User:Kwh/IFF

The International Freedom Foundation (IFF), founded in 1986, was described as a Washington conservative think-tank with branches in Johannesburg and London, but was actually a front organization for apartheid South Africa's Directorate of Military Intelligence.

Operation Babushka
The International Freedom Foundation, founded in 1986 seemingly as a conservative think tank, was in fact part of an elaborate intelligence gathering operation, and was designed to be against apartheid's an instrument for "political warfare" against apartheid's foes, according to former senior South African spy Craig Williamson. The South Africans spent up to $1.5 million a year through 1992 to underwrite "Operation Babushka," as the IFF project was known. One of its objectives was to try to reverse the apartheid regime's pariah status in Western political circles.

"We decided that, the only level we were going to be accepted was when it came to the Soviets and their surrogates, so our strategy was to paint the ANC as communist surrogates," said Williamson, formerly a senior operative in South Africa's military intelligence, who helped direct Babushka. "The more we could present ourselves as anti-communists, the more people looked at us with respect. People you could hardly believe cooperated with us politically when it came to the Soviets."

Willing allies
The South Africans found willing, though possibly unwitting, allies in influential Republican politicians, conservative intellectuals and activists. Sen. Jesse Helms, now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served as chairman of the editorial advisory board for the foundation's publications. Alan Keyes was described as an IFF adviser. And Washington lobbyist and movie producer, Jack Abramoff, was identified as actively helping to run the IFF.

Foreign agents
Under U.S. law, anyone who represents a foreign government or acts under its orders, direction or control, has to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. Asked if a "think-tank" sup up and supported by a foreign government has to register, a Justice official said, "If the foreign [government] has some say in what they are doing and, obviously, if they are funding it they probably do then they probably do have to register." Violation of the law carries a fine up to $10,000 and a prison term of up to five years.

Williamson said that the operation was deliberately constructed so that many of the people would not know they were involved with a foreign government. "That was the beauty of the whole things guys pushing what they believed," he said. Helms for example, voted against virtually every punitive measure ever contemplated against South Africa's white minority government, however mild. And Burton was nearly hysterical in arguing against sanctions that a large bipartisan majority passed in 1986 over President Ronald Reagan's veto, at one point warning that "there will be blood running in the streets" as a result.

Red Scorpion
But in some cases, such as Abramoffs, the relationship with the South African security apparatus was more than merely coincidental, according to Williamson and others. A former chief of intelligence, now retired, said emphatically that the South African military helped finance Abramoffs 1988 movie "Red Scorpion."

The movie was a sympathetic portrayal of an anti-communist African guerrilla commander loosely based on Jones Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader allied to both Washington and Pretoria. Williamson also said the production of "Red Scorpion" was "funded by our guys," who in addition provided military trucks and equipment -as well as extras.

To the right of Ghengis Khan
In South African government thinking, the IFF represented a far more subtle approach to defeating the anti-apartheid movement. Officials said the p!an was to get away from the traditional allies of Pretoria, the fringe right in the United States and Europe, "some of whom were to the right of Ghengis Khan," said one senior intelligence official. Instead, they settled for a front staffed with mainstream conservatives who did not necessarily know who was pulling the strings. "They ran their own organization, but we steered them, that was the point," Williamson said.