Jamestown Foundation

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Jamestown Foundation was born from a single defection. In 1978, Arkady Shevchenko walked away from his post as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, becoming the highest-ranking Soviet official ever to defect to the West. What followed was a question that would shape a think tank: what do you do with a man who knows the inner workings of the Soviet system but has no institutional home in the country he has chosen? An American lawyer named William Geimer had been working closely with Shevchenko, and he saw a gap. The U.S. intelligence community, in his view, was not doing enough to support people who had risked everything to leave the Eastern Bloc. So in 1984, Geimer established a foundation to fill that gap. The questions that drove the founding are still worth asking: who decides which defectors matter? What happens to their knowledge once they cross over? And how does a small Washington think tank, started to publish the memoirs of two men, grow into an organization tracking China, Russia, and global terrorism decades later?

• 2. The Defectors at the Center

  ›

  Arkady Shevchenko defected in 1978, six years before the foundation that would bear his work's name even existed. Ion Pacepa, a former top Romanian intelligence officer, was the other figure whose writings Geimer wanted to amplify. With the foundation's support, both men published books that became bestsellers. The goal was practical: give defectors a platform, help them reach Western audiences, and let their firsthand knowledge of Soviet-bloc systems circulate in policy circles. The foundation also aided defecting intellectuals from the Eastern Bloc more broadly, helping them disseminate their ideas in the West. Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Casey backed the formation of the foundation, sharing Geimer's complaint that the U.S. intelligence community provided insufficient funding for Soviet-bloc defectors. That CIA connection would follow the foundation for decades.

• 3. The Boardroom's Weight

  ›

  Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, once sat on Jamestown's board of directors. That lineage set a tone for the kind of figures the foundation would attract. Michael G. Vickers, who later served as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, also joined the board. His earlier role at the Central Intelligence Agency during the Soviet-Afghan War was documented in George Crile's 2003 book Charlie Wilson's War. As of 2021, the board included General Michael V. Hayden, Bruce Hoffman, Matthew Bryza, and Robert Spalding, who served as an architect of U.S.-China strategy on the National Security Council during the Donald Trump administration. Michael Carpenter, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense who advised Joe Biden on foreign policy when Biden was vice president under Barack Obama, is among the current members. In September 2023, Peter Mattis was named president of the foundation, succeeding Glen E. Howard, who had held the position for 20 years.

• 4. Publications and Focus Areas

  ›

  China Brief, Eurasia Daily Monitor, Terrorism Monitor, and Militant Leadership Monitor are the four main publications the foundation runs as of 2023. The list of past titles offers a map of where the organization's attention has drifted over the years: North Korea Review, Chechnya Weekly (later renamed North Caucasus Weekly), Russia's Week, Spotlight on Terror, and Terrorism Focus, among others. From 1995 to 1997, Jamestown published Prism: A Monthly on the Post-Soviet States. The fellows list as of 2021 reflects the same geographic and thematic spread. Jacob Zenn is identified as a leading expert on Boko Haram; Stephen Ulph is described as a leading expert on Jihadist ideology; Willy Wo-Lap Lam is a Hong Kong-based China specialist. Thomas Kent, the former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was also among the fellows. Michael Scheuer, another fellow, publicly claimed he was fired for criticizing the United States' relationship with Israel.

• 5. Nikolai Getman's Hidden Record

  ›

  Nikolai Getman spent eight years imprisoned by the Soviet regime after a caricature of Joseph Stalin was drawn on a cigarette box by one of his friends. Getman himself had participated in what the regime called anti-Soviet propaganda, and that was enough. He survived. For four decades after his release, he worked in secret on a series of paintings that documented the Gulag system from the inside, a visual record built from memory. The Jamestown Foundation hosted his collection. In September 2009, the foundation transferred the Getman collection to The Heritage Foundation. The paintings stand as one of the more unusual artifacts in Jamestown's history, a reminder that the organization's original instinct was to preserve and circulate the witness of people who had lived inside systems that the West could only observe from outside.

• 6. Russia's Response and the Critics

  ›

  In 2007, the Russian government accused the foundation of spreading anti-Russian propaganda after Jamestown hosted a debate on violence in the Russian republic of Ingushetia. Russia's Foreign Ministry issued a statement accusing the event's speakers of spreading slander about conditions in Chechnya and other regions of the North Caucasus, and of inciting ethnic and inter-religious discord. Glen Howard, then the foundation's president, responded by saying Russia was "intimidated by the power of the free word" and that this reaction reflected the state's control over Russian media. Criticism has come from the other direction as well. The Right Web project, based at the Institute for Policy Studies and later renamed the Militarist Monitor, criticized the foundation for alleged links to the CIA and for advancing what it called a right-wing, neoconservative agenda. 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, citing its publications as attempts to stoke separatism in Russian regions. On the 8th of December 2011, Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, the State Department's Counterterrorism Coordinator under the Obama administration, delivered the keynote address at Jamestown's Fifth Annual Terrorism Conference and praised the organization's research.