Interaid Activities Provoke a Federal Investigation

National media attention focuses on allegations of mishandled donations.

The federal government has launched an investigation of International Christian Aid (ICA)—also known as InterAid—a relief organization headed by L. Joe Bass. The U.S. attorney in Los Angeles is coordinating the probe, which is being conducted by a task force representing several federal agencies, including the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service.

The investigation began after a barrage of news media reports cited allegations that ICA mishandled money raised for relief work in Ethiopia. Bass called the press attention a “witch hunt.” In addition, the Camarillo, California-based organization distributed financial statements for 1983.

Ventura County (Calif.) District Attorney Michael Bradbury says his office has been investigating ICA for a year. Bradbury’s spade work led to meetings with officials from the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Customs Service. “We think we’ve uncovered enough to justify a full-scale investigation,” Bradbury said.

Recent complaints against ICA are among the most severe the organization has weathered in more than 20 years of controversy. CHRISTIANITY TODAY reported on ICA’s previous scrapes with the law and with numerous former employees (CT, Apr. 13, 1973, p. 44; Mar. 2, 1979, p. 50).

In the recent controversy, the New York Times was the first to report that the group could produce only scant evidence that any money it raised to feed starving children in Ethiopia had reached that country. A spokeswoman for World Vision, a Christian relief-and-development organization working in Ethiopia, confirmed that observation. “Our field workers have never seen [ICA workers] in Ethiopia,” said Ann McKusick of World Vision. Fourteen relief organizations have staff people in the Ethiopian capital, she said, and famine relief efforts are closely coordinated. “If ICA were there, we’d know it.”

ICA has made claims about its African relief work in direct mail fund-raising appeals, in Cable News Network broadcasts, and in nationwide television specials. In defense of those claims, Bass said government restrictions in Ethiopia prevented his organization from working inside the country. He said money targeted for Ethiopia was channeled through a French agency known as Doctors Without Borders. However, the New York Times reported that Doctors Without Borders said it had received “not one centime” from ICA.

Following the New York Times report, ICA said $10,000 in medical supplies to the French group had been delayed in transit. In addition, ICA says it sent $25,000 in protein-blend food and bought a land cruiser for $12,500 for use in Ethiopia. An advance team was sent in to assess the work that needs to be done there, and $115,075 is “deposited overseas and earmarked for team support,” according to a press release.

In a prepared statement, ICA acknowledged that “obstacles” hampered the start-up of its Ethiopian relief work. “We will see to it that every single penny designated for Ethiopia will be spent there for urgently needed materials and supplies,” Bass said.

Elsewhere in Africa, more questions about ICA’s activities surfaced, ABC-TVsent reporter Karen Burns to Kenya, where ICA says it supports orphans with pledges of $20 per month given by American sponsors. The organization’s advertising says it provides the orphans with food, clothing, medical aid, housing, and education assistance. However, the guardians of some of those orphans told Burns that each child receives a blanket, a bar of soap, and a school uniform once a year. The guardians said a bar of soap and a blanket in Kenya would cost five dollars. In its International Report on programs and services for 1983, ICA says it spent $1,415,630 in Kenya and sponsored 3,000 children.

Marion and Arnie Newman, former ICA employees in Africa, told ABC that Bass’s organization requested thousands of photographs of orphans who were not supported by ICA. They said the photos were used to attract more sponsors who pledged $240 each year. The Newmans said they resigned three years ago because they believed Bass deliberately deceived his supporters. Yet ABC reported that videotaped appeals featuring Mrs. Newman still were being used to drum up support for the sponsorship program.

NBC-TV news reporters pursued questions of where the money went. The network reported that some donations were used for a $41,000 loan to one of Bass’s sons and a $109,000 loan to Bass’s assistant, Melanie Cross, NBC reported that another of Bass’s sons received $6,800 from donor funds to help pay for his Bible college education.

Former employees of ICA and a sister group headed by Bass, Underground Evangelism, are speaking up about their experiences with Bass. One of them, who asked to remain anonymous, said several employees had complained about blatant exaggerations in fund-raising letters. As a result, the former employee said, “we got called on the carpet and told to mind our own business.” ICA staff members also questioned Bass’s close association with his assistant, Melanie Cross. “The more we raised questions about ethics, the more isolated we [staff people] became,” the former employee said. At the end of 1983, Bass dismissed virtually his entire staff.

Bass is a native of Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he dropped out of high school. He later attended Bethesda Bible Institute in Portland, Oregon. He traveled in Nigeria as an independent Pentecostal missionary-evangelist, then founded an organization in 1960 called Evangelism Center, Inc., in Tulsa “to provide practical aid to Christians in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,” according to a published report.

Two years later, Bass began a program of Bible smuggling, called it Underground Evangelism, and moved his headquarters to southern California. In 1978, Bass formed International Christian Aid to assist refugees in Thailand. The umbrella organization, Evangelism Center, changed its name to InterAid, Inc., in 1983. Bass’s annual report for 1983 explains, “International Christian Aid is shortened to InterAid on all new programmes in order to reach a wider range of persons and to work more effectively.” One of Bass’s former employees says the evangelistic aspects of the organization were dismantled in recent years after a fund-raising consultant told Bass he could raise more money by scuttling “evangelism” from the group’s name.

The group’s 1983 report states, “Religious programmes are now totally separated from relief and development projects, as far as fundraising, staff, and location are concerned.” That change could make the group more vulnerable to investigation. Government investigators frequently are hampered in their attempts to examine religious voluntary agencies because of legal barriers protecting church activities. But when fund raisers approach the public at large with requests for funds, and target a cause that is not specifically religious, they become fair game.

The organization spent 41 percent of its public contributions on the programs described in its appeals in 1983, according to a report from the Philanthropic Advisory Service (PAS) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. That falls short of the “reasonable percentage” a group must spend before it meets Better Business Bureau standards. In addition, ICA did not provide an annual report when requested to do so, and its financial statements do not offer “adequate information to serve as a basis for informed decisions,” the PAS report said.

To be approved by the Better Business Bureau, a charitable organization must “ensure that solicitations and informational materials are accurate, truthful and not misleading in whole or in part.” PAS quotes from ICA brochures saying the group was “founded in its original form in 1960” and “for over twenty years, International Christian Aid has sought out the suffering children of the world giving them hope for the future.” However, the report notes, “PAS records indicate that ICA came into existence in 1979 and that evangelistic programs were the focus of the organization from its inception in 1960 to the creation of ICA in 1979.”

ICA is not a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), an organization that sets stringent standards for Christian fund raising and money management, ECFA director Art Borden said Bass has never applied for membership. The questions being raised about ICA are far from characteristic of charitable organizations in general, Borden said.

“Our impression is there are very few people out there trying to defraud the public,” he said. Yet the damaged reputation of one group can affect other organizations. Said Borden: “It only takes one or two to give the impression that everyone’s doing this.”

North American Scenes

Asbury Theological Seminary has received full regional accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). The accreditation will benefit the seminary’s graduates who move into further advanced degree work at other institutions with SACS accreditation. In addition, it will help the seminary as it seeks to cooperate on advanced degree programs with other accredited institutions. Asbury has professional accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools.

The Catholic diocese of Albany, New York, has obtained a temporary court order preventing two abortion clinics from opening. Bishop Howard Hubbard says the diocese took the action because the state health department did not follow its own procedures in approving the application for the Planned Parenthood clinics. In court, the diocese argued that the health department failed to prove a need for abortion services in the area, and that it had not investigated Planned Parenthood’s finances nor its competence to perform abortions.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that nourishment can be withheld from terminally ill patients. The decision reemphasized the right of competent adults to refuse medical treatment and extended that right to incompetent patients. The ruling reverses a unanimous 1983 decision by a lower court that called removing a feeding tube from a terminally ill, mentally incompetent patient “homicide.”

Houston voters—by a 4-to-l margin—defeated a measure that would have given homosexuals legal protection in city hiring. Some 30 percent of Houston’s registered voters cast ballots, the city’s largest voter turnout in a single issue referendum. Despite the vote, Mayor Kathy Whitmire says her administration will continue its policy prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals.

A federal district judge has ruled unconstitutional a Louisiana law that requires teachers to teach creation science along with evolution. Judge Adrian Duplantier ruled that creation science is religious and that its teaching in public schools would violate the separation of church and state. The Louisiana attorney general said he will appeal the ruling to a higher federal court.

The Senate Ethics Committee has issued a final report clearing U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield (R-Oreg.) of any corrupt dealings with a Greek financier. The report stated that “not one witness provided evidence of any corrupt behavior” on the part of Hatfield. In September, the committee ended a preliminary inquiry into whether Basil Tsakos’s real estate payments to Hatfield’s wife influenced the senator to support the Greek’s proposal for a trans-Africa oil pipeline.

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