[R-G] NED et. al.: The CIA’s Successors and Collaborators

[Anthony Fenton]

NED et. al.: The CIA’s Successors and Collaborators
US Overt and Covert Destabilisation

by Hernando Calvo Ospina

Global Research, April 15, 2008
Le Monde Diplomatique

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CAL20080415&articleId=8694

When a scandal in the 1980s revealed the CIA’s 35 years of  
international manipulations, President Ronald Reagan established the  
National Endowment for Democracy as a more discreet and less  
controversial instrument. It had the same purpose – to destabilise  
unfriendly governments by funding the opposition.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created in 1983,  
ostensibly as a non-profit-making organisation to promote human rights  
and democracy. In 1991 its first president, the historian Allen  
Weinstein, confessed to The Washington Post: “A lot of what we do  
today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” (1).

Long before the NED was created, the same newspaper had revealed in  
1967 how the CIA funded foreign trade unions, cultural organisations,  
media, and prominent intellectuals. As Philip Agee, a former operative  
with the Company told me in an interview in 2005: “The CIA used known  
American foundations, as well as other custom-made entities that  
existed only on paper.”

Under pressure, President Lyndon Johnson ordered an investigation,  
although he was aware that the CIA had been mandated to carry out such  
activities since its creation in 1947. Agee said: “In the aftermath of  
World War II, faced with threats to our democratic allies and without  
any mechanism to channel political assistance, US policy makers  
resorted to covert means, secretly sending advisers, equipment and  
funds to support newspapers and parties under siege in Europe” (2).  
They had to counter the Soviet Union’s ideological influence at the  
start of the cold war.

The funded organisations sometimes managed to weaken and even  
eliminate opposition to friendly governments, while creating a climate  
favourable to US interests. There were coups, such as the one in  
Brazil in 1964 that overthrew President João Goulart. The coup against  
Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973 showed that the US  
government had not abandoned such methods. Agee claimed: “To prepare  
the ground for the military, we funded and channelled the forces of  
leading organisations in civil society and the media. It was an  
improved version of the coup in Brazil.”

The battle of ideas

In 1975 the CIA was investigated by the Senate, particularly its  
involvement in plots against political leaders throughout the world,  
including Patrice Lumumba, Allende and Fidel Castro. The success of  
revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America forced the US to  
recognise that although the strategy of infiltrating social  
organisations remained crucial, the tactics were counter-productive.  
So, “to wage the battle of ideas, the Johnson administration  
recommended the establishment of a public-private mechanism to fund  
overseas activities openly” (3).

The American Political Foundation (APF), established in 1979, was a  
coalition of the Democratic and Republican parties, union leaders and  
employers, conservative academics and institutions relating to foreign  
policy. It was based on a model developed in West Germany, where the  
four major political parties had set up government-funded foundations  
as a response to the cold war. The most important of these was the  
Konrad Adenauer Foundation, linked to the Christian Democratic Union  
(4).

In January 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed the secret directive  
NSDD-77 (5), the result of what he described in a speech to the  
British parliament as a process designed “to foster the infrastructure  
of democracy” and “to determine how the United States can best  
contribute… to the global campaign for democracy” (6). The directive  
called for “close collaboration with foreign policy efforts –  
diplomatic, economic, military – as well as a close relationship with  
sectors of the American society – labour, business, universities,  
philanthropy, political parties, press.”

Reagan kept quiet about the directive when he presented an APF  
proposal, the Democracy Programme, to Congress. An act of 23 November  
1983 ratified the creation of the NED. At a ceremony at the White  
House in December he announced: “This programme will not be hidden in  
shadows. It’ll stand proudly in the spotlight. And, of course, it will  
be consistent with our own national interests” (7).

Anti-Sandinista dollars

The NED consisted of four core organisations responsible for its  
management. One already existed: the Free Trade Union Institute was a  
branch of the AFL-CIO trade union federation and was later  
incorporated into the American Centre for International Labour  
Solidarity. The others were the Centre for International Private  
Enterprise, an affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce; the National  
Republican Institute for International Affairs; and the National  
Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Although legally an NGO, the NED was funded from the State Department  
budget, subject to congressional approval. As well as allowing the  
government to disclaim any formal responsibility, this offered a  
further strategic advantage. As former State Department official  
William Blum said: “Notice the non-governmental – this helps to  
maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government  
agency might not have.”

In October 1986 the Reagan administration was shaken by the revelation  
that it had illegally funded the insurgency against the Sandinista  
government in Nicaragua, using money from cocaine trafficking. By  
coincidence, the operation, coordinated by Colonel Oliver North and  
authorised by the National Security Council (NSC), was called the  
Democracy Programme. The NED played a key role. But the investigation  
was more interested in the funding of the Nicaraguan counter- 
revolutionaries, the Contras, than in the involvement of this “NGO”,  
although the NED was supervised from its creation until 1987 by Walter  
Raymond, a senior CIA officer and a member of the NSC’s intelligence  
directorate.

The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) was an extremist anti- 
Castro organisation set up by the NSC at the same time as the NED. The  
foundation’s president, Jorge Mas Canosa, said: “The NED inherited  
Ronald Reagan’s Democracy Programme and provided funding to many Latin- 
American groups, including the CANF.” Convinced that the road to Cuban  
freedom lay through Nicaragua, the CANF committed itself to the anti- 
Sandinista struggle. Mas Canosa said: “This collaboration began when  
Theodore Shackley, the CIA’s former deputy director of operations and  
head of its covert operations section, asked members of the foundation  
to support Central American policy.”

In 1987, during the Contra scandal, the NED funded a front of anti- 
Sandinista organisations, including the permanent human rights  
commission of Nicaragua. This support helped Violeta Chamorro,  
Washington’s preferred candidate and the owner of the “independent”  
newspaper La Prensa, to win the presidency in 1990.

A non-governmental crusade

The NED’s talent for channelling money, establishing NGOs, electoral  
manipulation and media brainwashing owed much to the long experience  
of the CIA, the State Department’s foreign aid agency USAID, and  
members of the conservative elite associated with US foreign policy  
(including John Negroponte, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Francis Fukuyama).  
Terrorism apart, the Reagan administration used the same methods in  
eastern Europe, where it conducted “a non-governmental crusade for  
human rights and democracy which avoided accusations of imperialism by  
presenting itself as a direct response to the needs of dissidents and  
reformers worldwide” (8). Here the gap between rulers and ruled made  
it easier for the NED and its network of organisations to use money  
and advertising to manufacture thousands of supposed dissidents. After  
regime change, most of these individuals and the groups to which they  
had belonged evaporated.

One of the most historic victories was in Poland. As early as 1984 the  
NED was distributing direct aid to set up trade unions, newspapers and  
human rights groups, all “independent”. For the 1989 parliamentary  
elections, the NED handed $2.5m to the Solidarity movement, whose  
leader Lech Walesa, a powerful ally of the US, was elected president  
in 1990.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a prelude to the NED’s global  
expansion. It mobilised its money and expertise to intervene in the  
social, economic and political affairs of 90 countries in Africa,  
Latin America, Asia and eastern Europe. As Gerald Sussman pointed out,  
“electoral interventions are critically important to US global policy  
objectives”. “Democracy building” by the NED and other US  
organisations has been refined: “Compared to the surreptitious and  
nakedly aggressive manner in which the CIA typically carried out its  
destabilising forays from the late 1940s through to the mid-1970s,  
current forms of electoral manipulation are conducted largely as  
spectacles of spin and moral drama” (9).

During the 1990 elections in Haiti, the NED invested $36m in the  
candidacy of Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official. Despite this,  
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected, only to be overthrown in 1991  
after a media campaign funded by the NED and USAID.

In its first 10 years, the NED distributed $200m among 1,500 projects  
to support friends of the US (10). Since 1988 it has taken a  
significant interest in Venezuela. Philip Agee said: “There was a  
quiet operation against the Bolivarian revolution. It began under  
President Clinton and intensified under George Bush Jr. It’s like the  
campaign against the Sandinistas, but so far without the terrorism or  
the economic embargo: promote democracy, keep an eye on elections and  
support public life.” The US lawyer Eva Golinger discovered from  
official documents that between 2001 and 2006 the NED and USAID gave  
more than $20m to Venezuelan opposition groups and private media (11).  
On 25 April 2002 The New York Times revealed that Congress had ordered  
a quadrupling of the NED budget for Venezuela just a few months before  
the failed coup against President Hugo Chávez.

The campaign against Cuba

But the NED’s most consistent campaign has been against the government  
of Cuba, where it is believed to have invested some $20m over 20 years  
in an attempt to promote a “democratic transition”; $65m more has been  
contributed by USAID since 1996. Despite continued insistence upon the  
supreme necessity of democratic elections, official documents clearly  
specify that those elected must be to US governmental liking. Almost  
all the funds are in the hands of organisations based in the US and  
Europe. The governments of Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic  
receive a significant proportion of it in return for leading  
international pressure on Cuba. According to Laura Wides-Munoz  
(Associated Press, 29 December 2006), the NED paid them $2.4m in 2005.

Washington’s idea of democracy is elections and business walking hand  
in hand. In his January 2004 State of the Union address, President  
Bush announced that he would be asking Congress “to double the budget  
of the National Endowment for Democracy, and to focus its new work on  
the development of free elections, and free markets, free press, and  
free labour unions in the Middle East”; ideological work would  
accompany military action. Hitherto the NED’s involvement in the  
region had been minimal. It moved into Afghanistan in 2003. According  
to its website, it decided “to establish and strengthen business  
associations inside Afghanistan to ensure a more sustained and  
diversified effort to build democracy and market economy”. It funded  
emerging NGOs.

NGOs in occupied Iraq were funded with similar objectives,  
particularly in the north. Local organisations were supported by – and  
quickly became dependent upon – the NED. Under the banner of the  
struggle for democracy, they worked for a system whose interests  
seldom coincided with those of local people.

Uniquely for an NGO, the NED’s president must appear before the US  
Senate Foreign Relations Committee every year to account for its  
activities. In June 2006 Carl Gershman (president of the NED since  
April 1984) made an emergency appeal for more funds to support  
democracy. He claimed that NGOs in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan,  
Venezuela and Egypt needed more to confront “semi-authoritarian”  
governments. He later made an identical speech to the European  
parliament during the conference, “Democracy Promotion: the European  
Way”.

According to William Blum, the NED’s basic philosophy is that  
societies “are best served under a system of free enterprise, class  
cooperation… [and] minimal government intervention in the economy. A  
free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform and growth, and  
the merits of foreign investment are emphasised. NED’s reports carry  
on endlessly about democracy, but at best it’s a modest measure of  
mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not economic  
democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers that be.”

A weapon of global war

Addressing the UN General Assembly in September 1989, President George  
Bush Sr asserted that the challenge facing the world of freedom was to  
consolidate the foundations of freedom. In 1988, the Canadian  
parliament, encouraged by the US, had set up an NED clone, Rights and  
Democracy. In 1992 the British parliament established the Westminster  
Foundation for Democracy. Sweden followed with the Swedish  
International Liberal Centre, the Netherlands with the Alfred Mozer  
Foundation, and France with the Robert Schuman Foundation and the Jean  
Jaurès Foundation (linked to the Socialist Party).

As its network spread, the NED set up the Democracy Projects Database  
to coordinate 6,000 projects worldwide. It also created the Network of  
Democracy Research Institutes to bring together “independent  
institutions, university-based study centres, and research programs  
affiliated with political parties, labour unions, and democracy and  
human rights movements to facilitate contacts among democracy scholars  
and activists” (12). The NED hosts the Centre for International Media  
Assistance, which “brings together a broad range of media experts with  
the objective of strengthening support of free and independent media  
throughout the world” (13).

On the State Department’s official website, Carl Gershman declared  
that all these foundations, people and organisations were contributing  
to “building a worldwide movement for democracy”, a network of  
networks with the NED at its centre. Other foundations fell into step:  
the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Germany; the Olof Palme  
International Centre in Sweden; the Renner Institute in Austria; and  
the Pablo Iglesias Foundation, linked to the Spanish Socialist  
Workers’ Party.

In 1996, to justify increasing the NED’s budget, an enlightening  
report was submitted to Congress: “The US cannot afford to discard  
such an effective instrument of foreign policy at a time when American  
interests and values are under sustained ideological attack from a  
wide variety of anti-democratic forces around the world… [They] remain  
threatened by deeply entrenched communist regimes, neo-communists,  
aggressive dictatorships, radical nationalists, and Islamic  
fundamentalists. Given this reality, the US cannot afford to surrender  
the ideological battlefield to these enemies of a free and open  
society.” (14). Three years later, Benjamin Gilman, the president of  
the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took the same line.

As Blum put it: “What was done was to shift many of the awful things  
[done by the CIA] to a new organisation, with a nice sounding name.  
The creation of the NED was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public  
relations, and of cynicism.”

Hernando Calvo Ospina is a journalist and the author of Bacardi: the  
Hidden War (Pluto Press, London, 2002). Translated by Donald Hounam

Notes:

(1) The Washington Post, 22 September 1991.

(2) www.ned.org/about/nedhistory.h tml. On the CIA’s use of  
intellectuals see Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA  
and the Cultural Cold War (Granta Books, London, 2000).

(3) www.ned.org/about/nedhistory.html

(4) The others were the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Social Democratic  
Party), the Hanns Seidel Foundation (Christian Social Union) and the  
Friedrich Naumann Foundation (Free Democratic Party).

(5) http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd ...

(6) www.ned.org/about/reagan-060882.html

(7) www.ned.org/about/reagan-121683.html

(8) Nicolas Guilhot,“Le National Endowment for Democracy”, Actes de la  
recherche en sciences sociales, 139, Paris, September 2001.

(9) Gerald Sussman,“The Myths of‘Democracy Assistance’: US Political  
Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe”, Monthly Review, vol 58,  
no 7, New York, December 2006.

(10) Guilhot, op cit.

(11) Eva Golinger, The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in  
Venezuela (Pluto Press, London, 2006).

(12) www.wmd.org/ndri/ndri.html

(13) www.ned.org/about/cima.html

(14) James A Phillips and Kim R Holmes, “The National Endowment in  
Democracy: A Prudent Investment in the Future”, The Heritage  
Foundation, Executive memorandum 461, Washington DC, 13 September 1996.