Killing him in 2004 did nothing for you because he was already out. profit they weren’t supposed to,” Cabezas stated publicly. Please know, CIA does not engage in law enforcement. Office. The careerists in the news business quickly grasped that the smart play when it came to the Contras was either to be a booster or at least to pooh-pooh evidence of the Contras’ brutality or drug traffickers. Twenty years in one of those “for profit” prisons her hubby was so fond of trickling down on his drug customers would do her a world of good. In internal CIA interviews, Gomez admitted that in March or April 1982, he helped family members who were engaged in drug trafficking and money laundering. "My colleagues and I are very concerned that the allegations have left an indelible impression in many Americans' minds that the CIA was somehow responsible for the scourge of drugs in our inner cities," Tenet said. the approximately $36,000 that was seized when he was arrested belonged to the The earliest Contra force, called the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN) or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen “to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre,” according to a June 1981 draft of a CIA field report. Three months later, in September 1982, Gomez started his CIA assignment in Costa Rica. The protagonist for this part of the Contra-cocaine mystery was Moises Nunez, a Cuban-American who worked for Oliver North’s NSC Contra-support operation and for two drug-connected seafood importers, Ocean Hunter in Miami and Frigorificos De Puntarenas in Costa Rica. to a group of Contra sympathizers in California to support their administrative The money, which may, in fact, have been profit from drug trafficking, “Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council,” Hitz reported, adding: “Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC. because of Zavala's claim that the money belonged to the Contras.

The Justice Department report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S. embassies in Central America discouraging DEA investigations, including one into Contra-cocaine shipments moving through the international airport in El Salvador. [For more on that topic, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege and America’s Stolen Narrative.]. Although Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it went almost unnoticed by the big American newspapers. In another double standard, while Webb was held to the strictest standards of journalism, it was entirely all right for Kurtz, the supposed arbiter of journalistic integrity who was a longtime fixture on CNN’s “Reliable Sources”, to make judgments based on ignorance. In internal CIA interviews, Gomez admitted that in March or April 1982, he helped family members who were engaged in drug trafficking and money laundering. those individuals linked to the Contras? After being reassigned to the Mercury News's office in Curpertino, where they had him writing death notices, Gary Webb resigned and fell into depression. support group in which it had an operational interest. In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the "Dark In the last analysis, the painful truth is, both sides of the fence seem to use the same financing techniques and we the proles of the world are stuck in between these titanic forces. Corvo was working with Cuban anticommunist Frank Castro, who was viewed as a Medellín cartel representative within the Contra movement. It was also clear that the media careerists who had climbed up their corporate ladders by accepting the conventional wisdom that the Contra-cocaine story was a conspiracy theory weren’t about to look back down and admit that they had contributed to a major journalistic failure to inform and protect the American public. According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its Contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

Nearly a decade before Gary Webb published his investigative series on cocaine trafficking by Nicaraguan Contra rebels, U.S. law enforcement received a detailed account of top Contra leader Adolfo Calero casually associating with Norwin Meneses, called “a well-reputed drug dealer” in a “secret” document that I recently found at the National Archives. By fall 1986, Sen. Kerry had heard enough rumors about Vidal to demand information about him as part of his congressional inquiry into Contra drugs. Hitz reported that the CIA discovered Gomez’s drug history in 1987 when Gomez failed a security review on drug-trafficking questions. Meneses, a notorious drug kingpin in the Nicaraguan community, showed up uninvited and clearly had a personal relationship with Calero, who was then the political leader of the Contra’s chief fighting force, the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Democratic Force (or FDN). The movie never clarifies whether such complaints about Webb's reporting were just. I had a sense of his unstated questions: Why would the prestige newspapers of American journalism behave that way? Webb focused on the Los Angeles-based drug kingpin "Freeway" Ricky Ross, portrayed by Michael Kenneth Williams in the movie.

During Vietnam fighting peace activists were welcome in Hanoi, but pacifist Peter King when he went to Iraq to declare peace between the US and rebels he was held for ransom then killed.

movement. ", At least 106 people shot, 14 fatally, in Chicago weekend violence, Watch live: Gov. Employment: We do not routinely answer questions about employment beyond the information on this Web site, and we do not routinely answer inquiries about the status of job applications. Ross says he They refused to refer the Gomez case to the Justice Department, citing the 1982 agreement that spared the CIA from a legal obligation to report narcotics crimes by people collaborating with the CIA who were not formal agency employees.

Hitz revealed that the CIA put an admitted drug operative, known by his CIA pseudonym “Ivan Gomez”, in a supervisory position over Pastora. The first major shot against Webb and his “Dark Alliance” series did not come from the Big Three but from the rapidly expanding right-wing news media, which was in no mood to accept the notion that some of President Reagan’s beloved Contras were drug traffickers. As it turned out, Webb’s confidence in his editors had been misplaced. The drugs were then concealed in a shipment of frozen shrimp and transported to the United States. about a link between the CIA and crack responsible for the prosecution dispute these claims. Ross says he obtained cocaine from Blandon until 1988 or 1989. It was also mentioned that Gary was working on a new story concerning the CIA and drug trafficking.

However, no evidence has yet been presented contradicting the coroner's findings. Like the release of Hitz’s report in 1998, the admissions by Snider and the House committee drew virtually no media attention in 2000, except for a few articles on the Internet, including one at Consortiumnews.com. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more. Norwin Meneses.

giving several thousand dollars to support the operating expenses of Contra One Contra fund-raiser, Jose Orlando Bolanos, boasted that the Argentine government was supporting his Contra activities, according to a May 1982 cable to CIA headquarters. Ainsworth also said he tried to alert Oliver North in 1985 about the troubling connections between the Contra movement and cocaine traffickers but that North turned a deaf ear. also claims he witnessed Pereira deliver money to a Contra member. But Hitz made clear that the Contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra crimes from the Justice Department, Congress, and even the CIA’s own analytical division. Despite the evidence, Vidal remained a CIA employee as he collaborated with Frank Castro’s assistant, Rene Corvo, in raising money for the Contras, according to a CIA memo in June 1986. In early 1987, when Ainsworth spoke with U.S. Attorney Russoniello and the FBI, the Reagan administration was in full damage-control mode, trying to tamp down the Iran-Contra disclosures about Oliver North diverting profits from secret arms sales to Iran to the Contra war. In the report, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. During congressional Iran-Contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. After Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion was published in 1998, I joined Webb in a few speaking appearances on the West Coast, including one packed book talk at the Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica, California. Learn how the CIA is organized into directorates and key offices, responsible for securing our nation. Starring Jeremy Renner, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Sheen, Copyright © 2020 HistoryvsHollywood.com, CTF Media, Yes. The popular image of courageous editors standing up for their reporters in the face of government pressure was not the reality, especially not where the Contras were concerned. Horacio Pereira, who had contact with the Contras.

criminal investigation of Meneses and that a relative of Meneses alleged that This combination of factors led to the next phase of the Contra-cocaine battle: the “get-Gary-Webb” counterattack. contact with the Contras or CIA. But a CIA cable in March 1989 added that “some in the FDN may have suspected at the time that the father-in-law was engaged in drug trafficking.”. being developed during the extensive investigations of any connection between Make your tax-deductible donation by clicking here. But the CIA’s Central American Task Force chief Alan Fiers Jr. said the Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued “because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private Benefactor program [the Contra money handled by the NSC’s Oliver North] a decision was made not to pursue this matter.”. As for me, after losing battle after battle with my Newsweek editors (who despised the Iran-Contra scandal that I had worked so hard to expose), I departed the magazine in June 1990 to write a book (called Fooling America) about the decline of the Washington press corps and the parallel rise of the new generation of government propagandists.