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How the CIA Created the Crack Epidemic

Revolutionary Worker #873, September 15, 1996

In the early 1980s, a new drug, crack cocaine, appeared on the streets—at a time when many youth in the inner city were being forced into the underground economy in order to survive. New burdens were being added onto the poor. In a situation of intolerable poverty, unemployment, lousy health care, falling apart schools and crumbling housing, the spread of crack cocaine brought intensified conflicts between street organizations and the painful desperation of people addicted to the pipe. The government launched brutal new invasions by the police—a so-called “war on drugs”— using the spread of crack as an excuse.

This war on the people has resulted in an epidemic of police brutality and murder, the mass incarceration of Black and Latino youth, and the criminalization of a generation.It was widely believed that the sudden epidemic of crack cocaine into the oppressed communities—like the introduction of heroin in the Vietnam war era—could be traced to the authorities themselves.Now new facts are in, and it is revealed that this is precisely what has been going on.An exposé by reporter Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News reveals that agents working with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sold tons of cocaine in the United States during those years and shipped the profits to the CIA-run army of Nicaraguan Contras. Webb based his work on “recently declassified reports, federal court testimony, undercover tapes, court records here and abroad and hundreds of hours of interviews over the past 12 months.” He was assisted by journalists Georg Hodel and Leonore Delgado.Webb’s report uncovered the names of the Contra operatives who bought tons of cocaine from the Colombian drug cartels and passed it on to various drug-dealing networks within the U.S. It documents how Contra drug dealers met with a major CIA agent before starting their operation. It reveals how the Salvadoran government air force flew the cocaine into Texas airfields. It details how tons of cheap cocaine flowed like a river into ghetto streets—first in Los Angeles and then beyond. And finally, Webb’s report documents the repeated U.S. government efforts to protect these operations.It has been a long struggle to break through the government coverup of this CIA cocaine traffic. During the congressional Iran-Contra hearings in the late 1980s, two people stood up in the audience and shouted “What about the cocaine!?” They were arrested and sentenced to over a year in prison.Long-time readers of our newspaper, the Revolutionary Workerwill remember many articles, especially in 1988 and 1989, exposing the CIA’s use of cocaine to finance their secret war in Central America. Our reports were based on the work of many other people—including the Christic Institute, columnist Alexander Cockburn, journalists Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan, filmmaker Barbara Trent (who created the film Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra-Affair), and Professor Peter Dale Scott (author of The Iran Contra Connection—Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era).

Now an important new piece of the puzzle has fallen into place: Gary Webb documents that the CIA’s agents did more than participate in the cocaine trade. He reveals in detail the role they played in creating the crack explosion that has caused so much suffering among the people.Here is a U.S. government that publicly preached “Just Say No!” and sent an army of police to attack the people in the name of a “war on drugs.” And meanwhile, this same government had for years been at the nerve center of the operations that brought in the drugs!

Many people have suspected all along that the U.S. government was behind the crack explosion. Now here are the facts.In this article, we will pass on some of the information Gary Webb uncovered. And we will place it in the context of information documented by others about the role of the CIA and the Reagan/Bush White House in the cocaine trade.The full series by Gary Webb, called “Dark Alliance,” appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on August 18, 19 and 20. It is available on the Internet at http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs/.

The Nicaraguan Contras—
a Covert, Self-Financing
CIA Operation

http://revcom.us/a/firstvol/crack.htm