Gatekeepers who run groups have links to U.S. intelligence and only allow certain kinds of viewpoints—all while claiming to be promoting education and open debate about U.S. foreign policy

On March 17, 2025, the Tulsa Committee on Foreign Relations (TCFR) featured two National Endowment for Democracy (NED) staffers who were there to defend the reputation of the NED in the face of the Trump administration’s threatened budgetary cuts.

The TCFR is a branch of the American Committee on Foreign Relations (ACFR), an offshoot of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a dominant think tank that helps guide U.S. foreign policy.

A 1979 book on the CFR that noted its heavy Wall Street funding was tellingly titled “Imperial Brain Trust.”^[1]

The ACFR promotes a speaker series in cities across the southern and midwestern U.S. with the official purpose of “fostering non-partisan public dialog and education on foreign policy issues.”

Really, however, the speakers support a pro-imperialistic foreign policy.

One of the TCFR speakers on March 17, 2025, Tom Garrett, was vice president of the Republican Party’s arm of the NED, which supports political parties in foreign countries that adopt a similar platform to the U.S. Republican Party.

The second speaker that day, Patrick Merloe, has worked for the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the Democratic Party’s arm of the NED.

CovertAction Magazine has published numerous articles exposing the NED as a CIA offshoot/front specializing in the promotion of political propaganda that provides grants to civil society groups in countries targeted by the U.S. for regime change, or which the U.S. seeks to maintain in its geopolitical orbit.

In addition to these NED staffers, the TCFR has recently brought a CIA agent to speak, Meredith Woodruff, who regaled the crowd with tales of the duplicitous actions that she engaged in around the world.

Woodruff admitted in her talk that her job involved trying to get people to betray their countries and that putting them in contact with her meant that their lives were placed in jeopardy.^[2]

In April, the TCFR’s speaker was Vitalii Tarasiuk, the Ukrainian Consul-General in Houston.^[3] No one was ever invited to the group to offer the Russian perspective on the war so audiences could hear both sides—what proper educators try and do.

Previously, the TCFR hosted Fareed Zakaria, a protégé of neo-conservative Samuel Huntington who serves as a mouthpiece for the globalist/pro-imperialist elite that, according to historian Anatol Lievan, “can only feel safe and comfortable in a world that is some combination of that of 1950, when an economically utterly dominant U.S. confronted an alliance of totalitarian enemies, and of 1995, when a geopolitically utterly dominant U.S. lacked any serious competitor.”

Routinely, the TCFR invites State Department and other government officials and an assortment of inside-the-Beltway think-tank analysts who mostly parrot the official positions of the U.S. executive branch on Ukraine-Russia and a host of other conflicts.

One of these analysts, Ali Wyne, was typical in expressing his belief that the U.S. was a beacon for humanity and that U.S. military actions were responsive to Russian and Chinese aggression and a rising tide of authoritarianism (as if the U.S. has never supported authoritarian regimes).^[4]

Another TCFR speaker, CFR fellow Steven Cook, appeared on a podcast with CIA operative and Iran-Contra felon Elliott Abrams after October 7, 2023, to underplay the impact of Israeli settlements and occupation in shaping the conflict in Gaza and to blame Iran for October 7.^[5]

Accusing Iran, rather than the U.S. and Israel, of “creating chaos across the Middle East,” Cook agreed with arch neo-con Abrams on the need for a hawkish policy toward Iran and stated that the U.S. “should not leave the Middle East.” Regarding Syria, Cook wrote an article about the December 2024 “revolution” that omitted the CIA’s role in overthrowing the Assad government and inhuman U.S. sanctions policy that was designed to starve Syria’s population into submission.^[6]

The TCFR touts itself as a non-profit organization dedicated to “sponsoring rigorous and informed foreign relations discussions, between the heartland and the beltway, and across the USA.”

I found the latter statement to be a blatant lie when I joined the TCFR in 2022 (I had previously been a member some years earlier) and was given a form to request speakers and make suggestions to the committee chairman for improving the committee’s programs.

On that form, I requested that the committee invite someone associated with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)^[7] group (Ray McGovern and Colonel Ann Wright headed my list), or national security whistleblowers such as Scott Ritter and/or John Kiriakou.

Additionally, I suggested that the program committee include voices from the Global South.

After I made these suggestions, I attended a brief planning meeting for the coming year before the first speaker event. After that meeting, I spoke to the head of the TCFR, Robert Donaldson, the former president of the University of Tulsa whose son had been a student in my class at that university.

When I mentioned the speakers I had suggested, he responded: “Those are left-wing people and we present centrist and reasonable points of view.” Or something to that effect.

I responded by stating that the people I had highlighted were among the most knowledgeable insiders and truth-tellers who had been proven right about Russia Gate, CIA torture and many other things. He just smiled and walked away.

Previously, I had sent Donaldson notice of the publication of my book on Bill Clinton and invited him to a book talk that I gave at a local library.

Of course, I knew he would never come or invite me to speak as he never invited me before despite publishing numerous books and academic journal articles on topics relevant to his group that had passed rigorous academic peer review standards.

But Donaldson and his friends don’t care about these standards or good scholarship if it contradicts the world view of the corporate masters whom they serve.

Now a professor emeritus in the University of Tulsa’s Political Science Department, Donaldson has a past teaching at the U.S. Army War College and has worked as a State Department consultant. Holding a Ph.D. from Harvard in Sovietology, his bio on the University of Tulsa website lists him as a consultant to the U.S. intelligence community.^[8]

A former assistant of his, the former chairman of the University of Tulsa political science department who also attends the TCFR events, once called me to accost me for challenging the official narrative of the Kennedy assassination after I was interviewed by The Tulsa World on this topic. He said a board member of the university had been part of the Warren Commission, which he claimed got the investigation into the assassination right. (Polls show that most Americans do not believe this and massive evidence shows his view to be wrong—see investigation here).

Donaldson is a friendly man who co-authored a detailed study of Russian foreign policy history that I purchased from him and use periodically as a resource. His party affiliation appears to be Democratic and he once told me that, in the 1990s, he tried to lobby some of Oklahoma’s elected representatives against eastward NATO expansion.

While these latter efforts were noble, Donaldson functions as a gatekeeper who wants to keep any dissent within certain limits and censors anybody he considers to be to his left.

He projects himself as an anti-Trump liberal but promotes speakers who advance disinformation in support of empire and war while censoring and ridiculing those who display empathy for the people living on the wrong end of the guns.

David W. Conde, in the suppressed 1970 book CIA—Core of the Cancer called academic gatekeepers like Donaldson, those who received foundation money or worked directly for CIA-linked organizations, as being part of a system of “intellectual incest and rape.”

The “rapists” (i.e., CIA-linked gatekeepers like Donaldson who advance in the ranks of academia) define the parameters of discourse and censor real intellectuals who genuinely “speak truth to power.”

In 1967, Noam Chomsky wrote poignantly about the “responsibility of intellectuals” for the Vietnam War by virtue of the fact that they helped to advance the misconceived view that U.S. foreign policy was idealistic and well-intentioned, even if some believed it misguided.

Political-economic critiques that placed the Vietnam War in the larger pattern of U.S. imperialism were said to be adopted only by people whom National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy labeled “wild men in the wings” who faced blacklisting from academia.^[9]

In the past, the TCFR has brought in some critical speakers—like Andrew Bacevich^[10] and Rajiv Chandrasekaran^[11]—however, they confine their critiques within certain parameters and do not look at how corporate/Wall Street interests often drive U.S. foreign policy or adopt viewpoints of people from the Global South.

Nor do they address the adoption of false-flag operations by governing elites to hoodwink the public into support for illegal wars, or the pernicious nature of CIA operations.

The latter topics are out of bounds for the CFR/ACFR and anyone who addresses them are quickly subjected to Stalin-style purges or blacklisting—as with academia writ large.^[12]

A long-time member of the TCFR with whom I am friendly, a former DynCorp pilot who is critical of U.S. foreign policy and anguished by the Israeli genocide in Gaza, suggested to Donaldson inviting Alison Weir who wrote a book critical of U.S. support for the creation of the State of Israel.

This latter suggestion was shot down and my friend told me that whenever he gets up to ask questions at committee events, people hiss at him—which is why he stopped going.

Imperial Brain Trust

I did not fully understand the forces behind the ACFR until I reread Laurence Shoup and William Minter’s 1977 book Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy.

This book provides a detailed history of the CFR and discusses how it founded regional committees starting in 1938 with the goal of engendering support for a globalist U.S. foreign policy.

The CFR was founded in the late 1910s by an elite circle of Wall Street financiers, bankers and government officials who supported U.S. intervention in World War I and saw the U.S. as the rightful heir of the British Empire.^[13]

The CFR’s first honorary chairman, Elihu Root, was a corporate lawyer who served as Secretary of War during the Spanish-American-Philippines War and was an early leader in overseas American expansion.

The CFR’s first president, John W. Davis, was the Democratic Party candidate for president in 1924 and senior partner in the law firm that represented the J.P. Morgan group.^[14] Morgan was one of the wealthiest men on Wall Street who floated loans to Britain and France that drew the U.S. into World War I.

CIA Director Allen Dulles, whose exploits are well known to CovertAction Magazine readers, was another CFR director and a key part of the organization for more than 40 years.

Much of the early funding for the CFR came from some of the richest men in the U.S., including Morgan and his associate Thomas W. Lamont (who originally helped set up the CFR), John D. III and David Rockefeller, Herbert Lehman and Howard Heinz, among others.

CFR members were key architects of multiple U.S. foreign policy disasters, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the dropping of the atomic bomb.

When George Kennan published his blueprint for U.S. strategy in the Cold War, it was in the CFR’s house journal, Foreign Affairs.

In the 1930s Charles Beard wrote a critique of the CFR-backed Open Door Policy^[15] emphasizing how surplus U.S. production could be consumed at home in a rationally planned economy, making overseas expansion and colonialism unnecessary for domestic prosperity.^[16]

This viewpoint was rejected by CFR members who succeeded in getting Franklin D. Roosevelt to focus on trade expansion as a means of combatting the Great Depression rather than domestic reform under the New Deal.

Shoup and Minter suggest that the CFR laid the seeds for the post-World War II imperial strategy and Cold War, which was predicated on the belief that domestic prosperity was contingent on the opening of foreign markets by the U.S. military and establishment of a global system of free trade.

The CFR continues today to advance the same vision, which is why many of its members are offput by Trump’s revitalization of U.S. tariffs as part of what Trump calls an “America First” agenda.

The CFR had originally opposed the America First Committee, which favored U.S. isolationism and avoidance of conflict in Europe and Southeast Asia during the 1930s.

In 2003, the CFR published a book length study by CFR member Kenneth Pollack making the case for invading Iraq. It continues to promote writings that, as Laurence Shoup put it, “magnify threats and increase fears in order to build support among attentive publics and capitalist ruling class leaders for a possible war”—now either with Russia, Iran and/or China.

Plus Ça Change

While CFR members are entitled to their perspective, the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to free speech. Genuinely open debate and education are among the life bloods of democracy that the CFR and its offshoots, along with the CIA, have helped to stifle.

Like with their parent organization, the ACFR’s website shows that many of the organization’s board members worked for Fortune 500 companies or organizations connected to the CIA.

For example, the TCFR treasurer Duff Weddle was corporate counsel of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO), whose operations in Saudi Arabia were enabled by pioneering OSS and CIA covert operations.

Board members of the ACFR’s Dallas branch include ex-CIA operatives, U.S. intelligence contractors and heads of private intelligence firms, an ex-adviser to the U.S. Army Joint Chief of Staff, the former head of Bank of America Dallas, venture capitalists, oil and gas company executives, and a woman who sat on the board of the Sixth Floor Museum, which whitewashes the role of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination and makes it seem like Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

With these kinds of people, there is no way that the ACFR would promote any real dialogue or education among the public.

The latter can only occur when there is a willingness to hear out uncomfortable truths and a willingness to look at ongoing conflicts around the world from multi-faceted perspectives while critically scrutinizing U.S. governmental claims.

Progressives and anti-war activists should learn from the CFR’s strategy and try to develop alternative committees that do what the ACFR does not: educate people about the truth surrounding U.S. foreign policy and promote dialogue and debate, including about alternative policy visions to the currently dominant ones.

A smart approach would be to reach out to diverse sectors of the population. The ACFR events are largely attended by wealthy white people who are over age 60. Hosting speaker series that combine with live music or other events would be a way to draw in young people and a more diverse crowd.

One of the successes of the early 20^th century Anti-Imperialist League was the ability to educate people about the horrors of the U.S. war in the Philippines (for which Elihu Root served as a key architect) by publishing political pamphlets and hosting town hall speaker events.

The latter should be replicated by a new Anti-Imperialist League, whose establishment is urgently needed.

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1. 
   

   Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). ↑

   
   
2. 
   

   Sadly, after Woodruff’s talk, a number of students who attended the talk expressed interest in joining the CIA as a career. Fluent in German, hebrew and it appears Russian, Woodruff is a graduate of Oklahoma State University (OSU) who served with the CIA in classified missions in Central Eurasia, the Near East, Africa and Europe. Her husband Freddie also served with the CIA and died while on an undisclosed operation in Georgia, where he was CIA Station Chief, in 1993 (Freddie was shot in the head in the company of the chief of security of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze who had been installed in a CIA backed coup that unseated Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a democrat who himself died under suspicious circumstances). Meredith is recipient of the Donovan Award for Operational Excellence and the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. She now sits on OSU’s Global Ambassador’s Board and is a partner in a media company, Spycraft Entertainment, that shapes representations of the CIA in Hollywood so as to cover up the CIA’s misdeeds and to present the CIA heroically.   ↑

   
   
3. 
   

   Tarasiuk was invited by TCFR board member, Dr. Randy Kluver, a dean of international studies at Oklahoma State University who is a zealous Ukraine war hawk who incidentally works closely with Meredith Woodruff. The Tampa Committee on Foreign Relations this year hosted as a speaker Douglas Wise, a former member of the CIA’s senior intelligence service who, according to his official bio, “led a major CIA covert action.” ↑

   
   
4. 
   

   The June TCFR speaker, Lieutenant General Harry D. Raduege Jr., is a former Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency who has a background in the Air Force and in intelligence work. He worked for The Cohen Group, headed by former Defense Secretary William Cohen. ↑

   
   
5. 
   

   Cook and Abrams not surprisingly advanced the myth of a “surprise attack” on October 7 similar to Pearl Harbor, when strong evidence indicates that the attack was known in advance by the Israelis and could have easily been prevented. See my article on this topic here. ↑

   
   
6. 
   For an antidote, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “U.S. Media Ignored How CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore Paved the Way For the Syrian ‘Revolution,’” CovertAction Magazine, December 23, 2024, among other articles I have written on Syria for CAM.
   

   ↑

   
   
7. 
   

   The VIPS consists of intelligence professionals concerned about the politicization of intelligence. It was founded after the 2003 war on Iraq when false intelligence regarding WMDs was used to sell the war in Iraq. VIPS also published numerous memos debunking the official narrative about Russia Gate. It carried out a study, which determined that Democratic Party emails that made 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton look bad that were sent to WikiLeaks could not have been leaked by the Russians. This was based on the speed of the modem which showed that the emails had been leaked from within the U.S. ↑

   
   
8. 
   

   Donaldson is listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. ↑

   
   
9. 
   

   Those adopting this analysis were called communists during the height of the McCarthy era and beyond. ↑

   
   
10. 
    

    Bacevich has published a number of excellent books with antiwar themes and I found him to be a very nice, well informed person with sensible views on many topics. However, he is not a leftist but a conservative, which seems to make him more palatable to the CFR/ACFR and mainstream academia, along with the fact that there are certain gray areas in his analysis. He does not, for example, address false flags or do a good job of analyzing the corporate influence on U.S. foreign policy that Covert Action Information Bulletin founder Philip Agee addressed in his writings. ↑

    
    
11. 
    

    A onetime Washington Post reporter, he wrote a book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage, 2007) that exposed the insularity of U.S. government officials living in Iraq’s Green Zone. However, neither the book nor talk addressed the deeper imperialistic underpinnings of the U.S. intervention in Iraq or how it fit a wider pattern of U.S. foreign policy. ↑

    
    
12. 
    

    More consciousness is developing about the latter due to the recent publicized firing of pro-Palestinian academics and those critical of Israeli policies in Gaza. ↑

    
    
13. 
    

    Jim Macgregor and Jim O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler: Who Was Responsible? Anglo-American Money, Foreign Agents and Geopolitics (Walterville, OR: Trine Day Press, 2025), 26, suggest that the CFR was a creation of the Milner pro-imperialist group in England, an elite body that included Cecil Rhodes which drove support for the British empire and Anglo-American world supremacy. Chatham House was its counterpart in Great Britain. ↑

    
    
14. 
    

    The law firm was Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Gardiner and Reed. Davis, interestingly, became a member of the right-wing Liberty League backed by wealthy financiers who mounted a coup against Roosevelt because of their opposition to the New Deal. ↑

    
    
15. 
    

    Officially articulated by Secretary of State John Hay in the late 1890s, the Open Door Policy advocated for a strong U.S. military to open up business and trade opportunities around the world. ↑

    
    
16. 
    

    Beard it should be noted was fired from Columbia University for his views and opposition to World War I. ↑

    
    

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