What We Really Know About the CIA and Crack
The CIA claimed that any story linking it to the 1980s crack cocaine explosion was conspiratorial slander. But the evidence of its complicity is all there in the congressional record.
The CIA thought it had buried a sordid story with the death of San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb. Webb had spent years documenting the crack cocaine trade in the United States and the intelligence agency’s complicity in it.
Webb took his own life in 2004 after his 1996 “Dark Alliance” reporting series came under intense scrutiny from the heavy hitters of American journalism, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
Unfortunately for US intelligence chiefs, the accusations made by Webb and other journalists have continued to flare up in popular culture, where the opportunity to combine two movie archetypes, the spook and the gangster, seems irresistible. Hollywood films like the 2014 Webb biopic Kill the Messenger and 2017’s American Made, with Tom Cruise as CIA pilot Barry Seal, have helped keep the allegations in public consciousness.
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