ROBERT Ménard, the permanent secretary of Reporters sans frontières (RSF), which feigns to defend press freedoms, cannot listen to a few home truths. He has just publicly threatened to sue French investigator and writer Maxime Vivas for having exposed him in the Paris Metro daily as an accomplice to the U.S. Department of State.

In its April 6 edition, the paper published a long interview with Vivas, titled "Le Sud, front de refus" (The South, the front of resistance) in which he stated, among other things, that RSF receives significant funding from CIA front organizations. The following day, apparently traumatized by the divulgation of such a truth in the French press, which he attempts to control, Ménard demanded that the same daily publish a text in which he feverishly denounced Vivas and later threatened to take him to court.

By formulating this ultimatum, Ménard’s multimillion-dollar machine evidently attempted to silence the writer who, in addition, is demanding records from the European Union regarding its subsidies to RSF. But Vivas answered RSF with an open letter in which he detailed a long list of strongly documented arguments.

Regarding Bush administration money, the investigator first reminded Ménard and his troupe that, in a Guild Reporter article dated March 11, 2005, Californian Diana Barahona revealed how RSF received U.S. government funds through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). "The Human Rights Lawyer Eva Golinger has discovered that more than $20 million have been handed over by the NED and USAID to opposition groups and private media in Venezuela, many of whom participated in the coup. The NED granted RSF nearly $40,000 in January, 2005," wrote Barahona.

Vivas next cited former CIA agent Philip Agee, who stated in an interview with journalist Jonah Gindin (March 25, 2005) that the NED works with the CIA. In Nicaragua, for example, "the CIA and the NED have created a civic front called Vía Cívica" (Civic Way).

Later he noted how since 2002, the Center for a Free Cuba, created specifically to topple the Cuban Revolution using public funds and directed by Frank Calzón, whose history is well known, also grants money to RSF.

The investigator indicated that a text dated July 8, 2005 on RSF’s own website read: "…the only subsidies that we receive from the United States are those from the Center for a Free Cuba and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). "

However Vivas noted that on the same site, included in small print in the list of sponsors, is the George Soros Open Society Institute.

"Why is RSF hiding these sponsors from Metro readers?" he concluded.

Meanwhile, information demonstrating Robert Ménard’s complicity with U.S. intelligence agencies continues to accumulate. By mentioning the Center for a Free Cuba and the NED as his only source of U.S. funding, Ménard is lying by omission … and he knows it.

The last RSF financial report in the United States revealed that his attempts to obtain private donations from charities failed abysmally, as it received barely $75,000, of which $40,000 came from the Working Assets telephone company. All the money from the State Department comes directly to France and the funds to pay personnel and for the RSF offices in the United States are later sent to Paris.

The sum of the disclosed funds from the Center for a Free Cuba and the NED since 2002 is only $215,000, which is NOT sufficient to pay the costs of maintaining RSF’s representation in the United States. Therefore, other financing must exist.

The U.S. financial report on the RSF is prepared by a prestigious firm in Alexandria, Virginia, only a 15-minute drive from CIA headquarters. A bit strange for an organization that claims to be nongovernmental and has its office in New York.

An expert on the subject consulted by Granma International had a significant comment: "The costs of operating RSF are incredibly high for an organization with this level of income…"

Contacted a few days ago by this weekly, Diana Barahona, without doubt the most knowledgeable U.S. investigator regarding RSF, recalled that in 2002 Otto Reich was utilized once again by the U.S. State Department to coordinate the coup against Chávez (in Venezuela) and the overthrow of Aristide (in Haiti).

Reich is a "Cuban exile with a long criminal record, a trustee of the Center for a Free Cuba and was the person who arranged with Robert Ménard for State Department money to go to Reporters sans frontières," she emphasized.

The continually strengthening ties between RSF and U.S. agencies dedicated to the destabilization of countries that do not subordinate themselves to Washington’s interests explains Robert Ménard’s distress over the denouncement published in the Paris Metro. And, there is much more still to be told.