Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Jamestown Foundation was founded in 1984 by American lawyer William Geimer, primarily to support Soviet defectors and amplify their writings. It was established in part because Geimer and CIA Director William J. Casey believed the U.S. intelligence community provided insufficient funding for Soviet-bloc defectors.
Arkady Shevchenko was the highest-ranking Soviet official ever to defect, leaving his position as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1978. William Geimer had worked closely with Shevchenko and founded the Jamestown Foundation in part to promote Shevchenko's writings; with the foundation's support, Shevchenko published a bestselling book.
As of 2023, the Jamestown Foundation's main publications are China Brief, Eurasia Daily Monitor, Terrorism Monitor, and Militant Leadership Monitor. Past publications included North Korea Review, Chechnya Weekly, Russia's Week, Spotlight on Terror, and Prism: A Monthly on the Post-Soviet States, which ran from 1995 to 1997.
Past board members include Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, and Michael G. Vickers, former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. As of 2021, the board included General Michael V. Hayden, Robert Spalding, and Michael Carpenter, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.
The Jamestown Foundation hosted a collection of paintings by Russian artist Nikolai Getman documenting the Soviet Gulag system. Getman was imprisoned for eight years by the Soviet regime and spent four decades secretly creating this visual record. In September 2009, the foundation transferred the collection to The Heritage Foundation.
In 2007, Russia's Foreign Ministry accused the Jamestown Foundation of spreading anti-Russian propaganda after it hosted a debate on violence in Ingushetia. In 2020, Russia's Prosecutor-General declared the foundation an "undesirable organisation", a designation that could result in a ban under Russian foreign agent law.