[News] Agee - How United States Intervention Against Venezuela Works

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Part 1 (of 3)
How United States Intervention Against Venezuela Works
Tuesday, Sep 06, 2005



By: Philip Agee

Part 1 of 3
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/print.php?artno=1548
Summary, CIA Electoral Interventions, and Nicaragua as a Model for Venezuela

Summary

It is no secret that the government of the United States is carrying out a 
program of operations in favor of the Venezuelan political opposition to 
remove President Hugo Chávez Frías and the coalition of parties that 
supports him from power.  The budget for this program, initiated by the 
administration of Bill Clinton and intensified under George W. Bush, has 
risen from some $2 million in 2001 to $9 million in 2005, and it disguises 
itself as activities to “promote democracy,” “resolve conflicts,” and 
“strengthen civic life.”  It consists of providing money, training, counsel 
and direction to an extensive network of political parties, NGO’s, mass 
media, unions, and businessmen, all determined to end the bolivarian 
revolutionary process. The program has clear short, medium, and long-term 
goals, and adapts easily to changes in the fluid Venezuelan political process.

The program of political intervention in Venezuela is one more of various 
in the world principally directed by the Department of State (DS), the 
Agency for International Development (AID), the Central Intelligence Agency 
(CIA), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) along with its four 
associated foundations. These are the International Republican Institute 
(IRI) of the Republican Party; the National Democratic Institute (NDI) of 
the Democratic Party; the Center for International Private Enterprise 
(CIPE) of the US Chamber of Commerce; and the American Center for 
International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) of the American Federation of 
Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the main US national 
union confederation. In addition, the program has the support of an 
international network of affiliated organizations.

The various organizations carry out their operations through AID officials 
at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas and through three “private” offices in 
Caracas under the Embassy’s control: the IRI (established in 2000), the NDI 
(2001), and a contractor of AID, a U.S. consulting firm called Development 
Alternatives, Inc. (DAI) (2002).  These three offices develop operations 
with dozens of Venezuelan beneficiaries to which they contribute money 
originating from the State Department, AID, NED, and, although no proof is 
yet available, most probably the CIA.  The operations of the first three 
are detailed extensively in hundreds of official documents acquired by U.S. 
journalist Jeremy Bigwood through demands under the Freedom of Information 
Act, a law that requires the declassification and release of government 
documents, although many are censured when released.

Venezuelan associates of the U.S. intervention programs participated in the 
unsuccessful coup against President Chavez in April 2002, in the petroleum 
lockout/strike of December 2002 to February 2003, and in the recall 
referendum of August 2004.  Having failed in their three first attempts, 
the U.S. agencies mentioned above are currently planning and organizing for 
the Venezuelan national elections of 2005 and 2006.  This analysis seeks to 
show how this program functions and the danger it represents.

A. Some Historical Precedents

The U.S. intervention in the Venezuelan electoral process is nothing more 
than the continuation of a practice that began with the establishment of 
the CIA in 1947. In October of that year, just a month after President 
Truman signed the law establishing the Agency, he ordered the CIA to begin 
operations in Italy to prevent a victory of the Communist Party of Italy 
(PCI) in the elections planned for April 1948.  These would be the first 
national elections since the end of World War II, and the communists, who 
had wide prestige due to their role in the resistance to fascism, were 
perceived in Washington as a real threat to U.S. control of the 
country.  In alliance with the Vatican, the CIA organized multiple secret 
operations to discredit the PCI and to support the Christian Democratic 
Party. Press reports indicate that Truman transferred $10 million to the 
CIA for this intervention, a lot of money for the time.  The result was as 
desired­the Christian Democrats won easily.

The practice of secret electoral operations by the CIA continued, and 
became a category of routine covert operations, along with the penetration 
and manipulation of political parties; unions; student and youth 
organizations; cultural, professional and intellectual societies; women’s 
and religious organizations; and the communications media.  The reach of 
these operations was global, and practically all organizations of civil 
society were targets depending on the political situation of the moment. 
The 1976 House of Representatives investigation of the CIA’s history 
revealed electoral interventions had been the most frequent category of CIA 
covert actions.

 From the beginning of covert actions, the CIA was plagued by the perennial 
difficulty faced by their beneficiaries to justify or conceal the funds the 
Agency gave them.  To resolve this problem in part, the CIA established 
relations with cooperating U.S. foundations through which it channelled 
funds to foreign recipients. It also created a network of its own 
foundations that sometimes were nothing more than paper entities managed by 
lawyers on contract with the Agency.

In February 1967 a large portion of the CIA’s covert financing system 
collapsed when the U.S. press revealed the names of foundations used and of 
many of the subsidized foreign organizations. Two months after this scandal 
Congressman Dante Fascell of Miami, well known for his links with the CIA 
and the Cuban exile community, proposed in Congress the establishment of a 
private foundation to openly finance foreign private organizations that 
until then had been financed secretly by the CIA.  But at that time 
Fascell’s proposal failed to win support, and the CIA continued as the arm 
of the government responsible for covert actions like those that provoked 
the 1973 military coup in Chile.

Then, beginning in 1975 with the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, 
coupled with the investigations of the CIA that took place that year in 
both houses of Congress, resulting in constant scandals culminating with 
Watergate, a new school of thought among high level American foreign policy 
makers emerged. During the administration of Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) 
general agreement developed in the foreign policy establishment that the 
repressive dictatorships supported by the United States around the world 
(Philippines, Iran, the Southern Cone of South America, Central America, 
etc.) were not the best solutions to maintaining the long-term interests of 
the country. These interests fundamentally were free access to primary 
resources, labor, and worldwide markets especially those of the so-called 
Third World.  This new concept favoring democracy over authoritarian 
regimes came to be known as the Democracy Project.  In 1979 the American 
Political Foundation (APF) was established with both government and private 
financing, and with the participation of both political parties as well as 
business and union sectors.  Its purpose was to determine how the United 
States could better protect its foreign interests through freely elected 
civilian governments based on the U.S. federal system or the European 
parliamentary model.

The APF began studies and investigations under the direction of a 
high-ranking CIA official assigned to the National Security Council.  Its 
conclusions after two years’ work were to adopt something similar to the 
practice of the Federal Republic of Germany in which the Liberal, Social 
Democratic and Christian Democratic parties each had private foundations 
that were financed by the federal government. These foundations supported 
political parties and other organizations abroad that shared their 
political persuasions. The APF recommendations were broadly accepted, and 
in November 1983 Congress approved a law that established the National 
Endowment for Democracy awarding it $14 million for fiscal year 1984.

This new foundation, NED, was put under the control of the State 
Department, and it would channel its funds, approved annually by Congress, 
through four other associated foundations set up for this purpose: the 
International Republican Institute (IRI) of the Republican Party; the 
National Democratic Institute (NDI) of the Democratic Party; the Center for 
International Private Enterprise (CIPE) of U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and 
the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) of the 
AFL-CIO. Dante Fascell, the Miami Congressman who since 1967 had never 
ceased to promote this program, was named to the NED’s first Board of 
Directors.

The NED and its associated foundations were conceived as a mechanism to 
channel funds toward political parties and other foreign civil society 
institutions that favored U.S. interests, above all the neo-liberal agenda 
of privatization, deregulation, control of unions, reduction of social 
services, elimination of tariffs, and free access to markets.  The entire 
mechanism was, and is, nothing more than an instrument of U.S. government 
foreign policy.  Nevertheless the NED and its associated foundations have 
always tried to maintain the false impression that their operations are 
private, and in fact NED has the legal status of an NGO.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), and the CIA as well, 
also fully participate in this program “to promote democracy.” In 1984, the 
first year of NED operations, AID established a bureau called the Office of 
Democratic Initiatives (ODI), which in 1994 was renamed the Office of 
Transition Iniciatives (OTI), with the function, apart and in addition to 
NED, of channeling funds to civil society and electoral processes in other 
countries. Most likely the first officials of OTI were CIA electoral and 
civil society operations specialists who were integrated into 
AID.  Something similar had happened in the early 1960’s when the Office of 
Public Safety was established in AID to support and train foreign police 
officers.  Officials of the CIA who had been working for years in police 
assistance programs, under the internal CIA code name of DTBAIL, simply 
transferred their cover to the new AID office in order to expand these 
programs as “technical assistance.” AID established “Public Safety” offices 
in many foreign countries and trained tens of thousands of police officers 
who became some of the worst abusers of human rights around the world.

Since the 1980’s ODI/OTI has financed projects directly through the four 
foundations associated with NED, and in recent years OTI has channeled much 
more money to them than has NED.  These two funding sources, OTI and NED, 
have also channeled funds through an extensive network of U.S. foundations, 
consulting, and public relations firms.  Such mechanisms help the final 
beneficiaries conceal their financing by the U.S. government that 
nevertheless maintains complete control over the use of its funds.

Additionally the CIA can provide funds secretly to those “openly” provided 
by NED and OTI, for example in the form of supplementary salaries to assure 
the loyalty and discipline of foreign project leaders.  Likewise, certain 
projects are financed only in part by NED and OTI and require that the 
beneficiaries seek additional funds.  The CIA can provide these funds as if 
they were from individuals, businesses, or other private institutions.

Both AID and NED insist that they are prohibited from financing foreign 
political parties directly, and thus they cynically maintain that their 
activities are not partisan but dedicated to the “strengthening of civil 
society.” Nevertheless their programs always support the political forces 
that favor U.S. interests and work against those opposed. In doing so they 
have no difficulty giving financial and other support to politial parties 
via their networks of civil associations, consulting firms and foundations.

B. Nicaragua: the First Operation of the New “Project Democracy”

One of the first priorities of U.S. foreign policy during the decade of the 
1980s was to remove the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) from 
power in Nicaragua. The intervention took two fundamental approaches. One 
route was the paramilitary guerrilla force known as the “contras” that was 
organized, supplied, and directed first by the CIA and later by the Oliver 
North network based in the White House and National Security Council. The 
other route was electoral with operations organized by the CIA, AID, and 
NED with its four associated foundations. For NED Nicaragua would be the 
first test of its ability to channel funds and direct the development of a 
political opposition movement that could triumph at the polls. (This 
history can be found thoroughly detailed in A Faustian Bargain: U.S. 
Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections by William I. Robinson, Westview 
Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1992.)

The terrorism, human tragedy, and economic damage in Nicaragua caused by 
the contras are well known. Nonetheless, the contras were defeated on the 
battlefield. (In addition to Robinson, op.cit., see Holly Sklar, 
Washington’s War on Niaragua, South End Press, Boston, 1988.) During eight 
years of struggle (1980-1987) the contras could not take and hold any 
Nicaraguan village or municipality. But as a result of the disasterous 
effects in the entire region of this war and of those in Guatemala and El 
Salvador, in 1987 the Central American presidents agreed to a package of 
compromises called the Esquipulas Agreements in order to achieve peace. 
These agreements sought to transform the military conflicts into 
civic-political struggles, and they created an opening for a massive 
U.S.  intervention in the Nicaraguan electoral process that resulted in the 
defeat of the Sandinista Front in 1990.

Already the CIA had intervened in the Nicaraguan elections of 1984 when 
they organized the presidential candidacy of opposition leader Arturo Cruz. 
At the time the Agency was paying Cruz a salary of $6000 a month. But his 
candidacy was false because the plan was for him to run and then renounce 
his candidacy just before the elections, alleging that the Sandinistas had 
rigged the electoral process in its favor.  Various parties nevertheless 
participated, and the Sandinista Front captured 67% of the vote.  For the 
1990 elections the United States tried new techniques based on decades of 
CIA experience in electoral processes.

The new electoral intervention began in earnest after the Esquipulas 
Agreements in 1987, and consisted of developing three principal mechanisms: 
1) A coalition of the main opposition parties backing the same candidates 
for the presidency and other positions; 2) A political front of parties, 
unions, business organizations, and civil associations; and 3) A civic 
society of national scope to promote electoral participation and monitor 
elections, supposedly non-partisan but in reality anti-Sandinista.  Below 
we will see that the United States at present is applying this same formula 
in Venezuela in preparation for the 2005 and 2006 elections in that country.

Practically since the Sandinista triumph over Somoza in July 1979, the 
opposition, including the newspaper La Prensa, had received secret funds 
from the Carter Administration through the CIA. The core of this opposition 
was the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (Consejo Superior de la 
Empresa Privada, COSEP), a group of right-wing businessmen, financiers and 
landowners. In 1981 the Reagan Administration offered COSEP $1 million in 
AID funds to establish and fortify the Nicaraguan Democratic Coordinator 
(Coordinadora Democrática Nicaragüense, CDN), which, in addition to COSEP, 
would include four conservative parties and two union groups affiliated 
with AFL-CIO programs.  The CDN would be the vehicle for the aborted 1984 
presidential campaign of Arturo Cruz, and for the maintanence of the 
political opposition until the elections of 1990. This political-propaganda 
program, parallel to the terrorism and the economic destruction of the 
contras, was facilitated by $14 million in funds from the CIA in 1983 and 
at least $10 million annually from the CIA, AID, and NED (beginning in 
1984, its first year of operations) until 1988 when the electoral campaign 
began.

The most difficult task for the interventionist troika of the CIA, NED and 
AID was to unify the political opposition.  In this process NED played a 
key role acting through its associated foundations: NDI (the Democratic 
Party), IRI (the Republican Party), and ACILS (the AFL-CIO foundation), and 
it used as its main instrument the CDN.  NDI and  IRI established an office 
in Managua to direct their operations.  Always using money as the main 
incentive, NDI, IRI and ACILS managed to establish unified anti-Sandinista 
women’s, youth, and labor union fronts by 1988.  In July of the following 
year, only 6 months before the elections, they were able at last to achieve 
a political coalition of 14 of the more than 20 opposition parties. The 
front was called the National Opposition Union (Unión Nacional 
Opositora­UNO). A month after its formation UNO named Violeta Chamorro as 
its presidential candidate.  Chamorro, owner of the CIA-funded opposition 
newspaper La Prensa, had in fact already been pre-selected by the Bush 
administration as itscandidate.


The third necessary political mechanism, after the CDN and UNO, was a broad 
civic front, supposedly non-partisan but totally anti-Sandinista, to 
encourage people to register to vote and to assure the highest possible 
voter participation on election day. Another task for this front would be 
to monitor the registration and electoral processes, especially on election 
day, in order to assure a clean and transparent election. Again the CDN 
played the key role.  In August 1989, a month after the formation of UNO 
and after more than one year of organizing activities, Vía Cívica was 
launched as an organization for “education” in civic duties; to assure 
extensive voting; to monitor voting conditions on election day; to denounce 
any indication of fraud; and to conduct surveys and vote counts parallel to 
the official counts of the Supreme Electoral Counsel.  The activists of Vía 
Cívica were paid volunteers, and their member organizations included the 
women’s, youth, and worker’s associations that the CDN had established for 
this purpose.

To achieve all these objectives, NED in 1987 brought a U.S. consulting 
firm, the Delphi International Group, to Nicaragua. NED had employed this 
firm for political tasks in Latin America since 1984, and in Nicaragua 
Delphi provided organizers and propagandists, becoming the major recipient 
of NED funds while it carried out key tasks in the utilization of the CDN 
to form youth and women’s fronts, Vía Cívica and the UNO political 
coalition. Delphi was without a doubt the principal U.S. actor in these 
operations, and it was additionally in charge of UNO electoral publicity 
through La Prensa and various radio and television stations.

To complement and support activities carried out in Nicaraguan, the State 
Department, AID, CIA and NED in 1988 established operations centers in 
Miami, Caracas and San José.  These served mainly to channel funds toward 
beneficiaries in Nicaragua and for meetings outside the country.  Carlos 
Andrés Pérez, who began his second presidency in Venezuela in February 
1989, facilitated these operations through two foundations in Caracas under 
his control. In San José NED had already established in 1984 the Center for 
Democratic Consultation  (Centro para la Asesoría Democrática, CAD) to 
promote civic movements throughout Central America, but in 1987 Nicaragua 
became its main focus. CAD channeled funds and publicity materials to 
Managua and organized training courses for opposition activists.  For the 
pre-electoral campaign, beginning in 1988, CAD became the main rearguard 
base to assure logistics and communications among the different opposition 
organizations.


When the electoral campaign began in autumn of 1989, the new Bush 
administration assigned $9 million to NED to support UNO and associated 
groups.  These funds resulted from a strange pact negotiated by former 
president Jimmy Carter with the Sandinista leadership in which the United 
States would be permitted to “openly” finance the opposition through NED, 
but 50% of the funds would have to go to the Supreme Electoral Counsel to 
finance the elections.  In return, the United States promised not to 
intervene with additional secret funds from the CIA.  The CIA secretly 
violated this commitment immediately, but distribution of the “open” funds 
by NED to UNO proceeded. The total amount that the United States invested 
in the Nicaraguan electoral campaign of 1989-90 has never officially been 
revealed, but has been estimated at more than $20 million.

When the elections took place in February 1990, Nicaragua already had 
suffered 10 years of terrorist war and enormous economic devastation.  The 
United States had imposed an economic embargo in 1985 to worsen the 
situation, and in breach of the Esquipulas Agreements, that included a 
ceasefire, the contras were not demobilized.  They remained intact and 
constantly threatened the return of war. During the electoral campaign the 
contras carried out constant armed propaganda actions to remind the 
population of its presence.  The threat of more war, the economic ruin that 
affected the great majority of the population, and the promise from the 
United States of a large amount of reconstruction aid for a UNO 
government­all these factors took their toll at the moment of voting. UNO 
won with 54% of the vote over the Sandinista Front’s 42%.

It is impossible to speculate with certainty what would have been the 
results of these elections had it not been for the massive intervention by 
the United States. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that the intervention 
had an important impact, above all in the formation of the UNO coalition 
and in the concentration of opposition activists in Vía Cívica.  Neither 
can the importance of the major role played by the consulting firm Delphi 
International Group be underestimated.  What is certain is that the 
combined operations of NED, AID and the CIA, as well as the network of 
private U.S. contractors, were seen in Washington as a great success.  It 
was a formula that would be repeated in future foreign electoral 
interventions, including Nicaragua again to assure that the Sandinista 
Front did not return to power.  In fact, a month after the elections the 
Bush Administration asked Congress to approve $300 million in support for 
Nicaragua that included $5 million for AID, along with NED, to sustain for 
future use the organizations utilized in the 1990 electoral campaign. Next, 
we will see how this formula is now being applied in Venezuela.

Translated from Spanish by Dawn Gable

Part 2: <http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1549>Use of a 
Private U.S. Corporate Structure to Disguise a Government 
Program<http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1549>

Part 3: Agency for International Development with the Foundations of the 
Republican and Democratic Parties (to come)

Original source / relevant link:
<http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=18132>Rebelión.org


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