In honor of the passing of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald, the chairwoman of the House Administration committee, I am posting a link and excerpt to her most memorable moment in politics.
JIM LEHRER: Now the second CIA story which is about a most unusual trip that the CIA director made to the West Coast on Friday. It was to respond to charges concerning the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980’s. Jeffrey Kaye of KCET-Los Angeles reports.
REP. MILLENDER-McDONALD,(D): Please join me in welcoming Mr. John Deutch. (Applause)
JEFFREY KAYE: CIA Director John Deutch faced a largely hostile audience Friday afternoon at a community forum in South Los Angeles.
JOHN DEUTCH, Director, CIA: Thank you, Congresswoman Millender-McDonald, for holding this public meeting, for giving me the opportunity to talk with members of this community about charges that the CIA introduced crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. It is an appalling charge. It is an appalling charge that goes to the heart of this country. It is a charge that cannot go unanswered.
JEFFREY KAYE: Deutch pledged a thorough investigation. His extraordinary public relations mission to Watts came in response to a public outcry over a report by a California paper, the San Jose Mercury News. The three-part series, “Dark Alliance,” appeared in August on the Internet, as well as in print.
Although the articles drew criticism by several major newspapers, they raised a firestorm of outrage and prompted official inquiries. The newspaper asserted that members of the CIA’s army in Nicaragua helped spark a crack cocaine explosion in urban America in the 1980s. The report said two Nicaraguans, Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses, sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles drug dealer Ricky Ross. The articles said Blandon and Meneses funneled millions of dollars in profits to CIA-backed rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
The articles showed no direct link to the CIA but did include a photograph of Meneses, on the right, with Adolfo Calero, in the center, a leader in the CIA-funded rebel army known as the contras. Much of the information in the articles is not new. Allegations of Contra/drug connections have been the subject of congressional probes, news stories, and books.
What is new is the link the articles suggest between the wholesalers and the retailers–between men said to be associated with the CIA-backed contras and sales of crack cocaine on the streets. The series was written by reporter Gary Webb.
Read the whole thing. Below the fold, an excerpt from director of the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project and of the Cuba Documentation Project, Peter Kornbluh’s LA Times opinion piece that appeared prior to John Deutch’s appearance in Watts.
As CIA director John Deutch reviews his briefing papers for today’s town meeting in Watts on the Contra/drug scandal, he faces a challenge and an opportunity. His challenge is to overcome the deep distrust of a community that firmly believes the CIA played some role in the advent of crack in the inner cities; his opportunity is to commit his furtive agency to a process of disclosure and accountability that is necessary to lay this scandal to rest.
Deutch’s trip to South-Central Los Angeles is unprecedented; never before has a director of Central Intelligence left the CIA’s heavily guarded headquarters in Langley, Va., to face intense public questions about the impact at home of a covert war abroad. Many of those questions are likely to be harsh and accusatory. As I witnessed while testifying at a hearing last month in Compton held by Rep. Juanita Millender McDonald, citizens of South-Central are outraged by press allegations linking CIA-backed counterrevolutionary groups in Nicaragua with drug traffickers involved in the proliferation of crack cocaine in California. Standard assurances that the agency will fully investigate the charges are unlikely to satisfy a community already suspicious of a cover-up. To bridge the deep fissures of distrust and to establish his agency’s credibility, Deutch will have to do something that his predecessor, the late William Colby, attempted. Colby revealed the “family secrets,” secrets about the CIA scandals of domestic spying, assassination and coup plots in the mid-1970s. Deutch must commit himself to do the same on the CIA Contra war.
He can start by acknowledging that the CIA did, in fact, knowingly and willingly work with drug dealers, CIA officials, according to the Contras themselves, did authorize one rebel group to take money and airplanes from a major Colombian trafficker; CIA officials did seek to protect a key Honduran “asset”–convicted of conspiracy to smuggle $40 million worth of cocaine into the U.S. to finance the assassination of the president of Honduras–from a lengthy prison sentence for fear he might spill the beans on covert operations; CIA officials did scheme with the White House to help Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega clean up his image, stained by a 20-year career as a henchman for the Medellin cartel, in return for Noriega’s help in destabilizing the Sandinista government. To counter, extreme charges that the CIA targeted communities of color for crack distribution to finance the Contra war, Deutch must concede a different, but equally scandalous truth: the willingness of national security officials to consort with dope peddlers simply because they had a contribution to make to the covert war against Sandinista Nicaragua. It will be up to Deutch to convince those who have suffered from this chilling set of Cold War priorities that the CIA is now committed to preventing the criminalization of national security doctrine.
Gary Webb was savaged by CIA apologists like the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus. He lost he job, wound up working for the California Speaker of the Assembly’s office, and eventually committed suicide. But his story was largely corroborated.
# On January 29, 1998, [CIA Inspector General Frederick] Hitz published Volume One of his internal investigation. This was the first of two CIA reports that eventually substantiated many of Webb’s claims about cocaine smugglers, the Nicaraguan contra movement, and their ability to freely operate without the threat of law enforcement.
# On March 16, 1998, Hitz admitted that the CIA had maintained relationships with companies and individuals the CIA knew were involved in the drug business. Hitz told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that “there are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.” Senator John Kerry had reached similar conclusions a decade earlier in 1987.
# On May 7, 1998, Rep. Maxine Waters, revealed a memorandum of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department from 1982, which was entered into the Congressional Record. This letter had freed the CIA from legally reporting drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan rebels.
# On July 23, 1998, the Justice Department released a report by its Inspector General, Michael Bromwich. The Bromwich report claimed that the Reagan-Bush administration was aware of cocaine traffickers in the Contra movement and did nothing to stop the criminal activity. The report also alleged a pattern of discarded leads and witnesses, sabotaged investigations, instances of the CIA working with drug traffickers, and the discouragement of DEA investigations into Contra-cocaine shipments. The CIA’s refusal to share information about contra drug trafficking with law-enforcement agencies was also documented. The Bromwich report corroborated Webb’s investigation into Norwin Meneses, a Nicaraguan drug smuggler.
# On October 8, 1998, CIA I.G. Hitz published Volume Two of his internal investigation. The report described how the Reagan-Bush administration had protected more than 50 Contras and other drug traffickers, and by so doing thwarted federal investigations into drug crimes. Hitz published evidence that drug trafficking and money laundering had made its way into Reagan’s National Security Council where Oliver North oversaw the operations of the contras.[10] According to the report, the Contra war took precedence over law enforcement. To that end, the internal investigation revealed that the CIA routinely withheld evidence of Contra crimes from the Justice Department, Congress and even the analytical division of the CIA itself. Further, the report confirmed Webb’s claims regarding the origins and the relationship of contra fundraising and drug trafficking. The report also included information about CIA ties to other drug traffickers not discussed in the Webb series, including Moises Nunez and Ivan Gomez. More importantly, the internal CIA report documented a cover-up of evidence which had led to false intelligence assessments.
My thoughts are with Ms. Millender-McDonald and her family today.
