A new country found to have been in the CIA web: Finland

CIA funded Finnish Social Democrats since 1940s -Book


The US Central Intelligence Agency began to fund Finland's Social Democratic party in the latter half of the 1940s, according to a book launched Tuesday by Mikko Majander, a Finnish historian.

Dr Majander, having studied new primary sources consisting of SDP treasury records taken to Sweden in the 1950s, estimates that up to 80 per cent of the party's funding came from abroad in the 1940s and 1950s. The total figure includes aid from other Nordic countries and Finnish immigrants in the US.

According to Dr Majander, 1949 was a key important watershed in the official US approach to Finnish politics as it marked the time when the Americans became convinced, thanks to the suppression of a Communist-led strike movement, that Finland had not turned into a Soviet satellite. The US viewed the SDP as the only significant force capable of keeping communism in check in Finland.

Cash aid was out of the question because of Finland's postwar controlled economy. Dr Majander discovered that the Finnish government had looked the other way as a number of parties and dozens of NGOs received "charity donations" of goods like, coffee, fruit, nylon stockings, lipstick and even cars, benefited from considerably reduced duty and tax rates, and then sold them on for handsome profits.

Although all parties engaged in so-called charity trading, the SDP's operation was the biggest.

Original article posted here.