Front organization
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A front organization, also known as a front group (if it is structured to look like a voluntary association) or a front company or simply a front (if it is structured to look like a company), is any entity set up by and controlled by another organization. A front organization may simply be a proxy that keeps the parent group's name out of the picture or it may look publicly as if it is set up to do one thing, but actually be set up to do something else on behalf of its parent group. Fronts are sometimes set up by intelligence agencies, criminal organizations, banned organizations, or other organizations that are engaged in activities with which they would prefer not to be identified. The front organizations attempt to appear independent while actually working to support the parent organization. This can exist, for example, in politics, commerce, or religion, or in the areas where these intersect. In international relations, a puppet state is a state which acts as a front for another state.
In the extreme, a front organization is completely controlled by its parent organization and this fact is a secret from the general public. However, many groups that are commonly considered front groups only approximate this model: control may be only partial, or the relationship may be somewhat open.
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Fronts in organized crime
Many criminal organizations have front companies - these are mainly used for the purposes of laundering money.
Fronts for intelligence agencies
Air America was set up by and wholly owned by the CIA, supposedly to provide humanitarian aid, but flew many combat support missions and supplied covert operations in Southeast Asia during the Second Indochina War. Other CIA-funded front groups have been used to spread American propaganda and influence during the Cold War, particularly in the Third World.
Fronts for religious organizations
Some religious organizations use front groups either to promote their interests in politics or to make their group seem more legitimate. For example, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) is considered to now be a front group for the Church of Scientology [1] (http://www.xenu.net/archive/FAQ/answer_for_kids.html).
Fronts for banned paramilitary organizations
Banned organizations sometimes use front groups to achieve a public face. For example, banned paramilitary organizations often have an affiliated political party that operates more openly (though often these parties, themselves, end up banned). These parties may or may not be front organizations in the narrow sense — they have varying degrees of autonomy and the relationships are usually something of an open secret — but are widely considered to be so, especially by their political opponents. Examples are the relationship between the Irish Republican Army and Sinn Féin in 1980s Ireland or between the Basque groups ETA (paramilitary) and Batasuna (party) in Spain. Similarly, in the United States in periods where the Communist Party was highly stigmatized, it often operated largely through front groups.
Fronts for extremist political organizations
Extremist political movements sometimes set up front organizations to attract support from those who may not necessarily agree with the extremists' ideology. Communists and Marxist-Leninists have often used this tactic and during the Red Scare of the 1950s a number of organizations in the labor and peace movements were accused of being "Communist fronts". More recently, the neo-Stalinist Workers' World Party set up an anti-war front group, International ANSWER. Trotskyist and other left groups argue that united fronts are, in fact, legitimate coalitions and that it is only the Stalinist concept of the popular front which is illegitimate or misleading.
Fronts for corporations - astroturfing
Astroturfing — the term is wordplay based on "grassroots" efforts — is an American term used pejoratively to describe formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous and populist reactions to a politician, product, service, event, etc. by many diverse and distributed individuals acting of their own volition, when such reaction does not in fact actually exist.
For example, some pharmaceutical companies set up tame "patients' groups" as front organizations. These groups put pressure on healthcare providers and legislators to adopt their products. For example, Schering Healthcare and Biogen Ltd. tried to put pressure on the UK National Health Service (NHS) to adopt its drug Beta Interferon to treat Multiple Sclerosis (MS) sufferers. Schering set up and funded a group called MS Voice, with its own website, which claimed to represent MS sufferers. Another pharmecutical company, Biogen, set up a campaign called Action for Access, which also claimed it was an independent organization and the voice of MS sufferers. People who visited the website and signed up for the campaign didn't realise that these were not genuinely independent patient groups.