Cairo and Washington breathed a sigh of relief last month when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved military aid to Egypt. But their hopes for the future proved to be wishful thinking, as Egypt asked Interpol this week to issue red notices for the arrest of six Americans whom the Egyptians accuse of illegally stirring unrest. The Americans are all employees of three ostensibly private groups that Washington funds “to promote democracy” in Egypt and other countries. The State Department paid as much as $5 million in bail for the defendants, all of whom had to pledge to return for subsequent court proceedings. They did not do so, which legally makes them fugitives.

Washington is currently pressing Interpol to deny Egypt’s request, even as other countries in the region regard the American NGOs with suspicion. The United Arab Emirates has just banned one of the American groups, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and a similar group from Germany, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Observers are waiting to see if other countries will issue similar bans.

These attacks – and Washington’s effort to downplay any official role in the supposedly nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) – call into question American efforts to promote change in other countries. They also fuel long-standing suspicions that stem from the earliest days of the Cold War. A little history explains much of the present crisis.

Back in the day, the CIA secretly funded, sometimes created, and often ran supposedly private, nongovernmental organizations to make propaganda and provide cover for covert operations all over the world. The compromised groups included the Congress for Cultural Freedom with over 60 publications and an international news service, the European Movement, and France’s anti-communist trade union federation, Force Ouvrière, which worked closely with the legendary labor activist and CIA operative Irving Brown.

Inherently unwieldy and dependent on the willingness of too many people to turn a blind eye, the elaborate apparatus began to come apart in the late 1960s, undermined by growing opposition to the Vietnam War. Ramparts magazine (for which both of us subsequently worked) and other newly alert media exposed the agency’s use of private foundations, including the Ford Foundation, to channel government funds to a long list of CIA favorites. Congressional investigations led by Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike revealed even more, creating what many in the foreign policy establishment saw as a void.

To fill it, the Reagan administration and a bipartisan majority of Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983. The new law stipulated that NED would work largely through three newly created “core grantees” – the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI) – and the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute, which had a long history of working closely with the CIA.

Would the CIA continue to run the new apparatus under cover of the State’s Department’s “democracy bureaucracy?” It certainly looked that way in November 1985, when the Center for Investigative Reporting teamed up with the French daily Liberation to reveal that NED had secretly intervened against France’s socialist President Francois Mitterrand. As confirmed by the New York Times, NED gave $833,000 to Force Ouvrière and $575,000 to the right-wing National Inter-University Union, which the original exposé described as “the student arm of a banned paramilitary organization linked to political bombings and assassinations.” NED passed the money through the Free Trade Union Institute (now the Solidarity Center), and the AFL-CIO official handling the grant in Paris was the 74-year-old Irving Brown.

“We’re defending democracy in France,” he told the Los Angeles Times, which reported that the right-wing student group had plastered Paris with posters attacking Mitterrand. When the story broke, the U.S. Embassy in Paris denied any U.S. government role.