The CIA-crack connection:
The story nobody wants to hear

Your worst fears are true -- the CIA did help to smuggle drugs into American ghettos, says an investigative reporter

It should be on the front pages of the mainstream national dailies by now, but it isn't -- yet. According to a three-part series which ran in the San Jose Mercury News last month, a San Francisco Bay Area narcotics ring, with the assistance of the CIA, helped finance a U.S.-backed guerilla army in Nicaragua in the 1980s by introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles.

The series, based largely on court records and other documentary evidence, has resurrected the suspicion that the U.S. government deliberately imported drugs into the black community. The Congressional Black Caucus and the Clinton administration's drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, have called for an investigation into the allegations. Yesterday, CIA Director John Deutch said the agency's inspector general will look into the charges. "He seems to want to see us get to the bottom of this," said Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., chairman of the Black Caucus. The implications are stunning, yet the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, network television, CNN -- all the major news outlets -- have so far made little or no mention of the story.

We talked with Gary Webb, the Mercury News staff writer who wrote the series, and asked him why the press and the politicians -- especially since drug abuse has become a campaign issue -- have remained so quiet.

Suspicions have been floating around the black community for a long time that the crack cocaine epidemic might be part of a government conspiracy. Does your story confirm this suspicion?

It confirms the suspicion that government agents were involved. Clearly, when you're talking about drug dealers meeting with CIA agents it does go a long way toward validating this suspicion. There's a grain of truth to any conspiracy theory and it turns out there are a lot of grains of truth to this one. If you want to stretch it to its logical conclusion, the government was involved in starting the crack epidemic, because it was this pipeline that did it. Now we know what we didn't know in the '80s -- which is where they were selling the stuff. We were able to close the circle and show how this affected American citizens, whereas before it was some sort of nebulous foreign policy story. Now we can see the damage. Whether or not these guys were part of our government or just contract agents is still unclear.

Black political leaders have called for investigations based on your story, and CIA Director John Deutch seems to have heeded the call. But most politicians, including the White House, have stayed very quiet.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA., was on this immediately. But most politicians fear the whole subject. The worst case scenario is the government of the United States is giving drugs to its own citizens for some foreign policy adventure. And that's a pretty horrible scenario. I think politicians are looking at this story and saying "My God, do I want to get anywhere near this?" Because if this bears out -- which I'm sure it will -- it will be an awful scandal.

Both Bob Dole and President Clinton are talking a lot about the need for the government to wage a war on drugs. Dole has actually suggested enlisting the CIA to help fight this war.

Yeah. About four or five days after our series came out that Bob Dole was saying he would recruit the CIA to fight the war on drugs. Hey Bob -- you should read the papers once in a while. I think this story is something that neither party wants to come up and spoil the election. I think the idea that the U.S. government -- which these guys are vying to head -- could have been involved in something like this would sort of overshadow the election and catch them up in something they don't want to be caught up in.

The series began on August 18th. Why didn't the national -- and the local Bay Area media for that matter -- jump on it then, and why are they still resisting reporting it now?

The San Francisco Examiner was on this story back in 1986. Frankly, the only reason I learned who Norwin Meneses (one of the key alleged drug dealers) was, was because someone told me he lived in the Bay Area, so I had a friend at the Examiner run his name through their files. They came up with the stories and I thought Jesus Christ -- Meneses has a history! So it's surprising that the Examiner hasn't picked up on this, because they broke the first part of the story 10 years ago.

[ Salon spoke to Examiner investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld about the issue. Rosenfeld replied:

"The Examiner reported the heart of this story in detail in a series of front page stories ten years ago. The stories were picked up by other media and sparked congressional and State Department investigations. These articles were also cited in at least one book. We think it's odd that the Mercury News would pretend that it was the first to report these allegations concerning Norwin Meneses, Carlos Cabezas, the return of the $36,000 by U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello and other details. The Mercury News should have at least told its readers that much of its story was reported 10 years ago and made clear what new information it was presenting."]

Apart from who reported what and when, why hasn't the rest of the media picked up on the story?

I think there are a few reasons. By now journalists have read the series and they're figuring out how to tell this story in 12 inches because that's what most newspapers have the space to do these days. Secondly, a lot of newspapers and TV particularly -- they're just chickenshit. They see a story like this and they think "Oh my God, we don't know who this guy is. We don't know if this stuff is true. Let's just not run it." And everyone's been waiting for this big denunciation from the government saying "This is absolutely false, none of it is true."

Newspapers generally wait for official action before they do anything on their own. The official action was the sentencing of Rick Ross. (Editor's note: Ross was the high-level L.A. dealer who bought cocaine from the Contra-affiliated drug gang, then sold it to L.A.'s notorious street gangs, the Bloods and Crips. The money he paid the gang for the cocaine was allegedly channeled to the Contras.)Then that got postponed and they had to wait for Rep.Maxine Waters to say something. And finally I think what turned it around was Gen. Barry McCaffrey coming out and saying we need an investigation. Now I think the media got enough courage and thought, "Well if someone from the administration is saying this, then it must be true." If this had come out in the New York Times -- which it never would have -- then everyone in the world would take it as gospel.

Why wouldn't this story have run in the New York Times?

They've had this story for 10 years, saying we need an investigation. Now I think the media got enough courage and thought, "Well If they'd been interested they could have done it." If anyone was interested they could have done it.

What kept you on the story?

I've been working on it since June 1995. I had a pretty good tip right from the beginning from the girlfriend of a cocaine dealer who called me and said she knew Danilo Blandon,Rick Ross and Meneses. She had some grand jury testimony indicating that Blandon had been dealing cocaine for the Contras. That's pretty much all I knew. It was just a matter of knocking on doors and going to look in courthouses and rummaging around.

There are more leads coming in now. We got no help on this story from the government. None. Except pressure not to do it and rejection letters to our FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests. But we did the story anyway, so it's not necessary to have the government cooperate. Fortunately, we found one guy out of the entire federal government who believed that the Freedom of Information Act means what it says, and he sent us some documents. But if it hadn't been for that guy in the national archives, we would have never gotten shit.

How did you know that your sources are reliable?

You never know. Which is why for the most part I don't rely on human sources, I rely on documentary sources. I use the humans to point me to documents. That's why with this story we didn't feel uncomfortable at all, because it's all based on government documents or sworn testimony or court records [including records from Miami, Nicaragua and San Diego] or stuff we got from the national archives.

What happens next?

You can script it out from here. The CIA will do an investigation and say there's no credible evidence of any government involvement. Congress will convene its hearings. These will go on for a while, and you may get an answer and you may not. And depending on what still exists on paper and what people's memories still contain, you may find this went higher than the CIA agents we tracked it to, or you may find that it ends there and then these guys will take the fall. They're certainly in a good place to be the fall guys. They're not Americans. One of them is in prison. What better people to blame it on?

Lori Leibovich is an assistant editor at Salon.

Quote of the day

I am a happy prisoner on a chain gang

"Jail life is boring. It's dehumanizing. But this chain gang isn't so bad. At least it gets you back into the outside world for a couple hours a day."

-- Rebecca Lopez, 28, an inmate of the Maricopa County, Ariz. jail, and a member of the nation's first female chain gang. (From an Associated Press story).