Now, leaked emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal the organization has since descended into chaos, with two senior officials fired due to the fiasco, and remaining staff engaged in civil war between the neocon old guard and the “woke” new generation hired to replace them.

– Senior NED management is currently in complete disarray, with two high-ranking staffers fired due to their handling of The Grayzone’s phone call, and founding president Carl Gershman isolated and marginalized by those who took his place.

– What began as a bitter dispute over the decision to engage with The Grayzone ultimately devolved into a full-fledged culture war that pitted the group’s neoconservative founders against its more liberal recent hires, derided by the neocon old guard as “woke flakes” obsessed with “microaggressions” and compulsory DEI trainings.

– One of the fired NED staffers, neocon Michael Allen, accused his progressive boss of a “clear campaign of harassment, marginalization and victimization,” and fretted over her allowing NED staff to attend pro-Palestine rallies. He was so incensed by his dismissal that he threatened to reveal the details of his firing to the “many mailing lists of key decision-makers and opinion-formers that I have built and retained over the years” if he did not receive a substantial settlement.

Read a collection of the NED files exclusively obtained by The Grayzone here.

Through its lavish funding of anti-government opposition groups in countries where Washington has sought regime change, the US government-funded NGO known as the National Endowment for Democracy, or the NED, earned a reputation over its four decades in existence as an “overt operator” doing the work the CIA used to do in the shadows.  

Critics have long pointed to the destabilizing effects of NED’s meddling in places like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ukraine, and Haiti, where the Endowment has systematically undermined elected governments which undertook policies seen as violating the Washington Consensus. They referenced documents demonstrating the group’s origins in the Central Intelligence Agency of Ronald Reagan, and cited quotes by NED founders and Gershman himself boasting about their orchestration of coups and color revolutions.

The NED’s longtime leader, neoconservative activist Carl Gershman, invariably shrugged at his detractors, while his colleagues insisted that everything his organization did was above board, conducted in broad daylight with grantees generally listed on a publicly viewable website – and all in the name of the laudable mission of “democracy promotion.”

Since Gershman retired in 2021, the NED has undergone a dramatic internal shift. A new generation of ideologically milquetoast social progressives has taken the reins of the organization, and attempted to align the NED’s programming with the diversity politics that currently animate the Democratic Party.

Among those hired in the post-Gershman era was Leslie Aun, a self-described “senior creative communicator” who apparently knew very little about the NED when she came on board. In one of her first moves as the organization’s Vice President of Communications and Public Engagement, Aun decided to initiate a phone conversation with The Grayzone to refute the notion that her employer functioned as a “CIA cutout.”

Now, leaked private emails exclusively obtained by The Grayzone reveal how Aun’s call and its subsequent publication sent the NED spiraling into an existential crisis, triggering several firings, legal retaliations and angry recriminations that continue to this day. One veteran NED staffer privately described the phone call as the “biggest PR fiasco in [NED’s] history.”

The NED emails are filled with resentful tirades directed by the NED’s boomer neocon old guard at their younger successors. In one exchange, Gershman described Aun as “the moron,” trashed NED Director of Communications Christine Bednarz in another as a “woke flake,” and repeatedly questioned the competence of his successor, current NED President and CEO Damon Wilson.

Referring to the NED’s Chairman Ken Wollack, Gershman grumbled, “Screw Ken.”

From the perspective of Gershman and his clique, a collection of bumbling 40 and 50-something wokesters had infiltrated the Endowment they built, and was running it aground with their fixation on identity politics. “The NED culture may be undergoing a sea change,” Gershman complained at one point.

Michael Allen, a member of Gershman’s inner circle who edited the NED’s Democracy Digest for almost two decades, remarked that “the entire Grayzone fiasco… was due in large part to the perceived need to transcend the ‘old’ NED.” In other emails, Allen groaned about suffering through long meetings on “NED’s LGBTQIA+ agenda,” and offered detailed accounts of his remonstrations against co-workers who took issue with his vehemently pro-Israel views.

“Several NED staff attended a pro-Palestinian march organized by ANSWER, a pro-North Korean sect,” Allen vented. “And the NED President’s Facebook page still highlighted Black Lives Matter, several weeks after the group enthusiastically celebrated the Hamas massacre.”

Less than a year since Aun’s disastrous phone call with The Grayzone, the former vice president has been fired and apparently furnished with a substantial settlement for “sex discrimination.” Her LinkedIn profile shows no trace of her employment history at the NED. Allen was terminated as well, on the grounds of “insubordination” — and as a direct result of his attempt to intervene in the “Grayzone fiasco,” he privately alleged. Since being forced from his job, he has plotted a scorched earth campaign of legal retaliation against NED leadership, but remained silent in public.

While the US Department of State and Congress continue to fill the NED’s coffers with close to $200 million each year, enabling it to construct a flashy new headquarters just blocks from the White House, the leaked emails obtained by The Grayzone expose an organization adrift, with its founding fathers casting doubt on its future under the stewardship of a generation of corporate progressives fully aligned with the Democratic Party. The internal rift may have been inevitable, but it exploded into the open with a single phone call by a NED Vice President to The Grayzone.

In an email from Michael Allen, the longtime editor of the NED’s blog, Democracy Digest, to Gershman and other colleagues, Allen detailed how NED President Damon Wilson “spent considerable time and expense to headhunt” Leslie Aun, painting her as a “world class” strategic communications impresario. 

“Upon her appointment” as Vice President of Communications, Allen recalled, Aun “was presented at a staff meeting by way of a celebrity-style interview” with Wilson, “highlighting her exceptional qualifications and experience.” This was despite her confiding “to a NED comms staff retreat that she had never before heard of the Endowment” before applying.

Soon after Aun’s hiring, she decided to initiate a phone call with Alex Rubinstein, an independent journalist who has contributed to The Grayzone, to chide him for referring to the Endowment as a “CIA cutout.” Rubinstein’s reference appeared in an April 2023 articleabout Bellingcat, a self-described “open source” journalism outfit which is handsomely funded by the NED, and by extension, the US government.

A powerful outfit like the NED should have been able to casually ignore criticism from a small, albeit influential independent outlet like this one. But according to Allen, the Endowment’s communications director, Christine Bednarz, encouraged Aun to “address these critics as an example of the ‘new’ NED’s professionalism and positivity, and in contrast to what she has consistently dismissed as the ‘old’ NED’s amateurism and timidity.”

For his part, Allen claimed he tried to warn NED leadership about engaging “toxic critics” like The Grayzone, but was ignored.

From seemingly out of the blue, Aun emailed Rubinstein on April 5, 2023 to solicit a phone call. Less than 24 hours later, she was on the line with Rubinstein and Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal to demand they cease and desist from discussing any connection between the NED and US intelligence.

Over the course of the next 40 minutes, Blumenthal and Rubinstein detailed NED’s documented ties to US intelligence, pointing Aun to a declassified document showing Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, proposing the creation of a US government-funded “National Endowment.” They reminded her of NED co-founder Allen Weinstein’s notorious admission to the Washington Post in 1991: “What we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” And they ran through the history of regime change machinations, color revolutions and coup attempts orchestrated by the NED.

The self-styled “strategic communications” expert revealed a staggering ignorance of her employer’s confirmed mission as a peddler of “overt operations” overseas, and proved unable to answer basic questions about the organization’s history. 

When Blumenthal asked her to provide concrete evidence of Endowment provisions against working with US intelligence, she fumbled: “I don’t know if it’s in the statute. I don’t know if it’s — I mean, I don’t — I don’t know. I’m going to sound like an idiot. I don’t mean to sound like an idiot.”

For over a month, Blumenthal and Rubinstein attempted to follow up with Aun by email. She had promised them documentation demonstrating that NED staffers were forbidden from coordinating with US intelligence abroad, but it never arrived. Instead, Aun sent a series of messages expressing befuddlement about the nature of their on-the-record conversation.

“It’s been a hectic month,” she claimed to Rubinstein on May 4, 2023. “I wasn’t aware that you were on deadline for a story versus getting background information about NED. Can you tell me more about the story? I want to be sure I’m addressing your questions in the appropriate context. If you’re doing a full on story about us, I hope you’d be asking more than just two questions.”

A day later, Aun offered a distinctively corporate spin on the “dog ate my homework” excuse: “I’m actually on vacation with my family in the wilds of Oregon this week with limited connectivity, but working to get back to you asap.”

That was the last time they heard from Aun. On May 29, The Grayzone published the audio of the conversation she initiated with them over a month before.

They did not know it at the time, but while Aun was supposedly bushwhacking her way through the Pacific Northwest, her colleagues at the NED were in the throes of a full-fledged meltdown, with senior leadership engaged in an angry blame game over what they called the “Grayzone fiasco.”

The day after the recording appeared on YouTube, Allen forwarded it to Gershman and David Lowe, the organization’s vice president for government relations and public affairs.

“This is how the NED changes under the new ‘CEO,'” the retired NED leader growled, referring derisively to his 51-year-old successor, Damon Wilson, a former National Security Council official who helped coordinate color revolutions across Eastern Europe under President George W. Bush.

Allen erupted: “Amateur hour – hugely embarrassing! ‘I don’t know… I don’t know… I don’t know… I don’t know… I don’t know…’ I specifically counseled against her talking to these people.”

Aun’s performance was “breathtakingly ignorant,” Lowe replied, adding, “It was too painful to listen to.” Referencing NED president Damon Wilson, Lowe asked: “I assume Damon is aware of this – what does he say about it?” He noted that if Aun “was hired to get NED more publicity, she succeeded.”

Gershman lamented that it was “shocking that she would talk to Blumenthal.”

Allen responded that he had “just raised” the issue in a communications team meeting, in which Aun was “laconic about it.” She evidently didn’t “realize how damaging… and embarrassing this is.”

He added that he had “previously cautioned her” about discussing what he called the “NED=CIA BS” with The Grayzone, and even “wrote a memo explaining why.””

Indignation about the imbroglio soon filtered through the Beltway grapevine, as Gershman shared the recording of the call with fellow foreign policy operatives.

“It’s insulting to have someone with so little experience having the chutzpah to think this was a good idea,” Daniel Silverberg, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security think tank and former national security advisor to former Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, groaned in a June 12, 2023 email to Gershman.

Gershman for his part, was mortified over the “disastrous screwup,” slamming Aun as “obviously clueless.”

“Learning about [Aun] is like finding worms under a stone,” he remarked. Her presence at the NED’s highest echelons led the organization’s longtime leader to question “the situation of NED overall,” and conclude “the NED culture may be undergoing a sea change.”

Gershman went on to slam Aun as a “moron” and “clueless wonder,” describing her hiring as an “egregious error” reflecting “the importance [current NED President and CEO] Damon [Wilson] attaches to media and image and how much has changed in that area.”

He told Allen and Lowe he emailed the recording to NED Chairman Ken Wollack, but received no response.

“Screw Ken,” Gershman roared.

Gershman’s wife, Laurie, chimed in to calm his frayed nerves in a reply: “Not worth getting upset about.”

“I’m not at all upset,” Gershman shot back, “but screw him anyway.”

In between blustery diatribes against their younger colleagues, Allen and fellow members of the NED’s neocon cabal consoled one another by sharing articles and tweets denigrating Grayzone editor Blumenthal, whom they held ultimately responsible for their crisis.

In one such exchange, Gershman’s wife, Laurie, emailed a tweet by neoconservative NED board member and Atlantic Magazine staff writer Anne Applebaum attacking Blumenthal for addressing the United Nations Security Council on US arms sales to Ukraine, declaring with a large emoji,”Max Blumenthal Hearts Russia.”

The Grayzone emailed Gershman and his wife, Laurie, to solicit their comment on the institutional crisis that unfolded at the NED after the Grayzone affair. We also asked Gershman why he forwarded apparently privileged internal NED email discussions to his wife’s private email. They did not respond.

Back at the NED offices in downtown Washington DC, Allen unloaded on the organization’s communication’s team in a lengthy email.

“It is hugely damaging and embarrassing to voluntarily initiate a conversation and give a global platform to some of NED’s most vicious detractors, thereby legitimizing their specious arguments and compromising a reputation so assiduously cultivated and protected for the last 40 years,” he wrote. 

“More importantly,” Allen continued, “it threatens to undermine the safety, security and integrity of our partners and grantees in the field… There are robust reasons why we have always refused to engage with these toxic characters’ absurd claims. Now our critics are able to cite a senior NED official’s inability to refute such allegations and we can be sure that this video will be promoted and cited by the CCP, the Kremlin (whose line Grayzone generally follows) and the like to vilify NED and to attack our partners and grantees. There is a case to be made that the damage is already done and a public response would only exacerbate matters.”

Allen previously advised Aun and others: “NED has never directly addressed or sought to rebut the specious claims about being a CIA front or successor… To respond publicly to the NED=CIA BS would be a huge mistake.”

But now, in his view, it was important for NED staff to be able to push back more effectively than Aun had. Thus he proposed preparing “a rebuttal for internal use.” This would consist of “talking points that refute the CIA canard” and training on “How We Talk About NED” to journalists. Calling the recording “a self-inflicted wound,” he lamented that it had “gone viral – it consistently shows up in my social media feeds – so we can assume a great many of our partners, grantees and staff have seen it.”

In delivering the memo to NED’s comms team, Allen explained that he had avoided using “a certain acronym for FOIA reasons.” He appeared to be referring to the CIA.

Though Allen’s memo contained talking points which might have benefited a novice and clearly clueless hire like Aun, he claimed he was rebuffed by NED’s communications team. “My intervention went down like a lead balloon,” he complained in an email to Gershman and Lowe. “Ah well, I’m on my way out anyway.”

By this point, Allen was a marked man. In a May 30, 2023 email, his friend, David Lowe, surmised that Allen’s “position at NED is very fragile, particularly with his boss [Aun].” Recently, he wrote, she had “[given] him a highly negative performance review.”

According to Gershman, Aun had been personally recruited by Damon Wilson, who was still apparently supporting her, despite her self-destructive gaffe. He warned Allen that Aun might use Wilson’s sponsorship “to retaliate in some way” against them.

Wilson did not respond to an email from The Grayzone requesting his response to the allegations by Gershman and Allen.

With the walls seemingly closing in on the NED’s old guard, Gershman proposed an in-person war room meeting: “Please stay in touch… on this and other matters – I like to know what’s going on – but let’s do that very confidentially… Maybe the three of us should get together for dinner sometime, preferably not downtown. I’m not getting paranoid, but I sense that this incident exposes some problems beneath the polished surface [of NED] and I want to be very careful.”

A week later, Gershman wrote Allen to inquire about his employment status: “Are you Ok, or are you still in danger of being fired? It would not look good if they fired the whistle blower and retained a moron who should have never been hired in the first place.”

Allen later disclosed that after emailing NED leadership to propose remediating the damage caused by Aun’s phone call with The Grayzone, he was “told to report” to Endowment Chief Operating Officer Maju Varghese, “to explain MY actions.”

He said he was also subjected to a withering performance appraisal by Sheri Melvin, the NED’s director of human resources, whom he accused of submitting his review “5 months late, packed with palpable falsehoods and mistakes.” He groaned that the “main focus” of the meeting was not Aun’s “incompetent, incoherent sullying of NED’s reputation, but that I should have consulted with her before sending the email” advising her team on damage control.

Following an interminable comms team meeting in which everything from NED “swag” to the organization’s “LGBTQIA+ agenda” was discussed – everything but the PR crisis eating the Endowment from the inside – Allen predicted that while he might not be fired, “they’ll marginalize me and make life uncomfortable.”

When Gershman followed up with Allen, he asked him to “delete the last [email] with the stuff on ‘the moron,’ and this one, too.”

Apparently, Allen did not heed his friend’s instructions. And his marginalization deepened, just as he expected, as he escalated conflicts with colleagues over their fixation on diversity politics and insufficient support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Among the NED’s new generation of leadership, none inspired the resentment of the neoconservative old guard more than the Endowment’s director of communications, Christine Bednarz. A self-described “digital content strategist, writer, and artist,” and former food and travel writer, Bednarz was portrayed in email exchanges between Allen, Gershman and their clique as simultaneously inept and hard-charging, ruthlessly enforcing the woke agenda at every turn.

Under the watch of Bednarz, according to David Lowe, the NED placed a “big emphasis” on what he called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) “nonsense.” He mentioned “other warning signs” of the new generation’s excesses, such as the NED’s promotion of a new book “on police violence against blacks with an introduction by Angela Davis.” (The book appears to be a collection of essays called “Policing the Black Man.”)

Allen recalled how mandatory, in-office DEI sessions descended into rancor when he challenged the prevailing orthodoxy. “During the NED’s first compulsory DEI training (conducted by an external provider),” he wrote, “I asked why social class was not being considered alongside ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.; questioned the term ‘microaggression’; and observed that social justice movements have historically sought equality of opportunity, not equity of outcomes. I raised other questions at a DEI training on the 1619 Project, not least that it was an ideological, not historical project. After each session (and a couple more) certain colleagues – including my line manager – suggested that such interventions were ‘not helpful’ and, in essence, reflected my white male privilege.” (Allen’s line manager was Bednarz).

The October 7, 2023 attack on Israel deepened the cultural divide inside the NED. As the Israeli army commenced its bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip, Allen found himself isolated as the only outspoken Zionist in the office.

Bednarz’s “interventions increased notably but not exclusively following the Oct 7 Hamas atrocities,” Allen groused to his friends, “including her veto of an entirely neutral obituary of Israeli political scientist and [Journal of Democracy] contributor Shlomo Avineri which she deemed ‘partisan’ and ‘inflammatory.’”

In November, he said he showed up at work sporting an Israel-UK solidarity lapel pin. He claimed the display invited a scolding from Bednarz, who allegedly described his pin as“‘inappropriate’ in light of ‘recent events.'”

According to Allen, Bednarz also “observed that I was the only white, straight male on the comms team and twice the age of other team members; and asked why I didn’t cite my pronouns on my NED business card and email address.”

In a subsequent email, Allen noted in passing that Bednarz’s former spouse was Israeli. “Might she bear a grudge, a la Alice Walker, or is she just a woke flake?” Gershman asked, referring to the outspoken pro-Palestinian author, who weathered a nasty divorce with a Jewish man.

“The latter, combined with a certain megalomania and defensive resentment over the Grayzone fiasco,” Allen answered.

The Grayzone offered Bednarz an opportunity to respond to the accusations and invective against her by Allen and his cadre, sending detailed questions to her email and through a direct message on Twitter/X. She did not respond.

According to Allen, the anti-Zionist menace extended well beyond Bednarz, and had begun to envelope the NED’s international network. He accused several NED-backed organizations, “including a member of the World Movement’s Steering Committee,” of “posting aggressively anti-Israel screeds on social media, [and] orchestrating online petitions against ‘genocidal’ Israel.” He also harrumphed that “several NED staffers promoted and attended the pro-Palestinian march organized by ANSWER, a pro-North Korean sect; and the NED President’s Facebook page still highlighted Black Lives Matter, several weeks after the group enthusiastically celebrated the Hamas massacres.”

By December, one of the last holdouts of the NED’s neocon old guard had been fired for “insubordination” and ordered to relinquish his key card.

On February 12, 2024, Allen emailed a lengthy missive to his closest confederates in the NED network. He had just consulted with his union representative, and was ready to outline what he saw as the real reasons for his firing, and to propose a course of resolution.

While officially terminated on the grounds of “insubordination” to his line manager, Bednarz, for allegedly refusing to perform menial tasks – what he called “the latest in a pattern of willfully demeaning demands” – Allen revealed that he had been secretly recording phone conversation and gathering emails that would demonstrate his firing was, in fact, prompted by the following:

“a) being ‘canceled’ due to my outspoken criticisms of and resistance to DEI orthodoxy; b) and a related campaign of harrassment [sic] and marginalization prompted by the Grayzone affair, arguably the biggest PR fiasco in NED’s history.”

He charged that from the moment he held forth on Aun and Bednarz for stumbling into the “Grayzone fiasco,” he became the target of a “clear campaign of harassment, marginalization and victimization by Ms. Bednarz.”

What’s more, according to Allen, “a current NED board member” informed him that “in order to settle Ms. Aun’s entirely spurious claim that her dismissal was due to sex discrimination,” and not due to her politically suicidal call with The Grayzone, “management released confidential information of an ’embarrassingly intimate’ nature from my HR records in a stark violation of my privacy rights.”

After all he had endured at the hands of the NED’s incompetent leadership, Allen declared his intention to seek “a modest and equitable settlement.” The least they could do was provide him “12 months salary or compensation equivalent to the sum paid to Ms. Aun (subject to legal disclosure) to settle spurious claims of sex discrimination.”

If the NED failed to pay up, it could be costly, he suggested. After admitting “I deeply resent the way I’ve been treated,” Allen immediately issued a veiled threat, raising the possibility that he might “tell my side of the story through the many mailing lists of key decision-makers and opinion-formers that I have built and retained over the years (including every member of every cohort of the [NED’s Penn-Kemble Forum])” but claiming he was “reluctant” to do so.

Upon receipt of the hush money, he promised not to publicly blow the whistle about the circumstances of his exit. Allen’s public silence in the months after his firing suggests he may have received just such a payoff.

As Allen strategized with lawyers, he fretted over the future of two initiatives that he felt best reflected his legacy at the NED.

The first was a hagiography he and David Lowe planned to co-author on Melvin Lasky, the iconic Trotskyist-turned-cold warrior. Because he was locked out of the Endowment’s offices, he said had “also been denied access to any files and emails, including a significant cache of materials essential to the Lasky biography for which David and I have just received a contract from Stanford University Press.”

Having made the seminal case for a cultural Cold War against communism during the early 1950’s, Lasky’s journal, Encounter, received covert funding from the CIA until 1966.

The second initiative Allen saw as imperiled by the NED’s new generation was the Endowment’s Penn Kemble Forum, an off-the-record dinner salon for neoconservative activists which he helped oversee. He warned that Bednarz had attempted to seize control of the Forum “despite her demonstrable ignorance of proposed themes and speakers.”

The anticommunist activist who inspired the name of the NED’s off-the-record dinner forum, Richard “Penn” Kemble, was a founder of Social Democrats USA who wound up assisting the Reagan administration’s dirty war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. According to declassified CIA files and public reports on the Iran-Contra scandal, Kemble spent much of the 1980’s presiding over a covert $10 million US government lobbying campaign for military aid to the CIA-backed Contras.

After his fervid efforts to disseminate talking points to colleagues refuting the Endowment’s relationship with US intelligence, Allen apparently failed to see the irony in his veneration of one personal hero who operated as a CIA asset, and another who advanced Langley’s agenda as a dirty war lobbyist.

Allen did not respond to calls and emails from The Grayzone requesting comment on the circumstances of his departure from the NED.

Over two months since his firing, Allen’s research files and the contents of his desk remained locked inside the Endowment’s office. On February 25, he navigated traffic to downtown DC and met the NED’s office manager on E Street, just outside the Endowment’s new offices, to arrange a handover of his belongings. With cold drops of rain pouring down, he weathered a final series of humiliations.

“They also demanded my NED ID – already deactivated, of course, but I assume they fear I’ll be running around DC impersonating a bona fide NED employee,” Allen recounted in an email to Gershman. “It would be funny if it wasn’t so risible and deliberately demeaning.”

When he examined the returned belongings, Lasky claimed a check Penn Kemble’s widow made out to him was missing. Worse, someone had torn up the Israeli flag he kept on his desk.

“Do you assume that Bednarz shredded the flag, or do you think it was one of her underlings?” Gershman asked. “The hostility to the ‘old’ NED seems palpable.”

Opposition to Israel had become so rampant inside the Endowment, Allen replied, that “it could be anyone.”

“True,” he reflected, “the entire Grayzone fiasco – and much else – was due in large part to the perceived need to transcend the ‘old’ NED.”

https://thegrayzone.com/2024/07/30/grayzone-pr-fiasco-us-govt-regime-change-leaked-emails/

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 Jeremy Kuzmarov

Around the time of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday, The Intercept ran a series of articles by investigative journalist Nick Turse emphasizing that the secret bombing campaign over Cambodia carried out by Kissinger in the early 1970s killed even more civilians and caused more devastation than was previously thought.

Interviews with more than 75 victims of U.S. bombing attacks gave readers a sense of the terrible trauma experienced by survivors of the attacks, which were particularly horrific because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.

The official purpose of the bombing—which killed an estimated 150,000 civilians—was to flush out the sanctuaries of South Vietnam’s left-wing National Liberation Front (NLF) guerrillas who were hiding in Cambodia and to fortify a U.S.-installed coup regime that was carrying out a war on Cambodia’s left, the Khmer Rouge, which seized power in 1975.

Chhit Do, a former Khmer Rouge official, noted that “the ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children to go off with them.”

Based on such testimony, historians Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan concluded that “civilian casualties drove an enraged population into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion…the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.”

Popular historical representations, however, such as the 1987 Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields, helped to obscure the underlying conditions of U.S. bombing in which the Khmer Rouge rose to power and became radicalized. A Finnish commission characterized the 1970s as a “decade of genocide,” with Nixon and Kissinger’s crimes rivaling those of Pol Pot (Saloth Sar), whom the Reagan administration supported after the Vietnamese overthrew him in 1979.[1]

A new book by historian Matthew Jagel, Khmer Nationalist: Son Ngoc Thanh, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia (Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2023) makes clear that Cambodia’s “decade of genocide” was set in motion by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The CIA along with U.S. Army Special Forces contributed significantly to the destabilization of Cambodia by supporting raids carried out by Cambodian guerrillas known as the Khmer Serei (Free Khmer) based in South Vietnam and Thailand.

The aim was to overthrow the neutralist regime of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s head of state from 1953 to 1970, who allied with Communist China and gave support to the NLF—aka the Vietcong.

The guerrillas were loyal to Prince Sihanouk’s nemesis, Son Ngoc Thanh, an anti-communist nationalist who had served as Cambodian Foreign Minister after the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II and then became Prime Minister from March until October 1972 after a U.S.-backed coup led to Sihanouk’s ouster in March 1970 and replacement with Lon Nol, his army chief of staff.

The CIA valued Thanh—described by The New York Times as a “short, wiry, intense man”—because he was a right-wing republican nationalist who had served in the maquis fighting against France, which colonized Cambodia from 1863 to 1945 and 1945 to 1953.[2]

From 1945 to 1951, Thanh was exiled in France. Upon his return to Cambodia in October 1951, because of his strong anti-colonial stance, he was greeted by more than 100,000 people holding banners reading “Son Ngoc Thanh, National Hero,” and “Son Ngoc Thanh Our Hope.”[3]

During the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA was recruiting “Third Force” politicians across Southeast Asia who represented an alternative between right-wing authoritarians and communists or those seen as too sympathetic to the latter.

In Cambodia’s case, Sihanouk was a target for regime change because of his close alliance with China and desire to steer a neutralist course for Cambodia and avoid entanglement in the Indochina War, which he recognized would ruin his country.

Thanh initially opposed Sihanouk’s gradualist approach to decolonization with France, taking up arms in the jungles of Cambodia against him right after his triumphalist return in October 1951. Ironically at the time, Sihanouk lumped him in with the communists, though the CIA reported in June 1954 on the existence of non-communist dissidents in Cambodia against Sihanouk’s post- colonial rule who are “followers of the nationalist leader, Son Ngoc Thanh.”[4]

The Eisenhower administration’s support for Thanh increased because of its growing covert involvement in Vietnam and Sihanouk’s refusal to join the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) with Thailand, the Philippines and South Vietnam.

By February 1955, after losing a rigged election, Thanh assembled a force of two thousand men on the Thai-Cambodian border operating with Thai support (Cambodia and Thailand had long been enemies).

In December 1958, several CIA officers on the staff of John Peurifoy, the U.S. ambassador to Thailand who was a central architect of the 1954 Guatemalan coup, held a secret meeting in Bangkok where they plotted a coup against Sihanouk with Thanh along with Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat from Thailand, and Ngo Trong Hieu, a South Vietnamese official who was close to Ngo Dinh Diem (a U.S. client installed in power in 1955).[5]

CIA agent Victor Matsui played a key role with Thanh in coordinating the coup plot, which ultimately failed. When one of the main coup plotters, Dap Chhuon, was captured, he was found with a CIA radio in his possession.[6]

State Department officials acknowledged that, by this point, Thanh had lost much of his appeal among the Cambodian population and that Sihanouk, whatever his flaws, had considerable mass support.

Chiang Kai-shek, the head of state in Taiwan whom the U.S. supported against the communists in the Chinese civil war, said that Sihanouk had “essentially anti-communist, nationalistic motivation[s], which emphasized independent stature for [the] Cambodian nation,” and was “a positive benefit [to the] free world.”[7]

The release years later of a telephone conversation between then President John F. Kennedy and his Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Roger Hilsman, proved U.S. involvement in the Dap Chhuon coup plot.

In the conversation, Hilsman informed Kennedy that “there’s a history, during the administration of President Eisenhower, where the agency [CIA] did play footsie with opposition groups.”

When Kennedy asked: “Was that a true story about ’59 or something?” Hilsman responded: “yes sir, it is true.” “CIA did do it?” inquired the President. “Sure,” Hilsman responded, “they supplied some money and, uh, they were involved in a plot against Sihanouk back before this administration. The Agency in those days wasn’t responsible to the State Department. They did things they probably didn’t know about.”[8]

In 1958, Thanh reported that his anti-communist guerrilla forces began to receive military training from the United States to overthrow Sihanouk at its headquarters in the Prachin Buri province in Thailand.[9]

Many Khmer Serei were recruited into “Mike Force,” or mobile strike forces, that were organized by General Paul D. Harkins, a former Deputy Chief of Staff to General George S. Patton at the end of World War II and the first commander of the American Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) from 1962 to 1964.

According to Thanh, the Khmer Serei received financial backing as well as all of its weapons from the Americans from the late 1950s to the early 1960s.[10]

The total was millions of dollars in assistance, which enabled the Khmer Serei to develop eight battalions of mainly Khmer Khrom (ethnic Cambodians born in South Vietnam who supported Thanh) anti-Sihanouk forces and to establish a clandestine radio station run from a truck inside Thailand.[11]

Chinese Guomindang guerrillas based out of Taiwan actively supported the Khmer Serei along with the South Vietnamese and Thai governments, which supplied ammunition, bombs and explosives as Thanh’s men were sent as infiltrators into Cambodia to conduct sabotage and political warfare operations.[12]

Sihanouk was accused of harboring Vietcong agents, though the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, Philip D. Sprouse (1962-1964), admitted there was no proof to the charge.

John F. Kennedy wrote to Sihanouk denying U.S. support for the Khmer Serei, but crossed out a sentence suggesting CIA support for them. Sihanouk subsequently gave a fiery speech in which he said that the Americans were noted for “their habit of buying the conscience of [people]. They have bought such running dogs as…Son Ngoc Thanh, and the Khmer Serei, the Vietnamese and the new Vietnamese government.”[13]

As the Vietnam War expanded, the Khmer Serei were recruited into the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) run by the CIA, which ran cross-border infiltration, unconventional warfare and espionage missions and became part of the Phoenix Program, whereby suspected Vietcong on blacklists were kidnapped and then often tortured and executed.[14]

The CIA’s operations exemplified the exploitation of political divisions and minority grievances by the U.S. in the service of larger imperial ends.

Thanh played an active role in the Khmer Serei operations and was ferried to various CIDG camps by a U.S. helicopter. He said that there was always a CIA agent attached to his staff whom he identified only as “Fred.”[15]

The British embassy characterized the Khmer Serei’s chief methods as being “subversion and terrorism.”[16] They were known for blowing up railways and committed heinous atrocities for which they tried to frame the Vietcong.[17]

When CIDG officer Randolph Harrison was shown a photo of what appeared to be Khmer Serei forces next to mutilated and beheaded Cambodian communists, he said: “I know these guys. They’d been in my Special Forces unit.”[18]

CIDG operations laid the groundwork for the 1970 CIA-backed coup, which resulted in the ouster of Sihanouk and empowerment of Lon Nol, who had been known for carrying out brutal operations against Cambodia’s communists—the Khmer Rouge—in the mid-1960s.

Paid through U.S. aid money and continuously outfitted with U.S. weapons, the Khmer Serei played a key role in the coup by serving as a conduit for CIA infiltration of the Cambodian government, and then by helping the new post-coup government to flush out its enemies as it became integrated into the Cambodian Army.

As a reward, Thanh was appointed Prime Minister in 1972. Americans saw him as a potential check on Lon Nol’s drift toward authoritarianism and also liked him because he hoped to lead his Khmer guerrillas against the North Vietnamese in the Cambodian jungle.

Thanh’s support within Cambodia, however, was not what it once was: Judith Coburn reported in the Far Eastern Economic Review that “he labors under the cloud of decades long collaboration with the American CIA.”[19]

That collaboration became more and more unpopular as Cambodia was turned into a wasteland by Nixon and Kissinger’s savage bombing campaign, which combined with prior CIA-backed destabilization efforts, helped turn the population against the U.S. and its proxies like Thanh.

When the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975, they liquidated Cambodia’s cities and systematically massacred U.S. collaborators, including many former Khmer Serei fighters who were considered to be foreign invaders.

Those Khmer Serei who escaped took up resistance along the Thai-Cambodian border, though, according to Jagel, were little more at this point than black marketeers or bands of extortionists who preyed on the defenseless border refugee camps.[20]

With his health in decline, Thanh retired to Saigon in October 1972 though this retirement was not a happy one. Shortly after the liberation of Saigon on April 30, 1975, he was taken prisoner by the victorious communist forces and languished for the next two years at the Chi Hoa Prison where he died on August 8, 1977.

According to a relative who had served in the South Vietnamese military and was also imprisoned, Thanh refused to cooperate or work with his communist captors and went on a hunger strike, which led to his death.[21]

It was a sad end to an illustrious career in which Thanh went from a national hero who had helped lead Cambodia from the clutches of French colonialism to a turncoat arguably who helped orchestrate coups and ran mercenary troops on behalf the Americans that destabilized Cambodia and led to its eventual ruin.

Like others of his generation, Thanh was clearly under the illusion that the Americans were more benevolent than other colonial powers, and genuinely interested in promoting democracy, and that he could use them to free his own people.

In the end, however, Thanh came nowhere close to achieving those latter goals, and American intervention proved to be even more deadly and destabilizing to Cambodians than France’s.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/08/05/newly-declassified-how-the-cia-sponsored-terrorist-raids-and-then-secretly-murdered-150000-cambodian-civilians-in-paving-the-way-for-countrys-decade-of-genocide/

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