‘CIA SIDEKICK’ GIVES £2.6M TO UK MEDIA GROUPS

A US government-funded agency that claims to promote democracy but which helps undermine governments independent of Washington has moved decisively into Britain’s media space since 2016. 

MATT KENNARD AND MARK CURTIS

17 JANUARY 2022

US President Ronald Reagan makes a speech outside 10 Downing Street, 9 June 1982. During this visit, Reagan outlined his vision for the National Endowment for Democracy. (Photo: Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

• National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has funded groups such as Bellingcat, Index on Censorship, Article 19, Finance Uncovered, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation
• Former CIA officer tells Declassified the NED is a “vehicle” for US government “propaganda”

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-profit corporation funded by the US Congress, has ploughed over £2.6m into seven British independent media groups over the past five years. 

The NED was “created…to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades”, the New York Times reported in 1997. That included spending millions of dollars to “support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries.”

Since the end of the Cold War, the NED has grown and been involved in trying to undermine or remove governments independent of Washington, including democratic ones in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Allen Weinstein, the director of the research study that led to creation of the NED in the 1980s, remarked in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

The NED has traditionally focused on Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. But Declassified has found that the organisation has recently funded three British media outlets and four UK press freedom groups. All are seen as on the progressive end of the political spectrum.

NED money has gone to UK investigative groups Bellingcat, Finance Uncovered and openDemocracy, as well as media freedom and training organisations Index on Censorship, Article 19, the Media Legal Defence Initiative, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

 “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Since 2016, these groups have received £2,638,967 from the NED, putting it among the largest institutional funders of alternative media outlets and press freedom groups in the UK. 

The NED has also given hundreds of thousands of pounds to foreign media groups with a significant presence and affiliates registered in Britain, including Internews, PEN and Reporters Without Borders.

‘Sugar daddy of overt operations’

The NED was created in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan, who set out the idea in a set-piece speech in Westminster, in front of prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The aim, he said, was “to foster the infrastructure of democracy”.

This was a time of embarrassing scandals for the CIA. A Washington Post article soon noted: “The old concept of covert action, which has gotten the agency [CIA] into such trouble during the past 40 years, may be obsolete.” 

The NED was meant to defend against these scandals by putting certain programmes out into the open. “The sugar daddy of overt operations has been the National Endowment for Democracy,” the Washington Post continued. “Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been unspeakably covert”. 

CIA whistleblower Philip Agee, who served in the agency in the 1960s, commented in 1995: “Nowadays, instead of having just the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process secretly by inserting money here and instructions there and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy.”

https://declassifieduk.org/cia-sidekick-gives-2-6m-to-uk-media-groups/