Foreign Agents E-Book

Casey Michel

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 564

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Foreign Policy, Most Anticipated Books of 2024 A stunning investigation and indictment of the elements in United States' foreign lobbying industry and the threat they pose to democracy. For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they've not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they've secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, journalist Casey Michel contends some of them have begun turning their sights on American democracy itself. These Americans are known as foreign lobbyists, and many of them spent years ushering dictatorships directly into the halls of Washington, all while laundering the reputations of the most heinous, repressive regimes in the process. These lobbyists include figures like Ivy Lee, the inventor of the public relations industry - a man who whitewashed Mussolini, opened doors to the Soviets, and advised the Nazis on how to sway American audiences. They include people like Paul Manafort, who invented lobbying as we know it - and who then took his talents to autocrats from Ukraine to the Philippines, and then back to the White House. And they now include an increasing number of Americans elsewhere: in law firms and consultancies, among PR specialists and former lawmakers, and even within think tanks and universities. Many of these lobbyists have transformed into proxies for dictators and strongmen wherever they can be found. And for years, they've escaped scrutiny. In Foreign Agents, Casey Michel shines a light on these foreign lobbyists, and all the damage and devastation they have caused in Washington and elsewhere. From Moscow to Beijing, from far-right nationalists to far-left communists, from anti-American autocrats to pro-Western authoritarians, these foreign lobbyists have helped any illiberal, anti-democratic government they can find. And after decades of success in installing dictator after dictator, and in tilting American policy in the process, some of these lobbyists have now begun trying to end America's democratic experiment, once and for all.

Leseprobe

 

ALSO BY CASEY MICHEL

American Kleptocracy

 

 

Published in the UK in 2024 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPemail: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-183773-187-9eBook: 978-183773-189-3

Text copyright © 2024 Casey MichelThe author has asserted her moral rights.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed and bound in the UK

To my brother Norwood, the best man I know

Law? What do I care about Law? Hain’t I got the power?

—Cornelius Vanderbilt1

Ladies. Gentlemen. You have eaten well. . . . Your feast is nearly over.

—Frank Miller2

CONTENTS

Foreign Agents by the Numbers

Prologue: Bad Business

PART I: POISON

1. Dire Consequences

2. What Is a Fact?

3. Master of Publicity

4. Broken

PART II: MONSTERS

5. Secret Handshake

6. Wise Men

7. Excess Is Best

8. Shame Is for Sissies

PART III: REVOLUTIONS

9. Safe for Dictatorship

10. Ukrainian Cocktails

11. Blood Money

12. Not for Profit

PART IV: INSURRECTIONS

13. Pot of Gold

14. Black Hole

15. You’re Fucked

16. The Republic Itself Is at Risk

17. Mr. Lee’s Publicity Book

Afterword: November 2023

Acknowledgments

Notes

FOREIGN AGENTS BY THE NUMBERS

•Decline in staff overseeing foreign lobbyists in the United States before 2016: 43 percent1

•Decline in inspections and audits of foreign lobbyists before 2016: 86 percent2

•Total convictions for foreign lobbying crimes in the half century before 2016: 33

•Number of former members of Congress who became foreign agents, 1990–2016: 1144

•Foreign principals registered to lobby in America since 2016: 1,0405

•Amount foreign principals have spent to lobby in America since 2016: $4.1 billion6

•Growth of Chinese expenditures on foreign lobbying, 2017– 2021: 476 percent7

•Growth of Russian expenditures on foreign lobbying, 2017–2021: 584 percent8

•First year American officials called for a ban on lobbying for foreign governments: 18699

•Decline in Clinton Foundation donations after 2016: 75 percent10

•Undisclosed funds received by American universities from foreign sources: $6.5 billion11

•American president with the greatest number of advisors indicted for secretly working as foreign agents: Donald Trump

Prologue: Bad Business

The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.

—Orhan Pamuk1

On May 19, 1934, a man named Ivy Lee sat in front of a row of American congressional officials, all of whom were trying to determine whether Lee was secretly working for a new regime in Germany known as the Nazis.

Lee wasn’t an unknown figure to these officials. There in his starched collar and his pinstriped suit, his heavy cheeks beginning to sweat in the stuffy room, Lee cut a familiar look. By the early 1930s, Lee was already an American celebrity: a man close to politicians, tycoons, and cultural icons alike, steering their careers and their policies—and the direction of the country writ large. Not long before, Lee had launched a brand-new industry, which quickly roared across the nation. To his proponents, this new enterprise was the savior of American capitalism: an amalgamation of advertising and advice, useful to both business owners and political forces trying to navigate the strains of the early twentieth century. To his detractors, it was simply an excuse to plaster decorum on outright deceit, spinning lies in the service of deep-pocketed clients who were trying to protect their wealth from the masses.

The field was still hazy to most Americans, including those congressional officials now peering down at Lee. “Your business is what?” asked John McCormack, a Democrat who chaired the committee Lee sat in front of, known as the House Un-American Activities Committee.2

Lee looked back at him. “It is very difficult to describe, Mr. Chairman,” he replied. “Some people call it ‘publicity agent.’ Some people call it ‘counsel in public relations.’ But that would give you a general idea of it.”3 Even Lee may not have known what he’d launched.

But others noticed. This new industry—this new field of “public relations,” as it was eventually described—had brought Lee clients from across the country. There were the giants of the Gilded Age who’d turned to Lee to help bury controversies—people like the Rockefellers, who relied on Lee to help cover up some of the worst massacres in American history. There were the copper and steel and banking magnates, turning to Lee to thwart any kind of regulatory oversight. There were the plutocrats of the railroad industry, who still maintained a stranglehold on American transit, depending on Lee to retain their monopolies. And there were the politicians of the era, deep in the pockets of these American oligarchs, relying on Lee’s assistance in blocking the progressive forces rising around the nation.

But they weren’t the only ones. As Lee found success after success in America, international clients came calling, from across the political spectrum. The forces of fascism gaining ground in Italy welcomed Lee with open arms. Rising totalitarians in Moscow were likewise eager to see what kind of opportunities Lee might be able to unlock.

And there, in Germany, was a client who recruited Lee in the early 1930s: a company named I.G. Farben, which was concerned, as Lee told American officials on that day in 1934, with how Germany was perceived in the United States—and how Lee might be able to improve things.

The higher-ups at I.G. Farben knew Lee’s talents. They’d read about his connections and his cant, his willingness to open doors for—and whitewash—whichever clients were willing to pay the most for his services. As Lee revealed to congressional investigators, I.G. Farben was happy to pay for Lee’s work, for some of these “public relations” services they’d heard so much about, if only he’d make it easier for Germany to improve its image in the United States—and expand the efforts and success of a new dictatorship building in Berlin. “The directors of the company told me they were very much concerned over the German relationships with the United States, and antagonism toward Germany in the United States,” Lee admitted during the hearing. “They wanted advice as to how those relations could be improved. So they made an arrangement with me to give them such advice.”4 And that, to Lee, was all it was: an honest arrangement, based on honest advice. He’d broken no laws. He’d committed no crimes. And he was happy to take payment—the equivalent of more than half a million dollars, adjusting for inflation—for just such assistance.

Lee claimed that the guidance he offered was only to I.G. Farben— not that such advice was especially controversial, anyway. He told his German counterparts that if they wanted the regime in Berlin—which Lee preferred to refer to as the “German government” rather than Nazis—to succeed, they should avoid blatantly obvious propaganda. “Our people regard it as meddling with American affairs, and it was bad business,” Lee claimed. (When McCormack asked if Lee would ever consider acting as a mouthpiece for propaganda, Lee stiffened, saying that he’d “taken the position long ago that I would not disseminate anything, any [propaganda], however innocuous.”)5 Instead, Lee advised that the Nazis should “establish closer relationships . . . with American press correspondents located in Germany” and try to get those journalists to disseminate Nazi messaging. That, Lee told his German partners, was key: finding trusted mouthpieces and middlemen who could blast Nazi messaging far and wide, all for the sake of improving relations between the United States and Germany.

But as the questions continued, Lee revealed that it wasn’t just advice he had provided. He admitted that he’d also charged one of his employees to monitor American media for “what they are saying about Germany.” Lee would then relay the themes, as well as his thoughts, to his German contacts. All the better for German counterparts to craft their messages for American audiences—and for American audiences to understand that this new regime in Berlin was one worth supporting.

The hearing never grew heated, never grew especially raucous. (As Lee cooed at one point, “My dear sir, I am perfectly delighted to cooperate.”) His polished demeanor, though, belied a tension Lee had never known: a tension suddenly bubbling to the surface, breaking around Washington, spilling across Europe. Because no matter how much Lee tried to deny any connection between the Nazis and I.G. Farben, the American legislators refused to bite. “In other words, the material that was sent here by [I.G. Farben] was material spread—we would call it propaganda—by authority of the German Government,” Rep. Samuel Dickstein said at one point, pointing to items I.G. Farben had shipped to Lee. “But the distinction that you make in your statement is, as I take it, that the German Government did not send it to you directly; that it was sent to you by [I.G. Farben].” As Dickstein laid out, Lee’s claims that he’d advised only I.G. Farben were a deflection. In reality, the company—a conglomerate later responsible for, among other things, producing the poison gas that would slaughter millions of Jewish victims—was simply a cutout, a middleman between Lee and his ultimate Nazi clients. As Lee mumbled in response, “Right.”6

As the hearing wore on, and as the connections between Lee and the Nazis became obvious, Lee’s defenses began to slip. He admitted he’d been recruited by I.G. Farben chief Max Ilgner, a Nazi collaborator who would later oversee key pieces of Germany’s economy during the Second World War. He admitted meeting directly with Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and having a “very interesting conversation” with the war criminal. He’d even met personally with Adolf Hitler, telling the tyrant that he’d “like better to understand him if I could”—all the better to help craft the Nazis’ message for American audiences. And he admitted that he’d advised the Nazis—via their I.G. Farben cutout—on the best way to spin Germany’s growing stockpile of military weaponry, “to make clear to the American people” that these arms weren’t actually a threat.7

As Lee finished testifying, he thanked the officials, once more with the kind of obsequious, oleaginous manners that had served him so long. His body, and especially his scalp, ached, and he’d already begun making plans for a trip back to Germany, hoping to enjoy the soothing spa treatments that he thought might help. At fifty-seven, he deserved a breather, a break from this sudden pressure from Americans wondering just who he was working for, and just what impact he might be having on American policy. Plus, he wanted to check in on those clients he’d just described: those Germans who’d paid him phenomenal sums to help open doors, crafting messages for unsuspecting audiences— crafting messages that would help the Nazis rise, reign, and wreak havoc across the European continent.

Lee left that afternoon, sweat curdling around his collar, preparing for projects and clients to come. He had no inkling that the fallout from the hearing he’d just participated in would, in only a few short months, kill him, detonating the reputation he’d spent decades building—or that, nearly a century later, the kinds of links he’d created with the Nazis would come roaring back and nearly undo American democracy in the process.

* * *

IN EARLY 1986, just over fifty years after Lee’s hearing, a man named Jonas Savimbi touched down in Washington. Even among the characters and charlatans bouncing around the U.S. capital, Savimbi brought an odd, conspicuous look. With a bushy black beard and slanted red beret, he preferred the kind of revolutionary attire made famous by communist guerillas elsewhere. And that made a certain sense: Savimbi had risen to prominence among the leftist anti-colonial movements blooming throughout southern Africa, espousing the kinds of pro-communist rhetoric that were anathema to America’s geopolitical ends.

But Savimbi had since gone through a complete change, transforming from his communist chrysalis into a supposed “freedom fighter” in the new nation of Angola, then emerging from centuries of Portuguese colonization. Backed by the far-right apartheid regime in South Africa, Savimbi turned against his former leftist comrades who’d seized power in Angola. And he’d had more success than most anticipated, with his insurgents clawing territory from the Angolan government— launching Savimbi into a new role, as one publication called him, as the “Che Guevara of the right.”8

That success came saturated in horrors, with Savimbi authoring appalling crimes across the country. His forces had not only “committed atrocities against children,” as one journalist later recounted, but had even “conscripted women into sexual slavery.”9 Even during an era of Cold War proxy wars, Savimbi stood apart. As one analyst described, the warlord was unique in African history “because of the degree of suffering he caused without showing any remorse.”10 (To take just one example, Savimbi “personally beat to death a rival’s wife and children,” as The New York Times reported.11) Thanks to his efforts, Savimbi almost singlehandedly extended Angola’s post-colonial civil war—a war that would claim the lives of hundreds of thousands, decimating the new nation in the process—for a new generation.

By the mid-1980s, though, Savimbi’s forces were running low on arms and ammunitions. The Americans had cut him off years earlier, unwilling to work with a man who, among other things, bombed civilians and Red Cross facilities alike. He’d already traveled to Washington multiple times, seeking to lift the ban on American support for his forces, without success. No doors opened. No help came.

But he’d try once more, beret in hand, looking for whatever aid he could find: Searching for the kinds of heavy arms that the United States doled out to other anti-communist leaders around the world. Looking to convince American policymakers that his was a worthy cause, and that concerns about atrocities against children and women were mere rumor—or that even if they’d happened, well, they’d been for the greater good, hadn’t they?

Landing in Washington, Savimbi hopped in a waiting stretch limousine, beginning his tour of the American capital. And it didn’t take long for him to realize that this time would be different—that unlike those previous trips to the United States, doors now opened wherever he went, with praise and promises flooding this supposed “freedom fighter.”12

There were stops at multiple think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, where prominent conservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick dubbed Savimbi a “linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior” and “one of the few authentic heroes of our time.”13 There were interviews with major American newscasters, including ABC’s Nightline and CBS’s 60 Minutes, and even chatter about potentially landing on the cover of Time magazine.14 And at the Washington Hilton, Savimbi gave the keynote speech at a lavish banquet for the American Conservative Union, where he shared the dais with then–vice president George H.W. Bush. Both men received raucous applause from the crowd, with Savimbi joking that he’d “been following [Bush’s] career for a long time, from afar, from the bush!”15

It was, all told, a publicity coup for Savimbi. As The Washington Post wrote, it was “a welcome . . . unlike anything Washington has ever seen for an African guerrilla leader.”16

The trip not only ushered Savimbi into halls of power long blocked to the warlord, but it immediately jump-started the flow of arms Savimbi had long demanded—all the better to beat back his communist opponents, regardless of the women and children caught in the crossfire. As a capstone to his trip, Savimbi received a “bootlegged copy” of President Ronald Reagan’s forthcoming State of the Union address, where the American president would specifically mention Angola and would pledge that, moving forward, America would “support with moral and material assistance [Angolans’] right not just to fight and die for freedom, but to fight and win freedom.”17

The trip was an unmitigated success—and couldn’t have been more different from Savimbi’s previous, futile efforts to curry favor with the Americans. For observers, the shift appeared abrupt, almost jarring. With one trip, a decade’s worth of regional policy—which had effectively blocked all aid to Savimbi—had flipped, for no obvious, exogenous reason. It was enough to give observers whiplash.

Yet Savimbi hadn’t accomplished this transformation alone. He’d had help from a new figure, and a new force: a man who’d taken gargantuan sums from the guerrilla leader and become Savimbi’s Svengali in the process, steering the warlord through Washington. A man who, like Lee before him, preferred the shadows and the back rooms, whispering advice and navigating unseen hideaways. A man who cultivated links with powerful figures in America and then took his talents global, working for the most authoritarian, fascistic clients he could find in the process. And a man who would later watch everything he’d worked for collapse in infamy—but not before devastating, perhaps fatally, American foreign policy in the process.

It was a man who reignited Lee’s legacy, ushering in a new age of unrepentant Americans willing to sell their services to dictators and autocrats abroad. Mercenaries cloaked in three-piece suits and gleaming loafers, skirting and subverting regulations in the service of madmen and tyrants, adding a sheen of respectability to those behind the greatest global horrors of the past half century. Men who, in another age, might be considered traitors, and yet who remain welcomed by polite society, spinning their clients and shifting the direction of American foreign policy—and American democracy—in the process.

Men who are considered, to use the technical term, “foreign agents.” And men who have all followed in the footsteps of the foreign agent who helped Savimbi and who continued Lee’s legacy: Paul Manafort.

* * *

THE NARRATIVES OF Lee and Manafort are cornerstones of a far broader story: the creation and expansion of the world of foreign lobbying in the United States, and the transformation of American industries into platforms for foreign governments trying to upend and redirect American policy. And it’s the narratives of those men that highlight the contours of this transformation—and reveal how they followed remarkably similar paths, from distinction to disaster.

Lee, still considered the “father of public relations,”18 blossomed into one of the most influential voices of post–World War I America. He then took his services abroad, and watched his reputation crash on the shoals of rising fascism.

Likewise, Manafort, the man who first brought the worlds of lobbying and political consulting together, built a sterling reputation for success in post–Cold War America. He then took his services abroad, and watched his reputation crash on the shoals of rising fascism.

Yet this book isn’t just about these two men, each acting as a dark mirror of the other. It’s also about how they each ushered in unprecedented interest in how foreign governments actually try to shift American policy, and how those Americans working for these foreign regimes actually operate—and succeed—in the United States. It’s about all those Americans who’ve opted to take their talents to the despots and dictators willing to foot the bill, and degrade American democracy in the process.

This book is also about the decades-long effort to shine a light on these operations. Because the third central character in this book is not a person but a piece of legislation. Dubbed the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the legislation came into force as a direct response to Lee’s pro-fascist efforts, part of a broader slate of progressive reforms in the 1930s aimed at bringing transparency to the burgeoning world of foreign lobbying. This book tells the story of how FARA was then, for three-quarters of a century, all but forgotten and ignored— and how that lack of enforcement ushered in an explosion of foreign agents who saturated Washington, all in the secret service of foreign benefactors around the world. It’s about how America learned, and then promptly forgot, the lessons of Lee’s debacle—and how Manafort rose to remind Americans of all the threats these foreign lobbyists truly represent.

If you’ve heard of FARA, or about the broader threats of unchecked foreign lobbying in Washington, it’s likely thanks not to Lee or Manafort but to Donald Trump and Trump’s 2016 election. As with so many other topics—kleptocracy, election integrity, the safety and future of American democracy writ large, and plenty more—Trump’s success brought a sudden salience to the threats of foreign lobbying in the United States. And understandably so. No president has seen so many members of his inner circle—former campaign managers and national security officials, former fundraisers and political advisors—indicted for or convicted of secretly working on behalf of foreign dictatorships, all while pushing Trump to do their foreign clients’ bidding. Not that this reality is especially surprising; Trump was, after all, the first American president to openly accept the aid of foreign governments in order to get elected.

But Trump was hardly an outlier. By the mid-2010s, American politicians of all stripes—conservatives, liberals, and even outspoken progressives—had all welcomed help from foreign lobbyists or foreign governments looking to build these kinds of opaque, subterranean links. Nor were these bit players. They included Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose Clinton Foundation soaked up millions in foreign financing—only to watch that financing collapse following Hillary’s 2016 election loss, making a mockery of claims that the funding was somehow apolitical. They included figures like Bob Dole, a doyen of Republican politics and a supposed patriot, who left office in 1996 and immediately began shilling for foreign dictatorships, becoming a courtier to autocrats in the process. And they also included those like Bernie Sanders, whose chief strategist during the 2016 presidential campaign had just finished off a project helping elect a pro-Russian thug in Ukraine—a project overseen by, of all people, Manafort. (Naturally, Manafort was by then working as campaign manager for Trump’s 2016 campaign.)

Yet as this book will detail, these politicians were hardly the only ones profiting from the tsunami of foreign financing targeting Americans, all aimed at manipulating American policy for foreign governments’ ends. There were American universities and academics feasting on foreign financing and ignoring basic disclosure requirements, transforming into mouthpieces for autocratic forces in the process. There were American think tanks flowering across the United States, nominally dedicated to independent research while nonetheless spewing messaging favoring their foreign benefactors. There were white-shoe American law firms who had abandoned any interest in American clientele, slobbering instead for the opportunity to work for the dictators and autocrats looking for help.

There was industry after industry after industry, all of which pointed to an additional reality: Even though this book is nominally about lobbying, the people and institutes detailed in the following chapters aren’t those we’d recognize necessarily as lobbyists, per se. Indeed, even among experts, “lobbying” is something of a slippery term. “No definitive definition [of lobbying] has ever been agreed upon,” Lionel Zetter, author of one of the few textbooks on lobbying, wrote in 2011. To Zetter, lobbying is simply “the process of seeking to shape the public policy agenda in order to influence government (and its institutions) and the legislative program.” It is, in other words, “the art of political persuasion.”19 Or as Manafort once said, “You might call it influence-peddling. I call it lobbying.”20

And that influence-peddling is something anyone can attempt, without being part of any firm, any consultancy, or any body of accredited colleagues. This influence-peddling—this lobbying—is available to any and all. It’s also something that in the United States is a constitutionally guaranteed right. As the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution stipulates, all Americans are assured the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”21 Alongside the freedoms of speech and religion, the freedom to lobby is a core, constituent part of the American story.

And for centuries, that was a freedom used almost exclusively by Americans, on behalf of American clients, for American ends. In recent decades, though, that freedom has been abused by foreign forces looking to circumvent things like diplomacy and transparency, all in order to manipulate American policy and American national security to their own ends. It’s a practice that has become, in many ways, shockingly normalized—as if despots who assassinate political opponents, tyrants who lead campaigns of mass murder and mass rape, and dictators responsible for authoring genocides are no different than American clients.

That process of normalizing this practice is one of the topics this book will examine. But we’ll also look at how this entire process has exploded what we traditionally understand as lobbying, or as lobbyists. Because in twenty-first-century America, the world of lobbying now involves the law firms and think tanks mentioned above. It involves the political leaders and staffers who can navigate the halls of Congress and who can usher clients directly into the White House. It involves nonprofits and universities—those nominally dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge or the pursuit of a more democratic American polity— who have discovered just how much foreign financing awaits, if only they’d open their doors. And it involves some of the most nominally pro-American figures of the past decade, all of whom have decided that they’d rather surreptitiously work in the pay of foreign patrons instead.

These, then, are the foreign agents of this book: Those Americans selling their services to the highest bidders abroad, all in order to entrench and enlarge the most brutal governments on the planet—the Americans who, as one scholar wrote, help “make the world safe for dictatorship.” Safe for the regimes responsible for ethnic cleansings and genocides. Safe for the world’s most horrific environmental crimes and anti-LGBTQ abuses. Safe, in sum, for the most successful expansion of dictatorship the world has seen in nearly a century.

* * *

BEFORE BEGINNING THIS book in earnest, there are a couple of signposts to be aware of. While this book is about the foreign agents working and operating in America, it is not a book about espionage. There are innumerable books written on foreign spies operating in America and their effect on everything from American national security to global stability. Those figures, though, are purposely clandestine, purposely operating in the hidden crevices of society, infiltrating institutions and exfiltrating information alike. These are not figures who would ever register their work with federal authorities or disclose their meetings and efforts in accordance with something like FARA. These spies may work for the same governments, but they are a distinct group from these foreign agents—the latter of whom haven’t seen nearly as much attention but have done arguably just as much damage.

And while this book is largely chronological, it’s not necessarily comprehensive. With hundreds of entities, thousands of filings, millions of data points, and billions of dollars spent, the eruption of what we recognize as foreign lobbying in recent years is far too big for any one book. But that doesn’t mean that kind of encyclopedic work isn’t being done elsewhere. Civil society organizations like the Project on Governmental Oversight, OpenSecrets, and a handful of others are doing the kind of granular work necessary to make some of the connections I detail throughout this book, creating the databases and organizing the filings that allow journalists and researchers to actually put these stories together. And they are the ones providing and collating the material for future authors to build their own stories, craft their own narratives, and further highlight how these foreign lobbyists have done untold damage to not only American policy but also democracy as we know it.

As such, since this book is about such a broad (and understudied) phenomenon, not every country behind foreign lobbying campaigns will be mentioned in this book. Some countries that make headlines— including Israel, Japan, the UK, and others—won’t necessarily be featured heavily, while others—such as Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, and Rwanda—will feature more than expected, for reasons that will become clear.

Meanwhile, one country in particular will thread the entire chronology of this book: Russia. While many Americans learned of Russia’s subterranean lobbying efforts only in the mid-2010s, bundled alongside hacking and disinformation campaigns, the Kremlin’s efforts to secretly influence American officials stretch all the way back to the middle of the nineteenth century, culminating in the greatest foreign lobbying scandal of the entire century—and arguably the greatest foreign lobbying scandal the United States had seen until Moscow’s interference campaign in the mid-2010s. And it’s that campaign that begins the next chapter, setting the stage for all that followed.

In many ways, it’s Russia’s most recent efforts at subverting American democracy—and using foreign agents to achieve the Kremlin’s ends—that was the impetus for this book. As a graduate student at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute during the mid-2010s, focusing on how post-Soviet dictatorships manipulate Western (and especially American) audiences, I had a front-row seat to watching the Kremlin’s interference efforts play out in real time. Not only was I among the first to catalog and report on things like Russia’s social media interference campaign, but I even ended up on the receiving end of these foreign agents’ efforts, some of which are scattered throughout this book. And my graduate research focused specifically on all of the topics that would become suddenly, stunningly relevant in the aftermath of Trump’s election, diving as it did into topics like FARA and even intersecting with figures like Manafort, long before Trump hired the foreign agent as his presidential campaign manager.

But that was then. In the years since, these topics—foreign lobbyists, foreign funding, and the transformation of industry after industry into foot soldiers for dictatorships and mafia-states around the world— have only grown more relevant, and more pronounced. And that, in many ways, is what Foreign Agents is about. It’s about the broader history of foreign governments specifically, and secretly, lobbying American officials to do their bidding. It’s about how a man like Lee—still revered in certain quarters for birthing the public relations industry— ended his career by working to entrench fascism, and ended up with a legacy he never anticipated. And it’s about how, with the end of the Cold War, a new figure extended that legacy for a new generation, expanding it around the world and lighting a fuse that would detonate in the election of Donald Trump, that would shatter American foreign policy, and that threatens to destroy American democracy yet.

PART I

POISON

Where the crowd is, there is tyranny.

—Everett Dean Martin1

1

Dire Consequences

If I brought up repentance, the response would be, “What do I have to repent for?” Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice.

—Svetlana Alexievich1

While the rise of foreign lobbying and foreign agents is a relatively modern phenomenon, they both have their roots in the earliest days of the United States—and with the men who looked to take advantage of the new rights a new country promised to offer.

In late 1792, near the end of George Washington’s first term as the first president of the United States, a man named William Hull traveled from Virginia to the budding nation’s capital in Philadelphia. He had a plan: test the limits of the nascent U.S. Constitution, implemented just three years prior, and see how far the rights laid out in the First Amendment truly stretched. Specifically, Hull wanted to test the proposition that Americans had a right—a “freedom,” as the Constitution described it—to lobby, or to “petition,” any and all government officials. To pressure them, as a mere citizen, into passing the kinds of policies they wanted.

A vain man—a “proud-looking sort with luxuriant hair,” as one writer described him—Hull arrived in Philadelphia with an impressive pedigree. A former Revolutionary War officer, he reportedly “talked to President Washington as often as he liked.”2 And it was that relationship that Hull counted on. Because he hadn’t traveled to Philadelphia just for himself. Instead, he came at the behest of a group of Virginia military veterans who’d fought under Washington during the recent war for American independence. Years after thrashing the British, they were still waiting on compensation for their services. But the finances of the early American republic were in shambles, held together with little more than dreams and promises, with American veterans often going without pay while the country found its fiscal footing.

Hull wrote to other veterans groups, calling for “agents” to help him push for a wartime compensation bill to help these former soldiers.3 After arriving in Philadelphia, he buttonholed federal legislators, arguing his case, familiarizing himself with the workings of this new national government. And he highlighted the fact that, without those veterans, these legislators wouldn’t even have their jobs—and might well have been strung up by British authorities looking to decapitate this rebellious American nation.

Hull, though, couldn’t argue against the state of federal finances. The country remained effectively broke, and his compensation bill died. The Revolutionary War veterans lost out on the payment they demanded.

But in Hull’s failure, something else emerged. A new model for how Americans—regardless of profession, regardless of political persuasion—could try to reach their legislators. It was something untested in this new republic. It was something we would, in years to come, call “lobbying.” And like those clients of Hull, it was, in many ways, revolutionary.

* * *

HULL, OF COURSE, was hardly the first person to try to influence policy. “For as long as empowered individuals and groups have been responsible for governing societies, others have sought to influence them and their decision-making,” scholar Tarun Krishnakumar wrote in his 2021 history of lobbying in America.4 But unlike European monarchies, the new American government was hardly some outpost of far-off elites, where distant politicians claimed to wield power through some kind of divine right. Access to officials in Philadelphia, or to any of those in the state capitals dotting the expanding country, was far easier than anything the Western world had seen to that point. (If anything, the American model of influencing politicians—of bending the ears of local leaders, pushing them to preferred policies—was far closer to the governance structures of the Indigenous nations the Americans would soon decimate.)

And even with Hull’s failures, it didn’t take long for Americans to recognize that difference—and to begin using it to their advantage. Soon, those looking to push and provoke legislators began scouring across the American capital. “In 1795, a Philadelphia newspaper described the way lobbyists waited outside Congress Hall to ‘give a hint to a Member, teaze or advise as may best suit,’” one synopsis found.5 And as the country’s finances began stabilizing, and as the country began surging westward during the early nineteenth century, those throngs looking to sway legislators began to find success. From tariffs to fiscal policy, from railroad construction to industrial development, America’s expansion in turn expanded the opportunities for these Americans to sway politicians.

Much of such lobbying focused initially on domestic affairs. But soon, these self-styled lobbyists began skirting into foreign policy, too. In 1798, amidst a fraught standoff with France, one senator welcomed “a large committee of Philadelphia citizens” into the halls of Congress to “present a petition” backing his colleagues’ position on the potential war with Paris. Another senator, however, objected to saturating the Senate floor with Americans clamoring for certain foreign policy positions, and “won passage of a resolution to prohibit individuals or delegations from presenting such petitions in such a way in the future.”6

Indeed, even with the allowances in the Constitution, that opposition to free-for-all lobbying was baked into this American experiment from the beginning. Even from these earliest days of the United States, there was concern that these freedoms to petition—these freedoms to lobby—were too broad. That they were too widely available, or that they were too open for potential abuse. “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, considered one of the seminal documents of America’s founding. America’s openness, Hamilton worried, would provide avenues for foreign powers to meddle, to infiltrate, and to steer policy—without Americans ever being aware. History, as Hamilton added, “furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalenc[e] of foreign corruption in republican governments.”7

And Hamilton was right to worry—not least since the man who later killed him, Vice President Aaron Burr, ended up working alongside foreign agents to try to splinter the United States. (One of Burr’s secessionist allies was James Wilkinson, the commander of the U.S. Army, who secretly served as an agent of the Spanish monarchy.) Ironically, though, those “inlet[s] to foreign corruption” didn’t come via foreign lobbying during the early decades of the American republic. While there were instances—in 1796, in 1812—of attempted foreign interference in American elections, the first half of the nineteenth century saw surprisingly little in terms of threats of unchecked foreign lobbying in the United States. Americans freely lobbied, exercising their new rights—but almost always for domestic affairs rather than anything international.

But then the Civil War came, and everything changed.

* * *

DURING THE CIVIL War—while the American government beat back a group of white supremacist traitors aimed at fracturing the country and expanding the enslavement of millions—foreign governments watched and waited. In Paris, French officials toyed with recognizing the Confederacy, which would have delivered a fatal blow to the Americans. In London, British officials flirted with arming the Confederates outright, all the better to gut their American rivals. In the end, though, the United States’ victory over the separatists ended any discussion of European interference. And it instantly opened a new era of foreign lobbying in the United States—and a scandal that, 160 years later, now looks oddly, unsettlingly familiar.

In the immediate aftermath of the American victory, U.S. officials looked for opportunities to patch the country together. One potential outlet: expansion. As some American officials thought, if the United States could conquer or seize new lands, perhaps it could patch over its domestic disputes, at least for a bit. And as Secretary of State William Seward saw it, one region provided the perfect opportunity not only to improve America’s global (and economic) standing but to further tether a fractured country together: Alaska.

At the time, the vast expanse we now know as Alaska was a colony of tsarist Russia. Indigenous Alaska Natives had suffered for generations at the hands of Russian settlers, with massacre after massacre aimed at cementing Russian rule in the province. By the mid-1860s, though, the province was little more than dead weight for the Russian regime. It was too far, with too little infrastructure, for Russia to keep pumping it with money and men. And with Russia’s own finances slowly imploding, tsarist officials began casting about for someone to take Alaska off their hands.

There were only so many options. Selling to the British, which still controlled the adjacent Canadian provinces, was a nonstarter; Britain was Russia’s primary colonial rival, and anything that could strengthen London’s hand was to be avoided. The Americans, though, presented an attractive alternative. Selling Alaska to the United States would allow Washington to act as a counterweight to British influence in the region. Plus, in Russia’s eyes, America appeared set to eventually conquer the entirety of North America—why not sell out early, and at least make a bit of money along the way?

There was only one problem. Few Americans outside of Seward saw any reason to purchase Alaska from the Russians. “American interest in Alaska wobbled between ho-hum interest and disinterest,” one scholar described it.8 To many Americans, Russian Alaska in the 1860s—in the years before the discovery of the gold and the oil that would eventually make Alaska one of the wealthiest American states—was little more than an empty tundra. It was an “icebox,” a “polar bear garden” that the United States didn’t need.9 Plus, Washington had more pressing issues, from the military occupation of the former Confederate states to the passage of basic civil rights protections for Black Americans. Alaska would have to wait.

But the Russians couldn’t. Selling the province—and convincing the Americans to spend a gargantuan sum on something almost no Americans wanted, just as the country was trying to get back on its feet—was one of the easiest ways to help stabilize Russian finances, if only Washington could be convinced. Something had to be done.

Fortunately for the Russian government, their ambassador in Washington, a man named Edouard de Stoeckl, had an idea for how to circumvent American opposition—without the American populace, or even much of the American government, realizing what was happening.

In 1867, Stoeckl—who’d somehow earned the nickname “The Baron,” despite lacking any kind of actual title—began working. Huddling with Seward, the two hammered out a tentative deal. For $7.2 million in gold, the United States would take Alaska off of Russia’s hands. But Seward would still need to overcome congressional opposition, as only Congress could appropriate the funds. Nor did the issues stop there. Seward’s primary ally, President Andrew Johnson, began facing a tornado of criticism for his racist policies—and suddenly saw himself the target of the country’s first impeachment crisis, which sucked up all of the energy, and all of the focus, in Washington.10

By early 1868, Seward’s deal appeared all but dead. Which is when Stoeckl stepped in, and set a playbook that would roar back to relevance in the mid-2010s, when Russia once more attempted to direct American policy while remaining completely out of the public eye.

First, Stoeckl hunted down an American who could help rally the congressional votes to actually fund the purchase. He targeted Robert J. Walker, a former Mississippi senator and treasury secretary, as someone who could help. To Stoeckl, Walker was someone who could pose as an independent voice to pressure American legislators to back the funding—without anyone realizing that Walker had become a secret mouthpiece for Russia. Bankrolling Walker with the modern equivalent of a half million dollars, the Russian official “paid Walker to use his influence wherever and however he could.”11

And Walker was happy to oblige. The former senator and White House official began planting anonymous articles with unsuspecting newspapers, including front-page columns denouncing opponents of the projected sale. (Walker, never known for his creativity, signed his anonymous articles as “Alaska.”) He also publicly defended both Stoeckl and the Alaska purchase, predicting “dire consequences” if the purchase fell through. He pushed for the purchase in Washington wherever and however he could—and when questioned, Walker denied that any of his efforts ever qualified as “lobbying.”12

With Stoeckl funding him behind the scenes, Walker’s effort appeared to succeed. By the middle of June 1868, enough congressional officials had changed their mind and tossed their support behind the appropriations. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the funding measures passed—and suddenly, and unexpectedly, the United States saw its second-largest expansion in the country’s entire history.

In fact, the move was so sudden, and so unexpected, that something seemed off. And soon, details began leaking out confirming opponents’ suspicions. One journalist, Uriah Painter, reported that thieves in New York had supposedly stolen thousands of dollars from Walker—but when authorities nabbed the thieves, Walker refused to press charges. (A handy move, Painter pointed out, to transfer money without anyone being able to track its ultimate destination.) Painter also reported that “large sums” from the purchase funds had disappeared months before the formal purchase.13

In sum: money was missing all over the place. Combined with new rumors of bribery swirling Congress, all of it pointed to the “biggest lobby swindle ever put up in Washington,” as Painter said.14

The accusations of financial malfeasance grew so pronounced that shortly thereafter Congress opened its first formal investigation into foreign lobbying. And it didn’t take long for congressional investigators to confirm that the entire affair was a swindle, and a scandal. As they found, millions of dollars (adjusted for inflation) was somehow unaccounted for, disappeared into the financial ether. And all signs pointed to one inescapable conclusion: bribery, combined with clandestine foreign lobbying, all on behalf of Russia.

There was, naturally, one person who could help reveal what happened to the missing money: Stoeckl. Yet by the time congressional investigators discovered the disappearance, the Baron himself had vanished, heading back to Russia. As Ronald Jensen, author of the most detailed analysis of the scandal, wrote, “The Russian minister was probably the only man who knew the destination of all the missing funds from the Alaska appropriation, and that secret apparently left with him.”15

To this day, questions remain about what happened to the missing millions. But as Jensen detailed, there seems one obvious answer. Tucked amidst President Johnson’s papers was a memo outlining a conversation the president had with Seward—the man who’d jump-started the Alaska purchase in the first place. As the two sat in a “shady grove,” Seward revealed to the president that Stoeckl himself had “bought the support” of one major American newspaper—and that Stoeckl had directly bribed congressional officials to flip their votes, with a total of ten total congressional officials taking Russian funds.16 Nor were these anonymous officials. Among those bribed to support the Alaska purchase were the “incorruptible” Thaddeus Stevens, best known as one of the era’s greatest proponents for civil rights protections for Black Americans.17

Unfortunately for investigators, even while the bribery became an open secret in Washington, no hard proof ever emerged. Seward denied any knowledge, and Johnson refused to comment publicly. The congressional investigation concluded in frustration. As the committee report found, the inquiry ended “barren of affirmative or satisfactorily negative results.”18

Still, even while no convictions ever emerged—and even as Alaska became part of America proper—investigators wanted to make a stand. Members of the investigative committee chastised Walker “for representing a foreign power without public knowledge,” calling the former senator and cabinet member out for working as an agent for a foreign government. And a few of the investigators even floated a potential solution: banning former American officials outright from ever working as lobbyists for foreign governments. As congressional investigators wrote: “Certainly no man whose former high public position has given him extraordinary influence in the community has the right to sell that influence, the trust and confidence of his fellow-citizens, to a foreign government, or in any case where his own is interested.”19

As these officials saw it, no American official, once out of office, should work as a foreign lobbyist or a foreign agent for any other government. It was, in many ways, a statement ahead of its time, pointing directly to the kinds of foreign lobbying practices that would emerge in the decades to come. But it was also a statement that gained little notice, and that went nowhere.

And that was it. In this first foreign lobbying scandal in American history—in which a Russian official had bribed American officials and journalists and hired a former high-level American official to act as his mouthpiece in Washington, all aimed at secretly directing U.S. pol-icy—no one was found guilty. No one lost their job, or ended up in prison. No one, aside from the Russian official in question, even ended up having the full picture of the funding mechanisms, or where all the missing millions ended up.

To modern eyes, maybe that’s understandable. After all, the Alaska purchase is now recognized as one of the great successes of American foreign policy: as a pennies-on-the-dollar purchase of a territory that enhanced American power, American finances, and American influence in ways that are still paying off. But it was also something else: a story whose lessons, not least as they pertained to foreign lobbying (and bribery) of American officials, were promptly forgotten. And it was a formula that in coming years would only become more and more familiar—and that would, in the decades to come, reach directly from foreign governments into the White House itself.

* * *

DESPITE THE MAGNITUDE of the scandal, Americans largely shrugged at the allegations and revelations surrounding the purchase of Alaska. And not without reason. Because by the early 1870s, a Russian agent secretly steering American foreign policy—and blanketing Washington with secret payments in the process—was simply one of a far broader range of lobbying scandals saturating Washington.

In fact, it was in the immediate aftermath of the Alaska scandal that the word “lobbying” came into existence in the first place. With President Ulysses S. Grant now in the White House, rising American industrial interests spied an opportunity. As these businessmen knew, Grant made a habit of taking presidential breaks to wander across the street from the White House to a new, sprawling building called the Willard Hotel. There, Grant would head through the hotel’s spacious, colonnaded lobby and sit at the hotel’s circular bar, enjoying a tipple. It’s unclear how many drinks Grant would down—his memoir unfortunately doesn’t discuss his presidential years—but, after he’d had his fill, Grant would wander back to the Oval Office, heading back to continue repairing a fractured country.

But on those walks, Grant wasn’t alone. As Zetter, the author of the best-known lobbying textbook, recounts, “Those seeking to influence [Grant] would congregate in the lobby of the Willard Hotel and try to attract the great man’s attention.” All the better, they thought, “to raise specific areas of concern.”20 Flagging down the president, bending his ear, these men could plead their clients’ case. Maybe it was the railroad concerns who needed a new route approved. Or the industrialists who needed a new tariff implemented. Or the banking conglomerates who needed federal policy on gold loosened, or restricted, or whatever the day demanded.

There was always something. And there was always something that Grant specifically could help with. And if the president had had a few drinks, well, all the better.

Grant detested these moments he spent navigating the Willard lobby, trying to simply find his way to or from a drink. These men were all vultures, trying to pry loose a preferred policy—all buzzards, looking to extract another favor, all on behalf of their clients.

They were, as Grant would gripe, a group of “lobbyists,” all waiting to pounce on the president whenever he wandered through the Willard. “Crawling through the corridors, trailing its slimy length from gallery to committee room, at last it lies stretched at full length on the floor of Congress,” as one contemporary newspaper described it, “this dazzling reptile, this huge, scaly serpent of the lobby.”21

Again, these kinds of attempts to pressure politicians weren’t new, per se. “Lobbying has been going on since time immemorial, and there is certainly a case for saying that lobbying is one of the world’s oldest professions,” Zetter wrote.22 But by the time of Grant’s presidency, lobbying was transforming into something far more organized than its previous iterations—and something far closer to its modern equivalent. Similar to the corporate structures rising elsewhere—the holding companies and shell corporations and the offshoring tools, all helping build up corporate America—lobbying in post–Civil War America was becoming something recognizable. Under Grant, lobbying finally came into its own.

Not that everyone was a fan. As The Nation wrote, these new lobbyists were men “whom everybody suspects . . . and whose employment by those who have bills before a legislature is only resorted to as a disagreeable necessity.”23 They were, in other words, becoming a necessary evil—as a means to an end, even if few enjoyed their presence.

But it didn’t take long for that “disagreeable necessity” to manifest far more disastrously. Not long after the Alaska controversy, a new, darker scandal emerged—one that led directly to the first genocide that foreign lobbyists helped author, and that remains largely ignored by Americans to this day.

* * *

IN THE EARLY 1880s, while European empires carved up nation after nation in Africa—claiming their rights to colonization, regardless of the human costs associated—one small European country in particular eyed a swath of the continent to call its own. For Leopold II, the haggard, hatchet-faced king of Belgium, the Congo basin would make a perfect colony for his country. It stretched nearly a million square miles and hosted bottomless riches—and with Leopold’s more militant neighbors already claiming the right to rule neighboring regions of Africa, the Belgian king wanted his slice.

But Leopold would need help. He couldn’t rely on his minuscule Belgian army to muscle in, beating back more powerful rivals. And residents of the Congo basin would hardly consent to a distant sovereign, one bent solely on pillaging the region. In order to claim the Congo, Leopold would have to be creative.

So the Belgian king sketched out a plan. Instead of relying on his own military force, Leopold would turn to an unlikely ally: America. Specifically, Leopold thought, if he could obtain American recognition of Belgium’s right to rule the Congo, other European powers wouldn’t challenge his claims. America could effectively act as a mediator, backing Belgium against all comers. But how could Leopold convince Washington that he should be the man to control the lives of tens of millions of Congolese residents?

One man came to mind. Years earlier, Leopold had befriended an American named Henry Shelton Sanford, who’d served as U.S. ambassador to Belgium during the 1860s. A bespectacled businessman, interested primarily in land speculation and residential development, Sanford also envisioned precisely the kind of colony Leopold wanted to build in the Congo. And he wanted to help. As he saw it, he could be the king’s man in Washington, convincing American legislators to back Leopold’s Congolese strategy—convincing America to effectively gift the Congo to Belgium.

The king agreed. Sanford could be Leopold’s mouthpiece in Washington. No one would need to know their arrangement—or what the king truly had planned for the people of the Congo.

In early 1884, Sanford returned to the American capital with a new mission. He began touring Washington, claiming that “entire territories” in the Congo had already been “ceded by Sovereign Chiefs” to Belgian authorities. Naturally, those supposed treaties also promised that U.S. citizens could likewise purchase seized Congolese lands—a nice benefit for Americans on the fence about potential Belgian recognition.24

But it wasn’t all about business. As Sanford added, Belgian sovereignty over the region would allow Leopold to bring a “civilizing influence” to the region. A touch of Christianity, a dose of civilization, and the Belgians would transform the local populations, as Sanford claimed, into a “United States of the Congo.” And he didn’t hesitate to pander to legislators’ white supremacy. Belgian Congo, Sanford claimed, could provide an outlet for newly freed Black Americans—as “ground to draw the gathering electricity from that black cloud spreading over the Southern states.”25

Congressional legislators, feasting at Sanford’s house, nodded along, sipping his wines, ingesting his arguments. For American officials, it all sounded fantastic, even if the details were all a bit hazy. (As historian Adam Hochschild wrote, “everyone was left pleasantly confused.”)26 Congressional resolutions and reports soon began circulating, backing Leopold’s claims. One proclaimed that “no barbarous people have ever so readily adopted the fostering care of benevolent enterprise as have the tribes of the Congo [under Leopold], and never was there a more honest and practical effort made to . . . secure their welfare.”27 The primary author of the text: Sanford.

Sanford didn’t just target congressional officials. He also turned to American media, which began highlighting Leopold’s “philanthropic work” on behalf of Congolese residents. Rather than a craggy, distant monarch, American media began portraying Leopold as an empathetic emperor, simply looking out for the best interests of the Congolese nations. (Readers were left unaware that the positive coverage was secretly bankrolled “by quiet payments from Sanford.”)28

But the key relationship Sanford fostered was with the American president, Chester Arthur. Just a few months earlier, Sanford, who was close with Arthur’s Republican Party, had hosted the president at his Florida hotel. Soon, with Sanford whispering in his ear, Arthur started regurgitating the Belgian king’s talking points. From his perch in the White House, Arthur began his own campaign to back Leopold’s claims in the Congo.

Leopold could hardly have asked for more. The American president, thanks to the work of a single foreign lobbyist, had hopped directly into the Belgian king’s pocket. At one point, Arthur even directly inserted text Sanford had written, with a few small tweaks, into his State of the Union address. As the American president proclaimed to Congress:

The rich and populous valley of the Kongo is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is the president. . . . Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs, roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established . . . under one flag which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade. The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the valley.29

For the Belgian king, it was a coup. A foreign lobbyist had transformed the American president into an effective sock puppet, all with the aim of expanding a colonial empire. A foreign government, using an American lobbyist, had manipulated an entire American presidency into doing its bidding. “Leopold was delighted to hear his own propaganda coming so readily from the president’s mouth,” Hochschild noted. As the king cabled to Sanford, Leopold was “ENCHANTED” by the entire affair.30

Needless to say, everything Sanford claimed—about Leopold’s “philanthropic” aims, about the Belgians never seeking “permanent political control” of the Congo—was a hideous lie. But that didn’t matter. When the United States announced formal recognition of Leopold’s claims in 1884, Washington effectively sealed Belgian reign in the Congo. All told, it was “probably the most sophisticated piece of Washington lobbying on behalf of a foreign ruler in the nineteenth century.”31

It was also, as we now know, a prelude to a holocaust. Because of American recognition, Leopold cemented his grip over the millions living in the Congo basin. And over the next quarter century, the Belgian king oversaw one of the most devastating, genocidal campaigns of the entire era, and arguably in the entire history of the African continent.

As a direct result of Belgian cruelty—not least their habit of taking women as hostages and forcing children into effective slave labor— millions of Congolese inhabitants died under Leopold’s reign. The best estimates place the total fatality count at approximately ten million dead, or approximately half of the region’s total population before the Belgians’ arrival. And that’s not even including the thousands, and potentially millions, who ended up maimed—losing hands, arms, legs, and more—as a result of Belgian rule.

Thanks to Leopold and Sanford’s lobbying successes—thanks to the most sophisticated foreign lobbying campaign of the nineteenth century—Belgian sovereignty was confirmed over the Congo. Belgians and Americans both grew astronomically wealthier. And one out of every two Congolese inhabitants died.

Many in the United States, of course, ignored these developments. (To this day, the Belgian genocide in Central Africa remains largely overlooked.) But not long later, the kinds of tactics Leopold and Sanford pioneered began filtering back into the United States proper—and a new force began to emerge in America, leading to just as much disaster along the way. And all of it was propelled by a man named Ivy Lee.

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