Dark Alliance

reviewed by Chuck Munson

Dark Alliance: the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb (Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts Street, New York, NY 10013, 1998) 548pp. $24.95 hardcover.

If you read the alternative press on a regular basis, by now you’ve probably heard about Gary Webb’s explosive report on the CIA/Crack Cocaine connection that he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News. You may also be familiar with how pro-government newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post dismissed his series as old news and the stuff of African-American conspiracy theorists. They failed to mention that they never covered the CIA/Contra drug angle in the first place. After Webb had been dissed by the major newspapers, the Mercury News, in a cowardly move all too common these days at major newspapers, took Webb’s series off their website, and transferred Webb to a less desirable reporting post. Dark Alliance is an excellent attempt to tell the rest of the story about CIA and U.S. government complicity in the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

Dark Alliance spins a riveting tale of political intrigue, drug smuggling, murder, betrayal—it’s too bad it really happened. The human toll from U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s was immense, not just in the hundred of thousands of lives lost in wars and by death squads. Cocaine and the hypocritical drug war fought against drug users, who are mostly poor, ruined millions of lives in the U.S. While there is no smoking gun that the U.S. government conspired to bring tons and tons of cocaine into African American communities, there is plenty of evidence that they knew about it and could have stopped it, but did nothing for political reasons. After all, the Contras were shipping planeloads of cocaine into the United States to make money to buy arms for their revolution against those evil communists. There were even DEA agents, government prosecutors and many others who attempted to halt the drug shipments, but were met by thunderous silence from the CIA.

The cast of characters in Dark Alliance is so numerous that it’s easy to lose count: DEA agents, drug smugglers, Contras, cocaine dealers, government officials, lawyers, and many more. Such is the nature of operations and events that spanned dozens of countries and spanned a decade.

The events behind Dark Alliance also include what happened to all of the imported cocaine. A fascinating character in the Contra cocaine pipeline, at least the part that funneled cocaine into California, is “Freeway” Ricky Ross, who started out as a small time dealer and ended up as one of the principal cocaine wholesalers in southern California. Of interest here is how he capitalized on the creation of crack cocaine and perfected the franchising and fast food-like marketing of crack to African Americans. The crack cocaine epidemic of the 80s and 90s is really a tale of capitalism run amuck. If anything shows what true free market capitalism would look like, sans government regulation or community roadblocks, the crack cocaine industry is a pure success story.

One of the underlying themes of Dark Alliance is the failure of mainstream journalism to cover this subject matter, either now or back in the 1980s when this information was being divulged in the Iran/Contra hearings. It’s not like the facts were hidden in classified government files. Any journalist reading the transcripts from government hearings or from numerous drug trafficker trials should have been able to piece together the bigger picture. It’s more frightening that journalists have been largely silent in the wake of the San Jose Mercury series and resultant backlash. This timidity doesn’t bode well for the future of corporate newspapers or the ability of the journalism profession to maintain any crticial indepedence.

Dark Alliance is probably one of the most important books on government wrongdoing in recent memory. It demonstrates that a government’s policies, and the illegal covert actions of those who purport to uphold those policies, can have terrible effects throughout the hemisphere and even boomerang back to harm the citizens of the provoking nation.

-C.M.

This review originally appeared in the Spring/Summer 1999 issue of Alternative Press Review.