Robert A:
I would be interested in finding out more about any Kim Zigfeld/Jamestown Foundation connection. From what I understand, Jamestown started as a Washington D.C. job mill for defectors from the USSR in the early 1980s and somehow kept getting funded in spite of the collapse of the Soviet threat. (BTW, people like the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney Jr. were warning us not to be suckered by the Soviets’ taking a dive all the way up to 1991 when the party ended, but they persisted, with a lot of support from what Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex”).
After all, calling for a new Cold War with China is dangerous and steps on a lot of U.S. corporate toes, and it’s hard to fight someone you’re $2 trillion in hoc to. But continuing to wage the Cold War with Russia is relatively safe, or was until it led to actual innocent people dying in Ossetia, and the truth about that started to come out to the embarassment of Beltway enablers like the formerly wildly pro-Saakashvili Washington Post. And I would ask Kim Zigfeld which is more pro-government: the WaPost or Russia Today? It seems to me you can’t tell which is more party line, regardless of partisan identification, when it comes to Russia. The WaPost writers will more or less do what they are told by their State Department sources and buddies.
From the publically available reports, I have not been able to discern who funds Jamestown but I do know they were paying one of their writers, Vladimir Socor, who is based in Germany, about 50k a year in 2006. Multiply that figure by about ten writers/staffers and you have a fairly respectable budget paid out of some endowment. The question is, where does the private funding stop and the government friendliness endorsement begin? Jamestown didn’t seem to be as prominent as AEI or Heritage or have a revolving door with the Bush Administration but perhaps that is by design.
In any case, if you have some evidence that Zigfeld is linked to Jamestown, please post it here or shoot me an email at:
stevejnelson@yahoo.com.
Thanks.
