Jamba, Angola. The IFF campaigned against regimes and movements it described as Soviet allies. To achieve its aim the IFF, with offices in London and Johannesburg, sponsored symposia with high-profile speakers such as Henry Kissinger
. Among its eight periodicals, the IFF published a monthly newsletter—the Freedom Bulletin—with three editions: International; UK/Europe; and, Republic of South Africa. The IFF ceased its activities in 1993.
Funding
According to a
apartheid South Africa in the amount of $1.5 million per year from 1986. In return for this funding, South Africa was said to have used the IFF as an instrument to portray the African National Congress (ANC) together with its leaders, Oliver Tambo and the imprisoned Nelson Mandela
, as terrorists and as sympathetic to Soviet communism. Code-named Operation Babushka, the IFF succeeded in recruiting a large number of Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals to influence US policies towards the apartheid regime, and to counteract growing domestic and international pressure for the imposition of economic sanctions against South Africa.
The IFF's first chairman was Duncan Sellars. Its Washington lobbyist/film producer,
South-West Africa (now Namibia) in 1988—Williamson indicated that Abramoff would undoubtedly have known about the source of the IFF's funding. Another former SA intelligence official, Colonel Vic McPherson, declared to Newsday how pleased he was with the performance of the IFF: "They were not just good in intelligence, but in political warfare." In 1992, under pressure from Nelson Mandela, funding for the IFF was withdrawn by President F. W. de Klerk
and it closed down the following year.
Vic McPherson and Craig Williamson spoke to Newsday before the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act became law on July 26, 1995, and therefore before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began its case hearings in April 1996. McPherson and Williamson (along with seven others) applied for and were eventually granted TRC amnesty in 1999 for participating in the bombing in March 1982 of the ANC offices in London.[3]
London UK office
The IFF (UK) published an occasional Freedom Bulletin. The January 1989 edition (no.5, 8 pages) was devoted exclusively to opposing the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement, which had been signed at the Washington Summit in December 1987. They called for its abandonment and stated that from a Western angle it was appeasement.
The director of the IFF's London office, at 10 Storey's Gate, Westminster, was Marc Gordon (born 1966). On January 31, 1989, in a
anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua and was photographed holding an assault rifle.[5]
On August 1, 1989, during the debate about whether or not the
Jewish Chronicle
on 25 September 1992 stating that "the Conservative Party has always been a broad church. However, Marc Gordon's I.F.F.'s support for the importing to our overcrowded island of 3,000,000 Hong Kong Chinese would not, I believe, endear him to the vast majority of grass-roots conservatives."
Without revealing his political past, Gordon got a post with Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party, where he was helping to choose candidates in 1996. It emerged that Gordon had been vice-chairman of the West Midlands Federation of Conservative Students before it was controversially banned by the then Tory Chairman, Norman Tebbit, in 1987, for "its extremist views".[7]
think-tank said to be part of ruse to prolong power (Dele Olojede, who wrote the Newsday article, was joint winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting
