John Kiriakou says that while still at the CIA, he was aware USAID gave money to the National Endowment for Democracy amid accusations that the organization was a CIA front involved in money laundering under the guise of public-private partnerships.[1]
Nominal cover, not USAID cover
Kiriakou says there is a formal written agreement between the CIA and the State Department addressing cover issues, and that for his entire CIA career he worked under “nominal cover” as a State Department employee — with no actual institutional backing if anyone had called to verify it.[2] He says he never once encountered a CIA officer embedded undercover inside USAID itself, because the agency instead ran covert operations through USAID rather than placing officers under USAID cover.[3]
Origins and the 1964 shift
Kiriakou says USAID, the Peace Corps, and VISTA were all created together by President John F. Kennedy — in 1961, in a second telling — and that by 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, the CIA was running covert operations out of USAID, a fact he says has since been declassified and is available at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.[4][5] He is emphatic that the founding concept was sound — an organisation going “to some of the most horrible places on Earth” to dig water wells, build hospitals and clinics, and help countries create water-treatment plants and electrical grids — and equally emphatic about the outcome: “great idea. It never worked that way.”[5] By his account the reputation was established early: “even as far back as the late 60s, people who knew called it the CIA’s beachhead at the State Department.”[6]
The Kissinger letter
Kiriakou cites a declassified 1972 letter in which Senator Ted Kennedy asked the CIA whether it was paying Laotian mercenaries through USAID payroll checks. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s reply confirmed the CIA had paid the mercenaries in 1969, 1970, 1971, and 1972.[7] In a second telling Kiriakou adds a detail about the reply: Kennedy received two responses, one from the director of the CIA and one from Kissinger as Secretary of State, and “the letters were identical — they just had different signatures on them.” The answer, then classified and since declassified, was affirmative and forward-looking: the agency confirmed it used USAID to further covert action programmes, named the Laotian payments year by year, and stated that it intended to continue.[8][9]
Programmes since exposed
Kiriakou lists specific USAID operations that became public either through declassification or, in one case, by accident. The Cuban platform ZunZuneo, built during the George W. Bush administration to instigate an Arab Spring-style uprising, failed to interest Cubans and lapsed; its existence surfaced only when it was leaked to the Guardian by mistake.[9] In 2013 the Obama administration attempted to use USAID to overthrow the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia — an episode Kiriakou finds hard to justify even on the agency’s own terms: “like, why? What do you care if Evo Morales is the president of Bolivia?”[10] He treats these as instances of a continuing pattern rather than historical curiosities: “this is an ongoing thing that has been taking place for decades.”[10]
That continuity is where the vehicle meets the money. Kiriakou says the agency is “still using USAID as the CIA beachhead at the State Department, and they’re still using the American taxpayers’ money to try to overthrow governments that they deem are not friendly enough to the United States” — spending that never appears as such because of the way the budget is concealed.[11]