed indictment from ever being open. In one case detailed in the report, when traffickers linked to the Nicaraguan King of Drugs Norwin Meneses 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, uh, because the mission that they were trying to accomplish was so big, it was a matter of uh, uh, what do they call it? National security? National security. So the US the the CIA was allowing this to just kind of happen, the money, the drugs to go in and they were just 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 journalists 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.
