Leaked emails reveal ‘civil war’ at CIA regime-change cutout
Internal rancour has gripped the US NGO National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout responsible for fermenting political discontent in countries regarded as adversaries by Washington. It’s perhaps best known for helping to foment the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, a country that its founder Carl Gershman labelled “the biggest prize.”
The debacle has resulted in two senior officials being fired and a “civil war” erupting between older neoconservatives and younger management – which the former accuses of being too “woke” – according to documents obtained by The Grayzone.
The scandal was sparked after then newly-appointed NED vice-president for communications broke ranks by engaging with journalists the organisation had previously shunned. Leslie Aun took exception to the Grayzone’s portrayal of the organization as CIA proxy, and initiated a call with the outlet’s Max Blumenthal and Alex Rubinstein, which it published in May 2023.
During the call, Aun, failed to provide any assurance of any statutory separation between the NED and the CIA. “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,” she told the reporters.
On Tuesday, the Grayzone published several leaked emails between Michael Allen – former editor of the NED’s ‘Democracy Digest’ blog – and the Endowment’s founding president Carl Gershman, revealing that the fallout from the call’s publication may have cost Aun and Allen their jobs. Grayzone didn’t reveal where it had obtained the correspondence.
“Amateur hour – hugely embarrassing!” Allen emailed Gershman and NED VP for government relations, David Lowe, a day after the recording was posted on YouTube. “I specifically counseled against her talking to these people.”
Lowe described Aun’s performance as “breathtakingly ignorant” and “too painful to listen to.” Both he and Gershman, who retired in 2021, appeared to disparage the new NED president Damon Wilson – a veteran of NATO’s Atlantic Council adjunct – for hiring her.
You can read a comprehensive selection of the #NEDFiles obtained exclusively by The Grayzone here: https://t.co/v9hbVW6q6UI think many will be shocked that Congress allocates $200 million a year to an unstable, politically partisan organization with obviously inept leadership
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 30, 2024
Gershman described the call as a “disastrous screwup” and described Aun as “obviously clueless,” a “moron,” and a “clueless wonder” whose hiring was an “egregious error” reflecting Wilson’s alleged focus on media and image.
In messages to Gershman and Lowe, Allen blamed NED communications director, Christine Bednarz, who reportedly encouraged Aun to talk to the Grayzone. Allen also turned his fire on Bednarz for instituting mandatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” training and berating him about his “white male privilege.”
In one email, Allen complained about the DEI training agenda including “microaggressions” and the “ideological, not historical” 1619 Project, noting that Bednarz had berated him for not using pronouns on his business cards and email signature.
In a June 5, 2023 email to Gershman, Allen complained about the communications team focusing on the “more urgent matter of NED’s LGBTQIA+ agenda” rather than the Grayzone fallout.
Another point of conflict arose after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, with Allen complaining that several NED staffers “promoted and attended the pro-Palestinian march organized by ANSWER” and that the NED president still backed Black Lives Matter on Facebook even after they “enthusiastically celebrated the Hamas massacres.”
At one point, Gershman asked if Bednarz harbored some kind of personal resentment for her Israeli ex-husband, or if she was “just a woke flake,” to which Allen replied: “The latter, combined with a certain megalomania and defensive resentment over the Grayzone fiasco.”
Allen was eventully fired on December 12. In an email to Gershman and Lowe in February, he claimed his move was in part due to “marginalization prompted by the Grayzone affair, arguably the biggest PR fiasco in NED’s history.”
Aun was fired at some point as well and paid a substantial settlement for “sex discrimination,” according to the documents obtained by the Grayzone. Her online biographies make no mention of her work at NED.
NED was founded in 1983 at the behest of the CIA, which proposed the creation of such an organization to then-President Ronald Reagan. NED founder Allen Weinstein admitted to the Washington Post in 1991 “What we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
