Dark Alliance is the investigation Gary Webb published in the San Jose Mercury News after tracing the Los Angeles crack epidemic back to Nicaragua.
What Webb found
John Kiriakou’s account begins with the structure of the Contra rebels, which is the detail everything else turns on: Webb “found that the Contra Rebels were not one monolithic unit they were divided into Northern Rebels and Southern Rebels”, and, more importantly, that the rebels were largely in the pay of the CIA.[1]
He also establishes the division of labour that made the traffic possible. The Drug Enforcement Administration was present in Nicaragua and existed to stop drugs reaching America; the CIA “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 terrorism drugs are dea’s problem the CIA is not going to trouble itself with drugs.”[1][2]
Webb travelled to Nicaragua and interviewed dozens of Contra rebels including leaders, and members of the Sandinista government, who told him there was 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.” He came back “with notebooks full of information” and wrote seven articles.[2][3]
The precise claim
The series named Oscar Blandón, a senior Contra leader in charge of the cocaine operation, and a major Los Angeles importer, and said the CIA was allowing the traffic. Kiriakou is careful about the boundary Webb observed: “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.”[3][4]
The counterattack
The series “created an absolute Firestorm”, above all inside the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Kiriakou says the LA Times “called together 17 journalists to pick apart and to refute Gary web’s articles”, and that what they attacked was peripheral — Webb had been “a little bit weak in his analysis on the actual origins of the crack epidemic”, and crack had reached Los Angeles somewhat earlier than he said. “who cares… the point of the story was that the CIA was allowing cocaine into the country.”[4][5]
His editors initially backed him, financing a further trip to Nicaragua to answer the other papers’ questions — Webb went “not once not twice but four times.” The paper concluded there was not enough new material for another series but that Webb had told the truth. Then the Post and the Times ran a coordinated article on the same day calling him a liar and a fabricator who should be fired, and the Mercury News stepped back from him; Webb resigned after a dispute.[6][7]
Vindication without consequence
Investigations followed in Washington — by the CIA Inspector General, by the Justice Department Inspector General independently, and by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “and what did they find they found that everything Gary web said was true.” Kiriakou’s coda is about the asymmetry of outcomes: “the 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.”[8][9]