Collapsing Empire: RIP CIA Front's 'Overt Operations'

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In recent months, a remarkable development in the Empire’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database has been removed from the web. Until recently, a searchable interface allowed visitors to view detailed records of Washington-funded NGOs, civil society groups, and media projects in particular countries - covering most of the world - the sums involved, and entities responsible for delivering these initiatives. This resource has now inexplicably vanished, and with it, enormous amounts of incontrovertible, self-incriminating evidence of destructive US skullduggery abroad.

Take for example NED grant records for Georgia, the site of recent repeated colour revolution efforts, at the forefront of which were Endowment-bankrolled organisations. While still accessible via internet archives, they were deleted during summer 2024. Today, visitors to associated URLs are redirected to a brief entry simply titled “Eurasia”. Accompanying text describes in very broad terms the Endowment’s aims regionally and the total being spent, but the crucial questions of where and on what aren’t clarified. In a comic hypocrisy too, the blurb boldly states:

“The heart of NED’s work in the region is the need to maintain access to objective information for local populations. Across the region, government actors are attempting to limit the space for citizens to distribute information and communicate freely online.”

Resultantly, independent academics, activists, researchers, and journalists have been deprived of an invaluable resource for tracking and exposing the Empire’s machinations. Yet, the Endowment incinerating its public paper trail can only be considered a significant victory for these same actors. NED’s explicit and avowed raison d’être was to do publicly what US intelligence did - and in many cases still does - covertly. Now, after 40 years of wreaking havoc worldwide via “overt operations” in service of Empire, the CIA front has been forced underground, defeating its entire purpose. How long can it now survive?

NED’s ‘Eurasia’ entry

‘Spyless Coups’

NED was founded in November 1983, after the CIA became embroiled in a series of embarrassing public scandals. Then-Agency director William Casey was central to its construction. His objective was to create a public mechanism to conduct traditional CIA meddling overseas, except out in the open. Ever since, the Endowment has financed countless opposition groups, activist movements, media outlets, and trade unions to the tune of untold millions to engage in propaganda and political activism, to disrupt, destabilize, and displace ‘enemy’ regimes the world over.

The NED’s true nature was openly acknowledged by the mainstream media for many years. In June 1986, longtime Endowment president Carl Gershman told the New York Times, “it would be terrible for democratic groups around the world” to be subsidized by the CIA. Past exposure of such connivances meant they had been “discontinued”, and farmed out to NED. Several high-ranking interviewees strenuously denied there was any connection between NED and the Agency, although the outlet acknowledged many Endowment programs seemed “superficially similar” to past CIA operations.

At this time, NED was hard at work killing off Communism in the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia. This included for instance enormous investment in Poland’s famous Solidarity trade union, which became a global emblem of anti-Communist resistance. In September 1991, the Washington Post published a highly laudatory appraisal of these efforts, declaring “political miracles” achieved by the Endowment across the former Soviet sphere had ushered in a “new world of spyless coups”, and “innocence abroad”:

“The old era of covert action is dead. The world doesn’t run in secret anymore. We are now living in the age of Overt Action…When such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection. Covert funding for these groups would have been the kiss of death, if discovered. Overt funding, it would seem, has been a kiss of life.”

NED proceeded to take down a number of governments throughout the 1990s and 2000s, very overtly. In many cases, mainstream outlets published highly revealing accounts detailing precisely how. In Ukraine in November 2004, Endowment-trained and bankrolled activists forced a rerun of that year’s presidential election to install a pro-Western puppet. As The Guardian jubilantly reported, the entire effort was “an American creation” and “sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing,” which had been repeatedly deployed in the new millennium to “topple unsavoury regimes”:

“Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations…the operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.”

‘Kiss of Death’

The next year, USAID published a glossy magazine, Democracy Rising, bragging extensively about how it and NED were fundamental to a wave of insurrectionary upheaval in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere during the first years of the 21st century. Fast forward to February 2014, and Ukraine’s government once again fell victim to an Endowment-orchestrated coup, in the form of the Maidan ‘revolution’. Yet, the media either ignored the irrefutable US role in fomenting the upheaval, or dismissed the proposition as “Russian disinformation” or conspiracy theory.

Democracy Rising

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This is despite; contemporary polls never showing majority Ukrainian support for the Maidan protests; ousted President Viktor Yanukovych remaining the most popular politician in the country until his last day in office; every actor at Maidan’s forefront, including the individuals who started the demonstrations, receiving NED or USAID funding; leaders of Washington-financed organizations in the country openly advertising their desire to overthrow Yanukovych in the years prior; and the Endowment pumping around $20 million into the country in 2013 alone.

A Maidan crowd

This mass omertà, which has intensified since, may be attributable to ever-rising hostility towards NED by ‘enemy’ governments and populations, and associated efforts to restrict or outright proscribe the organization. The reality of the Endowment’s raison d’être and modus operandi has thus not only become unsayable, but must be vehemently denied by Western journalists. Representatively, a July 2015 Guardian report on Russia banning NED quite unbelievably relied on a brief quote from the Endowment’s own website to describe its operations.

While the mainstream media may have remained silent on the NED’s mephitic influence overseas over the past decade, the same is not true of dissident academics, activists, researchers, and journalists. The Endowment grant database served as an invaluable tool for keeping a close eye on Washington’s international intrigues, and mapping the personal and organisational connections of NED-sponsorsed agents and entities of influence. Meanwhile, the Enowment’s status as a CIA front could be simply proven, via multiple public admissions of its own leaders.

Whenever protests erupted somewhere in the world and received widespread Western news coverage, concerned citizens could consult the NED grant database and find in the overwhelming majority of cases, most if not all individuals and groups quoted in associated media reports were in receipt of Endowment funding. While difficult to quantify, it would be unsurprising if dissident voices calling attention to this fact has helped avert colour revolution efforts, disrupted meddling campaigns, protected popular governments and political figures, and more.

Of course, despite NED brazenly purging online evidence of its vast operations, that conniving continues apace regardless - now, covertly. One might even argue the Endowment’s chicanery is all the more dangerous resultantly, given individuals and organizations can conceal their funding sources. But the move amply shows NED today cannot withstand the slightest public scrutiny, which its existence was intended to exemplify. It also demonstrates “overt operations” with open US funding are now the very “kiss of death” the Endowment was meant to replace. The Empire is on the run.