USAID's Fist In A Velvet Glove

Cass Sunstein's malevolent hand

• USAID is not a charity; and yesterday few knew of its existence

• Students of Latin America and post-Soviet Europe are the benighted few

• If Dan Mitrione and Brazil ‘64 mean anything to you…

• A fresh generation is bamboozled into cancelling the present truth

• Even Mike Benz and Tucker Carlson won't broach its history

• Perspective informs USAID's present with its hidden past

Series:
USAID Regime Change Revealed - Eurasia note #105: Georgia's Color Revolution (Feb 04, 2025)
USAID Files Expose Knot In West's Throat - Graham Greene killed the do-gooder in Vietnam (Feb 08, 2025)
USAID's Fist In A Velvet Glove - Cass Sunstein's malevolent hand (Feb 09, 2025)

Related:
Judicial Overreach Mars Brazil's Election - Separation of powers has become a political plaything (Jan 11, 2023)
Jabbed At Gunpoint: Tropical Mémoire - Jim Jones was a CIA red flag: was it a dress rehearsal? (Nov 05, 2021)
Trump Addresses C02-Choked Audience - Yet WEF may abandon climate change for AI (Jan 24, 2025)
Tasting Uncertainty; Learning To Love Doubt - Why managed outcomes in politics and companies are killing creativity (Aug 12, 2021)

Series:
9/11, Part One: They Wouldn't Do That - The World Trade Center bombing set the narrative (Sep 10, 2024)
9/11, Part Two: The Perpetrators - Whodunnit is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma (Sep 11, 2024)
9/11, Part Three: Boomer & Zoomer - Wild tangents and useful conclusions (Sep 14, 2024)

(2,600 words or about 11 minutes of your company.)

Feb 9, 2025

Yet more revelations about USAID — and thousands more journalists in their pocket.

Just a day ago we wrote that USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets and 279 "media" NGOs

In the past 24 hours Wikileaks revealed that it used a proxy, Internews Network, to push almost half a billion dollars ($472.6m) to 4,291 media outlets, "training" over 9000 journalists (2023 figures), and producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people.

In this article we'll look at:

• what we knew of USAID years before these revelations;

• how that challenges our perception of recent history;

• what precautions we should take toward the media;

• what that tells us about how politics works today.

In no particular order.

USAID is not a charity, though in recent years it was happy to shelter under umbrella of the non-profit sector.

For most of its existence it was pronounced "U.S. ai-aye-dee," not aid.

Few people had cause to know of its existence, despite its budget estimated in the range $40-60 billion.

Only to students of the seamy side of Latin America during the dictatorships of the 1970s, or those who witnessed a similar struggle to control post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, is it a familiar name.

That is why the revelations that accompanied president Donald Trump's spending freeze caused such excitement among a bunch of nerds, in which I number myself.

History has jumped into real time. Researchers who unpicked the coups and far-off wars of the second half of the 20th century now see the same agencies manipulating elections in the U.S. and Europe today.

The Trump team's animosity towards USAID stems from the fact that the methods by which the U.S. waged war abroad, eventually came home, in the words of Douglas Valentine. USAID's techniques of political manipulation were weaponised in the struggle between the uniparty and the populist wings.

Potted history

The relevance of history goes something like this, with the broadest of brush strokes.

First, that the Allies recruited the top German scientists and spies after WW2. Hilariously, this was an open secret. You could watch German rocket scientist and SS Leutnant Werner von Braun on American television in 1955.

Frederick Forsyth would cement in popular culture the idea that large numbers of senior Nazi leadership survived, with the publication of The Odessa File in 1972.

Second, that elements in the Anglo-American Establishment had armed and financed Hitler's Reich. This would remain taboo for decades.

Thirdly, that these fascist elites survived WW2 and were planning a Fourth Reich. Even the comatose could see how former top Nazis occupied jobs in NATO, military intelligence, the UN, the European Union. Indeed, when the CIA merged with Reinhard Gehlen's Foreign Armies East (FHO) it was something of a reverse takeover.

You don't say!

Yet, this was unmentionable in the establishment-controlled press.

The alternative press — Mae Brussell and Jack Anderson, and the academic Antony Sutton in the mid-1970s — would document in detail what the mainstream media would only mention three decades later, in 2004.

The Guardian's article meets the definition of a bombshell only because it broke the omerta: "How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power."

Two decades after The Guardian's article and 50 years after Antony Sutton's Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974) and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (1976) there are still many who give you a blank stare if you suggest that there was any element of social engineering or malice aforethought on the part of the West.

Western perceptions are managed, and the press curated, by operations like USAID, which is being exposed in real time.

Yet even when the spymasters and storytellers are exposed in the act of paying journalists and censoring researchers, it is unlikely to open the minds of the majority.

Tropical Mémoire

U.S. meddling in Brazil long pre-dated the military coup of 1964.

Dan Mitrione, seemingly an ordinary Midwestern policeman, arrived in the northern state of Belo Horizonte in 1960, working for the Public Safety Program of the International Cooperation Administration, soon to become the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Mitrione taught torture techniques to the Brazilian police, using beggars for demonstrations with electrical wires. It is said that he tortured four of these homeless to death.