The Cost of Funding the Contras

In the 1980s, a decade after President Nixon declared a "war on drugs," illegal drug use continued to be a serious problem. In particular, the 1980s saw inexpensive crack cocaine become a dangerous drug of choice, especially in poorer neighborhoods. In an effort to reduce crime and minimize the number of lives devastated by drug abuse, President Reagan introduced tough new drug laws throughout his presidency.

The 1980s also saw the Nicaraguan contra uprising against the Marxist Sandinista government. The Reagan administration was an enthusiastic contra supporter, and it backed up that support with military aid. But in 1982, Congress cut off all U.S. military aid to the contras with the Boland Amendment.

Thus began the secret funding of the contras by so-called "rogue elements" of the U.S. government, including Oliver North. In what became known as Iran/Contra, payments from illegal arms sales to Iran were funneled to the contras.

And the contras had another source of secret funding - cocaine traffickers.

Did officials in the United States government knowingly allow cocaine and other drugs to flow into American cities - and at a time President Reagan was conducting a highly publicized campaign against drug use - rather than stop it and risk cutting off this lucrative source of contra funding? Consider these facts:

• Government agencies had evidence of connections between the contras and drug traffickers.

• In 1986, the State Department claimed publicly that it had no knowledge of these connections, but admitted privately that its public statements were false.

• Some of the pilots involved in the smuggling operations admitted to flying weapons for the contras into Costa Rican and other "protected" air strips, and then returning to the U.S. with loads of drugs.

• Some of the businesses that the State Department hired to ship humanitarian aid to the contras were owned and operated by drug traffickers - a fact known to other government agencies.

• Government officials protected key members of the drugs/weapons smuggling network from prosecution.

• In a smuggling operation called the Frogman case, where swimmers smuggled drugs into the U.S. West Coast from an offshore ship, one convicted smuggler convinced the U.S. to return roughly $36,000 that had been confiscated from him (along with weapons and drugs). The reason his request was granted - he claimed the money actually belonged to the contras.

These aren't the wild allegations of some fringe conspiracy theorist or ultra-left-wing blog. They are documented in a 1988 report by the Senate subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, headed by John Kerry.

Media Reaction

You would expect a Senate report that exposes connections between the U.S.-backed contras and drug traffickers - and worse, that accuses U.S. government officials either of "negligence" or of knowingly "turning a blind eye" to the contra/cocaine connection (p 44) - would surely cause an explosive, O.J.-style media reaction.

And you would be wrong. According to Peter Kornbluh in the Columbia Journalism Review:

[W]hen the report was released on April 13, 1989, coverage was buried in the back pages of the major newspapers and all but ignored by the three major networks. The Washington Post ran a short article on page A20 that focused as much on the infighting within the committee as on its findings; The New York Times ran a short piece on A8; the Los Angeles Times ran a 589-word story on A11. (All of this was in sharp contrast to those newspapers' lengthy rebuttals to the Mercury News series seven years later - collectively totaling over 30,000 words.) ABC's Nightline chose not to cover the release of the report.

Consequently, the Kerry Committee report was relegated to oblivion.

Dark Alliance

In 1996, a media firestorm finally did erupt over the contra/cocaine connection. But the eye of this storm wasn't the contras, or the Reagan administration, or even the drug traffickers. It was the messenger.

In August, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published a three-part series it called Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion, written by its Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Gary Webb. The series connected the dots established by the Kerry Committee report eight years earlier, and included the results of Webb's own year-long research: that crack cocaine has devastated lives and inner city neighborhoods on the West Coast and beyond, that it enabled gangs like the Crips and Bloods to thrive, that in the 1980s, profits from much of that crack was funneled to the U.S.-backed contras, and, most damning of all, that government officials who were aware of the contra/cocaine connection allowed it to continue, thus contributing to the crack epidepic of the 80s.

Beginning in early fall, 1996, the series came under attack by media giants such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. Within months after the media attack began, the editor of the Mercury News distanced himself and his paper from the series. Soon after, Webb was banished to a suburban police beat.

Years later, Webb claimed that he had been "silenced":

The national news media, instead of using its brute strength to force the truth from our government, decided that its time would be better spent investigating me and my reporting. They kicked me around pretty good, I have to admit…

To this day, no one has ever been able to show me a single error of fact in anything I've written about this drug ring…But, in the end, the facts didn't really matter. What mattered was making the damned thing go away, shutting people up, and making anyone who demanded the truth appear to be a wacky conspiracy theorist. And it worked.

After the Dark Alliance series, Webb's career and life began to slide downhill. It didn't help much that in 1998, the CIA finally admitted that CIA officials knew of connections between the contras and drug traffickers, and chose to do nothing about them. By then, the damage to Webb and his career had already been done.

In December of 2004, his career in ruins, divorced, heavily in debt, and forced to sell his home, Webb committed suicide.

Did the mainstream media essentially cover up a major story, destroying the reputation of Gary Webb in the process? Or was this a story with implications "so extraordinary" that it can only be pursued if the evidence is absolutely incontrovertible? In 1988, Katherine Graham put it more bluntly: "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t."

By closing its eyes to the drug smuggling operations of contra benefactors, was the CIA partially responsible for the flood of cheap crack cocaine in American cities in the 1980s?

You decide.