The Dark Alliance

Gary Webb's Incendiary 1996 SJ Mercury News Exposé

These articles were downloaded from the web

site of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose
Mercury News has removed the entire series
from their web site.

Gary Webb's career as a professional

journalist was destroyed shortly after
these articles were published. Anyone
who challenges the House of Rockefeller
is persona non grata throughout the
establishment.
-The Editor

Aug 22, 1996

Cocaine pipeline financed rebels

Evidence points to CIA knowing of high-volume drug

network
by Gary Webb

San Jose Mercury News

For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug
ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of
Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to an arm of
the contra guerrillas of Nicaragua run by the Central Intelligence
Agency, the San Jose Mercury News has found.

This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's

cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a
city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine
that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America
- and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs
to buy weapons.

It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the

union of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a
revolutionary socialist government and the "gangstas" of
Compton and South-Central Los Angeles.

The army's financiers - who met with CIA agents before and
during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. - delivered
cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central
crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.
Unaware of his suppliers' military and political connections,
"Freeway Rick" turned the cocaine powder into crack and
wholesaled it to gangs across the country.

Drug cash for the contras

Court records show the cash was then used to buy equipment for
a guerrilla army named the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense
(Nicaraguan Democratic Force) or FDN, the largest of several
anti-communist groups commonly called the contras.

While the FDN's war is barely a memory today, black America

is still dealing with its poisonous side effects. Urban
neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack
addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison
sentences for selling cocaine - a drug that was virtually
unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the
CIA's army brought it into South-Central in the 1980s at
bargain-basement prices.

And the L.A. gangs, which used their enormous cocaine profits
to arm themselves and spread crack across the country, are still
thriving.
"There is a saying that the ends justify the means," former FDN
leader and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes testified
during a recent cocaine-trafficking trial in San Diego. "And
that's what Mr. Bermudez (the CIA agent who commanded the
FDN) told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for
the contra revolution."

Recently declassified reports, federal court testimony,

undercover tapes, court records here and abroad and hundreds of
hours of interviews over the past 12 months leave no doubt that
Blandon was no ordinary drug dealer.

Shortly before Blandon - who had been the drug ring's Southern
California distributor - took the stand in San Diego as a witness
for the U.S. Department of Justice, federal prosecutors obtained
a court order preventing defense lawyers from delving into his
ties to the CIA.

Blandon, one of the FDN's founders in California, "will admit

that he was a large-scale dealer in cocaine, and there is no
additional benefit to any defendant to inquire as to the Central
Intelligence Agency," Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale
argued in his motion shortly before Ross' trial on cocaine-
trafficking charges in March.

The 5,000-man FDN, records show, was created in mid-1981

when the CIA combined several existing groups of anti-
communist exiles into a unified force it hoped would topple the
new socialist government of Nicaragua.

Waged a losing war

From 1982 to 1988, the FDN - run by both American and

Nicaraguan CIA agents - waged a losing war against Nicaragua's
Sandinista government, the Cuban-supported socialists who'd
overthrown U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

Blandon, who began working for the FDN's drug operation in

late 1981, testified that the drug ring sold almost a ton of
cocaine in the United States that year - $54 million worth at
prevailing wholesale prices. It was not clear how much of the
money found its way back to the CIA's army, but Blandon
testified that "whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was
going for the contra revolution."

At the time of that testimony, Blandon was a full-time informant

for the Drug Enforcement Administration, a job the U.S.
Department of Justice got him after releasing him from prison in
1994.

Though Blandon admitted to crimes that have sent others away

for life, the Justice Department turned him loose on
unsupervised probation after only 28 months behind bars and
has paid him more than $166,000 since, court records show.

"He has been extraordinarily helpful," federal prosecutor

O'Neale told Blandon's judge in a plea for the trafficker's release
in 1994. Though O'Neale once described Blandon to a grand
jury as "the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United
States," the prosecutor would not discuss him with the Mercury
News.

Blandon's boss in the FDN's cocaine operation, Juan Norwin

Meneses Cantarero, has never spent a day in a U.S. prison, even
though the federal government has been aware of his cocaine
dealings since at least 1974, records show.

Meneses - who ran the drug ring from his homes in the Bay Area
- is listed in the DEA's computers as a major international drug
smuggler and was implicated in 45 separate federal
investigations. Yet he and his cocaine-dealing relatives lived
quite openly in the Bay Area for years, buying homes, bars,
restaurants, car lots and factories.

"I even drove my own cars, registered in my name," Meneses

said during a recent interview in Nicaragua.
Meneses' organization was "the target of unsuccessful
investigative attempts for many years," O'Neale acknowledged
in a 1994 affidavit. But records and interviews revealed that a
number of those probes were stymied not by the elusive
Meneses but by agencies of the U.S. government.

CIA hampered probes

Agents from four organizations - the DEA, U.S. Customs, the

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the California
Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement - have complained that
investigations were hampered by the CIA or unnamed "national-
security" interests.

One 1988 investigation by a U.S. Senate subcommittee ran into

a wall of official secrecy at the Justice Department.

In that case, congressional records show, Senate investigators

were trying to determine why the U.S. attorney in San
Francisco, Joseph Russoniello, had given $36,000 back to a
Nicaraguan cocaine dealer arrested by the FBI.

The money was returned, court records show, after two contra
leaders sent letters to the court swearing that the drug dealer had
been given the cash to buy weapons for guerrillas.
After Nicaraguan police arrested Meneses on cocaine charges in
Managua in 1991, his judge expressed astonishment that the
infamous smuggler went unmolested by American drug agents
during his years in the United States.

His seeming invulnerability amazed American authorities as

well.

A Customs agent who investigated Meneses in 1980 before

transferring elsewhere said he was reassigned to San Francisco
seven years later "and I was sitting in some meetings and here's
Meneses' name again. And I can remember thinking, `Holy cow,
is this guy still around?' "

Blandon led an equally charmed life. For at least five years he

brokered massive amounts of cocaine to the black gangs of Los
Angeles without being arrested. But his luck changed overnight.

On Oct. 27, 1986, agents from the FBI, the IRS, local police and
the Los Angeles County sheriff fanned out across Southern
California and raided more than a dozen locations connected to
Blandon's cocaine operation. Blandon and his wife, along with
numerous Nicaraguan associates, were arrested on drug and
weapons charges.
The search-warrant affidavit reveals that local drug agents knew
plenty about Blandon's involvement with cocaine and the CIA's
army nearly 10 years ago.

"Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine

smuggling and distribution organization operating in Southern
California," L.A. County sheriff's Sgt. Tom Gordon said in the
1986 affidavit. "The monies gained from the sales of cocaine are
transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo,
who is a high-ranking officer of a chain of banks in Florida
named Government Securities Corporation. From this bank the
monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in
Nicaragua."

Raids a spectacular failure

Despite their intimate knowledge of Blandon's operations, the

police raids were a spectacular failure. Every location had been
cleaned of anything remotely incriminating. No one was ever
prosecuted.

Ron Spear, a spokesman for Los Angeles County Sheriff

Sherman Block, said Blandon somehow knew that he was under
police surveillance.
FBI records show that soon after the raids, Blandon's defense
attorney, Bradley Brunon, called the sheriff's department to
suggest that his client's troubles stemmed from a most unlikely
source: a recent congressional vote authorizing $100 million in
military aid to the contras.

According to a December 1986 FBI teletype, Brunon told the

officers that the "CIA winked at this sort of thing. . . . (Brunon)
indicated that now that U.S. Congress had voted funds for the
Nicaraguan contra movement, U.S. government now appears to
be turning against organizations like this."

That FBI report, part of the files of former Iran-contra special

prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, was made public only last year,
when it was released by the National Archives at the San Jose
Mercury News' request.

Blandon has also implied that his cocaine sales were, for a time,
CIA-approved. He told a San Francisco federal grand jury in
1994 that once the FDN began receiving American taxpayer
dollars, the CIA no longer needed his kind of help.

None of the government agencies known to have been involved

with Meneses and Blandon would provide the Mercury News
with any information about them, despite Freedom of
Information Act requests.
Blandon's lawyer, Brunon, said in an interview that his client
never told him directly that he was selling cocaine for the CIA,
but the prominent Los Angeles defense attorney drew his own
conclusions from the "atmosphere of CIA and clandestine
activities" that surrounded Blandon and his Nicaraguan friends.

"Was he involved with the CIA? Probably. Was he involved with

drugs? Most definitely," Brunon said. "Were those two things
involved with each other? They've never said that, obviously.
They've never admitted that. But I don't know where these guys
get these big aircraft."

That very topic arose during the sensational 1992 cocaine-

trafficking trial of Meneses after he was arrested in Nicaragua in
connection with a staggering 750-kilo shipment of cocaine. His
chief accuser was his friend Enrique Miranda, a relative and
former Nicaraguan military intelligence officer who had been
Meneses' emissary to the cocaine cartel of Bogota, Colombia.
Miranda pleaded guilty to drug charges and agreed to cooperate
in exchange for a seven-year sentence.

In a long, handwritten statement he read to Meneses' jury,

Miranda revealed the deepest secrets of the Meneses drug ring,
earning his old boss a 30-year prison sentence in the process.
"He (Norwin) and his brother Luis Enrique had financed the
contra revolution with the benefits of the cocaine they sold,"
Miranda wrote. "This operation, as Norwin told me, was
executed with the collaboration of high-ranking Salvadoran
military personnel. They met with officials of the Salvadoran air
force, who flew (planes) to Colombia and then left for the U.S.,
bound for an Air Force base in Texas, as he told me."

Meneses - who has close personal and business ties to a

Salvadoran air-force commander and former CIA agent named
Marcos Aguado - declined to discuss Miranda's statements
during an interview at a prison outside Managua in January. He
is scheduled to be paroled this summer, after nearly five years in
custody.

U.S. General Accounting Office records confirm that El

Salvador's air force was supplying the CIA's Nicaraguan
guerrillas with aircraft and flight support services throughout the
mid-1980s.
The same day the Mercury News requested official permission
to interview Miranda, he disappeared.

While out on a routine weekend furlough, Miranda failed to

return to the Nicaraguan jail where he'd been living since 1992.
Though his jailers, who described him as a model prisoner,
claimed Miranda had escaped, they didn't call the police until a
Mercury News correspondent showed up and discovered he was
gone.
He has not been seen in nearly a year.

Aug 22, 1996

Salvador air force linked to cocaine flights, Nicaraguan

contras, drug dealer's supplier

by Gary Webb

San Jose Mercury News

One thing is certain: There is considerable evidence that El

Salvador's air force was deeply involved with cocaine flights,
the contras and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes'
cocaine supplier, Norwin Meneses.

Meneses said one of his oldest friends is a former contra pilot

named Marcos Aguado, a Nicaraguan who works for the
Salvadoran air-force high command.

Aguado was identified in 1987 congressional testimony as a CIA

agent who helped the contras get weapons, airplanes and money
from a major Colombian drug trafficker named George Morales.
Aguado admitted his role in that deal in a videotaped deposition
taken by a U.S. Senate subcommittee that year.
His name also turned up in a deposition taken by the
congressional Iran-contra committees that same year. Robert
Owen, a courier for Lt. Col. Oliver North, testified he knew
Aguado as a contra pilot and said there was "concern" about his
being involved with drug trafficking.

While flying for the contras, Aguado was stationed at Ilopango

Air Base near El Salvador's capital.

In 1985, the DEA agent assigned to El Salvador - Celerino

Castillo III - began picking up reports that cocaine was being
flown to the United States out of hangars 4 and 5 at Ilopango as
part of a contra-related covert operation. Castillo said he soon
confirmed what his informants were telling him.

Starting in January 1986, Castillo began documenting the

cocaine flights - listing pilot names, tail numbers, dates and
flight plans - and sent them to DEA headquarters.

The only response he got, Castillo wrote in his 1994 memoirs,

was an internal DEA investigation of him. He took a disability
retirement from the agency in 1991.
"Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they
(DEA officials) were covering it up," Castillo said in an
interview. "You can't get any simpler than that. It was a cover-
up."

Aug 22, 1996

Trio created mass market in U.S. for crack cocaine

by Gary Webb

San Jose Mercury News

If they'd been in a more respectable line of work, Norwin

Meneses, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes and "Freeway Rick"
Ross would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.

This odd trio - a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a ghetto teenager -

made fortunes creating the first mass market in America for a
product so hellishly desirable that consumers will literally kill to
get it: "crack" cocaine.

Federal lawmen will tell you plenty about Rick Ross, mostly
about the evils he visited upon black neighborhoods by
spreading the crack plague in Los Angeles and cities as far east
as Cincinnati. Tomorrow, they hope, Freeway Rick will be
sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But those same officials won't say a word about the two men
who turned Rick Ross into L.A.'s first king of crack, the men
who, for at least five years, supplied him with enough
Colombian cocaine to help spawn crack markets in major cities
nationwide. Their critical role in the country's crack explosion
has been a strictly guarded secret.

To understand how crack came to curse black America, you

have to go into the volcanic hills overlooking Managua, the
capital of the Republic of Nicaragua.

Biggest military upset

During June 1979, those hills teemed with triumphant guerrillas

called Sandinistas - Cuban-assisted revolutionaries who had just
pulled off one of the biggest military upsets in Central American
history. In a bloody civil war, they'd destroyed the U.S.-trained
army of Nicaragua's dictator, Anastasio Somoza.

In the dictator's doomed capital, a minor member of Somoza's

government decided to skip the war's obvious ending. On June
19, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes gathered his wife and young
daughter and flew into exile in California.

Today, Blandon is a well-paid and highly trusted operative for

the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Federal officials say
he is one of the DEA's top informants in Latin America,
collecting intelligence on Colombian and Mexican drug lords
and setting up stings.

In March, he was the DEA's star witness at a drug trial in San

Diego, where, for the first time, he testified publicly about his
strange interlude between government jobs: the years he sold
cocaine to the street gangs of black Los Angeles.

Blandon swore that he didn't plan on becoming a dope dealer

when he landed in the United States with $100 in his pocket,
seeking political asylum. He did it, he insisted, out of patriotism.

When duty called in late 1981, he was working as a car

salesman in East Los Angeles. In his spare time, he said, he and
a few fellow exiles were working to rebuild Somoza's defeated
army, the Nicaraguan national guard, in hopes of one day
returning to Managua in triumph.

But the rallies and cocktail parties the exiles hosted raised little
money. "At this point, he became committed to raising money
for humanitarian and political reasons via illegal activity
(cocaine trafficking for profit)," said a heavily censored parole
report, which surfaced during the March trial.

That venture began, Blandon testified, with a phone call from a

wealthy college friend in Miami.

Blandon said his college chum, who also was working in the
resistance movement, dispatched him to Los Angeles
International Airport to pick up another exile, Juan Norwin
Meneses Cantarero. Though their families were related, Blandon
said, he'd never met Meneses until that day.

"I picked him up, and he started telling me that we had to (raise)
some money and to send to Honduras," Blandon testified. He
said he flew with Meneses to a camp there and met one of his
new companion's old friends, Col. Enrique Bermudez.

Bermudez - who'd been Somoza's Washington liaison to the

American military - was hired by the Central Intelligence
Agency in mid-1980 to pull together the remnants of Somoza's
vanquished national guard, records show. In August 1981,
Bermudez's efforts were unveiled at a news conference as the
Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN) - in English, the
Nicaraguan Democratic Force. It was the largest and best-
organized of the handful of guerrilla groups known as the
contras.
Bermudez was the FDN's military chief and, according to
congressional records and newspaper reports, received regular
CIA paychecks for a decade, payments that stopped shortly
before his still-unsolved slaying in Managua in 1991.

Reagan OKs covert operations

White House records show that shortly before Blandon's

meeting with Bermudez, President Reagan had given the CIA
the green light to begin covert paramilitary operations against
the Sandinista government. But Reagan's secret Dec. 1, 1981,
order permitted the spy agency to spend only $19.9 million on
the project, an amount CIA officials acknowledged was not
nearly enough to field a credible fighting force.

After meeting with Bermudez, Blandon testified, he and

Meneses "started raising money for the contra revolution."

While Blandon says Bermudez didn't know cocaine would be

the fund-raising device they used, the presence of the mysterious
Mr. Meneses strongly suggests otherwise.

Norwin Meneses, known in Nicaraguan newspapers as "Rey de

la Droga" (King of Drugs), was then under active investigation
by the DEA and the FBI for smuggling cocaine into the United
States, records show.

And Bermudez was very familiar with the influential Meneses

family. He had served under two Meneses brothers, Fermin and
Edmundo, who were generals in Somoza's army.

Despite a stack of law-enforcement reports describing him as a

major drug trafficker, Norwin Meneses was welcomed into the
United States in July 1979 as a political refugee and given a visa
and a work permit. He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area,
and for the next six years supervised the importation of
thousands of kilos of cocaine into California.

At the meeting with Bermudez, Meneses said in a recent

interview, the contra commander put him in charge of
"intelligence and security" for the FDN in California.

Blandon, he said, was assigned to raise money in Los Angeles.

Blandon said Meneses gave him two kilograms of cocaine

(roughly 4 1/2 pounds) and sent him to Los Angeles.
"Meneses was pushing me every week," he testified. "It took me
about three months, four months to sell those two keys because I
didn't know what to do. . . ."

To find customers, Blandon and several other Nicaraguan exiles

working with him headed for the vast, untapped markets of
L.A.'s black ghettos.

Blandon's marketing strategy, selling the world's most expensive

street drug in some of California's poorest neighborhoods, might
seem baffling, but in retrospect, his timing was uncanny. He and
his compatriots arrived in South-Central L.A. right when street-
level drug users were figuring out how to make cocaine
affordable: by changing the pricey white powder into powerful
little nuggets that could be smoked - crack.

Emergence of crack

Crack turned the cocaine world on its head. Cocaine smokers

got an explosive high unmatched by 10 times as much snorted
powder. And since only a tiny amount was needed for that rush,
cocaine no longer had to be sold in large, expensive quantities.
Anyone with $20 could get wasted.

It was a "substance that is tailor-made to addict people," Dr.

Robert Byck, a Yale University cocaine expert, said during
congressional testimony in 1986. "It is as though (McDonald's
founder) Ray Kroc had invented the opium den."

Crack's Kroc was a disillusioned 19-year-old named Ricky

Donnell Ross, who, at the dawn of the 1980s, found himself
adrift on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles.

A talented tennis player for Dorsey High School, Ross had

recently seen his dream of a college scholarship evaporate when
his coach discovered he could neither read nor write.

A friend of Ross' - a college football player home at Christmas

from San Jose State University - told him "cocaine was going to
be the new thing, that everybody was doing it." Intrigued, Ross
set off to find out more.

Through a cocaine-using auto-upholstery teacher Ross knew, he

met a Nicaraguan named Henry Corrales, who began selling
Ross and a friend , Ollie "Big Loc" Newell, small amounts of
remarkably inexpensive cocaine.

Thanks to a network of friends in South-Central L.A. and

Compton, including many members of various Crips gangs, the
pair steadily built up clientele. With each sale, Ross reinvested
his hefty profits in more cocaine.
Eventually, Corrales introduced Ross and Newell to his supplier,
Blandon. And then business really picked up.

"At first, we was just going to do it until we made $5,000," Ross

said. "We made that so fast we said, no, we'll quit when we
make $20,000. Then we was going to quit when we saved
enough to buy a house . . ."

Ross would eventually own millions of dollars' worth of real

estate across Southern California, including houses, motels, a
theater and several other businesses. (His nickname, "Freeway
Rick," came from the fact that he owned properties near the
Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles.)

Within a year, Ross' drug operation grew to dominate inner-city

Los Angeles, and many of the biggest dealers in town were his
customers. When crack hit L.A.'s streets hard in late 1983, Ross
already had the infrastructure in place to corner a huge chunk of
the burgeoning market.

It was not uncommon, he said, to move $2 million or $3 million

worth of crack in one day.
"Our biggest problem had got to be counting the money," Ross
said. "We got to the point where it was like, man, we don't want
to count no more money."

Nicaraguan cocaine dealer Jacinto Torres, another former

supplier of Ross and a sometime-partner of Blandon, told drug
agents in a 1992 interview that after a slow start, "Blandon's
cocaine business dramatically increased. . . . Norwin Meneses,
Blandon's supplier as of 1983 and 1984, routinely flew
quantities of 200 to 400 kilograms from Miami to the West
Coast."

Blandon told the DEA last year that he was selling Ross up to
100 kilos of cocaine a week, which was then "rocked up" and
distributed "to the major gangs in the area, specifically the Crips
and the Bloods," the DEA report said.

At wholesale prices, that's roughly $65 million to $130 million

worth of cocaine every year, depending on the going price of a
kilo.

"He was one of the main distributors down here," said former
Los Angeles Police Department narcotics detective Steve Polak,
who was part of the Freeway Rick Task Force, which was set up
in 1987 to put Ross out of business. "And his poison, there's no
telling how many tens of thousands of people he touched. He's
responsible for a major cancer that still hasn't stopped
spreading."

But Ross is the first to admit that being in the right place at the
right time had almost nothing to do with his amazing success.
Other L.A. dealers, he noted, were selling crack long before he
started.

What he had, and they didn't, was Blandon, a friend with a

seemingly inexhaustible supply of high-grade cocaine and an
expert's knowledge of how to market it.

"I'm not saying I wouldn't have been a dope dealer without

Danilo," Ross stressed. "But I wouldn't have been Freeway
Rick."

The secret to his success, Ross said, was Blandon's cocaine

prices. "It was unreal. We were just wiping out everybody."

"It didn't make no difference to Rick what anyone else was

selling it for. Rick would just go in and undercut him $10,000 a
key," Chico Brown said. "Say some dude was selling for 30.
Boom - Rick would go in and sell it for 20. If he was selling for
20, Rick would sell for 10. Sometimes, he be giving (it) away."
Ross said he never discovered how Blandon was able to get
cocaine so cheaply. "I just figured he knew the people, you
know what I'm saying? He was plugged."

But Freeway Rick had no idea just how "plugged" his erudite
cocaine broker was. He didn't know about Meneses, or the CIA,
or the Salvadoran air-force planes that allegedly were flying the
cocaine into an air base in Texas.

And he wouldn't find out about it for another 10 years.

Aug 22, 1996

Crack was born during 1974 in S.F. Bay Area

by Gary Webb

San Jose Mercury News

Though Miami and Los Angeles are commonly regarded as

the twin cradles of crack, the first government-financed study of
cocaine smoking concluded that it was actually born in the Bay
Area in January 1974.
After comedian Richard Pryor nearly immolated himself during
a cocaine-smoking binge in 1980, the National Institute on Drug
Abuse hired UCLA drug expert Ronald Siegel to look into the
then-unfamiliar practice.

Siegel, the first scientist to document crack's use in the United

States, traced the smoking habit back to 1930, when Colombians
first started it.

But what was being smoked south of the border - a paste-like

substance called BASE (bah-SAY) - was very different from
what Californians were putting in their pipes, Siegel found, even
though they called it the same thing: free base.

BASE was a crude, toxics-laden precursor to cocaine powder.

On the other hand, free base (which later became known as
crack or rock) was cocaine powder that had been reverse-
engineered to make it smokable.

When San Francisco Bay Area dealers tried recreating the drug
they'd seen in South America, Siegel learned, they'd screwed up.

"When they looked it up in the Merck Manual, they saw cocaine

base and thought, well, yeah, this is it," Siegel, a nationally
known drug researcher, said. "They mispronounced it,
misunderstood the Spanish, and thought (BASE) was cocaine
base."

The base described in the organic-chemistry handbook was

cocaine powder separated from its salts, a process easily done
with boiling water and baking soda.

It was an immediate, if unintentional, hit.

"They were wowed by it," Siegel said. "They thought they were
smoking BASE. They were not. They were smoking something
nobody on the planet had ever smoked before."

Using the sales records of several major drug-paraphernalia

companies, Siegel correlated crack's public appearance with the
appearance of base-making kits and glass pipes for smoking it.
The sales records zeroed in on the Bay Area.

"We were able to show to our satisfaction that they were directly
responsible for distributing the habit throughout the United
States," Siegel said.

"Wherever they were selling their kits, that's where we started

getting the clinical reports. It all started in Northern California."
His groundbreaking study was never published by the
government, purportedly for budgetary reasons.

Siegel, who said he grew concerned that the information would

not be made available to other researchers, published it himself
in an obscure medical journal in late 1982.

Aug 23, 1996

Drug king free, but black aide sits in jail

How cheap cocaine became the scourge of the inner city

by Gary Webb

San Jose Mercury News

For the past 1 1/2 years, the U.S. Department of Justice has
been trying to explain why nearly everyone convicted in
California's federal courts of "crack" cocaine trafficking is black.

Critics, including some federal-court judges, say it looks like the

Justice Department is targeting crack dealers by race, which
would be a violation of the Constitution.
Federal prosecutors, however, say there's a simple, if unpleasant,
reason for the lopsided statistics: Most crack dealers are black.

But why - of all the ethnic and racial groups in California to pick
from - crack planted its deadly roots in L.A.'s black
neighborhoods is something Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes may
be able to answer.

Blandon is the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California - the

Crips' and Bloods' first direct connect to the cocaine cartels of
Colombia. The tons of cut-rate cocaine he brought into black
L.A. during the 1980s and early 1990s became millions of rocks
of crack, which spawned new markets wherever they landed.

On a tape made by the Drug Enforcement Administration in July

1990, Blandon casually explained the flood of cocaine that
coursed through the streets of South-Central Los Angeles during
the previous decade.

"These people have been working with me 10 years," Blandon

said. "I've sold them about 2,000 or 4,000 (kilos). I don't know. I
don't remember how many."
"It ain't that Japanese guy you were talking about, is it?" asked
DEA informant John Arman, who was wearing a hidden
transmitter.

"No, it's not him," Blandon insisted. "These . . . these are the
black people."

Arman gasped. "Black?!"

"Yeah," Blandon said. "They control L.A. The people (black

cocaine dealers) that control L.A."

But unlike the thousands of young blacks now serving long

federal prison sentences for selling mere handfuls of the drug,
Blandon is a free man today. He has a spacious new home in
Nicaragua and a business exporting precious woods, courtesy of
the U.S. government, which has paid him more than $166,000
over the past 18 months, records show - for his help in the war
on drugs.

That turn of events both amuses and angers "Freeway Rick"

Ross, L.A.'s premier crack wholesaler during much of the 1980s
and Blandon's biggest customer.
"They say I sold dope everywhere, but, man, I know he done
sold 10 times more dope than me," Ross said during a recent
interview.

Nothing epitomizes the drug war's uneven impact on black

Americans more clearly than the intertwined lives of Ricky
Donnell Ross, a high-school dropout, and his suave cocaine
supplier, Blandon, who has a master's degree in marketing and
was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-
communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency. Called the Fuerza Democratica
Nicaraguense (FDN), it became known to most Americans as the
contras.

In recent court testimony, Blandon, who began dealing cocaine

in South-Central L.A. in 1982, swore that the first kilo of
cocaine he sold in California was to raise money for the CIA's
army, which was trying on a shoestring to unseat Nicaragua's
new socialist Sandinista government.

After Blandon crossed paths with Ross, a South-Central

teenager with gang connections and street smarts necessary to
move the army's cocaine, a blizzard engulfed the ghettos.

Former Los Angeles police narcotics detective Stephen Polak

said he was working the streets of South-Central in the mid-
1980s when he and his partners began seeing more cocaine than
ever before.

"A lot of detectives, a lot of cops, were saying, `hey, these

blacks, no longer are we just seeing gram dealers. These guys
are doing ounces; they were doing keys,' " Polak recalled. But he
said the reports were disregarded by higher-ups who couldn't
believe black neighborhoods could afford the amount of cocaine
the street cops claimed to be seeing.

"Major Violators (the LAPD's elite anti-drug unit) was saying,

basically, `ahh, South-Central, how much could they be
dealing?' " said Polak. "Well, they (black dealers) went virtually
untouched for a long time."

It wasn't until January 1987 - when crack markets were popping

up in major cities all over the nation - that law-enforcement
brass decided to confront L.A.'s crack problem head-on. They
formed the Freeway Rick Task Force, a cadre of veteran drug
agents whose sole mission was to put Rick Ross out of business.
Polak was a charter member.

"We just dedicated seven days a week to him. We were just on

him at every move," Polak said.
Ross, as usual, was quick to spot a trend. He moved to
Cincinnati and quietly settled into a woodsy, suburban home.

"I called it cooling out, trying to back away from the game,"
Ross said. "I had enough money."

His longtime supplier, Blandon, reached the same conclusion

about the same time. He moved to Miami with $1.6 million in
cash and invested in several businesses.

But neither Ross nor Blandon stayed "retired" for long.

A manic deal-maker, Ross found Cincinnati's virgin crack

market too seductive to ignore.

Plunging back in, the crack tycoon cornered the Cincinnati

market using the same low-price, high-volume strategy - and the
same Nicaraguan drug connections - he'd used in L.A. Soon, he
also was selling crack in Cleveland, Indianapolis, Dayton and St.
Louis.

"There's no doubt in my mind crack in Cincinnati can be traced

to Ross," police officer Robert Enoch told a Cincinnati
newspaper three years ago.
But Ross' reign in the Midwest was short-lived. In 1988, one of
his loads ran into a drug-sniffing dog at a New Mexico bus
station, and drug agents eventually connected it to Ross. He
pleaded guilty to crack trafficking charges and received a
mandatory 10-year prison sentence, which he began serving in
1990.

In Miami, Blandon's retirement plans also had gone awry as his

business ventures collapsed.

He returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and began brokering

cocaine again, buying and selling from the Nicaraguan dealers
he'd known in his days with the FDN. In 1990 and 1991, he
testified, he sold about 425 kilos of cocaine in Northern
California - $10.5 million worth at wholesale prices.

But unlike before, when he was selling cocaine for the contras,
Blandon was constantly dogged by the police.

Twice in six months he was detained, first by Customs agents

while taking $117,000 in money orders to Tijuana to pay a
supplier, and then by the LAPD when he was in the act of
paying one of his Colombian suppliers more than $350,000.
The second time, after police found $14,000 in cash and a small
quantity of cocaine in his pocket, he was arrested. But the U.S.
Justice Department - saying a prosecution would disrupt an
active investigation - persuaded the police to drop their money-
laundering case.

Soon after that, Blandon and his wife, Chepita, were arrested by
DEA agents on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. They
were jailed without bond as dangers to the community, and
several other Nicaraguans also were arrested.

The prosecutor, L.J. O'Neale, told a federal judge that Blandon

had sold so much cocaine in the United States his mandatory
prison sentence was "off the scale."

Then Blandon "just vanished," said Juanita Brooks, a San Diego

attorney who represented one of Blandon's co-defendants. "All
of a sudden his wife was out of jail and he was out of the case."

The reasons were contained in a secret Justice Department

memorandum filed in San Diego federal court in late 1993.

Blandon, prosecutor O'Neale wrote, had become "valuable in

major DEA investigations of Class I drug traffickers." And even
though probation officers were recommending a life sentence
and a $4 million fine, O'Neale said the government would be
satisfied if Blandon got 48 months and no fine. Motion granted.

Less than a year later, records show, O'Neale was back with
another idea: Why not just let Blandon go? After all, he wrote
the judge, Blandon had a federal job waiting.

O'Neale, saying that Blandon "has almost unlimited potential to

assist the United States," said the government wanted "to enlist
Mr. Blandon as a full-time, paid informant after his release from
prison."

After only 28 months in custody, most of it spent with federal

agents who debriefed him for "hundreds of hours," he said,
Blandon walked out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in
San Diego, was given a green card and began working on his
first assignment: setting up his old friend, "Freeway Rick," for a
sting.

Records show Ross was still behind bars, awaiting parole, when
San Diego DEA agents targeted him.

Soon after Ross went to prison for the Cincinnati bust, federal
prosecutors offered him a deal. His term would be shortened by
five years in return for testimony in a federal case against Los
Angeles County Sheriff's detectives that included members of
the old Freeway Rick Task Force.

Within days of Ross' parole in October 1994, he and Blandon

were back in touch, and their conversation quickly turned to
cocaine.

According to tapes Blandon made of some of their discussions,

Ross repeatedly told Blandon that he was broke and couldn't
afford to finance a drug deal. But Ross did agree to help his old
mentor, who was also pleading poverty, find someone else to
buy the 100 kilos of cocaine Blandon claimed he had.

On March 2, 1995, in a shopping-center parking lot in National

City, near San Diego, Ross poked his head inside a cocaine-
laden Chevy Blazer, and the place exploded with police.

Ross jumped into a friend's pickup and zoomed off "looking for
a wall that I could crash myself into," he said. "I just wanted to
die." He was captured after the truck careened into a hedgerow.
He has been held in jail without bond since then.

Ross' arrest netted Blandon $45,500 in government rewards and

expenses, records show. On the strength of Blandon's testimony,
Ross and two other men were convicted of cocaine-conspiracy
charges in San Diego last March - conspiring to sell the DEA's
cocaine. Sentencing was set for today. Ross is facing a life
sentence without the possibility of parole. The other men are
looking at 10- to 20-year sentences.

Acquaintances say Blandon, who refused repeated interview

requests, is a common sight these days in Managua's better
restaurants, drinking with friends and telling of his "escape"
from U.S. authorities.

According to his Miami lawyer, Blandon spends most of his

time shuttling between San Diego and Managua, trying to
recover Nicaraguan properties seized in 1979, when the
Sandinistas took power.

Aug 23, 1996

Cocaine sentences weighted against blacks

by Gary Webb

San Jose Mercury News

When it comes to cocaine, it isn't just a suspicion that the war

on drugs is hammering blacks harder than whites. According to
the U.S. Justice Department, it's a fact.
The "main reason" cocaine sentences for blacks are longer than
for whites, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 1993, is
that 83 percent of the people being sent to prison for "crack"
trafficking are black "and the average sentence imposed for
crack trafficking was twice as long as for trafficking in
powdered cocaine."

Even though crack and powder cocaine are the same drug, you
have to sell more than six pounds of powder before you face the
same jail time as someone who sells one ounce of crack - a 100-
to-1 ratio.

That logic has eluded Dr. Robert Byck, a Yale University drug
expert, from the moment he discovered the 100-to-1 ratio may
have been his inadvertent doing.

In 1986, at the height of an election-year hysteria over crack,

Byck was summoned before a U.S. Senate committee to tell
what he knew about cocaine smoking.

Byck, a renowned scientist who edited and published Sigmund

Freud's cocaine papers, had been studying crack smoking in
South America for nearly 10 years, with growing alarm.
Sen. Lawton Chiles, a Florida Democrat (and now that state's
governor), was pushing for tougher crack laws, and he asked
Byck about testimony he had given previously that "some
experts" believed crack was 50 times more addictive than
powder cocaine. Byck acknowledged some people believed that.

Despite the speculative nature of the figure, Byck said, the

addictive factor of 50 was "doubled by people who wanted to
get tough on cocaine" and then, for reasons he still finds
incomprehensible, turned into a measurement of weight.

The resultant 100-to-1 (powder-vs.-crack) weight ratio, Byck

said, was "a fabrication by whoever wrote the law, but not
reality. . . . You can't make a number."

Recently, the U.S. Sentencing Commission - a panel of experts

created by Congress to be its unbiased adviser in these matters -
tried and failed to find a better reason to explain why powder
dealers must sell 100 times more cocaine before they get the
same mandatory sentence as crack dealers.

The "absence of comprehensive data substantiating this

legislative policy is troublesome," it reported last year.

In 1993, cocaine smokers got an average sentence of nearly

three years. People who snorted cocaine powder received a little
over three months. Nearly all of the long sentences went to
blacks, the commission found.

Justice Department researchers estimated that if crack and

powder sentences were made equal, "the black-white difference .
. . would not only evaporate but would slightly reverse."

Based on such findings, the commission recommended in May

1995 that the cocaine-sentencing laws be equalized, calling the
100-to-1 ratio "a primary cause of the growing disparity between
sentences for black and white federal defendants."

Apparently fearful of being seen as soft on drugs, Congress

voted overwhelmingly last year to keep the crack laws the same.
On Oct. 30, President Clinton signed the bill rejecting the
commission's recommendations.

Oct. 3, 1996

Affidafit shows CIA knew of contra drug ring

by Gary Webb and Pamela Kramer

Knight-Ridder Newspapers
LOS ANGELES - During the early 1980s, federal and local
narcotics agents knew that a massive drug ring operated by
Nicaraguan contra rebels was selling large amounts of cocaine
"mainly to blacks living in the South Central Los Angeles area,"
according to a search-warrant affidavit obtained by the San Jose
Mercury News.

The Oct. 23, 1986, affidavit identifies former Nicaraguan

government official Danilo Blandon as "the highest-ranking
member of this organization" and describes a sprawling drug
operation involving more than 100 Nicaraguan contra
sympathizers.

The affidavit of Thomas Gordon, a former Los Angeles County

sheriff's narcotics detective, is the first independent
corroboration that the contra army - the Nicaraguan Democratic
Force - was dealing "crack" cocaine to gangs in Los Angeles'
black neighborhoods. Known by its Spanish initials, the FDN
was an anti-communist commando group formed and run by the
CIA during the 1980s.

Gordon's sworn statement says that both the Drug Enforcement

Administration and the FBI had informants inside the Blandon
drug ring for several years before sheriff's deputies raided it Oct.
27, 1986. Gordon's affidavit is based on police interviews with
those informants and one of the DEA agents who was
investigating Blandon.
Twice during the past year, Ron Spear, Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department spokesman, told the Mercury News that his
department had no records of the 1986 raids and denied having a
copy of Gordon's search-warrant affidavit.

The Mercury News obtained the entire search-warrant affidavit

this week. Sheriff Sherman Block's office did not respond
yesterday to written questions about the affidavit.

A recent Mercury News series revealed how Blandon's

operation, which sold thousands of kilos of cocaine to black Los
Angeles drug dealers, created the first mass market for crack in
America during the early 1980s and helped fuel a crack
explosion that is still reverberating through black communities.
Both the CIA and the Justice Department have denied
government involvement.

But according to a legal motion filed in a 1990 case involving a

deputy who helped execute the search warrants, one of the
suspects involved in the raid identified himself as a CIA agent
and asked police to call CIA headquarters in Virginia to confirm
his identity. The motion, filed by Los Angeles defense attorney
Harlan Braun on behalf of Deputy Daniel Garner, said the
narcotics detectives allowed the man to make the call but then
carted away numerous documents purportedly linking the U.S.
government to cocaine trafficking and money-laundering efforts
on behalf of the contras.
The motion said CIA agents appeared at the sheriff's department
within 48 hours of the raid and removed the seized files from the
evidence room. But Braun said detectives secretly copied 10
pages before the documents were spirited away. Braun
attempted to introduce them in the 1990 criminal trial to force
the federal government to back off the case. Braun was hit with
a gag order, the documents were put under seal and Garner was
convicted of corruption charges.

Internal sheriff's department records of the raid "mysteriously

disappeared" around the same time the seized files were taken,
Braun's motion said. That claim was buttressed in an interview
this week by an officer involved in the raid.

The officer, who requested anonymity, said the alleged CIA

agent was Ronald Lister, a former Laguna Beach police
detective who worked with Blandon in the drug ring. The 1986
search-warrant affidavit identifies Lister's home in Laguna
Beach as one of the places searched. It says Lister was involved
in transporting drug money to Miami and was Blandon's partner
in a security company. The company, according to a former
employee, was doing work at a Salvadoran military air base in
the early 1980s. Lister pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking in
1991.
Oct. 23, 1996

How Web fueled story of CIA, crack

Difference in format a problem, says editor

by Eleanor Randolph and John M. Broder

Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON - The controversy that began with the San

Jose Mercury News' publication of a series on cocaine and the
Nicaraguan contras has become a case study in how information
caroms around the country in the digital age.

In its printed version, as the paper's editor has pointed out, the
stories were careful never to claim that the Central Intelligence
Agency condoned or abetted drug dealing to support the contras.

Reporter Gary Webb has said that his research into the CIA-
crack connection "ended at the CIA's door," but did not firmly
establish a link between the agency and the crack epidemic of
the 1980s.

But that unproven link has become established as fact in the

minds of many Americans, and the Mercury News' editor, Jerry
Ceppos, says the way the paper used the World Wide Web to
disseminate its material may have contributed to that
misinterpretation.

Even before the stories were published in mid-August, managers

of the paper's Web site, Mercury Center, were alerting Internet
users to a coming bombshell.

The electronic version of the series appeared with a logo - a

figure smoking crack superimposed on the CIA seal - that was
more prominent than in the newspaper series. Underneath were
the words, "the story behind the crack explosion."

Many Americans believed that the Mercury News had finally

proved what had been a long-running rumor of government
complicity in the scourge of drugs in U.S. cities.

Ceppos said earlier this week that editing standards at the

paper's Web site are not always consistent with those for the
print version of the paper. He said the paper deleted the CIA
logo from the Web site after it became controversial.

"We changed the logo, because for a day or two it seemed to be

the focus of attention," Ceppos said. "You have to make sure
you're keeping your standards high, and we're going to have
some more conversations about that."
The series has provoked startlingly different reactions in
different media.

It ignited a storm of controversy on black-oriented radio

programs and in such newspapers as Louis Farrakhan's "The
Final Call," which headlined its account of the Mercury News
story, "How the U.S. government spread crack cocaine in the
black ghetto."

Washington talk-radio host Joe Madison, who is also black, is

starting a hunger strike to protest the CIA's alleged role in
cocaine trafficking. The newspaper series was seen by many as
confirmation of what had long been suspected in black
neighborhoods. "We've always speculated about this, but now
we've got proof," Madison said.

On the other hand, several prominent newspapers have

published stories that have been skeptical about the allegations.
The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The New
York Times ran articles this month casting doubt on a direct link
between the cocaine trade and the CIA's support of the contras.

The reaction on the "new media" of the Internet has opened an

additional dimension. The Mercury News' Web site received
100,000 additional "hits" a day after the series was posted, the
paper reported.

The paper invited Internet readers to comment, and hundreds

replied. Many indicated that they believed the paper had finally
proved that the CIA was trafficking in cocaine in black
neighborhoods.

The Mercury News broke new ground by making available not

only the articles, but much of the supporting documentation -
legal affidavits, court filings, charts, diagrams and interview
transcripts.

But a key document that appears to undercut one of the series'

central contentions is made available on the Internet site in
heavily edited form with contradictory material left out.

That document is the court testimony of convicted drug dealer

Oscar Danilo Blandon. The paper's stories lean heavily on
Blandon's testimony in the recent cocaine trafficking trial of Los
Angeles drug dealer "Freeway" Ricky Ross in San Diego.

The stories cite the testimony as establishing that for a period of

several years in the early- and mid-1980s, Blandon's drug profits
were going to the contras. The Internet site includes portions of
the trial transcript that support the story's contentions.
But the complete transcript, which is not included on the Web
site, includes statements by Blandon that point in a different
direction. According to his testimony, he diverted drug profits to
the contras not for years, but only during a period of months
early in his career - at a time when he was making virtually no
money dealing cocaine.

During the trial, Webb says, he gave questions to Ross' attorney

that the attorney, in turn, asked Blandon under oath. Webb then
used the statements elicited from Blandon as information for his
series.

Webb dismisses criticism of the appearance of taking sides in a

criminal case he was covering by saying that the Blandon
testimony provided "the best interview I've ever had - while the
man was under oath in a federal court and being vouched for by
two federal agencies."

Ceppos defended his reporter's relationship with Blandon's

attorney. "I may be missing something here," he said, "but I
think that everything he did with the lawyer was journalistically
ethical and aboveboard."

Monday, May 12, 1997

CIA series fell short, says paper

by Associated Press

SAN JOSE, Calif. - The executive editor of the San Jose

Mercury News has admitted to shortcomings in the newspaper's
controversial series on the crack-cocaine explosion in Los
Angeles in the 1980s.

In an open letter to readers in the newspaper's editorial section

yesterday, Jerry Ceppos said the newspaper solidly documented
that a drug ring associated with the contra rebels in Nicaragua
sold large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles, and
that some of the profits from those sales went to the contras.

However, he said, the three-part "Dark Alliance" series,

published last summer, occasionally omitted important
information and created impressions open to misinterpretation.

"I believe that we fell short at every step of our process - in the
writing, editing and production of our work. Several people here
share that burden," he wrote.

"We have learned from the experience and even are changing the
way we handle major investigations."
The series, written by reporter Gary Webb, reported that a San
Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold cocaine in South Central Los
Angeles, then funneled profits to the contras for the better part
of a decade.

The series traced the drugs to dealers Danilo Blandon and Ricky
Ross, leaders of a CIA-run guerrilla army in Nicaragua.

The Seattle Times ran the series on Aug. 22-23, 1996.

The reports sparked widespread anger in the black community

toward the CIA, as well as numerous federal investigations into
whether the CIA took part in or countenanced the selling of
crack cocaine to raise money for contras.

The investigations never found that the CIA had any link to drug
dealing. Several newspapers also disputed the Mercury News
report.

Ceppos wrote that while the newspaper did not report the CIA
knew about the drug operations, it implied CIA knowledge.
"Although members of the drug ring met with contra leaders
paid by the CIA and Webb believes the relationship with the CIA
was a tight one, I feel that we did not have proof that top CIA
officials knew of the relationship," he wrote. "I believe that part
of our contract with readers is to be as clear about what we don't
know as what we do know.

"We also did not include CIA comment about our findings, and I
think we should have."

Ceppos also said the series omitted conflicting information that

Blandon testified he stopped sending cocaine profits to the
contras at the end of 1982, after being in operation for a year.
That information, Ceppos said, "contradicted a central assertion
of the series" and should have been included.

The editor also said the series reported the profit figures from
the drug sales as fact when they were estimates, and unfairly
suggested the drugs funneled to Los Angeles played a critical
role in the crack problem in urban America.

"Because the national crack epidemic was a complex

phenomenon that had more than one origin, our discussion of
this issue needed to be clearer," Ceppos said.
Wednesday, May 14, 1997

Mercury News retraction won't stop drug probe

by Thomas Farragher

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - A federal investigator said he will continue to

examine whether a California drug ring sold cocaine to aid a
CIA-run guerrilla army, even though the San Jose Mercury
News has backed away from some aspects of the stories that
sparked the inquiry.

"We have our own investigative agenda . . ." said Justice

Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich.

The Mercury News series spawned twin investigations by the

inspectors general of the CIA and the Justice Department.

Bromwich's comment came after the Mercury News on Sunday

acknowledged that its series about shadowy drug dealers didn't
meet the paper's standards.
The inspector general drew a distinction between journalistic
concerns of Mercury News editors and what interests
government investigators. "We're not examining per se the
practices in the newspaper that led to the publication of the
article," Bromwich said.

In its "Dark Alliance" series published last August, the Mercury

News traced urban America's crack-cocaine explosion to a
Northern California drug ring involving two Nicaraguan cocaine
dealers who also were civilian leaders of the contras, an anti-
communist commando group formed and run by the CIA during
the 1980s. The series said millions of dollars in profits from the
drug sales were funneled to the contras. It never reported direct
CIA involvement, though many readers drew that conclusion.

But on Sunday, Mercury News Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos

told readers that "we didn't know for certain what the profits
were" and that the crack-cocaine scourge "was a complex
phenomenon that had more than one origin."

Ceppos also said the newspaper "did not have proof that top CIA
officials knew of the relationship" of the drug ring and contra
leaders.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., the chief congressional champion

of a thorough investigation into the newspaper's findings,
insisted yesterday that the Mercury News, while acknowledging
problems with its series, has not retreated from findings that
some drug money went to the contras.

from
http://www.parascope.com/mx/articles/garywebb/garyWebbSpea
ks.htm:

Gary Webb Speaks: A ParaScope Special Report

Investigative journalist Gary Webb speaks to a packed house

on the CIA's connection to drug trafficking, and the failure
of the media to expose the truth.

by Charles Overbeck
Matrix Editor
easterisle@aol.com

Dark Alliance author Gary Webb gave a fascinating talk on the

evening of January 16, outlining the findings of his investigation
of the CIA's connection to drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan
contras. Approximately 300 people, crowded into the First
United Methodist Church in Eugene, Oregon, listened with rapt
attention as Webb detailed his experiences. Webb's riveting
speech was followed by an intense question-and-answer session,
during which he candidly answered questions about the "Dark
Alliance" controversy, his firing from the San Jose Mercury
News, and CIA/contra/cocaine secrets that still await revelation.
It was a fascinating exchange packed with detailed information
on the latest developments in the case. Webb spoke eloquently,
with the ease and confidence of an investigator who has spent
many long hours researching his subject, and many more hours
sharing this information with the public. ParaScope will have a
full report on Webb's talk on Wednesday, January 20.

In the meantime, you get another opportunity to see a ParaScope

article come together from scratch, from behind the scenes. So
check back with us soon for the latest additions as this piece is
developed.
[Last update 1:40 a.m. EST 1/21. Video clips and hypertext
annotations coming soon.]

Transcript: Gary Webb Speaks on CIA Connections to

Contra Drug Trafficking (and Related Topics)

Date: January 16, 1999

Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: First United Methodist Church, 1376 Olive St.,
Eugene, Oregon

Gary Webb: I look like an idiot up here with all these mikes,
the CIA agents are probably behind one or the other... [laughter
from the audience]. It's really nice to be in Eugene -- I've been in
Madison, Wisconsin talking about this, I've been in Berkeley,
I've been in Santa Monica, and these are sort of like islands of
sanity in this world today, so it's great to be on one of those
islands.

One of the things that is weird about this whole thing, though, is
that I've been a daily news reporter for about twenty years, and
I've done probably a thousand interviews with people, and the
strangest thing is being on the other side of the table now and
having reporters ask me questions. One of them asked me about
a week ago -- I was on a radio show -- and the host asked me,
"Why did you get into newspaper reporting, of all the media?
Why did you pick newspapers?" And I really had to admit that I
was stumped. Because I thought about it -- I'd been doing
newspaper reporting since I was fourteen or fifteen years old --
and I really didn't have an answer.

So I went back to my clip books -- you know, most reporters

keep all their old clips -- and I started digging around trying to
figure out if there was one story that I had written that had really
tipped the balance. And I found it. And I wanted to tell you this
story, because it sort of fits into the theme that we're going to
talk about tonight.

I think I was fifteen, I was working for my high school paper,

and I was writing editorials. This sounds silly now that I think
about it, but I had written an editorial against the drill team that
we had for the high school games, for the football games. This
was '71 or '72, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam
War, and I was in school then in suburban Indianapolis -- Dan
Quayle country. So, you get the idea of the flavor of the school
system. They thought it was a cool idea to dress women up in
military uniforms and send them out there to twirl rifles and
battle flags at halftime. And I thought this was sort of
outrageous, and I wrote an editorial saying I thought it was one
of the silliest things I'd ever seen. And my newspaper advisor
called me the next day and said, "Gosh, that editorial you wrote
has really prompted a response." And I said, "Great, that's the
idea, isn't it?" And she said, "Well, it's not so great, they want
you to apologize for it." [Laughter from the audience.]

I said, "Apologize for what?" And she said, "Well, the girls were
very offended." And I said, "Well, I'm not apologizing because
they don't want my opinion. You'll have to come up with a better
reason than that." And they said, "Well, if you don't apologize,
we're not going to let you in Quill & Scroll," which is the high
school journalism society. And I said, "Well, I don't want to be
in that organization if I have to apologize to get into it." [More
laughter from the audience, scattered applause.]

They were sort of powerless at that point, and they said, "Look,
why don't you just come down and the cheerleaders are going to
come in, and they want to talk to you and tell you what they
think," and I said okay. So I went down to the newspaper office,
and there were about fifteen of them sitting around this table,
and they all went around one by one telling me what a scumbag
I was, and what a terrible guy I was, and how I'd ruined their
dates, ruined their complexions, and all sorts of things...
[Laughter and groans from the audience.] ...and at that moment,
I decided, "Man, this is what I want to do for a living." [Roar of
laughter from the audience.] And I wish I could say that it was
because I was infused with this sense of the First Amendment,
and thinking great thoughts about John Peter Zenger and I.F.
Stone... but what I was really thinking was, "Man, this is a great
way to meet women!" [More laughter.]

And that's a true story, but the reason I tell you that is because
it's often those kinds of weird motivations and unthinking
consequences that lead us to do things, that lead us to events that
we have absolutely no concept how they're going to turn out.
Little did I know that twenty-five years later, I'd be writing a
story about the CIA's wrongdoings because I wanted to meet
women by writing editorials about cheerleaders.

But that's really the way life and that's really the way history
works a lot of times. You know, when you think back on your
own lives, from the vantage point of time, you can see it. I
mean, think back to the decisions you've made in your lifetimes
that brought you to where you are tonight, think about how close
you came to never meeting your wife or your husband, how
easily you could have been doing something else for a living if it
hadn't been for a decision that you made or someone made that
you had absolutely no control over. And it's really kind of scary
when you think about how capricious life is sometimes. That's a
theme I try to bring to my book, Dark Alliance, which was about
the crack cocaine explosion in the 1980s.

So for the record, let me just say this right now. I do not believe
-- and I have never believed -- that the crack cocaine explosion
was a conscious CIA conspiracy, or anybody's conspiracy, to
decimate black America. I've never believed that South Central
Los Angeles was targeted by the U.S. government to become the
crack capitol of the world. But that isn't to say that the CIA's
hands or the U.S. government's hands are clean in this matter.
Actually, far from it. After spending three years of my life
looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S.
government's responsibility for the drug problems in South
Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever
wrote in the newspaper.

But it's important to differentiate between malign intent and

gross negligence. And that's an important distinction, because
it's what makes premeditated murder different from
manslaughter. That said, it doesn't change the fact that you've
got a body on the floor, and that's what I want to talk about
tonight, the body.

Many years ago, there was a great series on PBS -- I don't know
how many of you are old enough to remember this -- it was
called Connections. And it was by a British historian named
James Burke. If you don't remember it, it was a marvelous show,
very influential on me. And he would take a seemingly
inconsequential event in history, and follow it through the ages
to see what it spawned as a result. The one show I remember the
most clearly was the one he did on how the scarcity of firewood
in thirteenth-century Europe led to the development of the steam
engine. And you would think, "Well, these things aren't
connected at all," and he would show very convincingly that
they were.

In the first chapter of the book on which the series is based,

Burke wrote that "History is not, as we are so often led to
believe, a matter of great men and lonely geniuses pointing the
way to the future from their ivory towers. At some point, every
member of society is involved in that process by which
innovation and change come about. The key to why things
change is the key to everything."

What I've attempted to demonstrate in my book was how the

collapse of a brutal, pro-American dictatorship in Latin America,
combined with a decision by corrupt CIA agents to raise money
for a resistance movement by any means necessary, led to he
formation of the nation's first major crack market in South
Central Los Angeles, which led to the arming and the
empowerment of LA's street gangs, which led to the spread of
crack to black neighborhoods across the country, and to the
passage of racially discriminatory sentencing laws that are
locking up thousands of young black men today behind bars for
most of their lives.

But it's not so much a conspiracy as a chain reaction. And that's

what my whole book is about, this chain reaction. So let me
explain the links in this chain a little better.

The first link is this fellow Anastasio Somoza, who was an

American-educated tyrant, one of our buddies naturally, and his
family ruled Nicaragua for forty years -- thanks to the
Nicaraguan National Guard, which we supplied, armed, and
funded, because we thought they were, you know, anti-
communists.

Well, in 1979, the people of Nicaragua got tired of living under

this dictatorship, and they rose up and overthrew it. And a lot of
Somoza's friends and relatives and business partners came to the
United States, because we had been their allies all these years,
including two men whose families had been very close to the
dictatorship. And these two guys are sort of two of the three
main characters in my book -- a fellow named Danilo Blandón,
and a fellow named Norwin Meneses.

They came to the United States in 1979, along with a flood of

other Nicaraguan immigrants, most of them middle-class people,
most of them former bankers, former insurance salesmen -- sort
of a capitalist exodus from Nicaragua. And they got involved
when they got here, and they decided they were going to take
the country back, they didn't like the fact that they'd been forced
out of their country. So they formed these resistance
organizations here in the United States, and they began plotting
how they were going to kick the Sandanistas out.

At this point in time, Jimmy Carter was president, and Carter

wasn't all that interested in helping these folks out. The CIA
was, however. And that's where we start getting into this murky
world of, you know, who really runs the United States. Is it the
president? Is it the bureaucracy? Is it the intelligence
community? At different points in time you get different
answers. Like today, the idea that Clinton runs the United States
is nuts. The idea that Jimmy Carter ran the country is nuts.

In 1979 and 1980, the CIA secretly began visiting these groups
that were setting up here in the United States, supplying them
with a little bit of money, and telling them to hold on, wait for a
little while, don't give up. And Ronald Reagan came to town.
And Reagan had a very different outlook on Central America
than Carter did. Reagan saw what happened in Nicaragua not as
a populist uprising, as most of the rest of the world did. He saw
it as this band of communists down there, there was going to be
another Fidel Castro, and he was going to have another Cuba in
his backyard. Which fit in very well with the CIA's thinking. So,
the CIA under Reagan got it together, and they said, "We're
going to help these guys out." They authorized $19 million to
fund a covert war to destabilize the government in Nicaragua
and help get their old buddies back in power.

Soon after the CIA took over this operation, these two drug
traffickers, who had come from Nicaragua and settled in
California, were called down to Honduras. And they met with a
CIA agent named Enrique Bermúdez, who was one of Somoza's
military officials, and the man the CIA picked to run this new
organization they were forming. And both traffickers had said --
one of them said, the other one wrote, and it's never been
contradicted -- that when they met with the CIA agent, he told
them, "We need money for this operation. Your guy's job is to go
to California and raise money, and not to worry about how you
did it. And what he said was -- and I think this had been used to
justify just about every crime against humanity that we've
known -- "the ends justify the means."

Now, this is a very important link in this chain reaction, because

the means they selected was cocaine trafficking, which is sort of
what you'd expect when you ask cocaine traffickers to go out
and raise money for you. You shouldn't at all be surprised when
they go out and sell drugs. Especially when you pick people who
are like pioneers of the cocaine trafficking business, which
Norwin Meneses certainly was.

There was a CIA cable from I believe 1984, which called him
the "kingpin of narcotics trafficking" in Central America. He
was sort of like the Al Capone of Nicaragua. So after getting
these fundraising instructions from this CIA agent, these two
men go back to California, and they begin selling cocaine. This
time not exclusively for themselves -- this time in furtherance of
U.S. foreign policy. And they began selling it in Los Angeles,
and they began selling it in San Francisco.

Sometime in 1982, Danilo Blandón, who had been given the LA

market, started selling his cocaine to a young drug dealer named
Ricky Ross, who later became known as "Freeway" Rick. In
1994, the LA Times would describe him as the master marketer
most responsible for flooding the streets of Los Angeles with
cocaine. In 1979, he was nothing. He was nothing before he met
these Nicaraguans. He was a high school dropout. He was a kid
who wanted to be a tennis star, who was trying to get a tennis
scholarship, but he found out that in order to get a scholarship
you needed to read and write, and he couldn't. So he drifted out
of school and wound up selling stolen car parts, and then he met
these Nicaraguans, who had this cheap cocaine that they wanted
to unload. And he proved to be very good at that.

Now, he lived in South Central Los Angeles, which was home to

some street gangs known as the Crips and the Bloods. And back
in 1981-82, hardly anybody knew who they were. They were
mainly neighborhood kids -- they'd beat each other up, they'd
steal leather coats, they'd steal cars, but they were really nothing
back then. But what they gained through this organization, and
what they gained through Ricky Ross, was a built-in distribution
network throughout the neighborhood. The Crips and the Bloods
were already selling marijuana, they were already selling PCP,
so it wasn't much of a stretch for them to sell something new,
which is what these Nicaraguans were bringing in, which was
cocaine.

This is where these forces of history come out of nowhere and

collide. Right about the time the contras got to South Central
Los Angeles, hooked up with "Freeway" Rick, and started
selling powder cocaine, the people Rick was selling his powder
to started asking him if he knew how to make it into this stuff
called "rock" that they were hearing about. This obviously was
crack cocaine, and it was already on its way to the United States
by then -- it started in Peru in '74 and was working its way
upward, and it was bound to get here sooner or later. In 1981 it
got to Los Angeles, and people started figuring out how to take
this very expensive powdered cocaine and cook it up on the
stove and turn it into stuff you could smoke.

When Ricky went out and he started talking to his customers,

and they started asking him how to make this stuff, you know,
Rick was a smart guy -- he still is a smart guy -- and he figured,
this is something new. This is customer demand. If I want to
progress in this business, I better meet this demand. So he
started switching from selling powder to making rock himself,
and selling it already made. He called this new invention his
"Ready Rock." And he told me the scenario, he said it was a
situation where he'd go to a guy's house, he would say, "Oh man,
I want to get high, I'm on my way to work, I don't have time to
go into the kitchen and cook this stuff up. Can't you cook it up
for me and just bring it to me already made?" And he said,
"Yeah, I can do that." So he started doing it.
So by the time crack got ahold of South Central, which took a
couple of years, Rick had positioned himself on top of the crack
market in South Central. And by 1984, crack sales had
supplanted marijuana and PCP sales as sources of income for the
gangs and drug dealers of South Central. And suddenly these
guys had more money than they knew what to do with. Because
what happened with crack, it democratized the drug. When you
were buying it in powdered form, you were having to lay out a
hundred bucks for a gram, or a hundred and fifty bucks for a
gram. Now all you needed was ten bucks, or five bucks, or a
dollar -- they were selling "dollar rocks" at one point. So
anybody who had money and wanted to get high could get some
of this stuff. You didn't need to be a middle-class or wealthy
drug user anymore.

Suddenly the market for this very expensive drug expanded

geometrically. And now these dealers, who were making a
hundred bucks a day on a good day, were now making five or
six thousand dollars a day on a good day. And the gangs started
setting up franchises -- they started franchising rock houses in
South Central, just like McDonald's. And you'd go on the streets,
and there'd be five or six rock houses owned by one guy, and
five or six rock houses owned by another guy, and suddenly they
started making even more money.

And now they've got all this money, and they felt nervous. You
get $100,000 or $200,000 in cash in your house, and you start
getting kind of antsy about it. So now they wanted weapons to
guard their money with, and to guard their rock houses, which
other people were starting to knock off. And lo and behold, you
had weapons. The contras. They were selling weapons. They
were buying weapons. And they started selling weapons to the
gangs in Los Angeles. They started selling them AR-15s, they
started selling them Uzis, they started selling them Israeli-made
pistols with laser sights, just about anything. Because that was
part of the process here. They were not just drug dealers, they
were taking the drug money and buying weapons with it to send
down to Central America with the assistance of a great number
of spooky CIA folks, who were getting them [audio glitch --
"across the border"?] and that sort of thing, so they could get
weapons in and out of the country. So, not only does South
Central suddenly have a drug problem, they have a weapons
problem that they never had before. And you started seeing
things like drive-by shootings and gang bangers with Uzis.

By 1985, the LA crack market had become saturated. There was

so much dope going into South Central, dope that the CIA, we
now know, knew of, and they knew the origins of -- the FBI
knew the origins of it; the DEA knew the origins of it; and
nobody did anything about it. (We'll get into that in a bit.)

But what happened was, there were so many people selling

crack that the dealers were jostling each other on the corners.
And the smaller ones decided, we're going to take this show on
the road. So they started going to other cities. They started going
to Bakersfield, they started going to Fresno, they started going to
San Francisco and Oakland, where they didn't have crack
markets, and nobody knew what this stuff was, and they had
wide open markets for themselves. And suddenly crack started
showing up in city after city after city, and oftentimes it was
Crips and Bloods from Los Angeles who were starting these
markets. By 1986, it was all up and down the east coast, and by
1989, it was nationwide.

Today, fortunately, crack use is on a downward trend, but that's

something that isn't due to any great progress we've made in the
so-called "War on Drugs," it's the natural cycle of things. Drug
epidemics generally run from 10 to 15 years. Heroin is now the
latest drug on the upswing.

Now, a lot of people disagreed with this scenario. The New York
Times, the LA Times and the Washington Post all came out and
said, oh, no, that's not so. They said this couldn't have happened
that way, because crack would have happened anyway. Which is
true, somewhat. As I pointed out in the first chapter of my book,
crack was on its way here. But whether it would have happened
the same way, whether it would have happened in South Central,
whether it would have happened in Los Angeles at all first, is a
very different story. If it had happened in Eugene, Oregon first,
it might not have gone anywhere. [Restless shuffling and the
sounds of throats being cleared among the audience.] No
offense, but you folks aren't exactly trend setters up here when it
comes to drug dealers and drug fads. LA is, however. [Soft
laughter and murmuring among the audience.]

You can play "what if" games all you like, but it doesn't change
the reality. And the reality is that this CIA-connected drug ring
played a very critical role in the early 1980s in opening up South
Central to a crack epidemic that was unmatched in its severity
and influence anywhere in the U.S.
One question that I ask people who say, "Oh, I don't believe
this," is, okay, tell me this: why did crack appear in black
neighborhoods first? Why did crack distribution networks
leapfrog from one black neighborhood to other black
neighborhoods and bypass white neighborhoods and bypass
Hispanic neighborhoods and Asian neighborhoods? Our
government and the mainstream media have given us varying
explanations for this phenomenon over the years, and they are
nice, comforting, general explanations which absolve anyone of
any responsibility for why crack is so ethnically specific. One of
the reasons we're told is that, well, it's poverty. As if the only
poor neighborhoods in this country were black neighborhoods.
And we're told it's high teenage unemployment; these kids gotta
have jobs. As if the hills and hollows of Appalachia don't have
teenage unemployment rates that are ten times higher than inner
city Los Angeles. And then we're told that it's loose family
structure -- you know, presuming that there are no white single
mothers out there trying to raise kids on low-paying jobs or
welfare and food stamps. And then we're told, well, it's because
crack is so cheap -- because it sells for a lower price in South
Central than it sells anywhere else. But twenty bucks is twenty
bucks, no matter where you go in the country.

So once you have eliminated these sort of non-sensical

explanations, you are left with two theories which are far less
comfortable. The first theory -- which is not something I
personally subscribe to, but it's out there -- is that there's
something about black neighborhoods which causes them to be
genetically predisposed to drug trafficking. That's a racist
argument that no one in their right mind is advancing publicly,
although I tell you, when I was reading a lot of the stories in the
Washington Post and the New York Times, they were talking
about black Americans being more susceptible to "conspiracy
theories" than white Americans, which is why they believe the
story more. I think that was sort of the underlying current there.
On the other hand, I didn't see any stories about all the white
people who think Elvis is alive still, or that Hitler's brain is
preserved down in Brazil to await the Fourth Reich... [laughter
from the audience] ...which is a particularly white conspiracy
theory, I didn't see any stories in the New York Times about
that...

The other more palatable reason which in my mind comes closer

to the truth, is that someone started bringing cheap cocaine into
black neighborhoods right at the time when drug users began
figuring out how to turn it into crack. And this allowed black
drug dealers to get a head start on every other ethnic group in
terms of setting up distribution systems and trafficking systems.

Now, one thing I've learned about the drug business while
researching this is that in many ways it is the epitome of
capitalism. It is the purest form of capitalism. You have no
government regulation, a wide-open market, a buyer's market --
anything goes. But these things don't spring out of the ground
fully formed. It's like any business. It takes time to grow them. It
takes time to set up networks. So once these distribution
networks got set up and established in primarily South Central
Los Angeles, primarily black neighborhoods, they spread it
along ethnic and cultural lines. You had black dealers from LA
going to black neighborhoods in other cities, because they knew
people there, they had friends there, and that's why you saw
these networks pop up from one black neighborhood to another
black neighborhood.

Now, exactly the same thing happened on the east coast a couple
of years later. When crack first appeared on the east coast, it
appeared in Caribbean neighborhoods in Miami -- thanks largely
to the Jamaicans, who were using their drug profits to fund
political gains back home. It was almost the exact opposite of
what happened in LA in that the politics were the opposite -- but
it was the same phenomenon. And once the Miami market was
saturated, they moved to New York, they moved east, and they
started bringing crack from the east coast towards the middle of
the country.

So it seems to me that if you're looking for the root of your drug

problems in a neighborhood, nothing else matters except the
drugs, and where they're coming from, and how they're getting
there. And all these other reasons I cited are used as explanations
for how crack became popular, but it doesn't explain how the
cocaine got there in the first place. And that's where the contras
came in.

One of the things which these newspapers who dissed my story

were saying was, we can't believe that the CIA would know
about drug trafficking and let it happen. That this idea that this
agency which gets $27 billion a year to tell us what's going on,
and which was so intimately involved with the contras they were
writing their press releases for them, they wouldn't know about
this drug trafficking going on under their noses. But the Times
and the Post all uncritically reported their claims that the CIA
didn't know what was going on, and that it would never permit
its hirelings to do anything like that, as unseemly as drug
trafficking. You know, assassinations and bombings and that sort
of thing, yeah, they'll admit to right up front, but drug dealing,
no, no, they don't do that kind of stuff.

Unfortunately, though, it was true, and what has happened since

my series came out is that the CIA was forced to do an internal
review, the DEA and Justice Department were forced to do
internal reviews, and these agencies that released these reports,
you probably didn't read about them, because they contradicted
everything else these other newspapers had been writing for the
last couple of years, but let me just read you this one excerpt.
This is from a 1987 DEA report. And this is about this drug ring
in Los Angeles that I wrote about. In 1987, the DEA sent
undercover informants inside this drug operation, and they
interviewed one of the principals of this organization, namely
Ivan Torres. And this is what he said. He told the informant:

"The CIA wants to know about drug trafficking, but only for
their own purposes, and not necessarily for the use of law
enforcement agencies. Torres told DEA Confidential Informant
1 that CIA representatives are aware of his drug-related
activities, and that they don't mind. He said they had gone so far
as to encourage cocaine trafficking by members of the contras,
because they know it's a good source of income. Some of this
money has gone into numbered accounts in Europe and Panama,
as does the money that goes to Managua from cocaine
trafficking. Torres told the informant about receiving
counterintelligence training from the CIA, and had avowed that
the CIA looks the other way and in essence allows them to
engage in narcotics trafficking."
This is a DEA report that was written in 1987, when this
operation was still going on. Another member of this
organization who was affiliated with the San Francisco end of it,
said that in 1985 -- and this was to the CIA -- "Cabezas claimed
that the contra cocaine operated with the knowledge of, and
under the supervision of, the CIA. Cabezas claimed that this
drug enterprise was run with the knowledge of CIA agent Ivan
Gómez."

Now, this is one of the stories that I tried to do at the Mercury

News was who this man Ivan Gómez was. This was after my
original series came out, and after the controversy started. I went
back to Central America, and I found this fellow Cabezas and he
told me all about Ivan Gómez. And I came back, I corroborated
it with three former contra officials. Mercury News wouldn't put
it in the newspaper. And they said, "We have no evidence this
man even exists."

Well, the CIA Inspector General's report came out in October,

and there was a whole chapter on Ivan Gómez. And the amazing
thing was that Ivan Gómez admitted in a CIA-administered
polygraph test that he had been engaged in laundering drug
money the same month that this man told me he had been
engaged in it. CIA knew about it, and what did they do?
Nothing. They said okay, go back to work. And they covered it
up for fifteen years.

So, the one thing that I've learned from this whole experience is,
first of all, you can't believe the government -- on anything. And
you especially can't believe them when they're talking about
important stuff, like this stuff. The other thing is that the media
will believe the government before they believe anything.

This has been the most amazing thing to me. You had a situation
where you had another newspaper who reported this
information. The major news organizations in this country went
to the CIA, they went to the Justice Department, and they said,
what about it? And they said, oh, no, it's not true. Take our word
for it. And they went back and put it in the newspaper! Now, I
try to imagine what would happen had reporters come back to
their editors and said, look, I know the CIA is involved in drug
trafficking. And I know the FBI knows about it, and I've got a
confidential source that's telling me that. Can I write a story
about that? What do you think the answer would have been?
[Murmurs of "no" from the audience.] Get back down to the obit
desk. Start cranking out those sports scores. But, if they go to
the government and the government denies something like that,
they'll put it in the paper with no corroboration whatsoever.

And it's only since the government has admitted it that now the
media is willing to consider that there might be a story here after
all. The New York Times, after the CIA report that came out, ran
a story on its front page saying, gosh, the contras were involved
in drugs after all, and gosh, the CIA knew about it.

Now you would think -- at least I would think -- that something

like that would warrant Congressional investigation. We're
spending millions of dollars to find out how many times Bill
Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Why aren't we
interested in how much the CIA knew about drug traffic? Who
was profiting from this drug traffic? Who else knew about it?
And why did it take some guy from a California newspaper by
accident stumbling over this stuff ten years later in order for it to
be important? I mean, what the hell is going on here? I've been a
reporter for almost twenty years. To me, this is a natural story.
The CIA is involved in drug trafficking? Let's know about it.
Let's find out about it. Let's do something about it. Nobody
wants to touch this thing.

And the other thing that came out just recently, which nobody
seems to know about, because it hasn't been reported -- the CIA
Inspector General went before Congress in March and testified
that yes, they knew about it. They found some documents that
indicated that they knew about it, yeah. I was there, and this was
funny to watch, because these Congressmen were up there, and
they were ready to hear the absolution, right? "We had no
evidence that this was going on..." And this guy sort of threw
'em a curve ball and admitted that it had happened.

One of the people said, well geez, what was the CIA's
responsibility when they found out about this? What were you
guys supposed to do? And the Inspector General sort of looked
around nervously, cleared his throat and said, "Well... that's kind
of an odd history there." And Norman Dix from Washington,
bless his heart, didn't let it go at that. He said, "Explain what you
mean by that?" And the Inspector General said, well, we were
looking around and we found this document, and according to
the document, we didn't have to report this to anybody. And they
said, "How come?" And the IG said, we don't know exactly, but
there was an agreement made in 1982 between Bill Casey -- a
fine American, as we all know [laughter from the audience] --
and William French Smith, who was then the Attorney General
of the United States. And they reached an agreement that said if
there is drug trafficking involved by CIA agents, we don't have
to tell the Justice Department. Honest to God. Honest to God.
Actually, this is now a public record, this document. Maxine
Waters just got copies of it, she's putting it on the Congressional
Record. It is now on the CIA's web site, if you care to journey
into that area. If you do, check out the CIA Web Site for Kids,
it's great, I love it. [Laugher from the audience.] I kid you not,
they've actually got a web page for kids.

The other thing about this agreement was, this wasn't just like a
thirty-day agreement -- this thing stayed in effect from 1982
until 1995. So all these years, these agencies had a gentleman's
agreement that if CIA assets or CIA agents were involved in
drug trafficking, it did not need to be reported to the Justice
Department.

So I think that eliminates any questions that drug trafficking by

the contras was an accident, or was a matter of just a few rotten
apples. I think what this said was that it was anticipated by the
Justice Department, it was anticipated by the CIA, and steps
were taken to ensure that there was a loophole in the law, so that
if it ever became public knowledge, nobody would be
prosecuted for it.

The other thing is, when George Bush pardoned -- remember

those Christmas pardons that he handed out when he was on his
way out the door a few years ago? The media focused on old
Caspar Weinberger, got pardoned, it was terrible. Well, if you
looked down the list of names at the other pardons he handed
out, there was a guy named Claire George, there was a guy
named Al Fiers, there was another guy named Joe Fernández.
And these stories sort of brushed them off and said, well, they
were CIA officials, we're not going to say much more about it.
These were the CIA officials who were responsible for the
contra war. These were the men who were running the contra
operation. And the text of Bush's pardon not only pardons them
for the crimes of Iran-contra, it pardons them for everything. So,
now that we know about it, we can't even do anything about it.
They all received presidential pardons.

So where does that leave us? Well, I think it sort of leaves us to

rely on the judgment of history. But that is a dangerous step. We
didn't know about this stuff two years ago; we know about it
now. We've got Congressmen who are no longer willing to
believe that CIA agents are "honorable men," as William Colby
called them. And we've got approximately a thousand pages of
evidence of CIA drug trafficking on the public record finally.

That said, let me tell you, there are thousands of pages more that
we still don't know about. The CIA report that came out in
October was originally 600 pages; by the time we got ahold of
it, it was only 300 pages.

One last thing I want to mention -- Bob Parry, who is a fine

investigative reporter, he runs a magazine in Washington called
I.F. Magazine, and he's got a great website, check it out -- he did
a story about two weeks ago about some of the stuff that was
contained in the CIA report that we didn't get to see. And one of
the stories he wrote was about how there was a second CIA drug
ring in South Central Los Angeles that ran from 1988 to 1991.
This was not even the one I wrote about. There was another one
there. This was classified.

The interesting thing is, it was run by a CIA agent who had
participated in the contra war, and the reason it was classified is
because it is under investigation by the CIA. I doubt very
seriously that we'll ever hear another word about that.

But the one thing that we can do, and the one thing that Maxine
Waters is trying to do, is force the House Intelligence Committee
to hold hearings on this. This is supposed to be the oversight
committee of the CIA. They have held one hearing, and after
they found out there was this deal that they didn't have to report
drug trafficking, they all ran out of the room, they haven't
convened since.

So if you're interested in pursuing this, the thing I would suggest

you do is, call up the House Intelligence Committee in
Washington and ask them when we're going to have another
CIA/contra/crack hearing. Believe me, it'll drive them crazy.
Send them email, just ask them, make sure -- they think
everybody's forgotten about this. I mean, if you look around the
room tonight, I don't think it's been forgotten. They want us to
forget about it. They want us to concentrate on sex crimes,
because, yeah, it's titillating. It keeps us occupied. It keeps us
diverted. Don't let them do it.

Thanks very much for your attention, I appreciate it. We'll do

questions and answers now for as long as you want.

[Robust applause.]
Question and Answer Session

Gary Webb: I've been instructed to repeat the question, so...

Voice From the Audience: You talked about George Bush

pardoning people. Given George Bush's history with the CIA, do
you know when he first knew about this, and what he knew?

Gary Webb: Well, I didn't at the time I wrote the book, I do

now. The question was, when did George Bush first know about
this? The CIA, in its latest report, said that they had prepared a
detailed briefing for the vice president -- I think it was 1985? --
on all these allegations of contra drug trafficking and delivered it
to him personally. So, it's hard for George to say he was out of
the loop on this one.

I'll tell you another thing, one of the most amazing things I
found in the National Archives was a report that had been
written by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa -- I believe it was
1987. They had just busted a Colombian drug trafficker named
Allen Rudd, and they were using him as a cooperating witness.
Rudd agreed to go undercover and set up other drug traffickers,
and they were debriefing him.

Now, let me set the stage for you. When you are being debriefed
by the federal government for use as an informant, you're not
going to go in there and tell them crazy-sounding stories,
because they're not going to believe you, they're going to slap
you in jail, right? What Rudd told them was, that he was
involved in a meeting with Pablo Escobar, who was then the
head of the Medellín cartel. They were working out
arrangements to set up cocaine shipments into South Florida. He
said Escobar started ranting and raving about that damned
George Bush, and now he's got that South Florida Drug Task
Force set up which has really been making things difficult, and
the man's a traitor. And he used to deal with us, but now he
wants to be president and thinks that he's double-crossing us.
And Rudd said, well, what are you talking about? And Escobar
said, we made a deal with that guy, that we were going to ship
weapons to the contras, they were in there flying weapons down
to Columbia, we were unloading weapons, we were getting them
to the contras, and the deal was, we were supposed to get our
stuff to the United States without any problems. And that was
the deal that we made. And now he double-crossed us.

So the U.S. Attorney heard this, and he wrote this panicky memo
to Washington saying, you know, this man has been very reliable
so far, everything he's told us has checked out, and now he's
saying that the Vice President of the United States is involved
with drug traffickers. We might want to check this out. And it
went all the way up -- the funny thing about government
documents is, whenever it passes over somebody's desk, they
have to initial it. And this thing was like a ladder, it went all the
way up and all the way up, and it got up to the head of the
Criminal Division at the Justice Department, and he looked at it
and said, looks like a job for Lawrence Walsh! And so he sent it
over to Walsh, the Iran-contra prosecutor, and he said, here, you
take it, you deal with this. And Walsh's office -- I interviewed
Walsh, and he said, we didn't have the authority to deal with
that. We were looking at Ollie North. So I said, did anybody
investigate this? And the answer was, "no." And that thing sat in
the National Archives for ten years, nobody ever looked at it.

Voice From the Audience: Is that in your book?

Gary Webb: Yeah.

Voice From the Audience: Thank you.

Audience Member #1: Well, first of all, I'd like to thank you for
pursuing this story, you have a lot of guts to do it.

[Applause from the audience.]

Gary Webb: This is what reporters are supposed to do. This is

what reporters are supposed to do. I don't think I was doing
anything special.

Audience Member #1: Still, there's not too many guys like you
that are doing it.

Gary Webb: That's true, they've all still got jobs.

[Laughter, scattered applause.]

Audience Member #1: I just had a couple of questions, the first

one is, I followed the story on the web site, and I thought it was
a really great story, it was really well done. And I noticed that
the San Jose Mercury News seemed to support you for a while,
and then all the sudden that support collapsed. So I was
wondering what your relationship is with your editor there, and
how that all played out, and when they all pulled out the rug
from under you.

Gary Webb: Well, the support collapsed probably after the LA

Times... The Washington [Post] came out first, the New York
Times came out second, and the LA Times came out third, and
they started getting nervous. There's a phenomenon in the media
we all know, it's called "piling on," and they started seeing
themselves getting piled on. They sent me back down to Central
America two more times to do more reporting and I came back
with stories that were even more outrageous than what they
printed in the newspaper the first time. And they were faced with
a situation of, now we're accusing Oliver North of being
involved in drug trafficking. Now we're accusing the Justice
Department of being part and parcel to this. Geez, if we get beat
up over accusing a couple of CIA agents of being involved in
this, what the hell is going to happen now? And they actually
said, I had memos saying, you know, if we run these stories,
there is going to be a firestorm of criticism.

So, I think they took the easy way out. The easy way out was not
to go ahead and do the story. It was to back off the story. But
they had a problem, because the story was true. And it isn't
every day that you're confronted with how to take a dive on a
true story.

They spent several months -- honestly, literally, because I was

getting these drafts back and forth -- trying to figure out how to
say, we don't support this story, even though it's true. And if you
go back and you read the editor's column, you'll see that the
great difficulty that he had trying to take a dive on this thing.
And he ended up talking about "gray areas" that should have
been explored a little more and "subtleties" that we should have
not brushed over so lightly, without disclosing the fact that the
series had originally been four parts and they cut it to three
parts, because "nobody reads four part series' anymore." So, that
was one reason.

The other reason was, you know, one of the things you learn
very quickly when you get into journalism is that there's safety
in numbers. Editors don't like being out there on a limb all by
themselves. I remember very clearly going to press conferences,
coming back, writing a story, sending it in, and my editor calling
up and saying, well gee, this isn't what AP wrote. Or, the
Chronicle just ran their story, and that's not what the Chronicle
wrote. And I'd say, "Fine. Good." And they said, no, we've got to
make it the same, we don't want to be different. We don't want
our story to be different from everybody else's.

And so what they were seeing at the Mercury was, the Big Three
newspapers were sitting on one side of the fence, and they were
out there by themselves, and that just panicked the hell out of
them. So, you have to understand newspaper mentality to
understand it a little bit, but it's not too hard to understand
cowardice, either. I think a lot of that was that they were just
scared as hell to go ahead with the story.

Audience Member #1: Were they able to look you in the eye,
and...
Gary Webb: No. They didn't, they just did this over the phone. I
went to Sacramento.

Audience Member #1: When did you find out about it, and
what did you...

Gary Webb: Oh, they called me up at home, two months after I

turned in my last four stories, and said, we're going to write a
column saying, you know, we're not going ahead with this. And
that's when I jumped in the car and drove up there and said,
what the hell's going on? And I got all these mealy-mouthed
answers, you know, geez, gray areas, subtleties, one thing or
another... But I said, tell me one thing that's wrong with the
story, and nobody could ever point to anything. And today, to
this day, nobody has ever said there was a factual error in that
story.

[Inaudible question from the audience.]

Gary Webb: The question was, the editors are one thing, what
about the readers? Um... who cares about the readers? Honestly.
The reader's don't run the newspaper.

[Another inaudible question from the audience regarding

letters to the editor and boycotts of the newspaper.]

Gary Webb: Well, a number of them did, and believe me, the
newspaper office was flooded with calls and emails. And the
newspaper, to their credit, printed a bunch of them, calling it the
most cowardly thing they'd ever seen. But in the long run, the
readers, you know, don't run the place. And that's the thing about
newspaper markets these days. You folks really don't have any
choice! What else are you going to read? And the editors know
this.

When I started in this business, we had two newspapers in town

where I worked in Cincinnati. And we were deathly afraid that if
we sat on a story for 24 hours, the Cincinnati Inquirer was going
to put it in the paper, and we were going to look like dopes. We
were going to look like we were covering stuff up, we were
going to look like we were protecting somebody. So we were
putting stuff in the paper without thinking about it sometimes,
but we got it in the paper. Now, we can sit on stuff for months,
who's going to find out about it? And even if somebody found
out about it, what are they going to do? That's the big danger
that everybody has sort of missed. These one-newspaper towns,
you've got no choice. You've got no choice. And television?
Television's not going to do it. I mean, they're down filming
animals at the zoo!

[Laughter and applause.]

Audience Member #2: I assume you have talked to John

Cummings, the one that wrote Compromised, that book?

Gary Webb: I talked to Terry Reed, who was the principal

author on that, yeah.

Audience Member #2: Well, that was a well-documented book,

and I had just finished reading this when I happened to look
down and see the headlines on the Sunday paper. And he stated
that Oliver North told him personally that he was a CIA asset
that manufactured weapons.

Gary Webb: Right.

Audience Member #2: When he discovered that they were

importing cocaine, he got out of there. And they chased him
with his family across country for two years trying to catch him.
But he had said in that book that Oliver North told him that Vice
President Bush told Oliver North to dirty Clinton's men with the
drug money. Which I assumed was what Whitewater was all
about, was finding the laundering and trying to find something
on Clinton. Do you know anything about that?

Gary Webb: Yeah, let me sum up your question. Essentially,

you're asking about the goings-on in Mena, Arkansas, because of
the drug operations going on at this little air base in Arkansas
while Clinton was governor down there. The fellow you referred
to, Terry Reed, wrote a book called Compromised which talked
about his role in this corporate operation in Mena which was
initially designed to train contra pilots -- Reed was a pilot -- and
it was also designed after the Boland Amendment went into
effect to get weapons parts to the contras, because the CIA
couldn't provide them anymore. And as Reed got into this
weapons parts business, he discovered that the CIA was shipping
cocaine back through these weapons crates that were coming
back into the United States. And when he blew the whistle on it,
he was sort of sent on this long odyssey of criminal charges
being filed against him, etcetera etcetera etcetera. A lot of what
Reed wrote is accurate as far as I can tell, and a lot of it was
documented.
There is a House Banking Committee investigation that has been
going on now for about three years, looking specifically at
Mena, Arkansas, looking specifically at a drug trafficker named
Barry Seal, who was one of the biggest cocaine and marijuana
importers in the south side of the United States during the 1980s.
Seal was also, coincidentally, working for the CIA, and was
working for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

I don't know how many of you remember this, but one night
Ronnie Reagan got on TV and held up a grainy picture, and said,
here's proof that the Sandanistas are dealing drugs. Look, here's
Pablo Escobar, and they're all loading cocaine into a plane, and
this was taken in Nicaragua. This was the eve of a vote on the
contra aid. That photograph was set up by Barry Seal. The plane
that was used was Seal's plane, and it was the same plane that
was shot down over Nicaragua a couple of years later that
Eugene Hasenfus was in, that broke open the whole Iran-contra
scandal.

The Banking Committee is supposed to be coming out with a

report in the next couple of months looking at the relationship
between Barry Seal, the U.S. government and Clinton's folks.
Alex Cockburn has done a number of stories on this company
called Park-On Meter down in Russellville, Arkansas, that's
hooked up with Clinton's family, hooked up with Hillary's law
firm, that sort of thing. To me, that's a story people ought to be
looking at. I never thought Whitewater was much of a story,
frankly. What I thought the story was about was Clinton's buddy
Dan Lasater, the bond broker down there who was a convicted
cocaine trafficker. Clinton pardoned him on his way to
Washington. Lasater was a major drug trafficker, and Terry
Reed's book claims Lasater was part and parcel with this whole
thing.

Voice From the Audience: Cockburn's newsletter is called

Counterpunch, and he's done a good job of defending you in it.

Gary Webb: Yeah, Cockburn has also written a book called

Whiteout, which is a very interesting look at the history of CIA
drug trafficking. Actually, I think it's selling pretty well itself.
The New York Times hated it, of course, but what else is new?

Audience Member #2: Well I just wanted to mention that he

states also -- I guess it was Terry Reed who was actually doing
the work -- he said Bush was running the whole thing as vice
president.

Gary Webb: I think that George Bush's role in this whole thing
is one of the large unexplored areas of it.

Audience Member #2: Which is why I think Reagan put him in

as vice president, because of his position with the CIA.

Gary Webb: Well, you know, that whole South Florida Drug
Task Force was full of CIA operatives. Full of them. This was
supposed to be our vanguard in the war against cocaine cartels,
and if those Colombians are to be believed, this was the vehicle
that we were using to ship arms and allow cocaine into the
country, this Drug Task Force. Nobody's looked at that. But
there are lots of clues that there's a lot to be dug out.
Audience Member #3: Thank you, Gary. I lost my feature
columnist position at my college paper for writing a satire of
Christianity some years ago, and...

Gary Webb: That'll do it, yeah. [Laughter from the audience.]

Audience Member #3: And I lost my job twice in the last five
years because of my activism in the community, but I got a job
[inaudible]. But my question is, I knew someone in the mid-'80s
who said that he was in the Navy, and that he had information
that the Navy was involved in delivering cocaine to this country.
Another kind of bombshell, I'd like to have you comment on it, I
saw a video some years ago that said the UFO research that's
being done down in the southwest is being funded by drug
money and cocaine dealings by the CIA, and that there are 25
top secret levels of government above the Top Secret category,
and that there are some levels that even the president doesn't
know about. So there's another topic for another book, I just
wanted to have you comment...

Gary Webb: A number of topics for another book. [Laughter

from the audience.] I don't know about the UFO research, but I
do know you're right that we have very little idea how vast the
intelligence community in this country is, or what they're up to. I
think there's a great story brewing -- it's called the ECHELON
program, and it involves the sharing of eavesdropped emails and
cell phone communications, because it is illegal for them to do it
in this country. So they've been going to New Zealand and
Australia and Canada and having those governments eavesdrop
on our conversations and tell us about it. I've read a couple of
stories about it in the English press, and I read a couple of
stories about it in the Canadian press, but I've seen precious little
in the American press. But there's stuff on the Internet that
circulates about that, if you're interested in the topic. I think it's
called the ECHELON program.

Audience Member #4: I'm glad you brought up James Burke

and his Connections, because there are a lot of connections here.
One I didn't hear too much about, and I know you've done a lot
of research on, was how computers and high tech was used by
the Crips and Bloods early on. I lived in south LA prior to this,
knew some of these people, and you're right, they had virtually
no education. And to suddenly have an operation that's computer
literate, riding out of Bakersfield, Fresno, on north and then east
in a very quick period -- I'm still learning the computer, I'm
probably as old as you are, or older -- so I'd like to hear
something on that. The whole dislocation of south LA that
occurred -- the Watts Festival, the whole empowerment of the
black community was occurring beginning in the late '60s and
into the early '70s and mid-'70s, and then collapses into a sea of
flipping demographics, and suddenly by 1990 it is El
Salvadoran-dominated. And that's another curious part of this
equation as we talk about drugs.

Gary Webb: Well, that's quite a bevy of things there. As far as

the sophistication of the Crips and the Bloods, the one thing that
I probably should have mentioned was that when Danilo
Blandón went down to South Central to start selling this dope,
he had an M.B.A. in marketing. So he knew what he was doing.
His job for the Somoza government was setting up wholesale
markets for agricultural products. He'd received an M.B.A.
thanks to us, actually -- we helped finance him, we helped send
him to the University of Bogata to get his M.B.A. so he could go
back to Nicaragua, and he actually came to the United States to
sell dope to the gangs. So this was a very sophisticated
operation.

One of the money launderers from this group was a macro-

economist -- his uncle, Orlando Murillo, was on the Central
Bank of Nicaragua. The weapons advisor they had was a guy
who'd been a cop for fifteen years. They had another weapons
advisor who had been a Navy SEAL. You don't get these kinds
of people by putting ads in the paper. This is not a drug ring that
just sort of falls together by chance. This is like an all-star game.
Which is why I suspect more and more that this thing was set up
by a higher authority than a couple of drug dealers.

Audience Member #5: Hi Gary, I just want to thank you for

going against the traffic on this whole deal. I'm in the journalism
school up at U. of O., and I'm interested in the story behind the
story. I was hoping you could share some anecdotes about the
kind of activity that you engaged in to get the story. For
example, when you get off a plane in Nicaragua, what do you
do? Where do you start? How do you talk to "Freeway" Ricky?
How do you go against a government stonewall?

Gary Webb: The question is, how do you do a story like this,
essentially. Well, thing I've always found is, if you go knock on
somebody's door, they're a lot less apt to slam it in your face
than if you call them up on the telephone. So, the reason I went
down to Nicaragua was to go knock on doors. I didn't go down
there and just step off a plane -- I found a fellow down in
Nicaragua and we hired him as a stringer, a fellow named
George Hidell who is a marvelous investigative reporter, he
knew all sorts of government officials down there. And I speak
no Spanish, which was another handicap. George speaks like
four languages. So, you find people like that to help you out.

With these drug dealers, you know, it's amazing how willing
they are to talk. I did a series while I was in Kentucky on
organized crime in the coal industry. And it was about this mass
of stock swindlers who had looted Wall Street back in the '60s
and moved down to Kentucky in the '70s while the coal boom
was going on, during the energy shortage. The lesson I learned
in that thing -- I thought these guys would never talk to me, I
figured they'd be crazy to talk to a reporter about the scams they
were pulling. But they were happy to talk about it, they were
flattered that you would come to them and say, hey, tell me
about what you do. Tell me your greatest knock-off. Those guys
would go on forever! So, you know, everybody, no matter what
they do, they sort of have pride in their work... [Laughter from
the audience.] And, you know, I found that when you appeared
interested, they would be happy to tell you.

The people who lied to me, the people who slammed doors in
my face, were the DEA and the FBI. The DEA called me down
-- I wrote about this in the book -- they had a meeting, and they
were telling me that if I wrote this story, I was going to help
drug traffickers bring drugs into the country, and I was going to
get DEA agents killed, and this, that and the other thing, all of
which was utterly bullshit. So that's the thing -- just ask. There's
really no secret to it.
Audience Member #6: I'd like to ask a couple of questions very
quickly. The first one is, if you wouldn't mind being a reference
librarian for a moment -- there was the Golden Triangle. I was
just wondering if you've ever, in your curiosity about this,
touched on that -- the drug rings and the heroin trade out of
Southeast Asia. And the second one is about the fellow from the
Houston Chronicle, I don't remember his name right off, but you
know who I'm talking about, if you could just touch on that a
little bit...

Gary Webb: Yes. The first question was about whether I ever
touched on what was going on in the Golden Triangle.
Fortunately, I didn't have to -- there's a great book called The
Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred McCoy, which is
sort of a classic in CIA drug trafficking lore. I don't think you
can get any better than that. That's a great reference in the
library, you can go check it out. McCoy was a professor at the
University of Wisconsin who went to Laos during the time that
the secret war in Laos was going on, and he wrote about how the
CIA was flying heroin out on Air America. That's the thing that
really surprised me about the reaction to my story was, it's not
like I invented this stuff. There's a long, long history of CIA
involvement in drug traffic which Cockburn gets into in
Whiteout.

And the second question was about Pete Brewton -- there was a
reporter in Houston for the Houston Post named Pete Brewton
who did the series -- I think it was '91 or '92 -- on the strange
connections between the S&L collapses, particularly in Texas,
and CIA agents. And his theory was that a lot of these collapses
were not mismanagement, they were intentional. These things
were looted, with the idea that a lot of the money was siphoned
off to fund covert operations overseas. And Brewton wrote this
series, and it was funny, because after all hell broke loose on my
story, I called him up, and he said, "Well, I was waiting for this
to happen to you." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "I was
exactly like you are. I'd been in this business for twenty years,
I'd won all sorts of awards, I'd lectured in college journalism
courses, and I wrote a series that had these three little letters C-I-
A in it. And suddenly I was unreliable, and I couldn't be trusted,
and Reed Irvine at Accuracy In Media was writing nasty things
about me, and my editor had lost confidence in me, so I quit the
business and went to law school."

Brewton wrote a book called George Bush, CIA and the Mafia.
It's hard to find, but it's worth looking up if you can find it. It's
all there, it's all documented. See, the difference between his
story and my story was, we put ours out on the web, and it got
out. Brewton's story is sort of confined to the printed page, and I
think the Washington Journalism Review actually wrote a story
about, how come nobody's writing about this, nobody's picking
up this story. Nobody touched this story, it just sort of died. And
the same thing would have happened with my series, had we not
had this amazing web page. Thank God we did, or this thing
would have just slipped underneath the waves, and nobody
would have ever heard about it.

Audience Member #7: I'm glad you're here. I guess the CIA,
there was something I read in the paper a couple of years ago,
that said the CIA is actually murdering people, and they
admitted it, they don't usually do that.
Gary Webb: It's a new burst of honesty from the new CIA.

Audience Member #7: They'll murder us with kindness. In the

Chicago police force, there were about 10 officers who were
kicked off the police force for doing drugs or selling drugs, and
George Bush or something... I heard that he had a buddy who
had a lot of money in drug testing equipment, so that's one
reason everybody has to pee in a cup now... [Laughter from the
audience.] The other thing I found, there was a meth lab close to
here, and somebody who wasn't even involved with it, he was
paralyzed... And as you know, we have the "Just Say No to
Drugs" deal... What do you think we can do to stop us, the
People, from being hypnotized once again from all these
shenanigans, doing other people injury in terms of these kinds of
messages, at the same time they're selling. Because all this
money is being spent for all this...

Gary Webb: I guess the question is, what could you do to keep
from being hypnotized by the media message, specifically on the
Drug War? Is that what you're talking about?

Audience Member #7: Yeah, or all the funds... like, there's

another thing here with the meth lab, they say we'll kind of turn
people in...

Gary Webb: Oh yeah, the nation of informers.

Audience Member #7: Yeah.

Gary Webb: That's something I have to laugh about -- up until I

think '75 or '76, probably even later than that, you could go to
your doctor and get methamphetamine. I mean, there were
housewives by the hundreds of thousands across the United
States who were taking it every day to lose weight, and now all
the sudden it was the worst thing on the face of the earth. That's
one thing I got into in the book, was the sort of crack hysteria in
1986 that prompted all these crazy laws that are still on the
books today, and the 100:1 sentencing ratio... I don't know how
many of you saw, on PBS a couple of nights back, there was a
great show on informants called "Snitch." [Murmurs of
recognition from the audience.] Yeah, on Frontline. That was
very heartening to see, because I don't think ten years ago that it
would have stood a chance in hell of getting on the air.

What I'm seeing now is that a lot of people are finally waking up
to the idea that this "drug war" has been a fraud since the get-go.
My personal opinion is, I think the main purpose of this whole
drug war was to sort of erode civil liberties, very slowly and
very gradually, and sort of put us down into a police state.
[Robust burst of applause from the audience.] And we're pretty
close to that. I've got to hand it to them, they've done a good job.
We have no Fourth Amendment left anymore, we're all peeing in
cups, and we're all doing all sorts of things that our parents
probably would have marched in the streets about.

The solution to that is to read something other than the daily

newspaper, and turn off the TV news. I mean, I'm sorry, I hate to
say that, but that's mind-rot. You've got to find alternative
sources of information. [Robust applause.]
Voice From the Audience: How can you say that it was all a
chain reaction, that it was not done deliberately, and on the other
hand say it has at the same time deliberately eroded our rights?

Gary Webb: Well, the question was, how can I say on one hand
it was a chain reaction, and on the other hand say the drug war
was set up deliberately to erode our rights. I mean, you're talking
about sort of macro versus micro. And I do not give the CIA that
much credit, that they could plan these vast conspiracies down
through the ages and have them work -- most of them don't.

What I'm saying is, you have police groups, you have police
lobbying groups, you have prison guard groups -- they seize
opportunities when they come along. The Drug War has given
them a lot of opportunities to say, okay, now let's lengthen
prison sentences. Why? Well, because if you keep people in jail
longer, you need more prison guards. Let's build more prisons.
Why? Well, people get jobs, prison guards get jobs. The police
stay in business. We need to fund more of them. We need to give
bigger budgets to the correctional facilities. This is all very
conscious, but I don't think anybody sat in a room in 1974 and
said, okay, by 1995, we're going to have X number of Americans
locked up or under parole supervision. I don't think they mind --
you know, I think they like that. But I don't think it was a
conscious effort. I think it was just one bad idea, after another
bad idea, compounded with a stupid idea, compounded with a
really stupid idea. And here we are. So I don't know if that
answers your question or not...

Audience Member #8: To me, the Iran-contra story was one of

the most interesting and totally frustrating things. And the more
information, the more about it I heard -- we don't know anything
about it, I mean, if you look for any official data, they deny
everything. And to see Ollie North, the upstanding blue-eyed
American, standing there lying through his teeth, and we knew
it... [Inaudible comment, "before Congress and the President"?]
What galls me is that these people who are guilty of high crimes
and misdemeanors are now getting these enormous pensions,
and we have to pay for these bums. It sickens me!

Gary Webb: Right.

Audience Member #8: And I actually have a question -- this is

my question, by the way, I know you have a thousand other
questions [laughter from the audience] -- but the one that stays
with me, and has always bothered me, was the Christic Institute,
and I thought it was fantastic. And they were hit with this
enormous lawsuit, and they had to bail out. This needs to be
["rehired"?] because they knew what they were doing, they had
all the right answers, and they were run out of office, so to say,
in disgrace, because of this lawsuit.

Gary Webb: The question was about the Christic Institute, and
about how the Iran-contra controversy is probably one of the
worst scandals. I agree with you, I think the Iran-contra scandal
was worse than Watergate, far worse than this nonsense we're
doing now. But I'll tell you, I think the press played a very big
part in downplaying that scandal. One of the people I
interviewed for the book was a woman named Pam Naughton,
who was one of the best prosecutors that the Iran-contra
committee had. And I asked her, why -- you know, it was also
the first scandal that was televised, and I remember watching
them at night. I would go to work and I'd set the VCR, and I'd
come home at night and I'd watch the hearings. Then I'd pick up
the paper the next morning, and it was completely different! And
I couldn't figure it out, and this has bothered me all these years.

So when I got Pam Naughton on the phone, I said, what the hell
happened to the press corps in Washington during the Iran-
contra scandal? And she said, well, I can tell you what I saw.
She said, every day, we would come out at the start of this
hearings, and we would lay out a stack of documents -- all the
exhibits we were going to introduce -- stuff that she thought was
extremely incriminating, front page story after front page story,
and they'd sit them on a table. And she said, every day the press
corps would come in, and they'd say hi, how're you doing, blah
blah blah, and they'd go sit down in the front row and start
talking about, you know, did you see the ball game last night,
and what they saw on Johnny Carson. And she said one or two
reporters would go up and get their stack of documents and go
back and write about it, and everybody else sat in the front row,
and they would sit and say, okay, what's our story today? And
they would all agree what the story was, and they'd go back and
write it. Most of them never even looked at the exhibits.

And that's why I say it was the press's fault, because there was
so much stuff that came out of those hearings. That used to just
drive me crazy, you would never see it in the newspaper. And I
don't think it's a conspiracy -- if anything, it's a conspiracy of
stupidity and laziness. I talked to Bob Parry about this -- when
he was working for Newsweek covering Iran-contra, they weren't
even letting him go to the hearings. He had to get transcripts
messengered to him at his house secretly, so his editors wouldn't
find out he was actually reading the transcripts, because he was
writing stories that were so different from everybody else's.

Bob Parry tells a story of being at a dinner party with Bobby

Inman from the CIA, the editor of Newsweek, and all the
muckity-mucks -- this was his big introduction into Washington
society. And they were sitting at the dinner table in the midst of
the Iran-contra thing, talking about everything but Iran-contra.
And Bob said he had the bad taste of bringing up the Iran-contra
hearing and mentioning one particularly bad aspect of it. And he
said, the editor of Newsweek looked at him and said, "You know,
Bob, there are just some things that it's better the country just
doesn't know about." And all these admirals and generals sitting
around the table all nodded their heads in agreement, and they
wanted to talk about something else.

That's the attitude. That's the attitude in Washington. And that's

the attitude of the Washington press corps, and nowadays it's
even worse than that, because now, if you play the game right,
you get a TV show. Now you've got the McLaughlin Group.
Now you get your mug on CNN. You know. And that's how they
keep them in line. If you're a rabble rouser, and a shit-stirrer,
they don't want your type on television. They want the pundits.

The other question was about the Christic Institute. They had it
all figured out. The Christic Institute had this thing figured out.
They filed suit in May of 1986, alleging that the Reagan
administration, the CIA, this sort of parallel government was
going on. Oliver North was involved in it, you had the Bay of
Pigs Cubans that were involved in it down in Costa Rica, they
had names, they had dates, and they got murdered. And the
Reagan administration's line was, they're a bunch of left-wing
liberal crazies, this was conspiracy theory. If you want to see
what they really thought, go to Oliver North's diaries, which are
public -- the National Security Archive has got them, you can
get them -- all he was writing about, after the Christic Institute's
suit was filed, was how we've got to shut this thing down, how
we have to discredit these witnesses, how we've got to get this
guy set up, how we've got to get this guy out of the country...
They knew that the Christic Institute was right, and they were
deathly afraid that the American public was going to find out
about it.

I am convinced that the judge who was hearing the case was part
and parcel to the problem. He threw the case out of court and
fined the Christic Institute, I think it was $1.3 million, for even
bringing the lawsuit. It was deemed "frivolous litigation." And it
finally bankrupted them. And they went away.

But that's the problem when you try to take on the government
in its own arena, and the federal courts are definitely part of its
own arena. They make the rules. And in cases like that, you
don't stand a chance in hell, it won't happen.

Voice From the Audience: But if you cannot get the truth in the
courts, if you cannot write it in the papers, then what do you do?

Gary Webb: You do it yourself. You do it yourself. You've got

to start rebuilding an information system on your own. And
that's what's going on. It's very small, but it's happening. People
are talking to each other through newsgroups on the Internet.
People are doing Internet newsletters.
Voice From the Audience: Do you have a website?

Emcee: Let's use the mike, let's use the mike.

Gary Webb: The question is, do I have a website. No, I don't,

but I'm building one.

[Inaudible question from the audience.]

Gary Webb: Well, let's let these people who have been standing
in line...

[Commotion, murmuring. Someone calls out, "Please use the

mike."]

Audience Member #9: When you mentioned prisons a moment

ago, I couldn't help but remember that it is America's fastest-
growing industry, the "prison industry" -- which is a hell of a
phrase unto itself. But it seems that the CIA had people aligned
throughout Central America at one point, and El Salvador, with
the contras, and in Honduras and Nicaragua, and in Panama,
Manuel Noriega...

Gary Webb: Our "man in Panama," that's right.

Audience Member #9: Yeah. But something went wrong with

him, and he got pinched in public. And I'm interested to know
what you think about that.

Gary Webb: The question is about Manuel Noriega, who was

our "man in Panama" for so many years. What happened to
Noriega is that -- I don't think it had anything to do with the fact
that he was a drug trafficker, because we knew that for years.
What it had to do with was what is going to happen at the end of
this year, which is when control of the Panama Canal goes over
to the Panamanians. If you read the New York Times story that
Seymour Hersh wrote back in June of 1986 that exposed
Noriega publicly as a drug trafficker and money launderer, there
were some very telling phrases in it. All unsourced, naturally,
you know -- unattributed comments from high-ranking
government officials -- but they talked about how they were
nervous that Noriega had become unreliable. And with control
of the Panama Canal reverting to the Panamanian government,
they were very nervous at the idea of having somebody as
"unstable" as Noriega running the country at that point. And I
think that was a well-founded fear. You've got a major drug
trafficker controlling a major maritime thoroughway. I can see
the CIA being nervous about being cut out of the business.
[Laughter from the audience.]

But I think that's what the whole thing with Noriega was about
-- they wanted him out of there, because they wanted somebody
that they could control a little more closely in power in Panama
for when the canal gets reverted back to them.

Audience Member #9: Was there much of a profit difference

between Nicaragua and Panama as far as the drugs went?

Gary Webb: Well, what Noriega had done was sort of create an
international banking center for drug money. That was his part
of it. Nicaragua was nothing ever than just a trans-shipment
point. Central America was never anything more than a trans-
shipment point. Columbia Peru and Bolivia were the producers,
and the planes needed a place to refuel, and that's all that Central
America ever was. The banking was all done in Panama.

Audience Member #10: You talk about how they sat on their
stories, the newspapers? Why did they suddenly decide to
pursue the stories?

Gary Webb: Which stories are these?

Audience Member #10: The stories about the crack dealing and
the CIA. Why did they suddenly decide that, well, actually...

Gary Webb: The question was -- correct me if I'm wrong -- the

question raised the fact that the other newspapers didn't do
anything about this story for a while, and then after I wrote it
they came after me. Is that what you're asking?

Audience Member #10: Well, yeah, and then eventually the

CIA admitted it... and I mean, why are people asking, it sat for a
long time, and then suddenly everyone was on it. What was the
turning point that made them decide to pursue it?

Gary Webb: The turning point that made them decide to pursue
the story was the fact that it had gotten out over the Internet, and
people were calling them up saying, why don't you have the
story in your newspaper? You know, I don't think the subject
matter frightened the major media as much as the fact that a
little newspaper in Northern California was able to set the
national agenda for once. And people were marching in the
streets, people were holding hearings in Washington, they were
demanding Congressional hearings, you had John Deutch, the
CIA director, go down on that surreal trip down to South Central
to convince everyone that everything was okay... [Laughter from
the audience.] And all of this was happening without the big
media being involved in it at all. And the reason that happened
was because we had an outlet -- we had the web. And the people
at the Mercury News did a fantastic job on this website.

And so, news was marching on without them. There's a

professor at the University of Wisconsin who's done a paper on
the whole "Dark Alliance" thing, and her thesis is that this story
was shut down more because of how it got out than for what it
actually said. That it was an attempt by the major media to
regain control of the Internet, and to suggest that unless they're
the ones who are putting it out, it's unreliable. Which I think you
see in a lot of stories. The mainstream press gladly promotes the
idea that you can't believe anything you read on the Internet, it's
all kooks, it's all conspiracy theorists... And there are, I mean, I
admit, there are a lot of them out there, but it's not all false. But
the idea that we're being taught is, unless it's got our name on it,
you can't believe it. So they can retain control of the means of
communication anyway.

Audience Member #11: You mentioned Iran-contra, which was

private foreign policy in defiance of Congress, which means it
was a high crime. From there, we get more drugs, we get erosion
of civil liberties and the loss of the Fourth Amendment, which
you mentioned. And we have to get that back, because without
it, we're just commodities to one another. So what I'd like to ask
you is, what are you working on now? And do you have your
own journalistic chain of reaction? Are you going to be doing
something that connects back to this?
Gary Webb: The question is what am I doing now -- believe it
or not, I'm working for the government. [Laughter from the
audience.] I work for the California legislature, and I do
investigations of state agencies. I just wrote a piece for Esquire
magazine which should be out in April on another fabulous DEA
program that they're running. Actually, part of it's based here in
Oregon, called Operation Pipeline. That story is coming out in
April, and Esquire told me they want me to write more stuff for
them, they want me to do some investigative reporting for them,
so I'll be working for them. And I'm putting together another
book proposal, and a couple of other things. I'm not going to
work for newspapers any more, I learned my lesson.

Audience Member #12: A year ago the editor of your

newspaper was here to speak, sponsored by the University of
Oregon School of Journalism. Before I got up here, I took a
casual look around -- I don't know all of the members of the
journalism faculty, but I didn't recognize any. We did have a
student here who got up and asked a question. That leads to this
question: I'd like, if you don't mind, to ask if there is someone
from the University of Oregon journalism faculty here, would
they mind being acknowledged and raising their hand?

Gary Webb: All right, there's one back there.

Audience Member #12: There is one. Okay. [Applause from

the audience.] I'm pleased to see it. There is that one person. My
point is, I think much of what you've said this evening
constitutes an indictment -- and a valid indictment -- of the
university journalism programs in this country. [Applause.]
Most Americans and I believe -- and I'm interested in your
reaction -- that it reinforces that indictment when we see, to that
person's credit, that she is the only faculty member from our
school of journalism to hear you tonight.

Gary Webb: I think the general question was about the state of
the journalism schools. The one thing journalism schools don't
teach, by and large, is investigative reporting. They teach
stenography very well. That's why I consider most of journalism
today to be stenography. You go to a press conference, you write
down the quotes accurately, you come back, you don't provide
any context, you don't provide any perspective, because that gets
into analysis, and heavens knows, we don't want any analysis in
our newspapers.

But you report things accurately, you report things fairly, and
even if it's a lie you put it in the newspaper, and that's considered
journalism. I don't consider that journalism, I consider that
stenography. And that is the way they teach journalism in
school, that's the way I was taught. Unless you go to a very
different journalism school from the kinds that most kids go to,
that's what you're taught. Now, there are specialized journalism
schools, there are master's programs like the Kiplinger Program
at Ohio State, that's very good.

So, I'm not saying that all journalism schools are bad, but they
don't teach you to be journalists. They discourage you from
doing that, by and large. And I don't think it's the fault of the
journalism professors, I just think that's the way things have
been taught in this country for so long, that they just do it
automatically. I'd be interested in hearing the professor's
thoughts about it, but that's sort of the way I look at things. I
spent way too many years in journalism school. I kind of got
shed of those notions after I got out in the real world.

[End of transcript.]