Trojan
Horse
The National
Endowment for Democracy
How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy?
An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name
implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President
Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in
the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period.
Spurred by Watergate -- the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike
committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the
president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every
other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful
thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years.
The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the
powers-that-be much embarrassment.
Something had to be done. What was done
was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not.
What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization,
with a nice sounding name -- The National Endowment for Democracy.
The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had
been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the
stigma associated with CIA covert activities.
It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public
relations, and of cynicism.
Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment
for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout
the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the
"nongovernmental" -- part of the image, part of the myth.
In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal
government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each
issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an
NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a
certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might
not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.
Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation
establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: "A lot
of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."{1}
In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.
The Endowment has four principal initial recipients
of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic
Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such
as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate
of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private
Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions
in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to
yet other organizations.
In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the
internal affairs of foreign countries by supplying funds, technical
know-how, training, educational materials, computers, faxes, copiers,
automobiles, and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations,
labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers,
newspapers, other media, etc. NED programs generally impart the
basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served
under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining,
minimal government intervention in the economy, and opposition to socialism
in any shape or form. A free-market economy is equated with democracy,
reform, and growth; and the merits of foreign investment are emphasized.
From 1994 to 1996, NED awarded 15 grants, totaling
more than $2,500,000, to the American Institute for Free Labor Development,
an organization used by the CIA for decades to subvert progressive labor
unions.{2} AIFLD's work within Third World unions typically involved
a considerable educational effort very similar to the basic NED philosophy
described above. The description of one of the 1996 NED grants
to AIFLD includes as one its objectives: "build union-management
cooperation".{3}
Like many things that NED says, this sounds innocuous, if not positive,
but these in fact are ideological code words meaning "keep the
labor agitation down ... don't rock the status-quo boat".
The relationship between NED and AIFLD very well captures the CIA origins
of the Endowment.{4}
NED has funded centrist and rightist labor
organizations to help them oppose those unions which were too militantly
pro-worker. This has taken place in France, Portugal and Spain
amongst many other places. In France, during the 1983-4 period,
NED supported a "trade union-like organization for professors and
students" to counter "left-wing organizations of professors".
To this end it funded a series of seminars and the publication of posters,
books and pamphlets such as "Subversion and the Theology of Revolution"
and "Neutralism or Liberty".{5} ("Neutralism"
here refers to being unaligned in the cold war.)
NED describes one of its 1997-98 programs thusly:
"To identify barriers to private sector development at the local
and federal levels in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push
for legislative change ... [and] to develop strategies for private sector
growth."{6} Critics of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
have been supported by NED grants for years.{7}
In short, NED's programs are in sync with the
basic needs and objectives of the New World Order's economic globalization,
just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US
foreign policy.
Because of a controversy in 1984 -- when NED
funds were used to aid a Panamanian presidential candidate backed by
Manuel Noriega and the CIA -- Congress enacted a law prohibiting the
use of NED funds "to finance the campaigns of candidates for public
office." But the ways to circumvent the spirit of such a
prohibition are not difficult to come up with; as with American elections,
there's "hard money" and there's "soft money".
As described in the "Elections" and
"Interventions" chapters, NED successfully manipulated elections
in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996, helped to overthrow democratically
elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992,
and was busy working in Haiti in the late 1990s on behalf of right wing
groups who were united in their opposition to former president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide and his progressive ideology.{8} NED has made its weight felt
in the electoral- political process in numerous other countries.
NED would have the world believe that it's
only teaching the ABCs of democracy and elections to people who don't
know them, but in all five countries named above there had already been
free and fair elections held. The problem, from NED's point of
view, is that the elections had been won by political parties not on
NED's favorites list.
The Endowment maintains that it's engaged in
"opposition building" and "encouraging pluralism".
"We support people who otherwise do not have a voice in their political
system," said Louisa Coan, a NED program officer.{9} But
NED hasn't provided aid to foster progressive or leftist opposition
in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Eastern Europe -- or,
for that matter, in the United States -- even though these groups are
hard pressed for funds and to make themselves heard. Cuban dissident
groups and media are heavily supported however.
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 or the way-things-are, unless of course it's in a
place like Cuba.
The Endowment played an important role in the
Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North's
shadowy "Project Democracy" network, which privatized US foreign
policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally
charming activities. At one point in 1987, a White House spokesman
stated that those at NED "run Project Democracy".{10} This
was an exaggeration; it would have been more correct to say that NED
was the public arm of Project Democracy, while North ran the covert
end of things. In any event, the statement caused much less of
a stir than if -- as in an earlier period -- it had been revealed that
it was the CIA which was behind such an unscrupulous operation.
NED also mounted a multi-level campaign to
fight the leftist insurgency in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, funding
a host of private organizations, including unions and the media.{11}
This was a replica of a typical CIA operation of pre-NED days.
And between 1990 and 1992, the Endowment donated
a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers' money to the Cuban-American
National Foundation, the ultra-fanatic anti-Castro Miami group.
The CANF, in turn, financed Luis Posada Carriles, one of the most prolific
and pitiless terrorists of modern times, who was involved in the blowing
up of a Cuban airplane in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997,
he was involved in a series of bomb explosions in Havana hotels.{12}
The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what
it does supporting democracy. The governments and movements whom
the NED targets call it destabilization.{13}
NOTES
1. Washington Post, September 22, 1991
2. NED Annual Reports, 1994-96.
3. NED Annual Report, 1996, p.39
4. For further information on AIFLD, see: Tom Barry, et al., The Other
Side of Paradise: Foreign Control in the Caribbean (Grove Press, NY,
1984), see AIFLD in index; Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration
of Brazil (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1977),
chapter 6; Fred Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America
(monograph, San Jose, California, 1974) passim; The Sunday Times (London),
October 27, 1974, p.15-16
5. NED Annual Report, November 18, 1983 to September 30, 1984, p.21
6. NED Annual Report, November 18, 1983 to September 30, 1984, p.21
7. See NED annual reports of the 1990s.
8. Haiti: Haiti Progres (Port-au-Prince, Haiti), May 13-19, 1998
9. New York Times, March 31, 1997, p.11
10. Washington Post, February 16, 1987; also see New York Times,
February 15, 1987, p.1
11. San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1985, p.1
12. New York Times, July 13, 1998
13. For a detailed discussion of NED, in addition to the sources named
above, see: William I. Robinson, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention
in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold
War Era (Westview Press, Colorado, 1992),
This is a chapter from Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower,
by William Blum
http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm