Book Excerpt Of The Week: "Kill The Messenger" By: Nick Schou

"[Gary] Webb spent more than a year uncovering the shady connection between the CIA and drug trafficking through the agency’s relationship with the Nicaraguan contras, a right-wing army that aimed to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government during the 1980s. The Sandinistas were Marxist rebels who came to power in 1979 after the collapse of decades of U.S.-backed dictatorship at the hands of the Somoza family. President Reagan called the contras 'freedom fighters' and compared them to America’s founding fathers. Even as Reagan uttered those words, the CIA was aware that the many of the contras' supporters were deeply involved in cocaine smuggling, and were using the money to fund their army, or, as more often proved the case, to line their own pockets.

Many reporters has written about the CIA's collusion with contra drug smugglers, but nobody had ever discovered where those drugs ended up once they reached American soil. 'Dark Alliance [Gary Webb's tome] provided the first dramatic answer to that mystery by profiling the relationship between a pair of contra sympathizers in California, Danilo Blandon and Norwin Menses, and ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross, the most notorious crack dealer in the history of South Central’s crack trade.

'Dark Alliance' created history in another way: it was the first major news expose to be published simultaneously in print and on the internet. Ignored by the mainstream media at first, the story nonetheless spread like wildfire through cyberspace and talk radio. It sparked angry protests around the country by African-Americans who had long suspected the government had allowed drugs into their communities. Their anger was fueled by the fact that 'Dark Alliance' didn’t just show that the contras had supplied a major crack dealer with cocaine, or that the cash had been used to fund the CIA’s army in Central America- but also strongly implied that this activity had been critical to the nationwide explosion of crack cocaine that had taken place in America during the 1980s.

It was an explosive charge, although a careful reading of the story showed that Webb had never actually stated that the CIA had intentionally started the crack epidemic. In fact, Webb never believed the CIA conspired to addict anybody to drugs. Rather, he believed that the agency had known that the contras were dealing cocaine, and hadn't lifted a finger to stop them. He was right, and the controversy over 'Dark Alliance'- which many consider to be the biggest media scandal of the 1990s- would ultimately force the CIA to admit it has lied for years about what it knew and when it knew it." -From, "Kill The Messenger: How The CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb" By: Nick Schou