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The CIA, the drug dealers, and the tragedy of Gary Webb
In 1996, journalist Gary Webb began looking into links between Nicaragua's drug-running Contra rebels and the CIA. As a recent film shows, what he found killed him
Explosive scandal: Jeremy Renner (left) plays Gary Webb (right) in Kill the Messenger
The man who knew too much: Jeremy Renner (left) plays Gary Webb (right) in Kill the Messenger
By Alex Hannaford6:18PM GMT 21 Mar 2015
Gary Webb knew his story would cause a stir. The newspaper report he'd written suggested that a US-backed rebel army in Latin America was supplying the drugs responsible for blighting some of Los Angeles's poorest neighbourhoods – and, crucially, that the CIA must have known about it.
Dark Alliance was a series written by California-based reporter Webb and published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. In it, he claimed the Contra rebels in Nicaragua were shipping cocaine into the US. which was then flooding Compton and South-Central Los Angeles in the mid-Eighties after being turned into crack – a relatively new and highly addictive substance sold in 'rocks' that could be smoked. Webb also said the CIA was aware that proceeds from the sales of those drugs were being funnelled back to help fund the Contras.
Dark Alliance has been called one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism, and was the first investigative story to "go viral". Webb didn't anticipate some of this, but he wasn't prepared for the level of uproar it would cause in LA’s black communities, incredulous that their own government could in some way be responsible for the crack epidemic plaguing their homes; that it would force the US government on the PR defensive; that the mainstream press, scooped by a tiny upstart, would attack Webb rather than try to dig deeper into the scandal they uncovered; or that the fallout would eventually lead to Webb taking his own life.
Nineteen years on, the story of Webb’s investigation and its aftermath has been given the full Hollywood treatment. Kill the Messenger, based on his account of what happened and a book of the same name about the saga by journalist Nick Schou was recently released in cinemas. And with it, some believe, came the full vindication that Webb deserves.
Gary Webb caught the writing bug in his early teens and started to hone his craft on his high school newspaper in Indiana. That’s where he met his future wife, Sue, but work took Webb's father to Ohio and the rest of the family followed. Webb never finished his journalism degree — instead landing a job with the Kentucky Post in 1978 and marrying Sue a year later. A decade on, after moving around a couple of different newspapers in Ohio, Webb and his family relocated to California where he was offered a job with the San Jose Mercury News.
Just a year after he started working for the paper, an earthquake destroyed an area in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, killing 63 and injuring thousands. The Mercury News's coverage of the Loma Prieta quake, to which Webb contributed, earned the paper a Pulitzer prize, the highest honour in American journalism.
Smear campaign: Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb, in Kill The Messenger
But the story that would make Webb’s name — and then contribute to his (many would say) unwarranted downfall, and then untimely death – began more than a decade earlier. In 1979 the Sandinista National Liberation Front (known colloquially as the Sandinistas) overthrew Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Debayle. Fearing the creation of a Communist state allied with Cuba and the Soviet Union, the US government under President Ronald Reagan, began funding and arming groups of rebels opposed to the Sandinistas — known as the Counterrevolutionaries, or Contras.
In his book A Twilight Struggle, Robert Kagan, one of the architects of Latin American foreign policy in the Reagan administration, wrote that when the Americans began their covert support of the contras, these armed militants numbered less than 2,000. By the end of 1983 there were up to 6,000. Opponents of America’s support for the contras pointed to the groups’ numerous human rights abuses - and that was essentially the gist of Webb’s story.
Read Tim Robey's review of Kill The Messenger
Webb arrived to the Contra story fairly late. There had even been mention in the press of the Contra's link with the drug trade in the U.S. – and by default, CIA involvement. But what Webb did that nobody else had was to follow the supply chain – right to the poverty stricken streets of Los Angeles. He showed what happened to the cocaine after it had been smuggled in by the Contras, focusing in on the human impact, and then revealing what became of the money made from its sales.
Webb summed up the heart of his Dark Alliance series thus: “It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history. The union of a U.S. backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the uzi-toting “gangstas” of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles.”
Perhaps most damningly, Webb wrote that crack was virtually unobtainable in the city’s black neighbourhoods before “members of the CIA’s army” began supplying it at rock-bottom prices in the Eighties.
“For the better part of a decade,” he wrote in the intro to the first piece in the trilogy, “a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tonnes of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles, and funnelled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”
He wrote about the cocaine trafficking trial of a former Contra leader named Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes who he said testified that the CIA agent who commanded the guerrilla army told them that “the ends justify the means,” and that they sold almost a tonne of cocaine in 1981 alone, the profits of which were going to the Contra revolution.
Webb’s series was published on the Mercury News’s fledgling website, but it wasn't exactly an instant sensation
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...rue-story.html
The CIA, the drug dealers, and the tragedy of Gary Webb
In 1996, journalist Gary Webb began looking into links between Nicaragua's drug-running Contra rebels and the CIA. As a recent film shows, what he found killed him
Explosive scandal: Jeremy Renner (left) plays Gary Webb (right) in Kill the Messenger
The man who knew too much: Jeremy Renner (left) plays Gary Webb (right) in Kill the Messenger
By Alex Hannaford6:18PM GMT 21 Mar 2015
Gary Webb knew his story would cause a stir. The newspaper report he'd written suggested that a US-backed rebel army in Latin America was supplying the drugs responsible for blighting some of Los Angeles's poorest neighbourhoods – and, crucially, that the CIA must have known about it.
Dark Alliance was a series written by California-based reporter Webb and published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. In it, he claimed the Contra rebels in Nicaragua were shipping cocaine into the US. which was then flooding Compton and South-Central Los Angeles in the mid-Eighties after being turned into crack – a relatively new and highly addictive substance sold in 'rocks' that could be smoked. Webb also said the CIA was aware that proceeds from the sales of those drugs were being funnelled back to help fund the Contras.
Dark Alliance has been called one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism, and was the first investigative story to "go viral". Webb didn't anticipate some of this, but he wasn't prepared for the level of uproar it would cause in LA’s black communities, incredulous that their own government could in some way be responsible for the crack epidemic plaguing their homes; that it would force the US government on the PR defensive; that the mainstream press, scooped by a tiny upstart, would attack Webb rather than try to dig deeper into the scandal they uncovered; or that the fallout would eventually lead to Webb taking his own life.
Nineteen years on, the story of Webb’s investigation and its aftermath has been given the full Hollywood treatment. Kill the Messenger, based on his account of what happened and a book of the same name about the saga by journalist Nick Schou was recently released in cinemas. And with it, some believe, came the full vindication that Webb deserves.
Gary Webb caught the writing bug in his early teens and started to hone his craft on his high school newspaper in Indiana. That’s where he met his future wife, Sue, but work took Webb's father to Ohio and the rest of the family followed. Webb never finished his journalism degree — instead landing a job with the Kentucky Post in 1978 and marrying Sue a year later. A decade on, after moving around a couple of different newspapers in Ohio, Webb and his family relocated to California where he was offered a job with the San Jose Mercury News.
Just a year after he started working for the paper, an earthquake destroyed an area in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, killing 63 and injuring thousands. The Mercury News's coverage of the Loma Prieta quake, to which Webb contributed, earned the paper a Pulitzer prize, the highest honour in American journalism.
Smear campaign: Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb, in Kill The Messenger
But the story that would make Webb’s name — and then contribute to his (many would say) unwarranted downfall, and then untimely death – began more than a decade earlier. In 1979 the Sandinista National Liberation Front (known colloquially as the Sandinistas) overthrew Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Debayle. Fearing the creation of a Communist state allied with Cuba and the Soviet Union, the US government under President Ronald Reagan, began funding and arming groups of rebels opposed to the Sandinistas — known as the Counterrevolutionaries, or Contras.
In his book A Twilight Struggle, Robert Kagan, one of the architects of Latin American foreign policy in the Reagan administration, wrote that when the Americans began their covert support of the contras, these armed militants numbered less than 2,000. By the end of 1983 there were up to 6,000. Opponents of America’s support for the contras pointed to the groups’ numerous human rights abuses - and that was essentially the gist of Webb’s story.
Read Tim Robey's review of Kill The Messenger
Webb arrived to the Contra story fairly late. There had even been mention in the press of the Contra's link with the drug trade in the U.S. – and by default, CIA involvement. But what Webb did that nobody else had was to follow the supply chain – right to the poverty stricken streets of Los Angeles. He showed what happened to the cocaine after it had been smuggled in by the Contras, focusing in on the human impact, and then revealing what became of the money made from its sales.
Webb summed up the heart of his Dark Alliance series thus: “It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history. The union of a U.S. backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the uzi-toting “gangstas” of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles.”
Perhaps most damningly, Webb wrote that crack was virtually unobtainable in the city’s black neighbourhoods before “members of the CIA’s army” began supplying it at rock-bottom prices in the Eighties.
“For the better part of a decade,” he wrote in the intro to the first piece in the trilogy, “a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tonnes of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles, and funnelled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”
He wrote about the cocaine trafficking trial of a former Contra leader named Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes who he said testified that the CIA agent who commanded the guerrilla army told them that “the ends justify the means,” and that they sold almost a tonne of cocaine in 1981 alone, the profits of which were going to the Contra revolution.
Webb’s series was published on the Mercury News’s fledgling website, but it wasn't exactly an instant sensation
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...rue-story.html
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