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.
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.
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 views on South Africa and the ANC.
But, in relation to Jack Abramoff—who produced a South African-funded movie Red Scorpion in South-West Africa (now Namibia) in 1988—Williamson indicated that Abramoff would undoubtedly have known about the source of the IFF's funding.
The January 1989 edition (no.5, 8 pages) was devoted exclusively to opposing the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement, which had been signed at the Washington Summit in December 1987.
By September 25, 1992, Gordon was railing against the Western Goals Institute, and urged the Conservative Party to expel WGI members, a move which the London Evening Standard described as "doubtless assisted by his South African paymasters".