The NED at Work By Richard Sale

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a Washington D.C-based quasi-governmental organization funded by the U.S. which boasts that it is "supporting freedom around the world."^[1]

Alan Weinstein, one of the founders of the NED, explained in 1991:

A lot of what we [NED] do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA ^[2]

Most of the NED, and its affiliated organizations, deals with influencing political processes abroad. The means employed range from influencing civil society, media, fostering business groups, lending support to preferred politicians/political parties, election monitoring, and fostering human rights groups.

It’s right there in the organizations own statements: 

The National Endowment for Democracy was set up by President Ronald Regan in the 1980s, and it employed an assortment of organizations across the political spectrum including the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to help funnel US tax dollars to overseas groups working to develop democracy in their respective countries.  In the 1980s, especially in Poland, the NED had proved an effective tool in loosening and weakening Soviet power by supporting Polish dissidents.

The NED was the chief pillar of a plan by then President Clinton to get rid of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.  The plan, developed by the CIA, was intricate and comprehensive. Basically, it was to work through the NED’s two subordinate wings, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) as well as the Center for International Private Enterprise, an offshoot of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The IRI would focus on dissident students while the NDI would work closely with different opposition parties. The State department and the U.S. Agency for International Development would play the leading role in channeling funds through commercial contracts and nonprofit groups. Under the authority AID, other money would be funneled to opposition groups and the mayor of opposition cities.

Because of their freedom of travel and their ability to move in closed off areas, the CIA recruited the staff of the NGOs, mainly relief agencies and human rights groups, which produced a great deal of useful intelligence. According to former CIA official, such recruitment was done very selectively. We didn’t want the organization discredited or people killed nor could they be seen as foreign vassals,” said a former official of the agency’s Directorate of Operations. Another agency official said, "There was a lot of reluctance in this area.”

The proposed coup against Milosevic had to be “very tightly controlled from the beginning, middle and end.  You had to support one group against another group; you helped people who were going to help you,” one said.

So the Clinton plan was to use covert/overt, insider/outsider elements simultaneously, which meant employing NGOs in coordination with sophisticated espionage. Said one former senior agency official, who was closely involved, “We planned to do to Milosevic what he’d done to us. We went in to create trouble spots, support dissidents, circulate subversive literature, beam in anti-Milosevic broadcasts, and neutralize his army and security forces. Solidarity was the model.”

The agency plan had several general goals; first the program should be a region-wide effort, making use of a Central European network of banks, corporations,  political, and social organizations to fund coup assets plus use the intelligence services of Austria, Germany, Albania, Italy, and even Greece, for recruitment and penetration.  All of these nations had their own excellent collection networks inside Serbia.   The plan was also to develop useful and valuable sources inside Milosevic’s circle.

A big part of the Clinton plan was to have the president appeal directly to Serbia’s people. Clinton saw them as an irreplaceable ally.  He wanted to forge a direct bond with them by speaking past the Milosevic government.  U.S. support could not win them their freedom; that was their task, and backing Slobodan was not in their best interest. This took place before huge public demonstrations. Since Milosevic controlled the media, the U.S. would counter with radio and TV broadcasts whose theme would be Slobodan’s decay.  The broadcasts would also contain phrase of code to agents on the ground, much like the French resistance in WWII. The NGO’s would smuggle in tons of printed materials and organize “a get out the vote” campaign.

“You had to be very careful; you had to look at every facet, every aspect,” said a US intelligence officer who was involved.

Such operations in the Balkan were usually run out of the CIA’s European Division in Frankfort, Germany, but this time it would the CIA’s Central Eurasian Division at Langley who would look to it.  Key support points would be U.S. Embassies in Austria, Hungary, Kosovo, Croatia, Germany, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania. Support would also come from the major German political parties, all of which had “action arms” that would contribute resources.  Vienna would be the major focus of intelligence collection efforts. In Vienna, intelligence poured in like “water through an open sluice,” a former participant said. Austrian military intelligence had given America details of Milosevic’s ”Operation Horseshoe,” a major Serb military plan, which would force 800,000 Kosovars into rootless exile. Austria and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe entirely wired. “Vienna’s information was amazing, and so was Germany's,” said a participant in the operation.

Another resource was the 30,000-40,000 Serbs living in Austria.  Serbia had established the military draft, and the CIA had many walk-in Serbs who gave it detailed assessments of troops, list of security and police officials and other valuable information. Other Serb deserters went by ratlines to Germany where they were debriefed at Westport, a former US military base turned intelligence center. Many Serbs returned to Belgrade to continue to report.

Milosevic was constantly passing draconian new laws to root out dissidents and make war on his  own students, and the CIA, having learned from the attempts by the Soviets who tried to decapitate Polish union, Solidarity, using mass arrests, the Serbian rebel students, whose outfit was called Otpor, set up a brilliant horizontal structure exactly the opposite of Milosevic’s central structure. Otpor was made up of small cells, and to escape capture, its members constantly shifted to a complicated network of safe houses. Operations were launched from these.  A safe house used signals such as a raised blind or a closed window or a raised flag on a mailbox to indicate that all was well.

In addition, the CIA, through NGO’s, supplied the rebel Serbian students with thousands of cell phones, radio transmitters, and fax machines.  Calls and e-mails went out through servers outside Serbia to escape Belgrade’s magpie scrutiny.  Otpor was also supplied with printing equipment and supplies, and the publications and leaflets began to have an impact.

But the most urgent priority had been to establish a money conduit to fund Otpor and other Serbian defectors in place. Much of the money was cash gathered  in Hungary and smuggled in suitcases over the border into Serbia., preferably U.S. dollars or German deutsche marks that were widely used in Serbia and had a higher value than the worthless Serb dinar. To avoid detection, the money trail moved constantly. Very early Otpor received money to a tune of $3 million from NED.  The money was transferred to accounts outside of Serbia, mainly in Hungary and Austria. Since Milosevic had nationalized the Serb banks, a lot of more money came over the Serb border in suitcases from Hungary.  The NED would not know where the money was going, and would receive a receipt signed by a dissident as to how the funds were used. For example, money going to underground publications would be acknowledged by a secret code on one of the pages.

Using its covert monies, the students began to buy t-shirts, stickers, leaflets that bore its emblem of a clenched fist.  Soon the clenched fist of Otpor appeared on walls, postal boxes, cars, the sides of trucks and statues.  The students painted red footsteps on the ground to symbolize Milosevic’s bloody exit from parliament and passersby found thrust into their hands cardboard telescopes that described a falling star called “Slobotea.” They also used public relations techniques including polling leafleting and paid advertising. As days went on recruitment was expanded and new assets acquired and in cities like Banja Luka in northern Bosnia in Pristina in Kosovo, and in the provincial cities of Serbia, activity was mounting to a climax  All the beatings of crowds, the disbanding of political parties, the fixing of the 1997 elections, the dismissal of honest Serb officials, the snubbing, the humiliating defeats, the arrogant indifference of  Milosevic had been piling up, generating a pent-up violence that was going to be discharged in one shattering explosion of  revolt.

The money trail expanded.  Regarding the funding of certain persons or groups, the agency took pains to use false flag recruitments – acting through intermediaries to get new agents while the CIA pretended that its own agents came from other countries. Clinton did not want the opposition derided as U.S. lackeys.  A participant said to me, "I don’t think a lot of our assets had a sense of working for the U.S. government. It’s a grey area letting them know where their monies are coming from.” In the end, they got over $70 million.

Communications gear came next.  The dissidents had to be supplied advanced CIA equipment such as Inmarsat scrambler phones to organize a command, control and intelligence, (C3I) network so they could remain underground and stay a step ahead of capture. Training for specific opposition leaders and key individuals was given U.S. assets within Serbia whose purpose was to serve as the eyes and ears for key dissident as well as to provide funds and security.

By now Otpor had developed a crisis committee to coordinate resistance that enabled networks from different regions to keep in close touch. All branches of U.S. intelligence was going to provide an early warning system for the students. The NSA and the CIA Special Collections Elements in neighboring countries had hacked into Slobodan’s key security bureaucracies and were reading Ministry of Internal Affairs' orders for police raids against the demonstrators. This intelligence was passed to the dissidents who gave advance alerts to Otpor cells which  allowed them to disperse and avoid arrest. By now the student group even had a committee to deal with administrative tasks such as lining up new safe houses, cars, fake IDs. As the campaign to dethrone Milosevic went on, the money and activities grew more and more quickly with more than $30 million from the U.S. alone.

 There were now seventy thousand Otpor students in 130 groups with twelve regional offices, and the Otpor leaders had been schooled in non-violent techniques designed to undermine dictatorial authority.  They were using a handbook, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation,” written by a retired U.S. Army Colonel, Robert Helvey. Chapters were copied and handed from cell to cell throughout the country. He said in an interview that his non-violent method “is not ethical. It is not pacifism. It is based on an analysis of power in dictatorship and how to break it by withdrawing the obedience of its citizens and the key institutions of society.”

In the meantime, the United States and Britain and others were seeing to it that Serbia felt more and more encircled. Covert operations continued and gained momentum as meetings were held in Szeged in Hungary, in Croatia, in Ulm, Germany, and in Montenegro. In addition to Hungary, the U.S Embassies in Bulgaria and Romania were involved as well.  The Clinton presidency was now involved in establishing a new, anti-Milosevic elite in Serbia.

In the end, of course, Milosevic fell from power in 2000. In Clinton’s view, the huge debts of blood Milosevic had run up during his campaigns of aggressive war, massacre, rape and plunder had to be paid in full. Milosevic had already been indicted as a war criminal before the Dayton talks, and after he returned to his fortified house in 2001, the new President George W. Bush carried out the Clinton plan to carry out a plan established by the CIA, the U.S. Army and U.S. Special Forces. In the end, Bush sent in SEAL Team Six, acting on a plan set up in the headquarters of EuroCom, the U.S. Army in Stuttgart, to capture Slobodan and send him to The Hague. That story should be told, but not here.

Milosevic was a truly evil, heartless, merciless man. His greed for power was unbounded and his reign was one of predatory massacres, institutional corruption, abuse, exploitation. 

By the time of the Dayton talks, after nearly four years, there were 250,000 killed, two million refugees, and there had been atrocities that had appalled the word.  In interview a UN woman who was the first US official to get new of the Srebrenica massacre when a man with a bullet graze, appeared to tell her his story, resulting in an urgent telegram to the State Department.

But talking recently to former CIA and other intelligence officials, they see nothing in the Ukraine that provides any reasonable pretext to whip up ignorant mobs there who talk democracy but who behave like thugs.  A former deputy chief of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, once a backer of NED,  now sees it with distrust, its ambitions  “too imperial,” manifesting the U.S. obsession with meddling with other countries internal affairs. Remember what Helvey said of his program, ““is not ethical. It is not pacifism. It is based on an analysis of power in dictatorship and how to break it by withdrawing the obedience of its citizens and the key institutions of society.”

Were such methods required in the case of the Ukraine? You tell me.

Comments

[The Twisted Genius]

seydlitz89,

Concerning your reporting about Serbian atrocities/war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, were your sources all Bosnian and Croatian refugees? On the clan side, they all were. We were directed to make a concerted effort to gather intel. Unfortunately our leads and sources were all taken from refugees... low hanging fruit. Our most prolific source proved to be a paper mill. The handling C/O discovered this himself with some persistent detective work. We only talked to one side and we got one sided reports. Vladko and his henchmen were bastards, but we never got a clear picture of the entire situation. We missed half the bastards.

Here's another sad story. We had several Yugoslavian sources prior to the troubles in the Balkans, but were directed to drop them not long after the WTO collapsed. "We'll never be interested in that region again," we were told. Turned out to be pretty damned shortsighted.

[turcopolier]

TTG and Sedlitz89

"Our most prolific source proved to be a paper mill." well, that's the problem is it not? If you interview refugees about the persecutors lot of them are going to lie to you. pl

[kao_hsien_chih]

In some sense, that is the direction politics has been moving in United States, too, although, as far as I can tell, without direct linkage to NED--but then, these are basically same people who are operating on both domestic electoral front and the int'l "democratization" front.

Within both parties, political activists have identified the loci of power within the parties and are using various peculiar features of American elections (e.g. primaries) to exercise undue influence within both parties. Tea Partiers, liberal activists, R2P types, neocons, neoliberals, etc.: all these people are relatively small (and often very small) minorities among the American public, even if they were all put together, but they have been successful in mobilizing key demographics of the public at the crucial points along the political process and have been able to exercise undue amount of influence. In other words, they have been able to threaten many elected politicians (even those who are not their fellow travelers) by threatening to "withdraw important subsets of the citizenry and the key institutions of society." It is basically the same cynical game they play, both at home and abroad.

[William R. Cumming]

Within the Washington Beltway really only one party!

The one party is the incumbents.

See William Greider's 1994 book "Who Will Tell the People?"!

[confusedponderer]

Then it all comes down to properly assessing the reliability of a source, that analysts are given the time necessary for that and that reality is being taken into account.

I think the inherent problem of such situations as we saw in Jugoslavia, Iraq, with Syria policy and now in Ukraine, is that there is a strong political impetus that wants a particular policy that heavily favours friendly news.

We have a 24h news cycle now, and that means that the political side tries to put out stories in support of political objectives as soon as they bcome available and still have news value to shape the narrative. This is propaganda pure and simple. It has nothing to do with reality.

The idea may be summed up as move fast, pick the stories you want, be first, and no more questions please.

In essence, policy moves faster than the understanding of the situation, and the decision makers are so cocksure of themselves that they don't bother operating in the fog.

Brandon O'Neill has called these people ahistorical and I concur. They don't know history, and they don't care.

What I marvel at is the degree of decentralised harmonisation that one can see at play in western and in partuicular in US media in such circumstances. Either they play along willingly and tacitly, or they are out of their depth and simply overwhelmed with events they have no time (or inclination or knowledge) to think through. Or is it just an elite consensus of an old boys and gals crowd, some sort of DC insisder intellectual incest?

I can't otherwise explain the piss poor performance we see with the hair-dos on tv and in the severely skewed reporting one can read in the newspapers.

The problem inherent in that is that not just the public but in particular the political sides is never fully or orperly informed, and thus prone fall prey to believing their own propaganda.

And these people are necessarily mislading their publics as much as their enemies. Regime change ops like this require secrecy and, more importantly, it inevitably requires domestic propaganda (something putatively prohibited in the US).

It's a small step from staying on message to believe all that crap yourself. It probably is one way to calm the inevitable dissonance arising from knowing better and selling something else in full knowledge it is wrong. Believing that wrong is right must be tempting then, even kore so among true believers who want to be good, want to do good.

It is small comfort that, of all things, they would find their redemtrion in self delusion.

And of course, all of it flies on the face of parliementary oversight (and in the US, the odds are the overseers are fully on board wih any of this) and government transparency.

The intel people then must be the perpetual skunks at the picknick, whose views endanger the policy - dangerous people who must be reigned in and watched with suspicion. It is worse, however, when the Intel people want to be team players and drink the proverbial kool aid. A thankless job.

Afterthought:
In a sense, the intelligence apparatus was rid of a conflict of interest when it was to drop the subversive mission and when Reagan outsourced it to bodies like NED. The underlying propblem however wasn't not one of the intelligence services but one of the US government wanting policies regardles of facts on the ground. That problem persists regardles of reorganisation. It is as curent now as it was in 2003 or during Iran-Contra.

[William R. Cumming]

See my comment on the POST reflecting this comment. Totally agree!

[kao_hsien_chih]

One would wish that were still the case.

Historically, incumbents were successful electorally because they were able to spend time building rapport with their constituencies and because their parties and other Washington insiders stayed out of their districts.

Now, the story is opposite. Nobody has had personal contacts with their congressperson any more. The biggest asset that incumbents have is their partisanship, followed by talking points on various "major" issues. In compensation, parties have helped create heavily partisan districts where a yellow dog or a pink cat can be elected as long as they belong to the right party and say the right things. People talk about campaign spending going up, but in fact, large sums of money are being spent ONLY in the areas where partisan balance is still competitive: since politicians have no "personal" character to bring to the table, they make it up for it by spending money. No politician is being elected because of who and what they are as individual any more. Every politician has only to toe the party line (defined in different senses) and that will be good enough.

If anything, we need incumbency to matter more, not less, to fight this madness.

[D]

The National Democratic Institute is the Democratic Party homologue of the Republican-affiliated International Republican Institute, both of which are under the umbrella of the National Endowment for Democracy.

[seydlitz89]

TTG-

Sources were all Bosnian and victims of the Bosnian Serbs. We reported based on the sources we had access to. What really stood out was the reaction. After months of hardly any notice, all the sudden our reporting, particularly regarding a specific camp, was of high value and interest. If I remember correctly this was around the time that a couple of high level State Department officials resigned. Members of our unit received Exceptional Human Intelligence Collector awards signed by James W. himself . . . There's a bit more I could add, but you'll have to buy the beer . . .

[seydlitz89]

Sir, regarding Putin, I have the greatest respect for him as a strategist, from a Clausewitzian perspective. I think he is very much the part and for that reason somewhat predictable in that he shares a certain outlook which I am sure you see as well. I've posted on this subject and have used Clausewitz and Svechin to describe in some limited way what is going one, provide a conceptual yardstick . . .

At the same time, I don't see the US reacting in any way effectively to this, divided as we are due to base interest. I fear we as a country have little concept of what strategy actually is, this attempt to use various sources of power as means . . . at the level of grand strategy, of where we as a people will our political community to develop in interaction with other political communities . . . a difficult task indeed!

Was it all simply a mad Enlightenment dream?

[The Twisted Genius]

All,

Here's a pretty good report on the Maidan protests done by RT and published on 19 February. Sure RT has a point of view, but just look at the video images. Can you imagine what we would do if the Occupy Wallstreet crowd looked and acted like the Maidan protesters?

http://rt.com/shows/documentary/kiev-masks-of-revolution-388/

Someone commenting on the Vineyard Saker found these YouTube videos supporting the claim that the protesters were the ones doing the sniping.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5qXS8Xc274
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl6RUgAMaiA

[Fred]

TTG,
that is a very interesting documentary from RT. I guess Ms. Wahl definitely had to quit her job at RT before this came out.

I was struck by the father (Orthodox?) being interviewed saying Berkut units were using rubber bullets. (I believe the Berkut is a special police unit?) A few minutes later the interchange where this line was said: “Did you ever see a Russian diplomat handing out cookies to Berkut units” Got to admit it was funny. One of the Berkut members said the hard core (violent) protesters were present every day and that if they were given the order they could have pushed them out (his words) easily as there were only 2-300 of them? That seems like a pretty small group to force such a change, but of course the real power struggle wasn't in plain sight, was it?

Yes, I can imagine what would have been done to the “occupy WallStreet” movement had they dressed like any of the Ukrainian protesters. As is they were effectively crushed by court order and/or police action in every city but Detroit. There the city not only didn’t have the money but everyone with power knew they would be completely ineffective, including both the Democratic members of Congress from the area and all the Republicans in the state.

Meanwhile, South of the Border, the US is apparently choosing sides in the Mexican political process:

US Embassy and Godaddy conspire to censor dissenting Mexican political site
http://boingboing.net/2014/03/05/us-embassy-and-godaddy-conspir.html