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Crack cocaine cia Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nydailynews/30232500.htmlhttp://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nydailynews/30232500.html
CRACK-CONTRA STORY WON'T DIE
New York Daily News; New York; Jun 16, 1998; JUAN GONZALEZ;
Copyright Daily News, L.P. Jun 16, 1998
A STANDING-ROOM-ONLY crowd of several hundred people jammed a meeting hall in midtown Manhattan on Thursday night to hear the details of a news story that refuses to die.
The story is about the birth of the crack epidemic in this country and its connection to Nicaraguan drug traffickers in San Francisco who funneled their profits to the CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan Contras in Central America in the early 1980s.
The story was told in a series of articles, "Dark Alliance," that appeared in August 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News. Written by investigative reporter Gary Webb, it sparked an uproar in black communities across the nation.
As a result, thousands of blacks in Los Angeles marched in protest, federal officials launched three separate probes of Webb's allegations and a former CIA director ventured to a community meeting in South Central L.A. to personally deny the charges.
It didn't take long for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times to pan both the series and Webb. Each relied on allegations by unnamed CIA or other federal sources to "prove" how Webb's account was exaggerated. One newspaper even published accounts of how black leaders who believed Webb's account were falling into the conspiracy paranoia that is supposed to be a special affliction of black people.
Eventually, the executive editor of the Mercury News publicly acknowledged several shortcomings in the series and said it had "oversimplified" matters. Webb felt forced to resign when his editors refused to publish his followup articles.
So there you have it. A discredited story. A disgraced reporter. And a victim, the Central Intelligence Agency, saved from slander. Well, not quite.
Webb and many who believe his story was right on target have kept digging.
One of those is Rep. Maxine Waters, head of the Congressional Black Caucus, who has represented South Central Los Angeles for more than a decade.
Waters wondered for years how the crack epidemic spread like wildfire in the mid-1980s, decimating her district and other inner cities.
Because of her pressure, a congressional subcommittee learned in March of a secret agreement between the CIA and the Justice Department to overlook drug trafficking by the CIA's outside operatives.
Last month, she received declassified copies of 1982 letters between former CIA Director William Casey and former Attorney General William French Smith spelling out the secret agreement.
A Feb. 11, 1982, letter from Smith to Casey relieved the CIA of having to report cases where its informants or outside operatives trafficked in drugs.
A month later, Casey wrote the attorney general saying that the exemption "strikes the proper balance between enforcement of the law and protection of intelligence sources and methods."
"This is unbelievable," Waters said. "There is no such thing as a "proper balance' when intelligence personnel and assets are involved in drug trafficking."
In late 1982, Congress ordered an end to all funding of a secret guerrilla army to overthrow the Sandinistas. The Contras, however, continued to operate, thanks to Col. Oliver North's fund-raising, and to the Contras' own drug trafficking.
The substance of Webb's series is that one of those Contra drug rings provided the bulk of the cocaine to a street gang in South Central L.A. led by Freeway Ricky Ross. Through that cheap supply, Ross became the city's biggest dope dealer and one of the earliest manufacturers of crack.
A quick newspaper series could never capture the saga Webb has uncovered. After two more years of digging, he has put his findings into a 500-page book.
The CIA issued a 150-page report denying many of the allegations. But a second 600-page report by the agency remains classified, as does a 400-page investigation by the Justice Department.
EVERYWHERE HE SPEAKS these days, Webb draws a huge crowd. Those who came out Thursday night were a cross-section of New Yorkers, among them Roger Green, the assemblyman from Brooklyn, and Mike Levine, a retired hero federal narcotics agent.
The story the mainstream press refused to touch just refuses to die. If the government wants to bury the story for good, why not release the 1,000 pages of classified investigations?
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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
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