Conceived during the Cold War by Willy Brandt to tie Europe and the United States, the German Marshall Fund was a breeding ground for journalists, university students and politicians committed to Atlantism. Although the Fund lost its ideological nature with the collapse of the USSR, it still draws the attention of the US secret service that is widely represented in its administration council.
When the Marshall plan celebrated its 25th Anniversary on June 5, 1972, the German Foreign Minister and the Nobel Prize winner Willy Brandt announced, in a speech in Harvard, the returning to the US of the outstanding balance of Marshall Fund and the establishment of an institution that would promote the investigation and Atlantic projects: the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
This association, which is registered under the US legislation, developed for 30 years two main tasks:
Organized trips for one month. They were offered to representative youngsters of European and US views to get acquainted with the social, cultural and political realities of the other side of the Atlantic in order to eliminate the prejudices and to enhance reciprocal friendship;
Research scholarships, which were offered to university students who would analyze the behavior of the population from both sides of the Atlantic (Europe - USA).
It is obvious that, in 1972, so much effort was to have something in return. Germany, still obliged by then to play a secondary political role in Europe, had the intention of restoring its situation developing its vassalage to compensate in humanitarian terms what it could not expect from politics. The alleged threats of the Ostpolitik had also to be compensated by its evident inclusion under the “American umbrella”.
Washington, for its part, wanted to strengthen the ties of West Europe with the United States by creating links with a new elite generation that did not come from the liberalization. It was the time when European youths rallied against the war in Viet Nam. The Red Army Fraction had just attacked the US Head Quarters in Heidelberg to destroy the strategic computer that controlled the bombers in South-East Asia. It was also the time of the tension strategy: NATO secret services manipulated right and left-wing factions to raise a reflection and demand public order among the voters.
The German Marshall Fund seemed a sort of Fullbbright Program but conceived with a bipartisan style. Thoroughly studied, the reaction of the young “fellows” would facilitate the identification and recruitment of new “messengers of Atlantism”. Funds for researchers should guarantee the production of Atlantism arguments and, at the same time, instruct further work by scholarship holders in their future carriers.
The German Marshall Fund was a breeding ground for journalists, university students and politicians totally devoted to the Atlantic cause until the collapse of the USSR. But, since the threat was dispelled, the Fund lost its ideological purpose. Some of its current employees have said that the Fund even got to swim against the tide trying to maintain a reciprocal understanding that was no longer a concern to any of the two sides of the Atlantic.
With the rearm of the United States, in 1988, the neoconservatives started to reactivate the Atlantic networks, not to defend the Atlantism after the collapse of the USSR but to use them in their own imperial project. Hence, they became also interested in the Fund.
Over the past three years, the German Marshall Fund and the Compagnia di San Paulo have been funding a transatlantic yearly study pertaining to the political perceptions in Europe and the United States.
Together with Bertelsmann Foundation, the Fund also organized meetings with young leaders at Tremezzo Hotel (Italy) and a Transatlantic Forum of Journalists in Brussels (Belgium). Participants were able then to hold discussions with some of the best US think tanks.
In February 2003, the Fund created a Forum on Trade and Poverty. Personalities who participated in the meeting not only represented Europe and the United States, but also Brazil, India, Japan and South Africa. The debates were presided over by a six-member committee, which included Robert Rubin (USA) and Dominique Straus-Khan (France).
It was strange that Rubin was- appointed in 1993 by Bill Clinton’s decision - the first president of the National Economic Council, which was the agency that had to identify the targets for CIA economic intelligence operations (led by James Woolsey by then). Some years later, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for his part, had been actively monitoring the CCSE, a committee that performed economic espionage within the General Secretariat of the National Defense in France.
On the other hand, the Fund increased its operations in Eastern Europe through the establishment together with USAID of a program worth 25 million dollars, the Balkan Trust for Democracy.
The association manages an annual budget of 20 million dollars for its operations, plus a favorable capital of 200 million dollars. It is led by Craig Kennedy, former manager of the liberal foundations of a multimillionaire from Chicago [1]. Craig Kennedy became notorious by the OECD (another institution from Marshall plan) when he used to work for it as a counselor.
The administration council of the Fund is made up of some 20 US personalities who have been posted to Germany and chosen to achieve a bipartisan balance.
Its co-chairmen are Guido Goldman and Marc Leland. The first one, son of the former president of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Goldman, is a professor of Germanic Studies in Harvard and was in charge of the Atlantik Brucke during the Cold War. Leland was assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury. He runs an investment office in Arlington and an oil service company in Texas. He was also in charge of the Atlantik Institute in Paris during the Cold War.
The brochure distributed by the German Marshall Fund vaguely refers to professional responsibilities of its benevolent managers. J. Thomas Presby appeared like a modest retired person managing the jewelry Tiffany & Co.; Richard T. Roberts as director of a forgotten investment fund, who was the assistant to Rudolph Giuliani in New York; and Robert M. Solow is identified as the professor in MIT without any record that he had won the Nobel Prize in economics.
It was obvious that so much discretion tried, above all things, to hide the responsibilities of the majority of directors in the Pentagon and CIA. Lee Hamillton is the vice-president of the presidential commission on September 11, member of the Homeland Security Advisory Board and has been decorated by the CIA and DIA. Hamilton, former member of Parliament, headed one of the investigation commissions on the scandal Iran-Contras where he studied the role of another manager of the Fund, Robert M. Kimmitt, who was then executive director of the National Security Council and involved in the scandal up to his neck. Later, M. Kimmit was appointed vice-president of AOL-Time-Warner by his friend, General Colin Powell.
The journalist Mara Liasson indicated that she works for the National Public Radio, but failed to mention that she hosts a Sunday show in Fox News where she hysterically denounces un-Americans. Jenonne Walter, is not even introduced even when this former Ambassador has spent her carrier in the CIA and NSC. J. Robin West was appointed head of an oil company and it was never mentioned that this veteran from the Pentagon currently runs the Institute of the United States for Peace, and so on...
But what is more surprising is the end. Barbara Shailor, who is introduced as the great cleaner of the AFL/CIO international department, was accused by Latin American delegates to the International Labor Organization in Geneva, of being the CIA agent in charge of the international trade union means. As for Suzanne Woolsey, director of relations at the National Academy of Sciences, she is the wife of R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and manipulator of the Iraqi National Congress. The later is about to become a scandal for it was known that he was a member of the Management Board of the Institute for Defense and, above all, of Fluor, which has captured major public contracts in Iraq.
The German Marshall Fund has become, according to what we are told, in a purely philanthropic association...Maybe...But its administration board is still made up by personalities who, most of them, are involved in secret actions undertaken by the United States.
[1] The term «liberal» must be interpreted here from an American point of view. Craig Kennedy has defended the role of the market in the protection of the environment as much as liberalization of drugs
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