Dark Alliance: Movie Tie-In Edition
The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion
By Gary Webb
Foreword by Maxine Waters
Category: Reference | 20th Century U.S. History | World Politics
Sep 30, 2014 | ISBN 9781609806217
Jan 04, 2011 | ISBN 9781609802028
About Dark Alliance: Movie Tie-In Edition
This, sadly, is a true story. It is based upon a controversial series I wrote for the San Jose Mercury News in the summer of 1996 about the origins of the crack plague in South Central Los Angeles.
Unlike other books that purport to tell the inside story of America's most futile war (Kings of Cocaine by Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen and Desperados by Elaine Shannon spring to mind), Dark Alliance was not written with the assistance, cooperation, or encouragement of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration or any federal law enforcement agency.
In fact, the opposite is true. Every Freedom of Information Act request I filed was rejected on national security or privacy grounds, was ignored, or was responded to with documents so heavily censored they must have been the source of much hilarity clown at the FOIA offices. The sole exception was the National Archives and Records Administration.
Dark Alliance docs not propound a conspiracy theory; there is nothing theoretical about history. In this case, it is undeniable that a wildly successful conspiracy to import cocaine existed for many years, and that innumerable American citizens-most of them poor and black-paid an enormous price as a result.
This book was written for them, so that they may know upon what altars their communities were sacrificed. — G.W.
Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, "Kill the Messenger," to be be released in Fall 2014
In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled "Dark Alliance," revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras.
Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities.
Webb's own stranger-than-fiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the media—not because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the story—had been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the "Dark Alliance" story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.
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About Gary Webb
An award-winning investigative reporter, GARY WEBB (1955–2004) is best known for his "Dark Alliance" series that linked a Northern California drug ring with the CIA and the United States' burgeoning crack epidemic. When the story first appeared in 1996 on the website… More about Gary Webb
Published by Seven Stories Press
Sep 30, 2014 | 592 Pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | ISBN 9781609806217
Jan 04, 2011 | 592 Pages | ISBN 9781609802028
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"Webb reminds us that the Reagan-approved contra program attracted lowlifes and thugs the way manure draws flies. He guides the reader through a netherworld of dope-dealers, gunrunners, and freelance security consultants, which on occasion overlapped with the US government. He entertainingly details the honor, dishonor, and deals among thieves…. All in all, it's a disgraceful picture—one that should permanently taint the happy-face hues of the Reagan years." —David Corn, Washington Post
"Two years ago Gary Webb touched off a national controversy with his news stories linking the CIA and the Nicaraguan Contras to the rise of the crack epidemic in Los Angeles and elsewhere. His gripping new book, richly researched and documented, deserves an even wider audience and discussion." —Peter Dale Scott, San Francisco Chronicle
"Webb [is] a highly regarded investigative reporter…. Dark Alliance is his effort to tell his side of the story and set the record straight." —James Adams, New York Times Book Review
Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award FINALIST 1999
Author Essay
The Tragedy of Gary Webb by Dan Simon
Originally Published in The Progressive on July 27, 2013
I began working as Gary Webb's editor on Dark Alliance, the book, in July 1997, almost a year after his newspaper series of the same name broke so controversially in the San Jose Mercury News. As recently as one year earlier Gary Webb had been one of the nation's top investigative reporters. His awards included a Pulitzer in 1990 as part of a team, and at least four other major prizes for his solo work. But by the time I met him, he'd already begun the spectacular fall that ended with his suicide several weeks ago, barely seven years later, at the age of forty-nine.
What would turn out to be the biggest story of his life ran as a three-day series beginning on August 18, 1996. Here's how it started: "For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found."
The "Dark Alliance" story documented a network of collusion in the 1980s that joined together the crack cocaine explosion, the Contras, and the CIA. But it might have vanished without a trace had the paper not chosen this story to create a splash for its website, complete with graphics and links to original source documents. It became, arguably, the first big Internet news story, with as many as 1.3 million hits on a single day. Talk radio picked it up off the Internet, and citizens' groups and media watchdogs soon followed. The CIA launched its own internal investigation. Gary's star had never shone more brightly.
The mainstream print media was ominously silent until October and November 1996, when The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all finally picked up the story. But instead of launching their own investigations into whether the CIA had shielded drug traffickers, these papers went after Gary's reporting, although they "could not find a single significant factual error," as Gary's then-editor at The Mercury News, Jerry Ceppos, would write in an internal memo. But after that, the series was described frequently as "discredited." Soon the story and Gary himself were spoiled goods. Gary's editor switched sides and penned an apologia distancing the paper from the series. Gary was forced out of his job, even though the body of evidence supporting Gary's account was actually growing.
Two years later, the CIA's internal investigation would prove to be a vindication of Gary's work. So would another internal investigation conducted by the Justice Department. Gary took solace in the historical significance of these findings, but shamelessly the mainstream press barely covered them, whereas the attacks on Gary had been page-one news.
With characteristic irony and faith in the facts, Gary faulted himself only for not being able to fathom initially the depths of the CIA's complicity. Writing in 2002 for a book called Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Gary said: "When the CIA and Justice Department finished their internal investigations two years later, the classified documents that were released showed . . . the CIA's knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I'd ever imagined. The drug ring was even bigger than I had portrayed. . . . And agents and officials of the DEA had protected the traffickers from arrest, something I'd not been allowed to print."
Gary had loved writing the Dark Alliance book, and together we relished presenting finished copies to the very same newspapers of record that had allowed themselves to be used as tools against Gary. The book was reviewed with high praise in two out of the three, and it was a strong seller.
The alternative media, to its credit, honored Gary. But the community of his peers in corporate journalism never again embraced him. He could never quite get over their betrayal. When you are an investigative reporter armed with the truth, the gun often fires backwards.
Gary once wrote about the "Dark Alliance" series, "It wasn't so much a conspiracy that I had outlined as it was a chain reaction." The same can be said of what happened to Gary.
Now when I reread the opening sentence of the "Dark Alliance" series, I realize Gary had found the big story, the one about the betrayal of a people by its own government. A monumental sadness remains.
Dan Simon is founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press.
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