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The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA cut-out[1][2] soft-power[3] organization which finances protest groups to destabilize targets of US foreign policy.
In 1986, NED's President Carl Gershman said that the NED was created because "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the 1960's and that's why it has been discontinued".[4]
In 1991 during an interview with Allen Weinstein the then-president of the NED said "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."[5]
Critics have compared the NED's funding of Nicaraguan groups (pro-U.S. and conservative unions, political parties, student groups, business groups, and women's associations) in the 1980s and 1990s in Nicaragua to the previous CIA effort "to challenge and undermine" the socialist government of Chile.[6]