In 1984, stories began to emerge about a secret Nicaraguan Contra network run by a Lieutenant Colonel in the basement of the White House and financed by the importation of large amounts of cocaine. It was soon revealed that the name of the Lieutenant Colonel was Oliver North and that there was in fact a secret illegal network that was pieced together by the Central Intelligence Agency. 

In the fall of 1987, the Iran-Contra hearings revealed a wide-ranging operation with CIA assets in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and in Honduras at the Nicaraguan border. While the congressional hearings revealed certain aspects of this operation, the question of the drug connection was actively suppressed by Democrats and Republicans alike. Despite numerous entries in Oliver North's own notebook about the Contra's involvement in drugs; field notes from his eyes and ears in the field, Rob Owen; and numerous stories from disgruntled Contras about such operations, this information was ignored. 

Several years later still, Sen. John Kerrey held hearings under the auspices of the Subcommittee on Narcotics and International Terrorism. Those hearings revealed many connections between major Colombian cocaine traffickers such as George Morales and the Contras. Morales, a world champion speed boat racer, owned a fleet of small planes that were used by the Medellin cartel to ship cocaine to the United States. Morales told the Kerrey committee that the was approached by the CIA in what he characterized as a marriage of convenience in which he agreed to ship weapons to the Contras in Central America in exchange for safe passage back into the U.S. with his illicit drug cargo. Despite testimony from Morales, other drug pilots, and law enforcement officials, nothing was ever done about the information. Kerrey's feet got cold, and the Republicans on the committee, led by Senator Alfonse D'Amato, refused to sign onto the report from the Subcommittee, and the issue died. Also continuing to die were tens of thousands of young Americans who had become addicted to cocaine, that in those same years began to be marketed as crack. 
Once again, the story made news when L.C. Oliver North attempted a run for the senate in Virginia. North, the Contra mastermind, was once again haunted by the Contra-drug story. A former DEA agent, Selorino Castillio III, published a book about his experiences in the DEA, where he was assigned to foreign service in El Salvador and Guatemala. Castillio found himself smack in the middle of Oliver North's secret operation which was based in Ilapango Airport in El Salvador. Castillio began to investigate and found that North had hired about a half dozen pilots who had active DEA records as drug traffickers to fly his secret weapons shipments. Castillio also found that two hangars at Ilapongo airport were being used for both weapons and drugs. Castillio attempted to alert his own superiors, then VP George Bush, a US ambassador to El Salvador, and the Iran Contra Prosecutor, but in all cases, he was rebuffed. 

Now, along comes Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News with a three- part well-documented story on how the Contra network created, supervised, and funded by the CIA, had run for 10 years a cocaine supply line by transshipping from Central America through San Francisco and down to Los Angeles thousands of kilos of cocaine. The cocaine was moved through a local middleman to Los Angeles gangs, the Crips and the Bloods. The cocaine was converted to crack, and according to Webb, this signaled the real beginning of the crack cocaine epidemic. Along with the drugs, the Contras supplied the gangs with automatic weapons, including an actual grenade launcher. Maxine Waters and several other congressmembers have called for investigations. For their part, the CIA again denies any knowledge of such activities on the part of the Contras. 

What follows is an interview by Dennis Bernstein and Julie Light on the Flashpoints program at KPFA Radio with Gary Webb about his investigation and the reaction to it. The complete documentation of Webb's work is online at San Jose Mercury Center. 

DB: Was this just a rogue contra operation or were the CIA and other government agencies either aware or a part of the operation? 

GW: We got as far as the front line CIA operatives, who were running this Contra army which was called the FDN. We got pictures of the drug dealers with Adolph Gallero, for instance, in S.F. during a meeting here. There was federal court testimony in San Diego about a meeting they had with Irenque Bermudas, who was the military commander of the FDN, and also the CIA agent. So we tracked it to the guys who had the hands on for the FDN. As far as how far it goes up the ladder after that, I don't know. I honestly don't. 
DB: Well, this is a very interesting story though, Gary Webb, because it really could go very far up the ladder. I want to ask you about specific reactions to the story and to the information in the story. One of the key players is a Mr. Blandon, who was a Contra operative supplying - he was the runner essentially, coming out of S.F. and bringing it to the Crips and the Bloods, through a middleman down south. And you write that this man is still employed by the DEA. Does he still have his job after your 3-part series? 

GW: I would suspect that he's not very useful to them as an undercover operative anymore. And they were very angry actually, that we've put his picture in the newspaper and then mentioned his name. Throughout the research on this, the DEA was asking us not to put Danilo Blandon's name in the paper because it was going to blow up his investigation. The latest information I have on that I got from our correspondent in Managua the other day. He said well Tartsa, the biggest daily in Managua, began running the series. They ran it for one day, and then the next day they stopped running it after the police chief came to them and said, You can't Danilo Blandon's name on the newspaper because he's currently involved with joint operations with the DEA. So, at least two days ago, the head of the Nicaraguan police said that this guy was still working with the DEA. 

DB: But we don't know yet if this guy is still employed or not. There's no indication that he was fired, if you will, or if he's off the payroll as of today. 

GW: No, I mean. I would be very surprised. He's in the witness protection program right now. Once you make those kinds of deals, the government basically supports you for as long as it takes, and I suspect he's probably a pretty hot property at the moment. 

JL: One of the things that friends and colleagues who are still based in Managua tell me is that with the change of government with the end of the war when the Contras returned, a lot of people came back with drug connections and drug habits and now Nicaragua has become a major transshipment point. Do you have a sense of how much the legacy of this policy is also not affecting just L.A., but affecting Nicaragua at this point? 
GW: Well, I can tell you what I know from the undercover DEA tapes that were made when they were running around after Danilo Blandon in 1990-1991, which was right when the Sandinistas lost the election and the Tumaro government came in. Blandon was delighted. He was inviting all his friends down to the inauguration; he was giving out tickets to other drug dealers. This is on tape. He said he was going to relocate back again down in Nicaragua because of the favorable political climate. So, Norm Menesses came back from exile in Costa Rica to go back into Nicaragua. Purportedly, he's an agent for the DEA. Now that's some stuff that came out in court down in Nicaragua when he was on trial in 92. That's really the only reason he was back there was to gather intelligence on the Sandinista military officials. 

JL: And in fact I think for the first time there really is a major cocaine problem of cocaine usage in Nicaragua. 

GW: It wouldn't surprise me. When Menesses was arrested in 91, he was arrested with 750 kilos of cocaine, and this was supposed to be the first of a 5,000 kilo shipment he was getting from the cartel in Bogata. That they were going to store in Nicaragua... Ultimately the destination for all this stuff is the United States, and we're the ones with the money; we're the ones that like the stuff. But you've got 5,000 kilos of cocaine sitting around a country the size of Nicaragua and it's not surprising that people down there are going to start using it. 

DB: We're speaking with Gary Webb; he's a reporter with the SJ Mercury News. He's been doing some serious investigations on the relationship between the crack cocaine problem in L.A. and in many places and its relationship to the Contra network that apparently funded itself through the importation of large amounts of cocaine.  

One of the things that seems to be unfolding around your reporting is that there are calls for investigations, congressional investigations, federal investigations. I'm wondering, you who has been immersed in this story, tell me some of the kind of questions that you have and you'd like to ask, say if you were a congressperson leading this investigation. 
GW: Well, I would first of all like to know how Norman Menesses was the leader of this drug ring and Danilo Blandon were able to get into the country in the first place. They came in as political asylums; Manessa's has a long criminal history in Nicaragua, and he came to the U.S. in 79. The DEA knew four years before that that he was a cocaine trafficker. Yet he was allowed to come into the country. That's question #1. Question #2 is, what happened with these police raids in 1986 -- there were a series of raids of Blandon's properties. Somebody tipped him off, because the police in this case brought along television crews, they were so certain of making a bust, and they got to all his properties -- his used car lots, his restaurants -- and they didn't find anything. And they knew exactly what this guy was up to. That investigation came up; a couple of days later the Iran-Contra scandal breaks; this case is dropped; and all the charges are dropped. So, that's another very bizarre incident along this way. And thirdly, in SF, in 1989, Norman Menesses was indicted by a federal grand jury for dealing 1 KG of cocaine in 1984. This indictment came down 4 years after he left the US; it was never unsealed -- it is still a secret -- you go over there today, and you ask for that file, and they will tell you they have no record of it. I found that in Nicaragua in his case down there. No, he was never put in the NCIC; he was coming in and out of the US even after he was under indictment. Somebody has been looking out for this guy for quite a while, and that's what I would want to know: who's looking over this fellow's shoulder? 

DB: Is there any clue who that might be? Is there any indication, any document, any testimony? 

GW: Well, the cop that ran the drug raid down in So. California in 86 believed it was the CIA. Blandon's lawyer, according to these FBI documents we got declassified, called up the police and told them that the CIA had winked at this whole operation, and that he was sort of mystified as to why the U.S. government was now turning against his client when he'd been working for them for so long. This was contemporaneous stuff; this is stuff that people aren't remembering now. These were FBI documents from the time. 

JL; Let's talk about the legacy now, because there still is a crack epidemic in L.A., in California, and throughout the country. What has the legacy of this policy been; are we still feeling the effects to this day? 

GW: What happened was, Contrary to what everybody may believe about when we discovered we had a crack problem in this country, which everybody puts at 1986, some amazingly respected organizations say that there wasn't a crack problem in this country until 1985 at least. You know, Rick Ross saw his first rock of crack cocaine in 1979, and it wasn't very popular, and a lot of people didn't do it, but by 1983, lots of people in LA were doing crack. By 1984, lots of people in the rest of the country were doing crack, and it went unrecorded, number one, by the media, and number two, by the police. I talked to Steve Pollack, who was an LAPD cop on the street in South Central in those years and he said they couldn't get anybody to listen to them down there. They were seeing kilos of cocaine where they'd seen grams before, and the attitude was, how much can they be dealing, we're talking about South Central. So, what happened was, denial and neglect I guess allowed this problem to fester in 1986, it's a huge issue, because number one, it's an election year, number two, we're in the middle of the war on drugs, we're going to get tough on crime, and they passed these amazingly harsh crack laws. So now, you've got people essentially been doing cocaine before this CIA pipeline brought it into their neighborhoods, and now they're being sent away for 20 years for dealing the stuff that the FDN brought in. 

JL: We're going to have to leave it right there. Thank you for your hard work.