The World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) initiative has been responsible for seeding many of the ruling elite into positions of power and influence within the worlds of business, civil society and, most importantly, politics. The fall of the Soviet Union soon became the apparent catalyst for the creation of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program, which was the precursor to the Young Global Leaders initiative over a decade later.

However, the supposed mastermind of the project, the WEF’s lifetime leader Klaus Schwab, had himself already been helped into his own influential position by a very similar program run out of Harvard University that was heavily funded by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Harvard initiative in question, often referred to as Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar, was one of several programs set up by senior members of organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the newly created CIA. In fact, during the post-World War II era, the United States was proactively creating many such programs with the intention of grooming potential young foreign leaders and installing them into positions of power. The main motive behind the establishment of these programs was ostensibly to combat and prevent communist infiltration of foreign states while also assuring that future global leaders would be amenable to US interests.

Originally, the United States created these secretive youth organizations with the aim of targetting potential future European leadership candidates. Yet, soon, no country in the world would be safe from possible CIA-sponsored political infiltration. In this article, we will examine one of the front organizations which used vast amounts of CIA money to fund various Harvard projects including Kissinger’s International Seminar. We will learn who the people were who created these funding platforms, and we’ll also look at other such educational initiatives, some still in existence today, which have helped American intelligence infiltrate governments worldwide.

The American Friends of the Middle East

In 1967, it was Harvard’s own Humphrey Doermann who exposed that certain Harvard Summer School courses and initiatives were actually being funded via CIA conduits. Even though almost a decade of funding throughout the 1950s remained undeclared, it was revealed that, between 1960 and 1966, Kissinger’s International Seminar received funding from three CIA conduits: The Asian Foundation, The Farfield Foundation, and The American Friend’s of the Middle East, the latter being one of the more well-known, influential and successful CIA conduits of the era.