Pubdate: 24 January 1999
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
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Copyright: 1999 Los Angeles Times.
DARK ALLIANCE: The Cia, The Contras, And The Crack Cocaine Explosion
By Gary Webb; (Seven Stories Press: 548 pp., $24.95)
Gary Webb is a man on a mission. The series he wrote for the San Jose
Mercury News two years ago alleging that the CIA-backed Nicaraguan
Contras helped ignite the nation's crack explosion set off its own
outburst of indignation and dismay. Radio talk shows burned up long
hours discussing the story, and the Mercury News' Web site received
more than 1 million hits a day. Both California senators wrote CIA
Director John Deutch demanding an inquiry, and Deutch eventually
agreed to conduct one. Webb seemed well on his way to winning a Pulitzer.
Then came the counterattack. The Los Angeles Times, New York
Times and Washington Post ran long articles questioning Webb's findings.
Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos, conducting his own
investigation, decided to run a front-page column backing off the series.
Webb was exiled to a distant suburban bureau and then left the paper.
Seething at the treatment he'd received, he determinedly set out to
vindicate himself. The result is "Dark Alliance," a densely researched,
passionately argued, acronym-laden 548-page volume. Its combative,
unyielding tone is apparent from the first page. " 'Dark Alliance,' " Webb
writes, "does not propound a conspiracy theory; there is nothing
theoretical about history. In this case, it is undeniable that a wildly
successful conspiracy to import cocaine existed for many years, and that
innumerable American citizens--most of them poor and black--paid an
enormous price as well."
Is "Dark Alliance" more history or conspiracy theory? To answer this, it's
necessary to assess the book's three main claims: that the Nicaraguan
Contras were involved in drug
trafficking; that the CIA knew about, condoned and even encouraged this
trafficking; and finally that this trafficking helped set off the crack
epidemic in South-Central Los Angeles and, by extension, the rest of the
country. Webb focuses on the activities of two Nicaraguan traffickers
operating in the United States: Norwin Meneses, an alleged importer of
cocaine from the Cali cartel; and Danilo Blandon, Meneses' main distributor
in Los Angeles. Relying on court documents, interviews with undercover
agents and a meeting with Meneses himself in a Nicaraguan prison, Webb
contends that both men supported the Contras and gave them part of their
trafficking revenues at a time when that group was strapped for cash.
Though the sums involved are in question--Webb puts the figure in the
millions of dollars, his critics in the tens of thousands--he seems on
solid ground in arguing that money from Nicaraguan traffickers ended up in
Contra coffers. This also happens to be Webb's least original point; in the
late 1980s, congressional hearings led by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) firmly
established connections between the Contras and drug traffickers.
As to how much the CIA knew about or approved of these activities,
Webb notes that Blandon and Meneses met with prominent Contra leaders
like Enrique Bermudez and Adolfo Calero, both of whom were on the CIA
payroll. He also describes the activities of a number of shadowy
figures who, while supplying arms and other assistance to the
Contras, seemed to have been smuggling drugs as well. In no case,
however, does Webb demonstrate that the CIA was involved in or
sanctioned these activities. What does seem clear, from Webb's
account and the CIA's own investigation, is that many agency
officials heard allegations of Contra-linked drug activity but did
little to intervene. As CIA Inspector Gen. Fred Hitz told Congress in
1998 (as quoted by Webb), "There are instances where CIA did not, in
an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with
individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have
engaged in drug trafficking activity."
This, to Webb, is shocking. Of one Contra faction involved in drug
smuggling, for
instance, he writes, "why the CIA was so eager to promote such a
drug-tainted organization as UDN-FARN is one of the enduring
mysteries of the Contra War." This seems naive. In Central America in
the 1980s, the CIA had one overriding goal--defeating communism--and
everything else was secondary. In the drive to overthrow the
Sandinistas, the CIA overlooked political assassinations,
disappearances, massacres, torture and rape. Is it really so
surprising, then, that it would overlook drug trafficking as well?
Of course, if that trafficking could be shown to have caused a
drug epidemic, that would be news indeed, and it is here, in charging
that the CIA and the Contras helped set off the nation's crack
explosion, that Webb's analysis is most controversial--and most
shaky. In Webb's telling, Blandon in the early 1980s began selling
large quantities of cocaine to Ricky Ross, an enterprising young Los
Angeles dealer. Nicknamed "Freeway Rick" (after the Freeway Motor Inn,
a hotel he bought with his drug profits), Ross quickly gained control
of South-Central's burgeoning crack trade.
He became so big that he began supplying other dealers, including members
of L.A. street gangs, who in turn started distributing the drug. "As the
South-Central crack market became saturated," Webb writes, "Ross'
gang customers started traveling to other cities in California to
make their fortunes, setting up new crack markets and using their
connections with Ross to supply them. It was the start of an
unprecedented cross-country migration by the Crips, and later the
Bloods, which would spread crack from South-Central to other black
neighborhoods across the United States."
All this, Webb insists, is traceable to Ross and his Contra-linked
supplier, Blandon.
Regarding one of the most vexing aspects of the whole crack
phenomenon--why the drug took root mainly in the black ghetto--Webb
asserts that the explanation "seems obvious" once the Blandon-Ross
partnership is taken into account.
"There was no market until we created it," Webb quotes Ross as
saying. "We started in our neighborhood and we stayed in our
neighborhood. We almost never went outside it. If people wanted dope,
they came to us." In other words, the crack epidemic--a calamitous
event that in a few short years engulfed the nation's inner cities
and decimated a generation of African Americans--can, in Webb's view,
be pinned on a lone Nicaraguan supplying a single Los Angeles dealer
over a one-or two-year period. Such a simplistic analysis is belied
by Webb's own reporting. At one point, for instance, he notes that
one of crack's big advantages over powder cocaine was that it
democratized cocaine not only for users but for dealers as well. It
didn't take a large investment anymore to call yourself a player.
With sellers popping up on every street corner, Ross faced vigorous
competition. It is thus misleading to maintain, as Webb does, that
Ross headed a crack "cartel" in Los Angeles; the market was far too
decentralized.
Moreover, it's clear that Blandon was but one of many distributors
supplying that market. Webb quotes a police detective who, citing
information from two informants, says that "the blacks were getting
their cocaine from three Colombians and 'a fourth peripheral source.'
Two of the Colombians they knew only by nickname; the 'peripheral
source' they knew quite well: Danilo Blandon." Rather than draw the
obvious conclusion--that Blandon was a minor player in a market
controlled by Colombians--Webb insists on focusing narrowly on
Blandon, the Nicaraguan connection.
The farther one gets from South-Central, the less important the
Ross-Blandon connection seems. Crack initially appeared in four
cities: New York, Miami, Detroit and Los Angeles. In none of these
three other cities did Ross or the Bloods or the L.A. street gangs
play a part. Beginning in 1986, crack began seeping out from these
enclaves into neighboring towns and cities and, while L.A. gang
members helped spread the drug, so did Dominicans, Jamaicans,
Haitians, Guyanese, Mexicans, Cubans, Panamanians, Puerto Ricans and
many non-gang-affiliated black Americans. What's more, all of these
carriers were simply middlemen; in the end, it was the Colombians,
operating out of the great trafficking centers of Medellin and Cali,
who controlled the flow of cocaine into the United States. To maintain
against this backdrop that the Contras and the CIA played a key part
in spreading crack seems a grab for headlines.
Sensational claims abound in "Dark Alliance." At one point, for
instance, Webb cites a Colombian trafficker who "claimed to have a
picture of [George] Bush posing with Medellin cartel leader Jorge
Ochoa, in front of suitcases full of money." According to the
trafficker, Pablo Escobar, another Medellin leader, said he would
make the photo public at the "appropriate time." "By 1993," Webb
writes, "Escobar was dead, killed in a shootout with Colombian
police, and Jorge Ochoa was in jail. The photos, if they ever
existed, were never heard of again." That Webb would even entertain
such an outlandish claim raises questions about his judgment.
Webb's overall thesis--that the CIA helped set off America's crack
explosion--seems fantastic. Like most drug epidemics, crack arose
from a tragic confluence of circumstances: the growing appetite of
Americans for cocaine in the late 1970s; the ability of Colombian
traffickers to smuggle tons of the drug into the United States,
causing a sharp decline in its price; the change in cocaine usage
patterns away from sniffing toward smoking; the discovery of a quick
and easy means of producing smokable cocaine; and, finally, the
existence of a large market in the inner city for a cheap, instant
and powerful high. In the end, it was this last factor--the growing
desperation of black Americans in the mid-1980s--that made the crack
epidemic possible.
Some of these points were made in the newspaper critiques of Webb's
series in the Mercury News. In reading "Dark Alliance," I was curious
to see whether Webb would make any concession to his critics--whether
he would perhaps humbly acknowledge that some of their concerns were
justified. The closest he comes is near the book's end, where he
observes that "I never believed, and never wrote, that there was a
grand CIA conspiracy behind the crack plague. Indeed, the more I
learned about the agency, the more certain of that I become. The CIA
couldn't even mine a harbor without getting its trench coat stuck in
its fly." This seems disingenuous, for Webb's entire book, beginning
with its subtitle ("The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine
Explosion"), seems pitched toward implicating the CIA in the crack
epidemic.
The CIA's complicity with the drug trade is a central theme of "White
Out" by Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for the Nation, and Jeffrey
St. Clair, an investigative journalist. Heavily dependent on
secondary sources, "Whiteout" rehearses the long history of the CIA's
alleged ties to international drug traffickers, from Corsican
mobsters in Marseilles in the late 1940s to moujahedeen-linked
smugglers in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s and
drug-running Contra supporters in Central America. That such episodes
are not better known, Cockburn and St. Clair maintain, is the result
of the liberal media's instinctive willingness to cover up for the
CIA. And Webb's case is Exhibit A. "The attack on Gary Webb and his
series in the San Jose Mercury News remains one of the most venomous
and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist's
competence in living memory," Cockburn and St. Clair write.
Devoting two full chapters to Webb's experience, the authors
strenuously seek to defend him against his attackers. Unfortunately,
their account seems a sanitized one, with some of Webb's more
questionable journalistic practices cleaned up for public
consumption. In "Dark Alliance," for instance, Webb describes
attending a 1995 preliminary hearing in the federal government's
prosecution of Ricky Ross. Among those scheduled to testify is
Blandon, who--now a DEA informer--was a key witness against Ross.
For nine months, Webb had been trying to interview Blandon, without
success, and he attended the hearing in the hope of connecting with
him. Blandon brushes him off, however. Alan Fenster, Ross' lawyer, is
much friendlier. Inviting Webb to lunch during a break in the
hearing, Fenster expresses his frustration at the government's
refusal to provide him with documents about Blandon's ties to the
Contras--documents that, he says, could help exonerate Ross.
Listening to Fenster, Webb suddenly hits on the idea of providing him
with questions based on his own research that he could ask Blandon;
in this way, Webb could indirectly conduct the interview that had for
so long eluded him. To most journalists, this would seem an
unacceptable degree of personal involvement in a story one is
covering, but Webb proceeds to feed him questions. Back at the
courthouse, Fenster questions Blandon about his ties to the Contras.
Blandon's answers, as recorded in "Dark Alliance," seem vague and
inconclusive. He has trouble recalling dates and other key details
regarding his trafficking activities, and he seems completely in the
dark about U.S. efforts to help the Contras. But Webb, untroubled by
this and by his own feeding of information to Fenster, grandly
concludes that Blandon's testimony confirms his basic findings about
the Contras.
In "Whiteout," Cockburn and St. Clair relate this episode quite
differently. After dutifully recounting Webb's lunch with Fenster,
they write: "Webb told Fenster to look at the DEA records and the
grand jury transcripts that had been turned over as part of the
discovery process in the investigation into the Meneses drug ring in
the Bay Area. Fenster immediately reviewed the documents and was able
to lead Blandon through a series of questions about his ties to the
Contras. . . ." In "Dark Alliance," Webb makes no mention of asking
Fenster to look at documents; rather, Fenster gets his information
directly from Webb.
This is the type of airbrushing of history one expects to find in a
Soviet archive. It serves Cockburn and St. Clair's purpose, however,
of portraying Webb as a journalistic martyr, a courageous battler
against the CIA and its apologists in the media. "Whiteout" is filled
with bitter attacks on reporters at such papers as the New York
Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times for helping
cover up the intelligence agency's misdeeds. Oddly, though, the
authors, in making their case against the CIA, frequently cite
stories appearing in those very papers. In a chapter on
narco-trafficking and money-laundering in Mexico, for instance, the
authors in their notes acknowledge the work of Douglas Farah of the
Washington Post, Laurie Hays of the Wall Street Journal, and Sam
Dillon and Tim Golden of the New York Times. Such citations seem to
contradict Cockburn and St. Clair's view of the press as CIA lap dogs.
Had Cockburn, St. Clair and Webb limited themselves to reporting on
the CIA's periodic alliances with forces involved in drug
trafficking, they would have performed a useful service. By instead
placing the CIA at the heart of the international drug trade and
blaming it for the woes that drugs have inflicted on American
society, they have guaranteed themselves an audience limited to true
believers. Reading their books, I was struck by how much their
worldview resembles that of the DEA and other prosecutors of the war
on drugs. If only the CIA would get out of the way and let the DEA do
its job, these writers suggest, the flood of drugs into the United
States would diminish. For them, foreign traffickers and suppliers
are the main source of the nation's drug problem, rather than any
internal social factors. Such an approach feeds the belief that the
solution to that problem lies not in reducing the demand for drugs
but in arresting more traffickers and busting more drug rings. Books
like "Dark Alliance" and "Whiteout," while purporting to expose the
hypocrisy of the drug war, paradoxically support it.
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