The International Freedom Foundation (IFF) was a self-described anti-communist group established in Washington, D.C. founded in 1986 by former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Its purported aim was to promote individual and collective freedoms worldwide: freedom of thought; free speech; free association; free enterprise; and, the free market principle. It came into being after the Democratic International, a 1985 meeting of anti-Communist rebels held at the headquarters of UNITA in Jamba, Angola. The IFF campaigned against regimes and movements it described as Soviet allies. To achieve its aim the IFF, with offices in London and Johannesburg, sponsored symposia with high-profile speakers such as Henry Kissinger. Among its eight periodicals, the IFF published a monthly newsletter—the Freedom Bulletin—with three editions: International; UK/Europe; and, Republic of South Africa. The IFF ceased its activities in 1993. Funding According to a Newsday article entitled "Front for Apartheid: Washington-based think-tank said to be part of ruse to prolong power" of July 16, 1995, the IFF was alleged to have been funded by apartheid South Africa in the amount of $1.5 million per year from 1986. In return for this funding, South Africa was said to have used the IFF as an instrument to portray the African National Congress (ANC) together with its leaders, Oliver Tambo and the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, as terrorists and as sympathetic to Soviet communism. Code-named Operation Babushka, the IFF succeeded in recruiting a large number of Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals to influence US policies towards the apartheid regime, and to counteract growing domestic and international pressure for the imposition of economic sanctions against South Africa. The IFF's first chairman was Duncan Sellars. Its Washington lobbyist/film producer, Jack Abramoff, was said by Newsday to have recruited willing—but perhaps unwitting—Republican politicians including: Senator Jesse Helms; Rep. Dan Burton; Rep. Philip Crane; Rep. Robert Dornan; and Alan Keyes. None of these five politicians—and neither Sellars nor Abramoff—admitted to being aware of any South African funding. Had they known that they were effectively working to further the interests of a foreign government, they would have been required under US law to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department. In apparent support of the politicians' denial, a former member of SA's Directorate of Military Intelligence, Major Craig Williamson, told Newsday that Operation Babushka was designed so that the people it recruited would be unaware of the foreign funding—they would simply be reinforcing their own principled