RIP, NED

The Infamous CIA cutout is reportedly being gutted

Pictured Above: The National Endowment For Democracy’s 2019 “Democracy Award ceremony”.

The neoconservative pundit Eli Lake has recently lamented the fact that the National Endowment for Democracy may collapse.

In his article for “The Free Press”, Lake wrote that “NED, a key U.S. instrument for supporting grassroots freedom movements around the world, is under siege from Elon Musk’s DOGE.” reporting that:

An order from DOGE to the U.S. Treasury that blocked disbursement of NED funds has crippled the organization—which received $315 million for fiscal year 2025—and its affiliates

Lake quoted one NED staffer who said “It’s been a bloodbath” saying the organization “has not been able to meet payroll and pay basic overhead expenses”.

Lake spent the rest of the article lamenting the fall of the NED claiming it was designed for “supporting democracy activists” and uses “a strategy of supporting local citizens opposed to the authoritarian systems”.

In reality, the organization was created as a cutout of the CIA to launder America’s meddling and overthrowing of foreign governments in countries that get in the way of American hegemony.

In this article, I will go over the real history of the NED ,cite some of the most relevant examples of its meddling in foreign countries, and discuss how it peddles domestic propaganda.

How The NED Was Birthed Out Of The CIA

The story behind the creation of the National Endowment For Democracy (NED) was exposed by Philip Agee, a former CIA case officer who blew the whistle on corruption within the agency in his 1975 book “Inside the Company: CIA Diary”.

In a 1995 interview, Agee called the NED a “CIA sidekick” and revealed that the idea was proposed after the media exposed that the CIA was secretly giving “money and instructions” and “channeling money into overseas organizations” in order to interfere in foreign countries' domestic affairs in 1967.

Agee said that this revelation was “a catastrophe for the CIA” saying “I was in headquarters at the time when these scandals broke and the gloom there was something you could touch almost”.

Agee revealed that after these CIA scandals were broken in February of 1967, Florida congressman Dante Fascell proposed “an open system to finance these overseas organizations” such as “government organizations, political parties, media organizations, youth organizations, and student organizations”. Agee noted that these organizations were not actually “free” as they were taking “funding and instructions” from the CIA.

This ide,a proposed by Fascell eventually materialized into the NED which was created by the Ronald Regan administration in 1984. Agee explained that the NED was a “mega conduit” for all the “tens of millions that are set aside for the meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”.

Agee explained that from the NED this money goes to four organizations, the Democratic Party’s “National Democratic Institute”,(NDI) the Republican Party’s “International Republican Institute” (IRI), the AFL-CIO, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Agee revealed that these groups passed the money to “recipients in foreign countries” citing the example of 12.5 million dollars of U.S. government money going from the NED ‘through these conduits” to the UNO political movement in Nicaragua, the opposition to the Sandinista movement, which eventually led to it’s leader Violeta Chamorro winning an election in 1990.

Agee’s revelations about the NED were soon after confirmed by David Ignatius in the Washington post. His report quoted NED official Allen Weinstein who admitted that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”. Ignatius noted that “The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection”.

Ignatius also argued that overt organizations like the NED would be able to do the same covert operations the CIA used to do but not face the same backlash. As he wrote:

Nowadays, sensible activities to support America's friends abroad (or undermine its enemies) are probably best done openly. That includes paramilitary operations such as supporting freedom fighters, which can be managed overtly by the Pentagon. And it includes political-support operations for pro-democracy activists, which may be best left to the new network of overt operators.

Some Contemporary Examples Of The NED’s Meddling

The Bush administration used the NED’s Republican arm- the IRI- to back coups against democratically elected governments in Haiti and Venezuela.

Mother Jones reported that:

In 2002 and 2003, IRI used funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to organize numerous political training sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600 Haitian leader

The outlet reported that many of the people in this training session went on to take part in the 2004 coup against Haiti’s democratically elected leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide. As they wrote:

In 2004, several of the people who had attended IRI trainings were influential in the toppling of Aristide

Anti-war.com recently noted that this NED-sponsored coup in Haiti “left 100 people dead and toppled Aristide”.

Mother Jones also reported that several figures involved in the 2002 coup against Venezuela’s democratically elected president Hugo Chavez were also trained by the IRI writing:

In April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez, and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta.

Far from promoting “Democracy”, Chavez was so popular with his base that the coup was eventually reversed after his supporters took the streets and demanded he be reinstated as president.

IRI, the Republican wing of the NED is not the only one to interfere in Venezuelan politics, the Democratic wing -NDI- has as well.

Leaked documents show that the NED through its democratic party wing -the NDI- “used Facebook to assist the Venezuelan opposition in municipal elections in 2013 and legislative elections in 2015.” The NDI bragged that it “mobilized a voter database that identified and targeted swing voters through social media” which successfully swung the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2015 to the more pro-U.S. opposition for the first time since 1999.

In 2018, the NED targeted Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan president who has been a long-time American enemy due to his involvement with the Sandinista movement.

The outlet Global Americans, which opposes the Ortega government admitted that “the NED has funded 54 projects in Nicaragua between 2014 and 2017” which “laid the groundwork for insurrection” in the country and that “the U.S. government (through the NED) actively helped build the political space and capacity in Nicaraguan society for the social uprising that is currently unfolding.”

The “social uprising” Global Americans refers to a violent coup attempt against the Ortega government that took place in 2018. Far from the peaceful uprising the mainstream media presented it to be, John Perry, a journalist who reported on it from the ground testified that “Public buildings and the houses of government supporters were burnt down by protesters”.

The independent mainstream media watchdog outlet FAIR Media, which has been covering Nicaragua since the 1980s found that the NED-funded protests “were implicated in 52 deaths” that occurred during clashes in the coup attempt.

There have also been graphic videos posted online of the protestors torturing civilians they deemed to be sympathetic to the Ortega government and even supporters of the protests were brutally beaten for condemning the violent elements.

The investigative journalist Alan Macleod who writes for the independent website “Mint Press News” has extensively researched the NEDs activities this decade and uncovered several other regime change operations and examples of meddling in other countries’ political affairs.

Macleod uncovered that the NED has run regime change operations against Alexander Lukashenko, the Russian allied leader of Belarus. Macleod reported that

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is spending millions of dollars yearly on Belarus and has 40 active projects inside the state, all with the same goal of overthrowing Alexander Lukashenko and replacing him with a more U.S.-friendly president

Macleod uncovered a Zoom meeting where “the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova” bragged that “the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko” in 2020 “were trained by her organization”.

Macleod quoted Ognianova saying that “We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight” admitting that the NED “made a modest but significant contribution to the protests.”

Macleod also uncovered a NED plot to weaponize rappers and LGBT people in Cuba to try to effect regime change. Macleod reported that the NED funded a project entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society,” and another called “Promoting Freedom of Expression in Cuba through the Arts” which were designed to promote “democracy, human rights, and historical memory” and “increase awareness about the Cuban reality.” In reality, the “reality” the U.S. wanted to “increase awareness” of through the NED was opposition to the Cuban government where the U.S. has long sought regime change.

Macleod also reported that the NED was weaponizing sports journalism and LGBT issues to try to force discontent with the Cuban government writing:

Other areas in which U.S. organizations are focussing resources include sports journalism — which the NED hopes to use as a “vehicle to narrate the political, social, and cultural realities of Cuban society” — and gender and LGBTQ+ groups, the intersectional empire apparently seeing an opportunity to also use these issues to increase fissures in Cuban society.

All of this is not to make a moral or political judgment about any of the governments targeted by the NED.

Certainly, all of these countries are in complex situations with divided populations and many internal issues.

But the solutions should be left up to the domestic populations. The United States had a freakout over Russian-funded Facebook memes during the 2016 election, yet openly interfered in the domestic situation of countless countries for their own geopolitical goals.

No matter what one thinks of the leaders in these countries or their internal politics, the important point is that they should be left to the people living there, and the United States should not be meddling in them, which is always done to benefit American foreign policy interests.

The NEDs Propaganda Comes Home

The National Endowment For Democracy has not limited its propaganda operations to official enemy countries, they have deployed the same tactics domestically.

Perhaps the most successful example of this is through their funding of “Bellingcat” a supposed “open source investigative outlet” out of Britain which often launders the CIA’s official version of contentious events used to justify Western foreign policy.

The independent outlet Declassified UK reported that the National Endowment for Democracy gave 2.6 million dollars to seven “independent” media outlets in Britain over 5 years ,one of which was Bellingcat.

The outlet focuses almost exclusively on U.S. “enemy” countries. Journalist Matt Kennard found that in 2021 the outlet had only written 5 stories on the UK and 17 on Saudi Arabia compared to 144 on Russia and 224 on Syria.

Bellingcat and its founder Elliot Higgins are often cited in mainstream media as credible forensic experts, but in reality, they are far from qualified.

A profile of Bellingcat’s founder Elliot Higgins in The New York Times wrote :

Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.

Aside from the fact that Higgins's only forensic expertise comes from “playing video games” the UK foreign office has even admitted that Bellingcat’s reporting is unreliable. In a leaked document the UK foreign office wrote “that Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay”.

Despite having no expertise, and spreading “disinformation”, the CIA has boasted about Bellingcat being useful for laundering their claims. Foreign Policy Magazine wrote that Bellingcat “has also enabled U.S. officials and lawmakers to discuss Moscow’s skullduggery openly without revealing the sources and methods of the U.S. intelligence agencies.”

They also quoted the CIA’s “former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia”, Marc Polymeropolous who said “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this” of Bellingcat’s work. Polymeropolous bragged that the CIA could cite Bellingcat’s work to bolster CIA claims saying: “Whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it, instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference their work”.

While heavily promoting information that aligns with the CIA’s narrative, Bellingcat actively represses information that goes against it.

Bellingcat and Higgins have denied any claims that CIA-backed rebel groups were responsible for any of the chemical attacks during the war in Syria.

However, Higgins actively suppressed information he obtained that Rebel groups in Syria may have possessed chemical weapons.

In a leaked chat Higgin’s source, the rebels aligned foreign fighter Matthew Van Dyke said to him “don’t rule out the possibility that rebels do have a small quantity of chemical weapons”. Van Dyke added that “I have a source that has been reliable in the past, who gave me information about the rebels having acquired a small quantity (of chemical weapons) a few months ago and I know what building they came out of.” “I know some things about the building, having been to the site, that gives the information some additional credibility”.

Higgins did not publicly report on this information which only came to light through a leak.

In fact Higgins even published a statement in September of 2013 from the rebel group Liwa al-Islam where they stated “Only the Assad regime has chemical weapons in Syria” without mentioning that his source told him Rebels also had chemical weapons four months earlier, in May of 2013.

In February of 2015, Bellingcat stated that they were “working on” an investigation of the Maidan Massacre- a sniper massacre of protestors that took place in Ukraine’s Maidan Square in 2014- but never put out an investigation into what happened.

This was likely because the facts of the Massacre show that it was undeniably carried out by the U.S.-backed far-right group Right Sector, which they then blamed on Ukraine’s pro-Russia president Viktor Yannakovitch to justify the ensuing coup against him.

As the University of Ottawa’s Ivan Katchanovski noted Bellingcat “initially indicated that would analyze the Maidan massacre but did nothing because it did not fit politically”.

Bellingcat was also one of the main outlets bolstering the Uk and US intelligence allegation that Russia was behind the posting of the ex-British spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England.

The official intelligence narrative bolstered by Bellingcat was that Skripal was poisoned after the Soviet-era poison Novichok was put on his door handle by Russian spies.

However recent testimony has signaled that something else may have happened.

Journalist Kit Klarnberg reported that in a recent testimony Dr Stephen Cockroft- the doctor who took care of Skripal’s daughter Yulia Skirpal- said that she communicated to him that they were actually “sprayed” with poison at a restaurant called “Zizzi” where she and her father were eating.

Crockroft has hinted at a government cover-up of this information, testifying that he was removed from the Skripal’s case and told he “should not discuss any aspect of the poisoning with colleagues… or other individuals”, and that he was “forbidden to discuss any aspect of the presentation, recognition or initial treatment of Yulia or Sergei Skripal,” by higher-ups at the hospital.

He also said:

“If [my colleagues] were having a conversation [about the Skripals] they would stop talking about it in front of me,” , adding: “it was odd. It was very odd.”

Bellingcat also falsely reported in March of 2022 that

Three members of the delegation attending the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia on the night of 3 to 4 March 2022 experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning with chemical weapons.

implying that Russians had poisoned Ukrainian negotiators. Reuters shortly debunked this claim writing that :

A U.S. official said on Monday that intelligence suggests the sickening of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators was due to an environmental factor, not poisoning.

This fabrication by Bellingcat certainly could have impeded the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia which we now know were blocked by the United States and UK in order to prolong the Ukraine war.

Bellingcat is the perfect example of the NED tasking techniques they use abroad and deploying them domestically for a Western audience. In this case, they are funding a media outlet that bolsters American intelligence narratives used to justify war in order to manufacture consent domestically.

It’s Not Over

Despite the fact that the NED is being defunded, it does not mean that these regime change operations and domestic psyops will end. As I wrote about recently Secretary of State Marco Rubio openly admitted that:

There are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue, that are going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy.

The same will certainly be true of the operations the NED did. Still, it is worth reviewing what the NED was actually used for, before the mainstream media paints it as a noble organization, as they did with USAID.

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