Note: this is a piece I wrote in, I think, 1999. It was originally slated to appear in two installments on the op-ed page of the Philly Inquirer, but was killed at the last minute. I still think it makes a variety of important points.

Crack and the White House

By Crispin Sartwell

I've got a scary question for you: what if the Reagan-Bush White House was partly responsible for the epidemic of crack cocaine? This question arises now in response to a recent CIA internal investigation.

The information I present below is not new. But I am going to try to draw connections between two existing bodies of information: information about the origins of crack cocaine and information about the Iran-Contra scandal.

On the origins of crack:

In 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published a sensational series of articles by Gary Webb that traced the origins of crack cocaine in southern California, where the crack epidemic began in African-American communities, to the CIA-sponsored contra guerillas in Nicaragua. The basic argument was that the contra effort was in large part funded by drug money and controlled by drug traffickers. The South American cocaine cartels used the contras and their airstrips to import massive amounts of cocaine into California, cocaine that made possible and fed the early stages of the crack epidemic.

The editor of the Mercury-News has since published a piece admitting that some of the assertions in that article were doubtful. But the apparent retraction also points out that the basic picture of the connection between the contras and crack was accurate. As I understand it, the main problem with the story was that it simplified the origin of crack to a single pipeline, which is almost certainly inaccurate. Yet the pipeline that Webb identified also appears to have been central to the sudden explosion of the cocaine supply.

Recently, in response to the Webb series, the CIA released the results of an internal investigation exonerating itself of any direct connection to cocaine trafficking. Anyone in his right mind would view a CIA internal investigation with scepticism. However, that investigation also showed in various ways that the contras were in fact heavily involved with drugs. For example, it said that cocaine dealers provided planes and trucks to contra leaders, both in Nicaragua and in California, where the contras had training facilities.

The CIA appears puzzled as to why they would do that, and to take seriously, for example, contra leader Eden Pastora's laughable declaration that he did not know who was supplying all this stuff, or why. I don't think anyone needs to be puzzled about why drug kingpins fly planes or need airstrips and trucks. Meanwhile Pastora was living rent-free in the Costa Rican home of drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon, who was at the same time importing vast amounts of cheap cocaine into Los Angeles and coordinating contra activity in California.

Now to the second element of the story: the Iran-Contra scandal. Bear with me as I remind you of the outlines.

In the early eighties, Congress had prohibited American aid to the contras, on the grounds that the groups were anti-democratic, deeply unpopular with the people of Nicaragua, and utterly corrupt, all of which was true. However, the Reagan White House felt strongly that the effort to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government should continue.

It launched a massive effort to supply the contras-who were recruited by the CIA out of the remnants of the Somoza dictatorship--with money and arms. This effort was secret and much of it was illegal. With the full support of Reagan and, perhaps more centrally, Vice President Bush, efforts were made to pressure countries such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Brunei to contribute cash or arms to the contras. I put the emphasis on Bush because, as a high-ranking State Department official in the Reagan administration told me, "we all assumed that the operation was run out of Bush's office: it had his stamp all over it, and it used his connections to the CIA."

According to the testimony in 1986 of DEA agents in the hearings of a Senate committee chaired by John Kerry, Oliver North suggested at one point that $1.5 million dollars seized in a sting of the Medellin cocaine cartel be diverted to the Contras, though this plan was apparently scuttled. (It should be remarked that the Republican members of this committee refused to sign off on its report.)

Stipulations made by the U.S. government in Oliver North's trial indicate that the government of Honduras received arms and aid in exchange for allowing the contras to operate in their country. Manuel Noriega was recruited by the CIA to help carry out sabotage operations against the Sandinista government. When it came time to turn on Noriega, of course, his involvement with the drug industry was a primary justification.

The White House and CIA operations in Nicaragua were "dovetailed," according to the report of Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh; they were coordinated in the White House. The CIA ran the contra movement on the ground while the White House worked out ways to keep it funded and supplied.

Finally, in the mind-numbingly idiotic strategy that led to the scandal, the White House--secretly and in direct violation of its own declared policies--made an arms sale to Iran, which at the time was supposed to be a pariah state due to its sponsorship of terrorism. This sale was a form of ransom for American hostages held by Iranian-sponsored groups in the Middle East, even as Reagan and later Bush continued to claim that "we will never negotiate with terrorists." Money from the arms sales was then diverted to the contra resupply effort, again with the full knowledge of the White House. Indeed, the arms-for-hostages swap was endangered because the White House, in its zeal to help the contras, overcharged Iran for the arms.

Now as the Senate Committee chaired by Kerry suggested, the effort to supply the contras was also a drug smuggling operation. For example, the shipping companies hired by the White House to bring weapons to the contras were owned by drug runners, many of whom had been wanted for years by the DEA. An example is SETCO, a drug-running operation owned by smuggler Juan Matta Ballesteros which was put under contract by Oliver North to resupply the FDN, the main contra group. These planes would bring loads of weapons from the United States or third countries to airstrips in Honduras, and then leave with shipments of cocaine bound for the West Coast in the early days of the crack epidemic.

In other words, the contras had two main sources of funds and materiel, both of them fundamentally illegal: the White House and the cocaine cartels. The White House resupply program and the drug smuggling were completely integrated: they happened at the same time, were carried out by the same people, on the same planes and trucks, at the same airstrips, and so on. The people on the ground making the physical exchanges of guns, money, and cocaine were in a general sense under the command of the CIA.

Bringing these two stories together, here are some questions: Did the drug smuggling take place with the knowledge of the White House? That appears to me to be very likely. Did the White House encourage the drug smuggling as a way to supplement other illegal sources of funds for the contras, and, in particular, did it arrange for the protection of the smugglers in California as they shipped weapons in one direction and drugs in the other? That is more than possible. We need to keep in mind the puzzling intensity of White House support for the contras and the extreme contempt for the law in the operations that expressed that support.

Now when you are talking about a drug epidemic like crack, you are talking about a very complex matter. Thousands of people were involved in distribution, and tens of thousands of users created the demand. The devastation, and the systems that supported it, were huge and elaborate, and they continue. But the whole thing could not have started without a sudden influx of cheap cocaine into California, and it seems probable that the contra connection, and the contra resupply effort run by the White House, were central to that influx.

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