False allegations about Sen. John Kerry’s wife have been circulating for months, but the velocity of the Internet “whispering campaign” picked up substantially with the approach of the fall campaign.

One false message claims Teresa Heinz Kerry gave $4 million to a foundation that used the funds to support a list of “radical” groups including one with alleged links to Hamas and another that is said to have offered to provide a lawyer for Saddam Hussein. But public records show otherwise. Heinz Kerry’s foundation money was directed to projects such as “Sustainable Pittsburgh,” which promotes “smart growth” strategies.

Another widely circulated e-mail claims Kerry and his wife “own” dozens of H.J. Heinz Co. factories in Europe and Asia. It accuses Kerry of hypocrisy for denouncing offshoring of U.S. jobs while “making millions off that cheap labor.”

That’s also false: neither of them owns Heinz. Public records show Heinz Kerry isn’t an officer of the company, isn’t on the company’s board of directors, and isn’t even close to being the largest shareholder. The Heinz Endowments do own Heinz stock – less than 4 percent of the company – but income from that stock goes to charity, not to the Kerrys personally.

FactCheck.org has received hundreds of copies of these two e-mails from subscribers who asked us to check out whether there’s any truth to them. They have been circulating like a virus, relayed by people who either don’t bother to check out whether they are true, or don’t care. It’s the modern equivalent of the old “whispering campaign” in which false rumors served as political weapons.

The more virulent of these nasty, false mailings alleges that she’s given more than $4 million to the Tides Foundation of San Francisco to fund a variety of “radical” groups including some that the message suggests are supportive of terrorists.

To start, that’s flatly denied by Maxwell King, the president of the Heinz Endowments.

The Tides Foundation also says that no Heinz funds have gone to any of the groups named in the e-mail. Further, it says Tides itself gives little or no money to several of them. Christopher J. Herrera, director of communications of the Tides Foundation, told us that the allegation about a Ramsey Clark group is utterly false, for example.

According to Herrera, Tides Foundation gifts to the National Lawyers Guild total “approximately $30,000 over the last 10 years,” and donations to the Council on Islamic Relations amounted to a single $5,000 grant in 2002 for a Southern California project called the “Interfaith Coalition Against Hate Crimes.” But even those relatively small sums didn’t come from Heinz money as alleged.

Where $8 million went: Both groups say the only money given directly to the Tides Foundation by the Heinz Endowments was $230,000 given between 1994 and 1998, all used to support a pollution-prevention initiative and other environmental projects in Western Pennsylvania.

Much larger sums have gone through a related legal entity called the Tides Center, which administers grants for groups receiving donations that are not themselves incorporated as a nonprofit organization. The Tides Center takes a fee, typically between 7 percent and 9 percent, for handling payrolls, disbursing, legal and administrative work, but the rest legally must go to the group for which the donor intended it.

The Heinz Endowments released a list of grants totaling $8.1 million given through Tides since 1994. None of the money went for the “radical” groups named in the e-mail.

Included in the $8.1 million are grants from the Howard Heinz Endowment and also the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, which collectively make up the Heinz Endowments. Heinz Kerry chairs the Howard Heinz Endowment, the larger of the two, and is a member of the board of directors of the smaller Vira I. Heinz Endowment.

The list appears to be accurate: FactCheck.org checked each grant on the list against those that the Heinz endowments reported to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service on their form 990s for the five years 1998 through 2002. We found no discrepancies: All the grants on the master list matched grants reported on the IRS forms, where there could be legal penalties for false reporting. We would have checked 990s for other years but those before 1998 are not readily available, and the two Heinz endowments aren’t scheduled to file their forms for 2003 until Aug. 15.

Overseas factories: Another e-mail that many of our subscribers have asked about claims – falsely – that Heinz Kerry and her husband “own” factories overseas and hypocritically are “making millions off all that cheap labor” while denouncing Bush for letting jobs go to other countries.

This one can also be proved false from publicly available records. In fact, Heinz Kerry has no role in running the food company.

As the H.J. Heinz Co. reports in its most recent proxy statement on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Heinz Kerry is not on the company’s board of directors, nor is she listed among the principal shareholders (those who control 5 percent or more of the outstanding shares). The charitable foundations she controls once held much more Heinz stock but sold off most of it nearly a decade ago to diversify their investments. The Heinz company said in a recent public statement that she currently controls less than 4 percent of the company’s stock. The largest shareholder is actually a California investment company that owns roughly three times as much as the Heinz charitable foundations.

About all that is true in this e-mail is that the Heinz company has a number of factories overseas.

Its most recent annual report, also publicly available at the SEC’s Web site, lists 32 factories owned in Europe (and three more leased), and 18 in Asia and the Pacific (plus four more leased). Heinz also reported selling just over $3 billion in products in Europe and more than $1 billion more in Asia and the Pacific – accounting for roughly half the company’s global sales.

The company issued a statement back in March, when this e-mail first began circulating, saying that 60 percent of its sales are outside the U.S. (including those in Mexico and Canada as well as Europe and Asia) and that it locates plants in other countries “to accommodate those customers by providing facilities closer to those markets” and “to pack the freshest ingredients, tailor its recipes to local tastes and deliver the final products in a timely and efficient manner.”

The company also distanced itself from the Kerry campaign and Heinz Kerry.

The Heinz company also said it is “nonpartisan.” Worth noting, however, is that the company’s Political Action Committee has given nearly all its donations to Republican candidates, including $5,000 to the Bush campaign and nothing to Kerry’s as of the most recent reports available. That’s additional evidence, as if any was needed, that the company isn’t “owned” by Kerry’s wife.

Analysis provided by FactCheck.org, a service of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. For more information, visit FactCheck.org.

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