Title: The Gary Webb Story: CIA, Cocaine, and a Media Assassination
Show: John Kiriakou
Date: 2025-03-12
URL: https://youtu.be/tjcwiMRDy9k
Duration: 13:00

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[00:00] in the late 1970s Anastasio Samosa the dictator of the small Central American country of Nicaragua was overthrown Samosa was overthrown and was replaced by a group called The sandinistas they had been called the Sandinista Rebels and they were led by a man named Danielle Ortega Ortega was a communist he called himself a socialist but he was pro-soviet and pro Cuban and received a great deal of aid from both of those countries the United States at the time was led by President Ronald Reagan and

[00:32] as historians will tell you Reagan was absolutely obsessed with Communism and he promoted something called the Domino Theory the Domino Theory held that if one single Central American country fell to the Communists the other countries in Central America would fall like dominoes leading right up to the US border So Reagan and the people around him set out to stop the Communists from taking control of Nicaragua they did that by announcing their support for the

[01:03] Contra Rebels the contras were conservatives right-wingers and some cases even fascists or Military Officers who were disgruntled with the with Ortega they decided to take to the jungles with American weapons and fight the new communist government the problem with that though was that the Democratic controlled Congress at the time passed an amendment that forbade the government from spending any money to provide weapons ammunition or weapon systems to

[01:34] the Contra Rebels so how do you get around that well there was a director at the National Security Council at the time by the name of Colonel Oliver North North decided to take this thing on on his own he did not report back to his superiors at the Pentagon he worked closely with the CIA and here's the plan they came up with they would sell weapons to America's arch enemy Iran the weapons would be paid for in cash the cash would be turned over to a Saudi

[02:05] businessman and arms dealer named Adnan Kashi Kashi would put the money in a bank in Cyprus and then would transfer it to the Contra Rebels there was a middleman there of course it was a series of arms dealers mostly in Romania Bulgaria and uh and elsewhere around the world that were able to provide These Arms with little to no notice uh coming to the attention of any body who follows these things keep in mind also that this entire operation was off the books it

[02:37] was supposed to be secret not just secret from the public of course but secret from the Congressional oversight committees secret from the president of the United States himself secret from the FBI and from the Pentagon nobody was supposed to know about this except Oliver North and the CIA and so the CIA involved Adnan Kashi because he was was an old friend of the organization he became a billionaire by selling arms around the world what better person to do something like this somebody who

[03:10] already has a lot of money somebody who's not going to raise eyebrows by transferring hundreds of millions of dollars somebody who's going to use foreign Banks just as a matter of course so imagine Adnan koki takes money from the Iranians puts that money in a cypriate bank transfers the money from the cypriot bank to International arms manufacturers takes the arms from those manufacturers turns them over to the CIA the CIA puts them on unmarked unlicensed

[03:43] and unregistered planes and sends them to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua it sounded like the perfect idea in fact it was a terrible idea and it was a violation of the law many many laws but Adnan koki was someone who the CIA could trust to keep his mouth shut take his 10% commission and do as he was told in the end the Iranians got weapons they paid cash the cash was used to buy more weapons that were given to the Contra Rebels so the contras began fighting

[04:15] Daniel Ortega and the sandinistas the US meanwhile was doing things like mining the harbors of uh of managa the capital of Nicaragua to put pressure on the sandinistas and the fight was really raging in the jungle at at the same time by the mid1 1980s cocaine began arriving in the United States ostensibly from Colombia but really making its way through Nicaragua now that cocaine for whatever reason ended up in Los Angeles

[04:45] and in Los Angeles it was turned into crack cocaine now we had never heard of crack cocaine before 1984 and it took off like wildfire an investigative journalist by the name of Gary Webb decided to look into the Advent of the crack epidemic in Los Angeles and that investigation led him right back to Nicaragua so here's what he found he found that the Contra Rebels were not one monolithic unit they were divided into Northern Rebels and Southern Rebels

[05:17] more importantly he found that the rebels were largely in the pay of the CIA Now The Drug Enforcement Administration was also present in Nicaragua at the time and remember it's DEA job to stop the flow of drugs to the United States the CIA though doesn't care about drugs in many cases it's perfectly happy to allow drugs into the United States if it helps them to fight communism or contemporaneously to fight

[05:48] terrorism drugs are dea's problem the CIA is not going to trouble itself with drugs and so these drugs were making their way to California Gary Webb traveled to Nicaragua where he interviewed dozens of Contra Rebels including Contra leaders he also interviewed members of the sandanista government who told him look there's a drug problem but it has nothing to do with us it's your people the contras that are bringing these drugs to the United States Gary Webb returned to California with notebooks full of

[06:21] information and he began to write a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News his investigation resulted in seven separate articles and in those articles he said that the drugs were coming from Nicaragua and making their way to Los Angeles that there were two people in particular one was named Oscar Blandon Oscar Blandon was a senior Contra leader who was in charge of this cocaine operation the other was a major drug importer based in Los Angeles he also said that the CIA was allowing this

[06:54] to happen he did not say that this was a CIA operation although that's how the CIA took it Gary web said that the CIA was turning a blind eye and was actually stying the work that the DEA was trying to do to keep the drugs out of the United States as you might imagine this series of Articles created an absolute Firestorm especially within the Los Angeles Times The Washington Post and the New York Times we now know that as

[07:25] soon as these articles were published the Los Angeles Times called together 17 journalists to pick apart and to refute Gary web's articles now they focused on things that were Silly and nonsensical for example web was a little bit weak in his analysis on the actual origins of the crack epidemic that's not the point of the story though the point of the story was that the CIA was allowing cocaine into the country the Los Angeles Times though said well he got it wrong

[07:56] about Los Angeles crack arrived in Los Angeles a little bit earlier than Gary Webb said who cares but this is something that Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News had to deal with on the other coast The Washington Post and the New York Times essentially said on their front pages that Gary Webb had made the entire story up uh Walter pinkis an esteemed reporter for the Washington Post got the side of the CIA and put that on the very front page of the Washington Post saying that none of this was true this was just an anti- CIA

[08:28] uh tie raade and that nobody should pay any attention to it well Pinkus was wrong Pinkus probably knew he was wrong but published anyway the bottom line here is that both the Washington Post and the New York Times leapt as quickly as they could to the defense of the CIA Gary web's editors then decided to double down they decided to finance another trip to Nicaragua that Gary web would take so that he could answer some of the questions that these other major newspapers had so he went to Nicaragua

[08:59] not once not twice but four times in the end the paper decided that there wasn't enough new information to Warrant another series but they were confident that Webb had told the truth still on the very same day the Washington Post and the New York Times finally wrote a coordinated article saying that Gary Webb was a liar that he was a fabricator and that he should be fired it was then that the Mercury News decided maybe they should take a step back from web and they did in a dispute he ended up Res signing now the sad postcript to this is

[09:32] this was a guy who had a storied career in investigative journalism he was a a co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize he had done investigative journalism in Cincinnati Ohio in Cleveland in Columbus Ohio and then out to California where he made a real name for himself in San Jose but he resigned from that position he freelanced for a little while he worked for the state for a few months and then decided to move to Denver Colorado and start over but depression overcame him

[10:02] finally Gary Webb rented a cheap motel room and reportedly allegedly put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger a lot of people think that he actually didn't commit suicide his family does and the coroner did but there are questions surrounding his death in the end it was the CIA the New York Times The Washington Post in the Los Angeles Times that ruined him there are reporters now who have retired from the LA Times who have spoken publicly about their effort to ruin Gary Webb and his

[10:34] career they express regret and they admit freely that that's exactly what they did they ruined his career and by ruining his career they ended his life later on there were investigations in Washington the CIA Inspector General conducted an investigation the justice department Inspector General conducted an independent investigation and even the house permanent select committee on intelligence conducted investigation and what did they find they found that everything Gary web said was true the

[11:05] sad part of this is that no one at the CIA was ever prosecuted no one was ever even fired or suspended for trafficking cocaine into the United States but that's how the CIA Works remember the CIA Mantra is we're the good guys the good guys don't get punished for doing their job but Gary Webb was a good guy and he certainly was punished for doing his job hey thanks for watching this report there is so much more that I'd like to dive into but unfortunately we can't do that here thanks to heavy

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