The Dark Side Of USAID Left Out Of The Recent New Yorker Article.
The New Yorker's Recent Article On USAID Left Out It's History As A CIA Cutout.
The New Yorker has recently put out a puff piece on USAID (United States Agency for International Development) by Atul Gawande, who served as Assistant Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development under the Biden administration.
In the piece, Gawande claims that USAID “helped move billions of people out of poverty. And it showed how to deliver results for all of humanity, including Americans, through coöperation, rather than coercion”.
While the piece briefly mentions that, “aid was bent to American military and political aims—in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere,” it ignores the fact that USAID has often been used as a tool of the CIA, to back coups and regime change operations against unfriendly governments around the world- something that is still happening today despite Trump’s claims to have ended USAID.
As Foreign Policy Magazine wrote in 2014, “Foreign governments have long accused the U.S. Agency for International Development of being a front for the CIA or other groups dedicated to their collapse. In the case of Cuba, they appear to have been right.”
Foreign Policy Magazine noted that USAID, “covertly launched a social media platform in Cuba in 2010, hoping to create a Twitter-like service that would spark a ‘Cuban Spring’ and potentially help bring about the collapse of the island’s Communist government,” adding, “It was a digital Bay of Pigs, but it was funded by USAID”.
As the outlet noted, “Though better known for administering humanitarian aid around the world, USAID has a long history of engaging in intelligence work and meddling in the domestic politics of aid recipients. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the agency often partnered with the CIA’s now-shuttered Office of Public Safety, a department beset by allegations that it trained foreign police in ‘terror and torture techniques’ and encouraged official brutality, according to a 1976 Government Accountability Office report.”
“Cuban Twitter” is not the only time in recent years that USAID has functioned as a CIA cutout.
In 2004, the United States gave, $15 million to USAID to carry out a program of regime change in Venezuela against the country’s elected president, Hugo Chavez, tasking it to undermine him by “penetrating Chavez’s political base, dividing Chavismo, protecting vital US business, and isolating Chavez internationally”.
Similarly, USAID money was used to back a coup against Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004.
As Mother Jones reported :
In 2002 and 2003, IRI (International Republican Institute) 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 leaders. Though IRI’s work is supposed to be nonpartisan — it is official U.S. policy not to interfere in foreign elections — a former U.S. diplomat says organizers of the workshops selected only opponents of Aristide and attempted to mold them into a political force.
Mother Jones noted, “In 2004, several of the people who had attended IRI trainings were influential in the toppling of Aristide”.
USAID also pumped millions of dollars into media outlets in Nicaragua, which eventually led to violent riots against the country’s president, Daniel Ortega, in 2018.
As journalist Max Blumenthal reported:
When the socialist-oriented Sandinista Front returned to power in Nicaragua through democratic elections in 2006, Washington began pouring tens of millions of dollars into the creation, training, and funding of right-wing opposition groups in the Central American nation.
Millions of dollars have flowed from the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, into the bank accounts of anti-Sandinista groups.
These US-funded organizations were at the heart of a failed coup d’etat that ravaged Nicaragua in 2018, leading to hundreds of deaths and destabilizing the country.
Blumenthal noted that “Among the most prominent recipients of the millions USAID plowed through the Chamorro Foundation was the opposition media outlet 100% Noticias,” adding that the USAID-funded outlet, “was the main propaganda channel of the violent elements that attempted to overthrow the country’s elected Sandinista government by force” which, “urged anti-Sandinista forces to storm the presidential residence, kill the president, die by the hundreds doing so, and hang his body in public”.
In 2019, USAID gave $52 million to Juan Guaidó, an unelected American puppet in Venezuela who the U.S. recognized as the official president, and who went on to attempt several coups against the actual government of Venezuela, including by storming Venezuela’s national assembly.
USAID’s meddling has gone beyond South America and also played a large role in the proxy war in Ukraine.
As journalist Branko Marcetic reported, USAID-funded think tanks in Ukraine organized protests in 2014 against the country’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, resulting in his being overthrown in a violent coup, when far-right militants began shooting snipers at protestors in the Maidan square, and then falsely blaming the shooting on Yanukovych’s forces to justify the coup.
The coup eventually led to a civil conflict in Eastern Ukraine, and USAID later helped block the Minsk Accords, the peace deal that would have ended the war.
As the University of Ottawa professor Ivan Katchanovski documented, “The Western governments and foundations, such as Soros foundation, funded all but one of about two dozen Ukrainian NGOs, which initially issued in 2019 a collective statement that any talks with Donbas separatists were impermissible after the head of the Zelenskyy’s presidential administration supported creation of a consulting group with representatives of the separatist-controlled Donbas during the Minsk negotiations”.
As journalist Aaron Mate noted, “the vast majority of Ukrainian groups that signed the list were funded by Western governments and foundations. These include the media outlets and organizations Detector Media, the Institute of Mass Information, and Internews-Ukraine, all of which are supported by USAID.”
After the start of the Ukraine proxy war, USAID continued to back coups against leaders in Europe who opposed the proxy war.
When the popular candidate Calin Georgescu- who was critical of NATO and the proxy war in Ukraine- was kicked off the ballot in the most recent Romanian elections based on false accusations that he was backed by Russia, journalist Lee Fang uncovered that, “Think tanks and civil society NGOs funded by the U.S. – via USAID … have served as the most vocal voices championing the judicial coup”.
Despite claims that Trump ended USAID, he has continued this regime change aspect of the organization.
As Drop Site News reported, “Despite disbanding USAID in February 2025, the Trump administration redirected some $400 million dollars in recent months to combat ideologically opposed governments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua”.
While the New Yorker lauds USAID as a purely humanitarian organization, its article failed to mention its long history of being used for CIA interference and coups.
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At least half o USAID “humanitarian aid” came with a hidden and not so hidden prize: rigged elections, coups “regime” changes, spionage, brainwash and the training of people in favor of the US, to attack their own countries, among other not so good things. The modern Trojan Horse.
USAID also funded Lutheran Social Services and Hebrew Immigrant Aid, who were incentiving illegal immigration, through free hotel rooms and cell phones and free money. This had to stop, to stop the immigration crisis, as almost everybody would come here on those terms.