by Alex Christoforou, The Duran:
On 24 April 2023, the well-intentioned fool Leslie Aun, who since November 2022 was Vice President and Communications Director for the National Endowment for Democracy — the organization which took over coup planning for the U.S. Government when the CIA’s reputation for doing that became internationally toxic in the 1980s — was shocked to learn from The Grayzone’s investigative reporters, what her organization actually does and has been doing for the past fifty years.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
She had phoned them that day in order to object to their having referred to her organization as “a CIA cut-out.” She didn’t even know what that phrase meant. The website https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy, says on its page about her organization,“National Endowment for Democracy”,
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA cut-out[1][2][3] soft-power[4] organization which finances protests and color revolutions to destabilize targets of US foreign policy.[5] It provided $1.2 billion of grants between 2011 and 2020 and issues over 2,000 grants every year.[6] Despite calling itself a non-governmental organization, it receives funding from the U.S. Congress.[7]
Ronald Reagan founded the NED in 1983.[7] In 1986, NED’s President Carl Gershman said that the NED was created because “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued.”[8]
In 1991, Allen Weinstein, founder of the NED, said “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[9]
The organization has been involved in numerous coups, including the 2014 coup in Ukraine. But, apparently, Aun didn’t know anything about any of that.
Here was her phone-conversation on 24 April 2023 with The Grayzone’s Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal, where you can hear her befuddlement at learning what she was actually doing for a living (which was providing PR cover for NED’s shilling for U.S. billionaires on their foreign coups):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khv7dYG15Fs
The Grayzone debates National Endowment for Democracy VP on group’s CIA ties
29 May 2023, The Greyzone
And here is the file of internal NED executives’ emails that The Grayzone somehow acquired, showing merely the ones which concerned this PR catastrophe for that branch of the U.S. Government (which constantly denies being that and claims to be “independent”):
https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/NED-Master-Files.pdf
On that file’s page 17 is NED Founder Carl Gershman responding on 17 August 2023 to his wife Laurie Gershman’s email of an “Anne A” (probably Anne Applebaum) tweet which had alleged that “The Grayzone is going to appear at a UN meeting on behalf of Russia.” (Anne Applebaum is the wife of Radosław Sikorski, who had served as Poland’s Defence Minister, Foreign Minister, Marshal of the Sejm, and a member of the European Parliament, and is again Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. The aristocracies both of Poland and U.S. hate and aim to regime-change or otherwise conquer — take over — Russia.)
On 12 December 2023, Michael Allen, special assistant to the vice-president for government and external relations at the National Endowment for Democracy, and editor of their Journal of Democracy, emailed to a colleague “Re: Terminated” and said that Christine “Bednarz” (who had just taken over Aun’s job because of Aun’s blunder) “who sacked me, was complicit in the Grayzone fiasco — but more complicated and relates to DW [Deutsche Welle, Germany’s equivalent of the BBC] being hugely embarrassed by the whole business [because they get money from NED].”
On 12 February 2024, Allen explained to Gershman, who supported him, that “my termination was prompted by
a) being “canceled” due to my outspoken criticisms of and resistance to D[iversity]E[quity]I[nclusion] orthodoxy;
