Eighteen Years Ago Today, Journalist Gary Webb Was Murdered after Exposing CIA Drug Trafficking
MEDIA, 22 Dec 2025
Jeremy Kuzmarov | CovertAction Magazine – TRANSCEND Media Service
Journalist Gary Webb holding a copy of his Contra-cocaine article in the San Jose Mercury-News.
10 Dec 2025 – On 10 Dec 2004, the body of journalist Gary Webb, 49, was discovered in his home near Sacramento after a moving company worker found a note posted to his front door that read: “Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance.”
Webb’s death was listed as a suicide, but Webb was found with two bullet holes in the head, indicating that he was executed.[1]
In the days leading up to his death, Webb had told friends that he was receiving death threats, being regularly followed by what he thought were government agents, and that he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen breaking into and leaving his house.
In the late 1990s, Webb had written a series of stories for the San José Mercury News, which provided the basis for his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998).
In it, Webb detailed how the explosion of crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles during the 1980s was sparked by two Nicaraguan émigrés, Danilo Blandón and Norwin Meneses, who sold huge amounts of cocaine to raise funds for a CIA-backed rebel army—the Contras.
Webb was a Pulitzer Prize winner whose “Dark Alliance” series went viral in the early days of the internet. It caused a firestorm that led to the resignation of CIA Director John Deutch after he was grilled by angry Black activists at a meeting in L.A.[2]
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Tags: Alternative Media, CIA, Drug Dealers, Drugs, Investigative Journalism, Official Lies and Narratives, State Terrorism
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