Ed. note: On Friday, a series of tweets from Wikileaks took aim at Internews, the nonprofit media development agency once based in Arcata. (It still has offices and some employees here.) The tweets come as the Trump Administration dismantles the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Internews’ principal funder.

The tweets spoke of half a billion federal dollars “funneled through” Internews. Coming, as they did, under the Wikileaks brand, they were understood as secret revelations liberated from the deep state. Some local people who had never heard of Internews demanded answers.

In fact, though, there was really nothing of substance in the Wikileaks dump that wasn’t already public knowledge. Here’s a North Coast Journal story from 22 years ago that basically laid out Internews’ whole history and explored the quandaries of the company using federal funding for its work.

But these recent media flurries prompted Kay Elewski, a former Internews staffer, to write down some memories of working for the company. She was kind enough to share them with the Outpost.

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Goodbye To All That
By Kay Elewski

I read in The New York Times that Elon Musk called USAID “corrupt and criminal.” The USAID employees I encountered during my time with Internews Network, the Arcata-based NGO recipient of hefty USAID grants, were multilingual, helpful, dedicated, ambitious. I attended their trainings, shared cocktails and romantic secrets, sought their professional advice, filed reports in a timely manner, and got leads to new assignments.

Internews’ mission when I joined in the mid-nineties was to support and launch independent news media in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union and other fledgling democracies around the globe. One of the early program offices was based in Kyiv. USAID invested heavily in these activities.

Internews provided equipment and training to nascent radio and television stations setting up news programming that was not government sponsored and controlled. Small media outlets popped up across Central Asia. I visited news programming projects in Almaty, Kazakhstan and in Bishkek, in the Kyrgyz Republic.

It was a privilege and a responsibility to visit the local offices. NGO employees represented an up close and personal America to citizens of places where Americans had not previously been admitted. We brought equipment and trainers and helped set up facilities for news stations to broadcast local reporting. We schooled local staff on the accounting systems for USAID fund use reporting and imported an American business model for team development. News programming evolved to cover the environment, culture, education, economic issues, health and women.

Although USAID funds were grants, the use of these funds required both narrative reports and financial statements. The names of regional officials, lawyers, journalists, fixers and other individuals who assisted us were included in the reports. Program by program, USAID essentially created a global directory, listing individuals, their professions, their contact information.

At the local level, we were genuinely curious about each other’s lives. We shared our histories, problem solving, support, friendship and sometimes deep revelations during the late talking drinking nights that were never paid for on USAID contract dollars. Exactly.

At some point the Internews leadership’s desire to launch programs in Latin America led one of my colleagues who read an article by John Lee Anderson in The New Yorker to send him an email, describe the work we did and ask if he could direct her to journalists in the region. Anderson responded that while she might have other intentions, he never felt as certain as he did when reading her email, that he was being fished by a spook, and stated he did not want to be contacted by her again. Ever.

When I texted her recently, my former colleague wrote: “That was a conversation I will never forget.” At the time, we were both shocked. Spies? CIA ops? Us?

But what was USAID doing around the world, making friends and saving lives? In the big picture, no one I know would consider the US government a benevolent entity. Internews was surely a soft ops, changing hearts and minds, bringing Central Asian teams to DC and California meetings. Of course, corruption lurked. And like all stressed performers under pressure, USAID contractors and employees made mistakes. Funds were misspent on local scams. I’m not calling anyone out. We’re past that.

After a decade, the distant travel lost meaning for me. The big directory was no longer a comfortable concept. Questions about being part of a team that imported a practice of independent fair and balanced news media in the face of rising cable news opinion journalism in the US whined in the back of my thoughts like a vampire mosquito. One long night alone in my Novotel hotel room after visiting the Nyarube massacre site — a small Catholic church where 1,500 Tutsi sought refuge, but were trapped and slaughtered—I watched lightning lash the mountains outside my window and knew I was in the wrong place.

A few months later, back in California, I resigned.

Shedding USAID causes me no grief, but the dismantling of an agency staffed by dedicated personnel around the world aiming to deliver assistance deserves respectful management. Back in the day, USAID and NGOs attracted individuals seeking adventure, community and most of all peaceful relations with other nations. Maybe that no longer matters.