San Jose Mercury News, staff report. “ ‘Dark Alliance’ Reporter Resigns.” San Jose Mercury News, Dec. 13, 1997.
Schiraldi, Vincent. “Black Paranoia – or Common Sense?” Pacific News Service, Dec. 18, 1996.
Schorr, Daniel. “Weekly Review.” Weekend Edition, NPR, Oct. 26, 1996.
Shepard, Alicia. “The Web Gary Spun.” American Journalism Review, Jan./Feb. 1997.
Solomon, Norman. “Snow Job.” Extra! Jan./Feb. 1997.
Stewart, Jill. “Bah-Bah-Bah.” New Times, June 5, 1997.
Stein, M. L. “Reporter Reined In.” Editor and Publisher, June 21, 1997.
Suro, Roberto, and Walter Pincus. “The CIA and Crack: Evidence Is Lacking of Contra-Tied Plot.” Washington Post, Oct. 4, 1996.
Terzian, Philip. “CIA Rumors Not All They’re Cracked Up to Be? Familiar Thesis.” Washington Times, Oct. 19, 1996.
Tucker, Cynthia. “CIA’s Drug Dealing Role.” San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 21, 1996.
Waters, Lou. “Journalist Points to CIA Involvement in Drugs.” (Interview with Gary Webb and Ronald Kessler.) CNN Today, Sept. 20, 1996.
Washington Post, editorial. “The Story of the Crack Explosion.” Washington Post, Oct. 9, 1996.
Washington Times, editorial. “The CIA and Drugs.” Washington Times, Oct. 23, 1996.
Webb, Gary. “Webb on ‘Dark Alliance.’ ” (Letter) American Journalism Review, April 1997.
Weise, Elizabeth. “Series Draws Black Community to the Web.” AP Wire, Dec. 9, 1996.
Weinberg, Steve. “Crack and the Contras.” Baltimore Sun, Nov. 17, 1996.
Weiner, Tim. “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.” New York Times, Dec. 19, 1997.
White, Jack E. “Crack, Contras and Cyberspace.” Time, Sept. 30, 1996.
——. “Caught in the Middle: The CIA–Crack Story Put Black Reporters in a Bind.” Time. May 26, 1997.
Wickham, DeWayne. “Clinton Must Act on CIA/Crack Case.” Tampa Tribune, Oct. 21, 1996.
3
The History of Black “Paranoia”
The fury among American blacks sparked by Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series was powerful enough to cause serious concern to the US government, urban mayors and major newspapers, and even prompted CIA director John Deutch to make an extraordinary appearance at a town meeting in South Central Los Angeles.
One of the first to seize on the significance of Webb’s series was Joe Madison, the black host of a syndicated talk show on WWRC based in Washington, D.C. Madison read Webb’s series on the air and devoted two full weeks of his show to an explanation of the charges, and a detailed examination of the CIA, its history of domestic spying and its role in toppling black leaders round the world. Madison’s shows were not Rush Limbaugh–style rants but thoughtful attempts to push the story forward. Gary Webb was interviewed on the show several times, as were black historians explaining the rise of the national security state and urban sociologists exploring the history of the crack epidemic in the 1980s. Madison also brought on to his show former DEA man Celerino Castillo III, who had worked as a narcotics agent in El Salvador at the height of the Contra War. Castillo described for Madison’s audience how he had watched Contra supply planes at the Ilopango air base outside San Salvador arrive loaded with weapons and leave for the United States packed with cocaine. He also recounted how he developed extensive case files on the smuggling operations of the CIA-backed Contras, including the serial numbers of the airplanes used and the names of the pilots and his informants. He had sent this information back to DEA headquarters: “All of my reports went into a black hole and I was told by my superiors, your career is going to end in Central America if you keep this up.” Castillo persisted in his investigation and the DEA carried out its threat by transferring him from El Salvador and then by launching an investigation of him.
Madison also teamed up with the black activist Dick Gregory. On September 11, the two held a press conference at the National Press Club to demand a federal investigation into the charges made in the San Jose Mercury News, and also that the CIA be compelled to declassify and release all documents relating to activities involving drug traffickers. Madison and Gregory then left the Press Club, crossed the Potomac and showed up at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Their plan was to make a personal delivery of copies of the Mercury News series to John Deutch. They were stopped at the entrance by CIA internal security. Madison and Gregory refused to leave without a personal meeting with Deutch, were then arrested and taken away.
On the political side, Rep. Maxine Waters, who represents South Central Los Angeles in Congress, seized on the Mercury News series. She pressed House Speaker Newt Gingrich to order a congressional investigation into the charges and petitioned both Deutch and US Attorney General Janet Reno to launch probes. She then organized a session at the Congressional Black Caucus legislative conference entitled “Cocaine, Contras and the CIA: How They Introduced Crack into the Inner Cities.” The session drew a crowd of 2,000 in Washington, D.C.
Waters used the floor of the House aggressively to put the story before C-SPAN viewers, and she organized town meetings not only in Los Angeles but in Detroit, Denver and Atlanta where, despite constant jibes inside the Beltway, her efforts met with a sympathetic hearing. In Los Angeles she extracted important corroborating evidence that had been deep-sixed by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department; she also went to the San Diego jail and interviewed Rick Ross. In addition, she traveled to Managua, where she tracked down Enrique Miranda, the former Somocista intelligence officer who was Meneses’s link to the Calí cocaine cartel. Waters said Miranda “gave me information about the connection between Meneses and Blandón and he indicated he had been involved in drug running with Meneses and the Calí Cartel.”
Waters was also a constant thorn in the side of her hometown newspaper, continually berating the Los Angeles Times for its hostile stance toward the whole story. This hostility, she explains, left her no option but to go on the road and spread the story by meeting with church groups and alternative media and appearing on talk radio. “In South Central Los Angeles we wondered where these guns were coming from,” she recalls. “They were not simply handguns, they were Uzis and AK-47s, sophisticated weapons brought in by the same CIA operatives who were selling the cocaine because they had to enforce bringing the profits back in. It was at about this time when you saw all these guns coming into the community, that you saw more and more killing, more and more violence. Now we know what was going on. The drugs were put in our communities on consignment, out to the gangs and others. If they did not bring the profits back, the guns were brought in so they could enforce their control. The killings just mounted and people said, ‘What are they fighting about? What are these drive-by shootings about? What is this gang warfare?’ And the press said, ‘Oh, it’s the colors. Some like red, some like blue.’ Well, you know it was about the drugs, it was about crack cocaine, introduced into our communities by people who brought it in with a purpose.”
As for the attacks on Webb by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Waters notes that at least they had admitted that money had gone to the Contras: “I never cared how much money was involved. Just that it happened.”
Waters was not deterred by the mean-spirited and often racist attacks of her journalistic critics, particularly those at the New Republic. Shortly after the CIA finally unveiled the hitherto secret annual intelligence budget – $26.7 billion – Waters took to the floor of the House of Representatives and in a sixty-minute speech called for the Agency to be “zeroed out”: “I know that there are some who will say that this is a very, very harsh recommendation, but it is no harsher than the recommendation that came to this House from the other side of the aisle when they said to get rid of the Department of Education.”
And, of course, Waters was accused of fanning the flames of “black paranoia.” The following sections briefly outline why this “paranoia” is amply justified and why Webb’s series very reaso
nably struck a chord in the black community.
In all discussions of “black paranoia” during the Webb affair, white commentators invariably conceded – as indeed they had to – that the one instance where such fears were entirely justified was the infamous Tuskegee experiments. Yet in all of the press coverage no more than a sentence or two was devoted to any account of what actually happened at Tuskegee.
The facts are terrible. In 1932, 600 poor black men from rural Macon County, Alabama were recruited for a study by the United States Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute. The researchers found 400 out of the 600 infected with syphilis, and the 200 uninfected men were monitored as the control group. The other 400 men were told they were being treated for “bad blood” and were given a treatment the doctors called “pink medicine,” which was actually nothing more than aspirin and an iron supplement. No effective medical treatment was ever given to the Tuskegee victims because the researchers wanted to study the natural progress of venereal disease. When other physicians diagnosed syphilis in some of the men, the Public Health Service researchers intervened to prevent any treatment. When penicillin was developed as a cure for syphilis in 1943 it was not provided to the patients. Indeed, the development of a cure only seemed to spur on the Tuskegee researchers, who, in the words of historian James Jones, author of Bad Blood, saw Tuskegee as a “never-again-to-be-repeated opportunity.”
As an inducement to continue in the program over several decades the men were given hot meals, a certificate signed by the surgeon general, the promise of free medical care and a $50 burial stipend. This stipend was far from altruistic because it allowed the Health Service researchers to perform their own autopsies on the men after they died. The experiments continued until 1972, and were canceled only after information about them had leaked to the press. Over the course of the experiments more than 100 of the men died of causes related to syphilis, but even after exposure, the lead researchers remained unapologetic. “For the most part, doctors and civil servants simply did their job,” said Dr. John Heller, who had headed the US Public Health Services Division of Venereal Diseases: “Some merely followed orders, others worked for the glory of science.”
In 1996 President Clinton issued a public apology to the Tuskegee victims. Nor was this an entirely disinterested act of governmental contrition. Earlier in the year Clinton had been approached by Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala regarding the scarcity of blacks willing to volunteer as research subjects. Shalala attributed this reluctance to “unnatural fears” arising from the Tuskegee experiments. George Annas, who runs the Law, Ethics and Medicine program at Boston University, notes that the apology was skewed and that Clinton and Shalala should have been finding ways of recruiting more blacks as medical students rather than research subjects. “If you were to look at the historical record, you will see that blacks’ distrust predated Tuskegee,” according to Dr. Vanessa Gamble, an associate professor of the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “There were experiments dating back to more than a hundred years that were more often done by whites on slaves and free blacks than on poor whites.”
Another oft-cited explanation for the readiness of blacks to believe the worst about the white man’s intentions is briskly referred to as “the FBI’s snooping on Martin Luther King Jr.,” as Tim Golden put it amid his reflections on black paranoia in the New York Times. The government’s interest in Dr. King went considerably beyond “snooping,” however, to constitute one of the most prolonged surveillances of any family in American history. In the early years of the century, Lieut.-Col. Ralph Van Deman created an Army Intelligence network targeting four prime foes: the Industrial Workers of the World, opponents of the draft, Socialists and “Negro unrest.” Fear that the Germans would take advantage of black grievances was great, and Van Deman was much preoccupied with the role of black churches as possible centers of sedition.
By the end of 1917 the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division had opened a file on Martin Luther King Jr.’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. A. D. Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and first president of the Atlanta NAACP. King’s father, Martin Sr., Williams’s successor at Ebenezer Baptist, also entered the army files. Martin Jr. first shows up in these files (kept by the 111th Military Intelligence Group at Fort McPherson in Atlanta) in 1947, when he attended Dorothy Lilley’s Intercollegiate School; the army suspected Lilley of having ties to the Communist Party.
Army Intelligence officers became convinced of Martin Luther King Jr.’s own Communist ties when he spoke in 1950 at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the integrated Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Ten years earlier, an Army Intelligence officer had reported to his superiors that the Highlander school was teaching a course of instruction to develop Negro organizers in the southern cotton states.
By 1963, so Tennessee journalist Stephen Tompkins reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, U-2 planes were photographing disturbances in Birmingham, Alabama, capping a multilayered spy system that by 1968 included 304 intelligence offices across the country, “subversive national security dossiers” on 80,731 Americans, plus 19 million personnel dossiers lodged at the Defense Department’s Central Index of Investigations.
A more sinister thread derives from the anger and fear with which the army high command greeted King’s denunciation of the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967. Army spies recorded Stokely Carmichael telling King, “The Man don’t care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble.”
After the 1967 Detroit riots, 496 black men under arrest were interviewed by agents of the army’s Psychological Operations group, dressed as civilians. It turned out King was by far the most popular black leader. That same year Maj. Gen. William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for intelligence, observing the great antiwar march on Washington from the roof of the Pentagon, concluded that the empire was coming apart at the seams. There were, Yarborough reckoned, too few reliable troops to fight in Vietnam and hold the line at home.
In response, the army increased its surveillance of King. Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying landing zones and potential sniper sites in major US cities. The Ku Klux Klan was recruited by the 20th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Alabama as a subsidiary intelligence network. The army began offering 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis.
In his fine investigation, Tompkins detailed the increasing hysteria of Army Intelligence chiefs over the threat they considered King to pose to national stability. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover was similarly obsessed, and King was dogged by spy units through early 1967. A Green Beret special unit was operating in Memphis on the day he was shot. He died from a bullet from a 30.06 rifle purchased in a Memphis store, a murder for which James Earl Ray was given a 99-year sentence in a Tennessee prison. A court-ordered test of James Earl Ray’s rifle raised questions as to whether it in fact had fired the bullet that killed King.
Notable black Americans, from the boxing champion Jack Johnson to Paul Robeson to W. E. B. Du Bois were all the object of relentless harassment by the FBI. Johnson, the first black superstar, was framed by the FBI’s predecessor under the Mann Act. Johnson ultimately served a year for crossing state lines with his white girlfriend (who later became his wife). Du Bois, founder of the NAACP, was himself under surveillance for nearly seventy years and was arrested and shackled for urging peace talks with North Korea.
Still fresh in the minds of many blacks is the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, started in 1956 and conceived as a domestic counterinsurgency program. Though its ambit extended to the New Left, Puerto Rican revolutionaries and Native Americans, the most vigorous persecutions under COINTELPRO were those of black leaders. A memo from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover described the program as it stood in August 1967: the purpose of COINTELPRO was to “expose, disrupt, mis
direct, discredit or otherwise neutralize” black organizations the FBI didn’t care for. And if any black leader emerged, Hoover’s order was that the Bureau should “pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercised their potential for violence.”
“Neutralize” has long been government-speak for assassination. At least six or seven Black Panther leaders were killed at the instigation of the FBI, the most infamous episode being the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago. These two Panther leaders were shot in their beds while asleep, by Chicago police who had been given a detailed floor plan of the house by an FBI informant who had also drugged Hampton and Clark.
During the mid-1970s hearings chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church, the FBI was found to have undertaken more than 200 so-called “black bag” jobs, in which FBI agents broke into offices, homes and apartments to destroy equipment, steal and copy files, take money and plant drugs. The FBI was also linked to the arson fire that destroyed the Watts Writers Workshop in Los Angeles.
In all the stories about “black paranoia” trolled forth by Webb’s assailants one topic was conspicuously ignored: the long history of the racist application of US drug laws.
The first racist application of drug laws in the United States was against Chinese laborers. After the US Civil War opium addiction was a major problem: wounded soldiers used it to dull pain and then became habituated. One study estimates that by 1880, 1 in every 400 adults in the United States had such an addiction to opium. Chinese laborers had been brought into the United States in the wake of the Civil War to build the transcontinental railroad and, in California, to haul rock in the gold mines in the Sierras. Thousands of Chinese were also brought into the South to replace slave labor on the cotton and rice plantations. The Chinese brought opium smoking with them, their addiction having actively fostered in the Opium Wars by the British, who had successfully beaten down efforts by the Chinese government to curb the habit.
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