Ford Foundation

Ford Foundation   (Tax exempt foundation)
Motto	Working with Visionaries on the Frontlines of Social Change Worldwide
Founder	Edsel Ford
Leader	Ford Foundation/President
Interest of	Bonnie Jenkins
Member of	First Draft
Founder of	Better Than Cash Alliance
Sponsor of	Population Council, First Draft, Aspen Institute, Black Lives Matter, Democracy Now!, Amnesty International, ACLU, Tides Foundation, Institute for Security Studies, Australian National University, Humanity In Action, International Press Institute, Human Rights Watch, Partners In Health, Better Than Cash Alliance, PolitiFact, Reporters Without Borders, International Commission of Jurists, Sourcewatch, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Kaiser Family Foundation, Obama Foundation, Dangerous Speech Project, Center for American Progress
Subpage	•Ford Foundation/President
In addition to its own billionaire agenda, also known to have been $$$ middleman for covert CIA funding.

The Ford Foundation was started by Edsel Ford in 1936. During the Cold War it was a CIA-cutout, to funnel cash to front groups, like NGOs and 'independent' media. Its present day function is most likely the same. From its very origins there was a close structural relation and inter-change of personnel at the highest levels between the CIA and the Ford Foundation.

Close collaboration with the CIA

The Ford Foundation is one of the most important “private foundations” collaborating with the CIA over a significant span of time in major projects in the cultural Cold War.

“At times it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects”

Frances Stonor Saunders, a noted scholar of the Cold War writes: “At times it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects”.

The leaders of the Foundation were in total agreement with Washington’s post-WWII projection of world domination, and they had over 3 billion in assets, a lot of money in 1950.

This is graphically illustrated by the naming of Richard Bissell as President of the Foundation in 1952. In his two years in office Bissell met often with the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, and other CIA officials in a “mutual search” for new ideas. In 1954 Bissell left Ford to become a special assistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954 .

Under Bissell, Ford Foundation (FF) was the “vanguard of Cold War thinking”. One of the FF first Cold War project was the establishment of a publishing house, Inter-cultural Publications, and the publication of a magazine Perspectives in Europe in four languages. The FF purpose according to Bissell was not “so much to defeat the leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat (sic) as to lure them away from their positions”

The result of their collaboration was the proliferation of a number of journals and access to the mass media which pro-U.S. intellectuals used to launch vituperative polemics against Marxists and other anti-imperialists. The FF funding of these anti- Marxists organizations and intellectuals provided a legal cover for their claims of being “independent” of government funding (CIA).

The foundation was also active in the warm-up to coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973.

Deep political connections

Donated £20,000 to Le Cercle.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Susan Berresford	“The program we designed [the Ford Foundation International Fellowship Program], which we're funding to the tune of $300 million — the largest single grant in the history of the foundation — is just wrapping up its first year. Over the next ten years, it will support about thirty-five hundered people around the world for up to three years of graduate study. And we hope they will not only take advantage of this opportunity — paid in full, anywhere in the world — but that they will return to their home countries and begin to function effectively as leaders. Eventually, we think that out of this group will emerge some extraordinary world leaders — at least we hope so. We do need to be thinking consciously about where the next generation of world leaders is going to come from.”	Susan Berresford	28 May 2002
Foundation funding
Gloria Steinem	“The CIA's big mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough”	Gloria Steinem	1967

 

Employees on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End
Wayne Fredericks	Associate director for South and Southeast Asia	1956	1961
Bassma Kodmani	Leader of Governance and International Cooperation program for the Middle East and North Africa	1999	2005
Gary Sick	Deputy Director for International Affairs	1982	1987

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