Cia introduced crack black neighborhoods

Plumlee has since spoken in detail about the flights in media interviews. Hart told HuffPost he recalls receiving Plumlee's letter and finding his allegations worthy of follow-up. When the Contra revolution took off in the s, Plumlee says he continued to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with him, with the blessing of the U.

The Calero transactions Baca says she witnessed would have been no surprise to the Reagan White House. Celerino Castillo, a top DEA agent in El Salvador, investigated the Contras' drug-running in the s and repeatedly warned superiors, according to a Justice Department investigation into the matter.

Webb's investigation sent the CIA into a panic. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the Internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and to keep black Americans from advancing.

Denunciations of CIA -- reminiscent of the s -- abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved. In December , CIA sources helped advance that narrative, telling reporters that an internal inspector general report sparked by Webb's investigation had exonerated the agency. Yet the report itself, quietly released several weeks later, was actually deeply damaging to the CIA. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua.

One of the keys to Webb's story was testimony from Danilo Blandon, who the Department of Justice once described as one of the most significant Nicaraguan drug importers in the s.

In the interview notes with filmmaker Levin, Blandon confirms his support of the Contras and his role in drug trafficking, but downplays his significance. There were the Torres [brothers], the Colombians, and others," he says. The Managua lumberyard where Levin tracked down Blandon. Nick Schager.

In this article:. Story continues. Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions. In order to improve our community experience, we are temporarily suspending article commenting.

Recommended Stories. Atlanta Black Star. Yahoo Life. The Daily Beast. The Telegraph. Women's Health. 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.

Central Intelligence Agency. The Mercury News published a three-part series in late August that detailed how a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the street gangs of South-Central Los Angeles in the s, sending some of the millions in profits to the Contras. The series never reported direct CIA involvement, although many readers drew that conclusion. Regardless of the intent of the Mercury News , the accusation of government involvement in the crack epidemic had taken root.

This dramatic interpretation of the series continued to build with ferocious velocity, especially in black communities, as the Mercury News story attracted the attention of newspapers across the country. Throughout September , the Dark Alliance series was published in one newspaper after another: the Raleigh News and Observer ran the articles on September 1, ; the Denver Post published them on September 13, ; the Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran them on September 15, ; and so on.

While many other newspapers did not publish the Dark Alliance series, they carried stories about the sensation created by the series' claims. The story garnered further exposure from television and radio talk show appearances by Gary Webb. Ricky Ross' attorney, Alan Fenster, also made several appearances on television shows to assert that the government, not his client, was responsible for cocaine dealing in South Central Los Angeles.

Many African-American leaders were particularly troubled by the articles, mindful of the frequency with which young black men were being incarcerated for drug offenses. If the Mercury News was right, it appeared that the same government that was arresting so many black men had played a role in creating the drug crisis that precipitated their arrest.

This point was emphasized by the Mercury News ' Dark Alliance series, which included articles entitled, "War on drugs has unequal impact on black Americans; Contras case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.

The Congressional Black Caucus and many leaders in the black community also insisted upon an investigation into the charges raised by the Mercury News. As noted above, the Mercury News series was not only a story about the United States government and crack cocaine. It also revisited allegations concerning the Contras and drug trafficking that has been reported upon and investigated for many years.

In , the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations began an investigation focusing on allegations received by the subcommittee chairman, Senator John Kerry, concerning illegal gun-running and narcotics trafficking associated with the Contras. A two-year investigation produced a 1,page report in analyzing the involvement of Contra groups and supporters in drug trafficking, and the role of United States government officials in these activities.

Allegations of cocaine trafficking by Contras also arose during the investigation conducted by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh into the Iran-Contra affair. Drug trafficking allegations, however, were not the focus of that inquiry and the Walsh report included no findings on these allegations. The issue of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan Contras has also been the subject of books: e. It was also reported upon in the news media.

Following the December piece mentioned above from the Associated Press , the San Francisco Examiner ran stories in about Norwin Meneses, Carlos Cabezas an individual with links to Contra organizations who was convicted in the mids of drug charges , and drug trafficking by the Contras. It is undisputed that individuals like Meneses and Blandon, who had ties to the Contras or were Contra sympathizers, were convicted of drug trafficking, either in the United States or Central America.

There is also undeniable evidence that certain groups associated with the Contras engaged in drug trafficking. The pervasiveness of such activities within the Contra movement and the United States government's knowledge of those activities, however, are still the subject of debate, and it is beyond the scope of the OIG's investigation, which we describe below.

Yet it is noteworthy that, as interesting as the story of Contras and illicit drug deals may be, it was not the catalyst for the public's or the media's interest in the Dark Alliance series. Investigations into the alleged connection between Contras and cocaine dealing were conducted and articles were printed in the late s, at a time when interest in the Iran-Contra story was cresting. Neither those investigations nor the published articles tracking the allegations sparked a firestorm of outrage comparable to that created by the Dark Alliance series.

The furor over the Mercury News series was driven by the allegations of the government's complicity in cocaine deals within black communities. If the Dark Alliance series had been limited to reporting on Contras, it seems unlikely that the groundswell of press and public attention would have occurred. Notwithstanding the Mercury News ' explosive allegations, the series did not receive extensive coverage from major newspapers in either August or September The Los Angeles Times briefly discussed the Mercury News series in several articles in August and September that covered Ross' postponed sentencing and other events in the Ross trial.

Similarly, the Dark Alliance series did not initially receive much television coverage. With the exception of CNN, which ran several pieces on the story in September, and the NBC Nightly News, which ran a piece about the allegations on September 27, , the story received little national television news coverage.

By early October , however, that changed. It did not, for the most part, wrestle with the series' claims about drug dealing by the Contras.

That Casey was willing to flout the law is beyond dispute; his obsession with the Sandinistas later led to the Iran-contra scandal. Webb, citing an array of previously secret reports and sources, suggests that the CIA must have been aware of the Nicaraguan connection, which reportedly included shipments aboard Salvadoran Air Force planes to an unnamed U. Air Force base in Texas. But that is just his own supposition: Webb does not say anyone in the CIA actually knew about the Nicaraguans' cocaine trafficking or that any CIA operative actually took part.

So it comes down to those familiar questions: how much did the CIA know, and when did it know it?