Dark Alliance
Cover of the 1998 first edition
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| Author | Gary Webb |
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| Publisher | Seven Stories Press |
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Publication date
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November, 1998 (hardcover) |
| Media type | Print (hardcover, paperback) |
| Pages | 548 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 38281498 |
| 363.4/5/097285 | |
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion is a 1998 book by journalist Gary Webb. The book is based on "Dark Alliance", Webb's three-part investigative series published in the San Jose Mercury News in August 1996. The original series claimed that, in order to help raise funds for efforts against the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front Sandinista government, the CIA supported cocaine trafficking into the US by top members of Nicaraguan Contra Rebel organizations and allowed the subsequent crack epidemic to spread in Los Angeles. The book expands on the series and recounts media reaction to Webb's original newspaper expose.
Dark Alliance was published in 1998 by Seven Stories Press, with an introduction by U.S. Representative Maxine Waters. A revised edition was published in 1999. The same year the book won a Pen Oakland Censorship Award and a Firecracker Alternative Book Award. It served as part of the basis for Kill the Messenger, a 2014 film based on Webb's life.
According to Webb, in the 1980s when the CIA exerted a certain amount of control over Contra groups such as the FDN, the agency as well as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) granted amnesty to and put on the agency’s bankroll important Contra supporters and fundraisers who were known to the US Government to be cocaine smugglers. Later, at the behest of Oliver North, the Reagan Administration began to use Contra drug money to support the anti-communist Nicaraguan rebels' efforts against the Sandinista government. The Sandinistas were hated by successive Democratic and Republican U.S. administrations for the 1978-79 Sandinista Revolution (the overthrowing of the U.S.-sponsored brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua) and for their support of worker and peasant revolutions developing throughout Central and South America.
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