In the 1980s, during the heart of the crack boom, violent crime spread like an insidious cancer, families were forced into poverty, and fatal overdoses skyrocketed. Was this a horrible epidemic that the government failed to contain… Or a sinister conspiracy organized by none other than the Central Intelligence Agency, aimed at disenfranchising African American communities and funding bloody government insurrections? Today, we’re going to find out - In an insane story that involves two US Presidents, a South American coup, journalists getting their lives and livelihoods destroyed, and an unimaginable pile of untraceable dark money.
First, let’s go back to June of 1971, when President Richard Nixon started all this by formally declaring a War on Drgs. According to Nixon, the use and abuse of narcotics was the public’s number one enemy, after the free-loving Sixties normalised drug use in the States to an unprecedented degree. The War on Drgs involved imposing stricter measures against drug-related crimes, such as mandatory minimum prison sentencing for even minor offences.
This was the first domino in a series that would have horrific consequences even today. As of the end of 2023, around one 1. 8 million Americans had been incarcerated within the US.
One in five of the incarcerated population in the United States has been imprisoned for a drug-related offence, and this includes minor offences like possession or even suspected possession. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, gave an interview in 1994 that expanded on the ulterior motives behind the War on Drgs campaign – most of which revolved around Nixon wanting to keep the presidency. The main opposition to this, as Ehrlichman put it, were two demographics who were bound to not vote for old Tricky Dick, those being the left wing who were vehemently opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War, and Black people who Nixon’s Republican coalition had turned into a scapegoat.
So, why did Nixon have it in for Black Americans? In the wake of the civil rights movement, the more radical Black power movement started gaining momentum and was met with backlash from Republicans and white supremacists. Nixon used racial inequality as a wedge issue, without actually addressing the systemic problems causing racial inequality in America.
The War on Drgs was a perfect cover to kneecap the movements Nixon saw as a threat to his political power. As John Ehrlichman put it: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Black people with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did. ” Back in the mid-seventies, the War on Drgs took a bit of a hiatus, and between 1973 and 1977, some states even decriminalized the possession of marijuana.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter became president by running on a campaign of decriminalizing marijuana, and the Senate Judiciary Committee did vote to decriminalize possession of up to a single ounce of marijuana. It wasn’t much and certainly didn’t undo the damage done by the War on Drgs, but it was a start. But if you’re wondering how any of this leads us to the CIA and crack smuggling, then you haven’t been paying attention – all this context lays the groundwork for what would happen when the War on Drgs saw a resurgence in the eighties, and Black Americans once again bore the brunt.
Under the administration of Ronald Reagan, many of Nixon’s earlier War on Drgs policies were expanded upon and reinforced. Reagan was committed to passing more severe penalties for drug-related crimes in both congressional and state legislatures. This caused a massive boom in the number of incarcerations that occurred for those committing nonviolent drug crimes.
Similarly to how things went under Nixon, mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain drug offenses were established in 1986 when Congress passed the Anti-Drg Abuse Act. Many would later levy criticism against this law for having racist ramifications, as it mandated longer prison sentences for offenses that involved crack cocaine than it did for those that involved powder cocaine. Why?
Well, because, thanks to someone – more on the CIA in a moment – crack cocaine was more prevalent in predominantly Black American areas, while powder cocaine was more widely used among white Americans. A five-year prison sentence was automatically given to anyone found with five grams of crack, while you’d need to have five hundred grams of powder cocaine to land the same sentence. But you’re probably wondering; just where did all that crack cocaine come from?
How did it end up on the streets in the first place? Well, those are exactly the kind of questions that will have the nearest CIA agent shuffling awkwardly in their chair. To uncover the connection between the CIA and the crack that flooded US cities in the eighties, we need to look away from the streets of LA or Miami, and instead head on over to the jungles of Central America.
Just a year before the 1980 election that saw Ronald Reagan assume power, the dictatorial government of Nicaragua was overthrown. Huh? What does that have to do with the situation in America in the eighties?
Well, it turns out, everything. As the US’ international intelligence agency, the CIA has a long and unnerving history when it comes to meddling in the affairs of other countries. Especially when it starts to look like other nations might be tilting towards a left-wing or, heaven forbid, a socialist government, then the Central Intelligence Agency swoops in to pull some strings in the shadows to get this country’s leaders assassinated or overthrown.
Of course, American’s clandestine intelligence experts can’t be seen meddling like this, otherwise, it would spark an international incident and possibly a war. So, what the CIA prefers to do is bolster anyone in their target country who already opposes the new way of doing things. These are usually extreme, right-wing paramilitary groups who suddenly receive a surprising amount of funding and even weaponry courtesy of the boys at Langley.
Here’s a not-so-fun fact: that’s exactly how mujahadeen fighters in Afghanistan ultimately formed the Taliban, with a little help from the CIA, who wanted the country’s communist government overthrown. This practice was particularly commonplace during the Cold War as almost every communist government became allied with the USSR, so the USA sought to undermine these allies by backing extremist groups and rebels to destabilize these countries. And in a tale as old as time, that’s exactly what went down in Nicaragua.
After the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a political party of socialist revolutionaries overthrew the Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, they were able to seize control as part of the Junta of National Reconstruction. This was a provisional government that aimed to restore the country post-revolution. Eventually, the Sandinistas forced the more centrist members of the Junta out, taking exclusive control in March of 1981.
This was all largely considered perfectly fine by the US until it became apparent that the new regime in Nicaragua saw itself as a satellite of Cuba – which had close ties to the Soviet Union. Shortly after, the Contras formed, a group of far-right paramilitary oppositional rebels, and received backing and support from… you guessed it, the Central Intelligence Agency. When Reagan became president following the 1980 election, he began quietly sending aid to the Contras through the CIA to assist them in fighting against the Sandinista government.
As part of their Cold War efforts against the Soviet Union, money and weapons were provided to the Contras by the CIA, enabling them to conduct a brutal paramilitary campaign against the Sandinista government. Almost just as sickening was that Ronald Reagan himself described these right-wing extremists as ‘freedom fighters’, and claimed that cutting off support to the Contras would allow the USSR to influence Central America. This CIA backing of the Contras didn’t continue unencumbered though, as in 1982, Democrats within Congress passed laws that did, eventually, prevent the support of the rebels in Nicaragua.
But, of course, this didn’t stop the CIA from backing the Contras, it just meant they were forced to get creative, to really think outside the box for new ways to channel funding to the extremist paramilitary group. And what’s a good way to make a lot of money? Cocaine.
Now, coke wasn’t new to the US at the time, and we aren’t talking about soda. Since the late seventies, there have been record numbers of people snorting cocaine in the United States. Then, when the eighties were in full swing, the latest designer drug hit the market, a smokable variation of cocaine: crack.
You might have heard those two terms used interchangeably, but there’s actually a difference – the more you know! Most of the cocaine entering the United States was illegally imported from Colombia, but the rise in the usage of crack cocaine across American cities became a seemingly instant, infinite money hack for organized crime groups – even those backed by the CIA. You see, as with other countries where the US had covertly assisted in overthrowing newly established governments – like Laos, Afghanistan, and Burma – Nicaragua also had a pre-existing trade in narcotics.
This had caught the CIA’s attention long before their effort to assist the Contras. So, it didn’t take long for the order to come through from the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia: let’s smuggle some drugs to get some cash for our operations in Nicaragua. Okay, well, that’s pretty uncharitable against the CIA.
In 1981, one of the paramilitary groups working alongside the CIA’s officers to overthrow the Sandinista government were members of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance. A message that was sent to the CIA headquarters stated that the leadership of this group had decided to “engage in drug smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations”. The same message also declared that an “initial trial run” had taken place during July of 1981, wherein drugs were transported from Nicaragua to Miami, Florida, and smuggled aboard a plane.
Now, despite the alleged drug trafficking taking place during the Contra war, the Central Intelligence Agency never bothered to verify whether or not any of it was true. As for their involvement, it’s never been outright confirmed, nor denied, but just taking a look at some of the particulars, the waters get a little murky. For one, the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance was disbanded in 1982, with some of its former members instead joining up with the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, which also worked with the CIA.
CIA agents directly received allegations that five now ex-members of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance had been involved with drug trafficking while fighting against the Sandinista government on the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. These five were supposedly working alongside a man named Jorge Morales, who was a known drug trafficker. Here’s the interesting part though; while the CIA officially broke its ties with the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance in 1984, it still continued to maintain contact with four out of the five members who were allegedly associates of Morales until as late as 1987.
Coincidence? Maybe. These Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance members had previously worked alongside the CIA, but their involvement with Jorge Morales didn’t strictly mean that the Agency themselves were then able to participate in Morales’ drug trafficking efforts, right?
Well, you want to know something else that could also be a ‘total coincidence’? How about a letter from the then Attorney General of the USA to the CIA director permitting agents to effectively turn a blind eye to narcotics crimes? In early 1982, while the US was still trying to secretly overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, a letter titled “Memorandum of Understanding” was being drafted in Washington, D.
C. by William French Smith, the United States Attorney General. The letter was sent to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Casey, and detailed a list of offenses that the US government required CIA field officers to report if they became aware of such crimes while they were operating in the field.
This was particularly prescient if the crimes in question involved an informant working with the CIA, or any person the Agency was looking to recruit. The letter had all manner and severity of crimes, ranging from murder to passport fraud. But do you want to guess what type of criminal violations were completely omitted from Smith’s letter?
If you said narcotics crimes, then you’d be correct. Of course, the fact these had been completely left out of the Attorney General’s letter was too glaring of an omission to ignore. So, a few weeks later, a follow-up letter was sent to the CIA Director, following what we can only assume was a stern internal discussion between William French Smith and the US Justice Department.
But in his next letter, sent on February 11, 1982, Smith didn’t just add narcotics crimes to the list. Instead, he slyly just regurgitated the United States’ existing federal policy on the enforcement of drug-related crimes. He wrote: “In light of these provisions and in view of the fine co-operation the Drg Enforcement Administration has received from CIA, no formal requirement regarding the reporting of narcotics violations has been included in these procedures.
” This meant that CIA officers were not obligated to report any narcotics violations that they witnessed in the field back to headquarters. Sure, the revised letter mentioned that the US had policies surrounding drugs, but there was nothing indicating that the CIA’s operatives were required to acknowledge them. While it might have not given agents free rein to work as drug smugglers while in the field, they still wouldn’t have to report narcotics-related crimes that they did witness – even if CIA agents were the ones committing them.
That’s a pretty handy loophole for the CIA right there. By omitting any requirement for the CIA to report narcotics violations, the US had provided cover for its agents to potentially become embroiled in the thriving drug business that was growing in Central America. It might not have been endorsed behavior by anyone within the United States government, but it seems odd that not only was it not not allowed, but that the CIA also just so happened to have indirect ties to one of Nicaragua’s very own drug smugglers.
Now, sure, if the CIA had been discovered to be involved in drug smuggling, then it would be a disastrous look for them. Especially since, during this time, it would cause significant political damage – nobody would want the USA backing the Contras if it was revealed they were smuggling drugs into America to finance that cause, while the President was banging the war drums against crack on the streets. But then, in 1985, a pair of reporters – Robert Parry and Brian Barger – broke a story that almost seemed too outlandish to believe.
They alleged that not only did the Contras have links to the Colombian drug cartels responsible for much of the cocaine entering the US, but the reporters also claimed that not only did the CIA know the Nicaraguan rebels were involved in drug trafficking, but they allowed them to continue – all so the money it generated could fund that Contras’ war efforts. Parry and Barger had managed to get their hands on a report that revealed the CIA’s involvement with the Contras in the mid-eighties. Feeling an obligation to make the information public, they were warned by their editors that doing so would anger the people who owned the newspapers the reporters worked for.
Both of them ended up losing their jobs when the story broke. The CIA vehemently denied any involvement in the drug trade, but once the details of their connections with the Contras, and the Contras’ connections to drug trafficking, then rumors began to embed themselves in the public consciousness. Many believed that the government was allowing crack cocaine to be sold on the streets of American cities.
In 1996, these rumors were reignited when another journalist named Gary Webb looked at the story from another angle. Webb investigated the activities of a man named ‘Freeway’ Rick Ross, the biggest kingpin in the Los Angeles crack business during the early eighties. Ross was possibly even the US’ very first crack millionaire, claiming to have made three million dollars in a single day during his peak - though we should take any claims made by a posturing crack gangster with a pinch of salt.
Webb’s investigation uncovered that Ross’ main supplier for crack cocaine was a Nicaraguan exile named Danilo Blandón, who had funneled tens of thousands of dollars in profits from smuggling cocaine back to the Contras, using banks in Miami. Now, the man above Blandón was one Norwin Meneses, one of if not the biggest drug trafficker in Nicaragua, with deep ties to the Contras’ leadership. Meneses was both living out in the open and raising money to support their cause, so much so that the Drg Enforcement Agency tried to have him arrested.
Some of them even believed he was known as ‘El Rey del Drgas’ in Nicaragua; which translated to ‘the King of Drgs’. However, they had never been able to successfully build a case against him, leading some to speculate he might have been benefitting from CIA protection. So, when Webb’s story came out in the mid-nineties, it not only exposed the links between Meneses, Blandón, and Ross, but also delved into the history of this large-scale and well-documented crack distribution ring that had been operating for years and channeling drugs into the US – and the CIA had known about it, and willingly turned a blind eye.
When the newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, ran Webb’s story, it certainly seemed that the CIA bore at least some of the blame for the escalation of crack usage in the United States. In August of 1996, Webb’s reports would be published by Mercury News in a three-part series titled Dark Alliance. This raised the profile of the story among the American public, in particular amongst the African American community, given how they were unfairly and disproportionally targeted by law enforcement thanks to Reagan’s revamped War on Drgs policies.
Now, it’s worth pointing out that, at no point in Dark Alliance does Webb explicitly claim that the CIA was responsible for the crack epidemic in the US, nor that they ever intentionally sold drugs. He merely exposed the existence of a crack cocaine ring that was operating throughout the West Coast of the United States during most of the 1980s. The money being made by that crack cocaine ring, or at least some of it, was being sent to Nicaragua to support a paramilitary group that the men who ran the cocaine ring also worked for – the Contras.
In other words, an army that the CIA supported around the same time. Despite never making any direct claims of the sort, the narrative that people ran with was that the CIA had been directly involved in the crack epidemic. At the very least, they were certainly far more aware of, and even worked with, some of the people who were involved in smuggling the drug to the US.
The advent of the internet in the mid-nineties also helped the story take off, as Dark Alliance was one of the first pieces of major investigative journalism to be posted online and in print simultaneously. It wasn’t just the public who latched onto the story either. Politicians critical of the Reagan and the later Bush administrations such as Maxine Waters, a congresswoman for California, also championed what was revealed by Gary Webb in Dark Alliance.
Reactions to the story were so intense that the CIA’s Director even publicly defended itself against the accusations of the Agency’s involvement in drug trafficking, and swore that the CIA would be looking into its own activities in Central America. But how could anyone trust the CIA to investigate itself and find anything? Perhaps just as shocking as the discoveries his reporting shed light on, was how the US mainstream media treated Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News after Dark Alliance.
Their hope had been that the reports would be the beginning of a much larger investigation, that newspapers with more resources could then come in and continue to look into what the CIA was doing in Nicaragua. But rather than launching their investigations into the CIA, larger newspapers including the L. A.
Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times instead attacked Webb himself, in an attempt to frame his story as nothing more than a conspiracy theory. After being hounded from his job, finding himself unable to find future work as a journalist thanks to a reputation that had been shamefully dashed by three major newspapers, Gary Webb tragically took his own life in 2004. Two years after the story broke, in 1998, the CIA’s inspector general released a report that admitted to at least some of the accusations levied against them in Dark Alliance.
The report confirmed that the Agency had indeed been aware that several people who were linked with the Contras were also importing crack cocaine to the USA. It also acknowledged that the CIA’s agents had done nothing to stop them, and had even used its resources to protect figures like Norwin Meneses from investigation. Even though what had been reported by Webb in the nineties, and earlier in the eighties by Parry and Barger was true, the CIA has long since claimed that any story linking the Agency with the 1980s crack epidemic in the US is nothing more than conspiratorial slander.
But there’s still evidence, if not of their involvement, then certainly of their complicity, and a lot of it exists in congressional records. Were CIA agents physically handing out crack on street corners? No, probably not.
Were they aware that people they were connected with in Central America had some level of involvement in drug smuggling? Yes, at the very least, it was alleged that certain Contras members worked with known drug traffickers. So, did the CIA’s agents have any obligation to report these narcotics offenses they witnessed in the field?
No, thanks to the Attorney General’s letter, they didn’t. And did the CIA work with and even protect major drug traffickers taking part in the importing of crack to the United States? Yes.
That much is indisputable. Now check out “50 Insane Facts About the CIA You Never Knew. ” Or watch this instead!
