The Ford Foundation and the CIA

by Robert Wenzel
Economic Policy Journal

Recently by Robert Wenzel: Is Obama a CIA Controlled Manchurian President?

A commenter to my earlier post suggesting CIA ties to the Ford Foundation wrote:

I am considered by most people who know me as being to the right of Genghis Khan. I worked or the company many years ago. I often laugh at the assertions you make. There is no basis in fact for what you propose. Most organizations like the Ford foundation wouldn't allow themselves to be used in this manner for fear of getting their folks killed or injured, not to mention the embarrassment if found out. I don't like Obama either but when you make inane comments like this you hurt us and make the voting public think we are crazy.

First, this has nothing to do with right versus left, it is about liberty versus the interventionist state. Second, the CIA does use businesses and foundations as front groups. A business friend of mine who has significant branches overseas has been approached more than once by the CIA. They wanted to use his business as a cover for some of his agents.

Third, in discussing the mysterious deaths of Nicholas Deak and Edmund Safra, with a very high level Citibank executive who was in charge of the global superwealthy, I expected him to begin shooting down my theory of a CIA connection to the murders, once I finished my story. Instead, he looked up to the ceiling and said, "Well, I can tell you for sure Safra wasn't murdered the way it was reported in the papers. The superwealthy think about security, especially outside the United States, the way we have hobbies. Safra would have never left himself exposed alone with such a person (the alleged murderer)." Then he stopped and added, and remember this guy handles Citi money for the global superwealthy, "Sometimes I think Citibank is part of the CIA."

As for the CIA not working through the Ford Foundation. You have to be kidding! There was a damn congressional investigation about it:

The CIA uses philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source. From the early 1950s to the present the CIA's intrusion into the foundation field was and is huge. A U.S. Congressional investigation in 1976 revealed that nearly 50% of the 700 grants in the field of international activities by the principal foundations were funded by the CIA (Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders, Granta Books, 1999, pp. 134-135). The CIA considers foundations such as Ford "The best and most plausible kind of funding cover" (Ibid, p. 135). The collaboration of respectable and prestigious foundations, according to one former CIA operative, allowed the Agency to fund "a seemingly limitless range of covert action programs affecting youth groups, labor unions, universities, publishing houses and other private institutions" (p. 135). The latter included "human rights" groups beginning in the 1950s to the present. One of the most important "private foundations"

Does make it kind of interesting that Geithner's father was in charge of microfinance funding in Asia for the Ford Foundation and that Obama's mother was in charge of microfinance funding in Indonesia, doesn't it?

Reprinted with permission from Economic Policy Journal.

March 22, 2012

©2012 Economic Policy Journal

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