DARK ALLIANCE: THE CIA, THE CONTRAS, AND THE CRACK COCAINE EXPLOSION - GARY WEBB

Man they did Webb dirty. Not just the salient facts that they, probably, literally killed him (offically a suicide by two shots to the head, but I’m not here to litigate that particular matter), and certainly ruined his career and life but they also managed to shape the public perception of his work to a remarkable degree. If you don’t know, Webb is famous for writing the Dark Alliance series of newspaper articles in the San Jose Mercury Sun which, in the popular imagination, was about the CIA causing the crack boom by facilitating the sell of cocaine as part of scheme to get money to a rebel group/death-squad in Nicaragua that they supported for anti-communism reasons. I didn’t even know he’d expanded it into a whole book until recently. At this point, the accusations about the CIA and cocaine are old and sort of thought of as either a crazy, reckless, stupid scheme some cowboys implimented on a short-term ad hoc basis long ago, or street rumor bullshit printed by an unscruplous, unhinged and paranoid “journalist.” The truth is significantly more insane. This book is quite long, at 500+ pages, well-sourced and sprawling. It pretty definitely lays out a clear path that starts with CIA created  “rebel” and runs through a series of guys who are all combination gun-runners, drug-dealers, terrorists, DEA agents, CIA-affilates before landing with Freeway Rick Ross, a major LA cocaine dealer in the early crack era who moved at least 200-300 kilos through this pipeline. This seems basically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and isn’t even really denied. The CIA, in the few fleeting moments when they’ve been forced into any sort of accountability or oversight, will begrudgingly conceded that some people they did business with probably did sell a bunch a coke but not with their (the CIA’s) knowledge or participation. Webb not only definitely proves that this obviously isn’t the case, the book is chock-a-blocked with instance after instance where investigations by other agencies (like the FBI or DEA) into the drug-dealings of CIA connected dealers are squelched, to name one example, he sprawls this thing out in a million different directions, all of which could have been their own books. There’s a side-story about a drug route into Mena, Arkansas and the involvement of then-Governor Bill Clinton and those associated with him, the “Frogman” case in San Francisco, a scheme to use an Indian reservation near Riverside to manufacture guns for smuggling to the Contras, the suicide/murder (which, sadly, acts as a bit of foreshadowing for Webb’s own life) of journalist Joseph Daniel Casolaro who was also working on aspects of this story. We get glimpses at the CIA’s previous attempts to merge secret wars with drug dealing, using opium/heroin sales to finance secret anti-communists forces in Laos, tell of a similar cocaine-to-fund-rebels scheme being run at the same time in Miami but involving Jamacians (part of which is recounted, fictionally, in Brief History of Seven Killings), a side-story about the US’s attempt to deal with the Medellian cartel to get money and guns to the Contras (this one includes an anecdote about Escobar himself telling people he had, as blackmail, a photo of George H. W. Bush shaking hands with Jorge Ochoa in front of suitcases of money), and an interesting sociology and history of crack (including how the whole epidemic resembled a similar wave of smokable cocaine devastation in Peru). To me the most fruitful, or the thread that I’d most like explored in further depth are about the weapons sold to the gangs (the same shady, CIA affiliated gun-runners like Ron Lister or Danilo Blandon sold high-powered weaponry and surveillance equipment to the Contras at the CIA’s direction, but also sold these very same military-grade weapons to gangs, which greatly exacerbated urban violence) in LA and elsewhere and to what extent we’re looking at a sort of American strategy of tension. Even at the length and depth of this book, there is so, so much that we needed to get investigated further by other journalists. Of course, we did not get this. The last part of this book is about the reaction to his piece, how the mainstream media, especially the Los Angeles Times went out of their way to denounce and bury the story (as an interesting aside, Tucker Carlson wrote one of his first notable pieces of journalism, after “failing” to get into the CIA, was a Webb takedown) instead of following up. Incredibly predictable and depressing. This book is much more thorough and definitive than it has the reputation of being. It contains a pretty startling image of how power and politics actually work in our world and engenders all sorts of questions about the world since the book has been written (the 2 decade war in Afghanistan springs to mind for some reason). One of the most grounded, riveting, informative and useful books in the on-going CIA reading group of one. If this sort of stuff interests you at all, read this, I promise you that you don’t know the whole story. 86 vials of crack