The National Endowment for Democracy as “The Second CIA”

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has earned its reputation as “the second CIA” for good reason: it was set up in 1983 as a pet project of CIA Director William Casey. One of the key figures behind the NED concept, Allen Weinstein, put it this way in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly by the CIA 25 years ago.” Political scientist William Blum and former CIA officer Philip Agee later arrived at much the same conclusion.
 
The NED concerns itself with scouting out, grooming, and bankrolling influence agents across the globe to orchestrate “color revolutions.” Among its earliest successes in subversive operations is reckoned to be its backing of the Polish trade union Solidarity, which staged mass walkouts in Poland throughout the 1980s. More recent NED undertakings include laying the groundwork for Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, funneling money into Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, and supporting the Euromaidan protests of 2013 – 2014. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a study in 2024 pointing to the NED’s role in fomenting the Arab Spring during the 2010s. In 2026, China’s news agency Xinhua Daily Telegraph reported that the Endowment had bankrolled protests across Arab countries by channeling funds through NGOs in Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Syria and Libya, all under the guise of women’s rights advocacy, press freedom work, and human rights campaigning. US media outlets have likewise corroborated the NED’s involvement in the Arab Spring. On February 9, 2011, for instance, Voice of America ran a piece titled Former Egyptian Police Officer Directs Protesters from Afar, detailing how Omar Afifi Soliman, an Egyptian expatriate based in Washington, coordinated Egyptian demonstrators via social media with the NED’s backing.