The Dark Alliance
Gary Webb's Incendiary 1996 SJ Mercury News Exposé
These articles were downloaded from the web site of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News has removed the entire series from their web site.
Gary Webb's career as a professional journalist was destroyed shortly after these articles were published. Anyone who challenges the House of Rockefeller is persona non grata throughout the establishment. -The Editor
Aug 22, 1996
Cocaine pipeline financed rebels
Evidence points to CIA knowing of high-volume drug network
by Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News
For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to an arm of the contra guerrillas of Nicaragua run by the Central Intelligence Agency, the San Jose Mercury News has found. This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America - and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy weapons. It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the "gangstas" of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles. The army's financiers - who met with CIA agents before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. - delivered cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross. Unaware of his suppliers' military and political connections, "Freeway Rick" turned the cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the country.
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Aug 22, 1996
Salvador air force linked to cocaine flights, Nicaraguan contras, drug dealer's supplier
by Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News
One thing is certain: There is considerable evidence that El Salvador's air force was deeply involved with cocaine flights, the contras and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes' cocaine supplier, Norwin Meneses. Meneses said one of his oldest friends is a former contra pilot named Marcos Aguado, a Nicaraguan who works for the Salvadoran air-force high command. Aguado was identified in 1987 congressional testimony as a CIA agent who helped the contras get weapons, airplanes and money from a major Colombian drug trafficker named George Morales. Aguado admitted his role in that deal in a videotaped deposition taken by a U.S. Senate subcommittee that year. His name also turned up in a deposition taken by the congressional Iran-contra committees that same year. Robert Owen, a courier for Lt. Col. Oliver North, testified he knew Aguado as a contra pilot and said there was "concern" about his being involved with drug trafficking. While flying for the contras, Aguado was stationed at Ilopango Air Base near El Salvador's capital. In 1985, the DEA agent assigned to El Salvador - Celerino Castillo III - began picking up reports that cocaine was being flown to the United States out of hangars 4 and 5 at Ilopango as part of a contra-related covert operation. Castillo said he soon confirmed what his informants were telling him. Starting in January 1986, Castillo began documenting the cocaine flights - listing pilot names, tail numbers, dates and flight plans - and sent them to DEA headquarters. The only response he got, Castillo wrote in his 1994 memoirs, was an internal DEA investigation of him. He took a disability retirement from the agency in 1991. "Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they (DEA officials) were covering it up," Castillo said in an interview. "You can't get any simpler than that. It was a cover-up."
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