Interview with Gary Webb about the 'crack epidemic' and the Reagan admin

[jpgray]

http://rwor.org/a/v19/910-19/913/webb.htm

RW: Wasn't this the era of "Just Say No," as official government policy? Nancy Reagan and all? So what government agencies were involved in getting this cocaine into the United States and then distributing it?

GW: That's hard to tell because the people who were doing it weren't directly connected. They were always at arm's length. I'll tell you the agencies that I have found links to. It was the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA and the DEA. And each agency was linked in different ways. There's a significant amount of evidence that shows members of this drug ring were in contact with agents of these agencies while this cocaine trafficking was going on. And they weren't being arrested. So it's kind of hard to explain why since we've gotten a lot of documentation that shows the federal government knew what was going on. At least some portion of it.

RW: What links did you find to the Drug Enforcement Agency?

GW: The DEA links were through Norwin Meneses, the head of the ring. He was working for the DEA. He's been working for the DEA for many years. Which is why it's so astonishing that he's never been arrested in the United States. But also may explain why. It's my opinion that he was protected. And that's the opinion of other people I've talked to--that he was protected.

RW: Have you learned anything since your original series about links between the CIA and this whole operation?

GW: One of the links we found was through an agent in Costa Rica. We talked to one of the couriers for this drug ring who was working for the Meneses organization in San Francisco. And he told us, and identified the agent, gave us the name of the agent, who he said was overseeing the distribution of the funds that he personally took down there. So, there's that.

There's the fact that, as I reported in the original series, they met with a CIA agent and essentially got their fundraising orders from this man, Enrique Bermúdez, who is the head of the FDN, the Contra Army called the FDN.

And we've also found evidence that people in Washington, at least one CIA official in Washington, had fairly specific information on the trafficking that was going on at the Salvadoran air base.