The Agency for International Development (AID) often uses intermediaries to conceal the fact that its programs are sponsored by the United States government. In 1986, AID initiated one of the strangest and most controversial “development” activities in its 32-year history. The project, which involved several contractors, was designed to plant in teaching institutions in Islamic northern Nigeria fake religious texts, written by a Pentagon consultant and disguised as the product of research initiated by the Nigerian government.
A 14 November 1986 memorandum from the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina to Muhiuddin Haider at the Pathfinder Fund in Boston includes a draft contract for the “Islam and Population Policy” project. Its objectives were to “motivate Muslim men and women to time and space births,” to “help to disseminate correct concepts on Islam and family planning,” and to promote “involvement by Muslim leaders with issues of population policy,” according to the unsigned agreement. The document warned, however, that the project was to proceed “exercising great caution,” and advises that, “Any tendency toward politicization in this matter might have serious effect.”
The activities described in the draft — including the publication of “a source manual for Muslim scholars” and a series of “carefully organized, small seminars” — were to be funded under AID’s “RAPID” (“Resources for Awareness of Population Impacts on Development”) program, under contract to the Glastonbury, Connecticut-based Futures Group.1
The Futures Group, according to a United Nations directory,2 is a “private organization concerned with policy analysis, development and strategic planning.” It works mainly with AID and the Department of Defense.3 Pathfinder is a major recipient of funds from AID’s Office of Population and currently has a $67 million contract to provide birth control information and services in developing countries.4 The Carolina Population Center participated in the design phase of a $100 million Nigerian population control program financed through AID’s Africa Bureau.5
Muhiuddin Haider, formerly with Pathfinder, now works with the Washington-based Center for Development and Population Activities,6 a subcontractor in a highly specialized AID “population communication” program in Nigeria run by Johns Hopkins University. That project, which also includes activities in the category of “Islam and family planning,” is designed exclusively to use mass media to generate the impression of a public consensus for population control. Its activities include “integrating family planning messages into existing popular radio and television series,” obtaining and broadcasting testimonials from respected “opinion leaders,” organizing workshops for journalists and policy-makers, and, in general, conducting “a broad range of mass media activities [and] mobilization campaigns” carefully orchestrated to affect “significant attitudinal changes favoring smaller family norms,” in the words of the written agreement.7
Using language more descriptive of a Cold War era “black propaganda” operation than a development assistance project,8 the AID-Johns Hopkins agreement states that the contractor is to “optimize the influence of its family planning messages” by making certain they are “conspicuously disseminated and distributed by familiar, credible, and multiple channels of communication.”9 The messages are, in short, to be attributed to members of the target audience, and not to the United States.
A final version of the “Islamic” text bears the title, A Resource Manual an Islam & Family Planning With Special Reference to the Maliki School. Its author, Professor Abdel-Rahim Omran, is identified on the cover as a “consultant to the Ministry of Health, Nigeria.”
In reality, the link between Omran and the Ministry of Health is tenuous. According to the 1986 draft agreement, Omran was to research and write the manual, plan and participate in seminars, and assist in follow-up activities. An official of the Ministry of Health, Dr. A.B. Sulaiman, was to provide management support, including record keeping, fiscal reporting, and clerical work.
A database of AID subcontracts reveals two payments made by the Futures Group to Dr. Sulaiman for a total of $100,000 between March of 1985 and May of 1988 — one of them for an “Islamic Conference on Policy,” and the second for “Population Policy Studies.” Omran received $25,000 from Pathfinder in 1987 for preparation of documents on Islam and family planning, and another $57,000 between March and September of 1988 for “Islamic and population workshops.”10
Abdel Rahim Omran taught epidemiology at the University of North Carolina until the mid-1980s, at which time he joined the staff of the Center for Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland.11
Sulaiman left the Ministry of Health in 1989,12 the same year the final version of the manual was completed, and the documents have not yet been widely distributed. Indeed, they probably will not be, at least in their present form.
In early 1991, several Nigerian newspapers carried reports about research commissioned in 1988 by the Office of the Director of Net Assessment at the Department of Defense. That study, which was published in abbreviated form by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the Spring 1989 issue of its Washington Quarterly,13 warned that low population growth in the West, combined with high fertility in the developing world, could produce a dramatic shift in the balance of power in coming decades.14 It projected, for example, that Nigeria will surpass both the United States and the USSR to become the third largest nation in the world in the first part of the next century.15 By that time, it added, a total of six African states would likely be among the top 25 nations in the world in population size.16
The report, which acknowledged that these patterns might be profoundly affected by the AIDS epidemic — conceding, in fact, that the disease could theoretically “wipe out some countries in 10 to 20 years”17 — nonetheless concluded that U.S. policy makers must place population control at the top of the nation’s security agenda.
U.S. “strategic planners,” it concluded, “have little choice in the coming decades but to pay serious attention to population trends, their causes, and their effects. Already the United States has embarked on an era of constrained resources. It, thus, becomes more important than ever to do those things that will provide more bang for every buck spent on national security. To claim that decreased defense spending must lead to strategic debilitation is fatuous. Rather, policy makers must anticipate events and conditions before they occur. They must employ all the instruments of statecraft at their disposal (development assistance and population planning every bit as much as new weapon systems). Furthermore, instead of relying on the canard that the threat dictates one’s posture, they must attempt to influence the form that threat assumes.”18
The study consisted of information provided by the Futures Group, as well as commissioned papers from several Pentagon contractors, including Johns Hopkins University and Abdel R. Omran.19
Endnotes
1 The RAPID project is one of several “policy development” programs funded by AID which are meant to assist less-developed country leaders to formulate and implement national policies that will reduce birthrates. This subcontract was written during the second phase of the activity, titled RAPID II. A 1991 directory of AID population projects (User’s Guide to the Office of Population, page 13) states that the RAPID program (now in its third phase, RAPID III) is intended to “raise leadership of relationships between population growth and development and about the positive socio-economic and health effects of lower fertility.” It operates under contract number (RAPID III) DPE-3046-Z-00-7069, effective September 1987 through September 1992, at $12,666,000.
2 Guide to Sources of International Population Assistance 1991, United Nations Population Fund, New York, p. 225.
3 Telephone conversation with Washington office of Futures Group, 18 October 1991. An employee, who identified herself only as “Lourdes,” said that she thought there had been some contracts with the Department of Energy, but could not confirm it. Most of the work done in the Washington office is related to AID, and the main office in Glastonbury, Connecticut handles most of the Defense Department contracts, she said.
4 Agency for International Development, User’s Guide to the Office of Population, 1991, page 24.
5 AID agreement no. 698-0462-C-000-7012-00; initiated 1987; cost $56,184. A statement of work attached to the contract states that during the first seven weeks of the Nigerian population project, the University of North Carolina was to conduct such activities as orientation meetings for prime contractors, AID and embassy representatives, and Nigerian government officials; to organize field trips; to prepare a project outline including financial management, procurement strategy, etc.
6 CEDPA has a subcontract under the Johns Hopkins University ‘population communication services’ (JHU-PCS) project worth $1.4 million, according to the 1.988 CEDPA annual report (page 22). M. Haider is listed in travel reports appearing in the most recent (1990) annual report to AID of the JHU-PCS as making three trips, each nearly a month long, to Nigeria as part of the CEDPA activities (JHU-PCS Annual Report 1990, pages 206, 207, 208, 209 and 210).
7 Johns Hopkins University Population Communication Services project, AID contract no. 620-0001-C-00-8013-00, March 1988, $14,998,497; provides for recruitment of musicians, scriptwriters, traditional media practitioners, and elders (p. 10) for “motivational” activities, and to obtain “testimonials from traditional and religious leaders.”
8 “Black propaganda” has been described variously as information that is spread without revealing its source, as intentional and unattributed disinformation, and as ideas falsely attributed to the target group. “Gray” propaganda may be statements that are only partially true, or material that is falsely attributed to a third party, but not to the target group. (See, i.e., Angelo Codevilla in Political Warfare and Psychological Operations: Rethinking the U.S. Approach, edited by Carnes Lord and Frank R. Barnett, National Defense University Press, 1989, pp. 82–85: “Where sources of influence on public opinion and on decision making are more restricted, black propaganda stands a better chance of being significant. In the Third World, an article planted in a newspaper or a story simply spread by word of mouth can cause or calm riots.” See also Loch K. Johnson, America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989, p. 24: “White propaganda is acknowledged openly by its source … Gray propaganda is either unattributed or attributed to some ostensible third source, that is, neither the United States nor anyone within the target group … Black propaganda is planted by the United States but in such a way that it seems to be the product or even an internal document of the target group …”
9 JHU-PCS Nigeria contract, p. 13.
10 “Overview of AID Population Assistance, FY 1989,” Office of Population, April 1990, a computer database print, under section of “Subproject Level Activities,” run date 4/5/90, p. 34 (Nigeria).
11 Notions and Needs, newsletter of the Center for International Development and Conflict Resolution, March 1985, p. 3.
12 Dr. A.B. Sulaiman has, since 1989, headed the national Planned Parenthood affiliate, Planned Parenthood of Nigeria (PPFN).
13 The Washington Quarterly, Spring 1989, “Global Demographic Trends to the Year 2010: Implications for U.S. Security,” by Gregory D. Foster et. al. The author is identified as a professor of sociology at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, and co-editor, along with Alan Ned Sabrosky and William J. Taylor, Jr., of Strategic Dimension of Military Manpower (Cambridge, Mass; Ballinger, 1987).
14 Ibid., “On the whole, demographic factors will produce completely different concerns in the developed world than in the developing world. Declining fertility rates will make it increasingly difficult for the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies alike to maintain military forces at current levels. In contrast, exceptionally high fertility rates in most LDCs (Lesser Developed Countries), if not matched by a commensurate growth of jobs, could lead to expanded military establishments in affected countries as a productive alternative to unemployment. In other words, where labor forces are significantly under-employed, military establishments may have built — in momentum to capitalize on unused manpower for purposes of both internal and external security.” “The distribution of population change may or may not produce shifts in the international balance of power over the next two decades. To the extent that the types of conflicts likely to predominate in the years ahead are manpower-intensive regional conflicts, developing states may indeed accrue added power and influence” (p. 6).
15 Ibid., p. 21.
16 Ibid., p. 22. The six nations are Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zaire, Tanzania and South Africa, p.22.
17 Ibid., 24.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
