US Foreign Aid and the CIA (part 1)

Like the intelligence arms of other major nations, the American CIA found it crucial to use a multitude of fronts -- institutional disguises and intermediaries -- in order to effectively pursue its covert operations. The CIA actually had some specialization in this tactic from the beginning. The Agency was largely founded and staffed by Wall Street elites who were very familiar with using shell companies to manipulate or hide assets.

In this context, a front is an organization of some kind whose public mission has no official relationship to US intelligence. Secretly, however, the CIA will use the front as cover to accomplish clandestine objectives. Note that several organizations hosting a CIA presence may be legitimate, fairly independent, and generally unaware of the fact. Whereas front businesses which the CIA virtually owns are what the US Senate Church Committee exposed as 'proprietaries', such as the most infamous example from the Vietnam era: the drug-smuggling Air America company (for an introduction to the CIA-drug connection, refer to this or this, or dozens of other articles and books). A more recent example of a CIA proprietary front is the firm Brewster-Jennings & Associates, which was exposed in 2003 during the Plame-Yellowcake Affair.

Since its inception with the signing of the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA has used thousands of fronts right to the present day. As a matter of course, the organizations selected to be fronts naturally have activities in foreign countries. They include various corporations, diplomatic embassies, other agencies of the federal government, non-profit charities, private NGOs, media organizations, and so forth.

A large bureaucratic organization long-suspected and finally proven to act as a CIA front is USAID, or the United States Agency for International Development. Run by the State Department, USAID is the main federal entity responsible for dispensing foreign aid.

Each year, USAID allocates billions of dollars in funding to selected nations across the globe. To most American taxpayers, it is an organization to be proud of. Indeed, many of its projects have produced positive humanitarian results and local employment, even if the projects are considered diplomatic rewards and instruments of US foreign policy. Nonetheless, a handful of the projects and a very small number of the personnel are in fact CIA-related, with missions far outside of the official mandate of USAID. These missions are launched to forward the blunt geopolitical interests of the US government (and undoubtedly to forward the special interests that influence that government). The missions have involved instances of corruption, subversion, espionage, and horrible violence. Some will be described here, and other modern examples will be described in Part Two.

Skeptics of the theorized CIA-USAID connection fell silent when, in 2007, the Agency itself released thousands of top secret documents -- the "Family Jewels", as they are called -- which included descriptions of its close working relationship with USAID. This admission is fascinating. While partially censored, the primary documents plainly show that CIA officers had worked abroad under USAID cover. The Office of Public Safety (OPS), a USAID bureau disbanded in 1974 by Congress for its inappropriate activities, served as a front for training and arming foreign police in counterinsurgency methods.

The formerly top secret documents show that, between 1963 and 1974, thousands of police officers and troops were trained by the OPS arm of USAID. In turn, the recipients then trained hundreds of thousands of others in total. It doesn't sound too heinous until we learn that the countries receiving the weapons and counter-insurgency training were very repressive police states in the process of cracking down hard on their own citizens, unions, and rebel groups. Training involved spying, torture, explosives, assassination, riot-control, and so forth.

Wikipedia has a toned-down yet still informative article on the matter. Excerpts:

The United States has a long history of providing police aid to Latin American countries. In the 1960s the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Office of Public Safety (OPS) provided Latin American police forces with millions of dollars worth of weapons and trained thousands of Latin American police officers. In the late 1960s, such programs came under media and congressional scrutiny because the U.S.-provided equipment and personnel were linked to cases of torture, murder and "disappearances" in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

In Washington, D.C., the Office of Public Safety had remained immune to public embarrassment as it went about two of its chief functions: allowing the CIA to plant men with the local police in sensitive places around the world; and after careful observation on their home territory, bringing to the United States prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees.

The OPS had formed a million policemen in the Third World. Ten thousands of them had undertook training courses in the US. $150 millions' worth in material had been sent to foreign police forces.

The massive training-arming program in Central and South America led to a hemispheric-wide human rights disaster. It escalated rapidly to the death squad era of Operation Condor. The destructive, multi-faceted operation was ultimately supervised by leaders in the CIA and US National Security Council, especially the-then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.

OPS police-training teams and 'aid projects' were not only sent to several repressive nations in Latin America, but also to South Vietnam, Iran, Taiwan, Greece, and others. According to award-winning journalist John Pilger, apparently USAID funds were even spent by the millions to assist the Thais and genocidal Khmer Rouge in building roads to lucrative gem mines.

Basically everywhere the US was propping up a repressive, corrupt client-state in the name of anti-communism, the USAID-CIA connection could be found. Some of the most brutal pages of Cold War history can be found in the Phoenix program in South Vietnam and the crack-downs of SAVAK, the secret police of then US ally, the Shah of Iran.