[6][7] The foundation, initially also dedicated to supporting Soviet dissidents, also aided defecting intellectuals from the Eastern Bloc in disseminating their ideas in the West.

[9] Jamestown's current board includes Michael Carpenter, the managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

[10] As of 2021, the foundation's current board includes General Michael V. Hayden; Bruce Hoffman; Matthew Bryza; Robert Spalding, who acted as an architect of US-China strategy while serving on the National Security Council in the Donald Trump administration; Michelle Van Cleave; Arthur Waldron; and Timothy J. Keating,[11] while Jamestown's fellows included Vladimir Socor;[12] Janusz Bugajski; Paul Goble; Michael Scheuer (who claims to have been fired for criticizing the United States' relationship with Israel),[13] Thomas Kent, the former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a Hong Kong–based China specialist; Jacob Zenn, a leading expert on Boko Haram; and Stephen Ulph,[14] a leading expert on Jihadist ideology.

Getman was imprisoned for eight years by the Soviet regime for participating in anti-Soviet propaganda as a result of a caricature of Joseph Stalin that one of his friends had drawn on a cigarette box.

According to a statement by the Foreign Ministry of Russia: "Organisers again and again resorted to deliberately spreading slander about the situation in Chechnya and other republics of the Russian North Caucasus using the services of supporters of terrorists and pseudo-experts.

[6][7] In 2020, the office of the Prosecutor-General of Russia said that Jamestown Foundation's publications sought to fan separatism in some Russian regions and posed a security threat.