The US Empire, the CIA, and the NGOs — Ludwig Watzal interviews F. William Engdahl

Disclaimer: F. William Engdahl is a controversial figure and this implies that his documentation should be scrutinized carefully, which I have not done in the case of his latest book on which he is reporting herein. But the outline he provides abut the establishment of NGOs for covert operations is corroborated by many others.

Ludwig Watzal: After WW II, hardly any coup d’état or organized uprising happened without the helping hand of the CIA. As I understood your book, in the last 25 years, the CIA got quite a few so-called little helpers in the form of NGOs. Please, could you elaborate on that?

William Engdahl: During the Reagan Presidency very damaging scandals were becoming public about CIA dirty operations around the world. Chile, Iran, Guatemala, the top secret MK-Ultra project, the student movement during the Vietnam War to name just a few. To take the spotlight away from them, CIA Director Bill Casey proposed to Reagan creating a “private” NGO, a kind of cut-out that would pose as private, but in reality, as one of its founders the late Allen Weinstein said in a later interview to the Washington Post, “doing what the CIA did, but privately.” This was the creation of the NGO named National Endowment for Democracy in 1983. Soon other Washington-steered NGOs were added like the Freedom House or the Soros Open Society Foundations, the United States Institute of Peace and so forth….

Of course, not all NGOs are doing the work of the CIA. I focus on the ones with a hidden political agenda, who, as I describe in the book, have weaponized human rights and the word democracy for devious ends....

LW: If you could give the NGOs a piece of advice, what would you tell them?

WE: For the honest persons who may have got caught up in nice rhetoric about values, human rights and such, I would suggest looking more closely at the money trail feeding your given NGO.

Russia and China have banned US NGOs as subversive, which the US claims is suppression of free expression.

NGOs have a legitimate aid and humanitarian purpose. When that purpose is used as a cover for intelligence and covert operations, the entire spectrum of NGOs suffers as a cloud of suspicion envelopes all of them and the good are banned along with the bad. Then it becomes a failed policy and also erodes American soft power.

Dissident Voice
The US Empire, the CIA, and the NGOs
Ludwig Watzal interviews F. William Engdahl

The US has also promoted "human rights activists" and "democracy activists" like the recently deceased Liu Xiaobo.

Liu’s admirers seldom discuss at length their hero’s other major views. Among other things, he supported the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He backed the Vietnam and Korean wars even long after they ended, in a 2001 essay. Despite the immeasurable human-rights abuses of those conflicts, Liu stated in his “Lessons from the Cold War” that “the free world led by the US fought almost all regimes that trampled on human rights.” He insisted: “The major wars that the US became involved in are all ethically defensible.” Liu Xiaobo also admired Israel’s positions in the Middle East’s, saying the Palestinians were “often the provocateurs.”

Worse, to Chinese sensibilities, was perhaps his advocacy of all-out Westernization for China. He told an interviewer in 1988 that “to choose Westernization is to choose to be human.” Reported Britain’s Guardian newspaper: “He also faulted a television documentary, He Shang, or River Elegy, for not thoroughly criticizing Chinese culture and not advocating Westernization enthusiastically enough: ‘If I were to make this I would show just how wimpy, spineless and fucked-up [weisuo, ruanruo, caodan] the Chinese really are’. Liu considered it most unfortunate that his monolingualism bound him in a dialogue with something ‘very benighted [yumei] and philistine [yongsu],’ the Chinese cultural sphere … In a well-known statement of 1988, Liu said: ‘It took Hong Kong 100 years to become what it is. Given the size of China, certainly it would need 300 years of colonization for it to become like what Hong Kong is today. I even doubt whether 300 years would be enough’.”

Counterpunch
Liu Xiaobo: the West’s Model Chinese