Waters Wants Probes of Alleged CIADrug Ties to Continue

By SAM FULWOOD III, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTONRep. Maxine Waters (DLos Angeles) said
Tuesday that she supports continuing federal inquiries into
allegations that the CIA helped spread crack cocaine in
SouthCentral Los Angeles, even though the San Jose Mercury
News has retreated from some assertions in a series that sparked
the investigations.
"The investigations started by the House Intelligence Committee,
the inspector general of the CIA, and the inspector general of the
Justice Department certainly should continue," Waters said at a
news conference. "I am pleased that they are continuing."
Waters, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, was
among the first national leaders to demand federal inquiries
stemming from the Mercury News series last summer. Tuesday, she
repeated her arguments backing the investigations, saying that the
public must know whether the CIA played a role in drug dealing.
"The idea of the investigation is to document or not whether or
not the CIA had direct involvement [in selling drugs in
SouthCentral]; whether it just knew and turned its head; who
knew, when did they know it and how high did it go," Waters said.
The admission by the Mercury News that the series suffered
from shortcomings does not "undermine the basic story," she said.
The series sparked alarm within black communities and among
antigovernment activists nationwide. While many innercity
residents previously had expressed suspicions that crack was
forced upon poor, black neighborhoods, the Mercury News series
gained widespread attention because it seemed to document the
CIA's involvement in drug dealing.
The series, Mercury News Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos
wrote in a column published Sunday, "strongly implied CIA
knowledge" of drug dealing in Los Angeles in the early 1980s by
two Nicaraguans who then sent millions of dollars in profits to the
U.S.backed Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
But Ceppos wrote that a reexamination by the newspaper found
that the series' central assertions were not sufficiently proven.
Ceppos also wrote that the series' clear implication that the
Nicaraguans' drug dealing "played the critical role in the [U.S.]
crack explosion" was an "oversimplification."
Waters portrayed Ceppos' column as an effort to make clear
what the series actually reported.
"Not one dime of dope money should have supported a war in
Nicaragua of a group that was organized and supported by the
CIA," she said.

Copyright Los Angeles Times