San Jose Mercury News: Dark Alliance investigation Senate report on drug trafficking and the Contras

THE US government launched an inquiry yesterday into reports that Nicaraguan Contra rebels, supported by the CIA, pushed drugs on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s, using the vast profits to fund their civil war against the Sandinistas.

The CIA director, John Deutch, and the Attorney-General, Janet Reno, ordered an immediate inquiry into newspaper reports that the agency had shielded the rebels from prosecution. The issue has become the hottest topic in black America with its implications that agents involved in covert action were mixed up with the Colombian drug lords who flooded the ghettos of South Central Los Angeles with crack cocaine, and then the rest of the country. Details of the allegations, including court documents, recorded interviews and photographs, have been posted on the World Wide Web by the San Jose Mercury News, a respected white-owned newspaper, which spent a year investigating the affair it labelled the "Dark Alliance".

The site has been flooded with up to 100,000 inquiries a day, with evidence that the Internet has electrified black computer buffs. Black radio station talk shows are also being inundated with calls. Joe Madison, who hosts a radio show in Washington, where a huge percentage of the population is black, has spent the past month devoting his programme to the alleged scandal. He said: "We've always speculated about this. Now we've got proof."

Details also come at a time in the election campaign when Republican candidate Robert Dole is attacking President Clinton for a new surge in teenage drug use. His attack may backfire if the former Reagan administration is linked.

A prominent black congresswoman in Los Angeles, Maxine Waters, is urging public hearings on the issue, amid statements from civil rights groups calling for an independent look at the claims.

Ross Perot, the presidential candidate, seized on the issue yesterday, suggesting that the government inquiry may cover up rather than expose the details

Donald Payne, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, spoke of a "tremendous amount of distrust" in the black community that persuaded people to believe that the CIA had been involved. "This is going to stay on the front burner for us," he said. Ross Perot, the presidential candidate, seized on the issue yesterday, suggesting that the government inquiry may cover up rather than expose the details.

Mr Deutch said: "I regard these allegations with the utmost seriousness. They go to the heart and integrity of the CIA enterprise and it's something that has to be addressed in a forthright and complete fashion."

Conspiracy theories have abounded about the Contras. Mr Perot pointed out that there was suspicion that Mena airfield in western Arkansas was secretly used - allegedly with the approval of the then state governor, Mr Clinton - for CIA gun-running flights to Central America. The planes are supposed to have returned loaded with cocaine.

This has always been dismissed as a rogue operation by CIA sources, but Mr Perot said that with both Republicans and Democrats apparently involved, any truth was unlikely to seep out. Time magazine called yesterday for an independent commission into the newspaper series which alleged that two Nicaraguan exile supporters of the Contras sold tons of cocaine to California gangs, beginning in 1981.

A recipient of the drug shipments was alleged to be a Los Angeles-based peddler known as Freeway Rick Ross. Millions of dollars were then sent to the Contras. The pair were identified as Danilo Blandon, who is alleged to have become a Drug Enforcement Agency informer, and Norwin Meneses.

It was claimed that both operated as drug dealers in the Bay area of San Francisco. Mr Deutch said an initial review had not uncovered any evidence that the CIA had supported drug dealing. His agency "never had any relationship" with the two men. Retired CIA agents involved in the Contra operation said the Nicaraguans were unknown to them.

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