CIA political action group
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The CIA political action group is, in John Kiriakou's description, the agency's lead clandestine propaganda arm, the successor to the Cold War "active measures group," renamed when the Berlin Wall fell. It places propagandists around the world, keeps them funded, and supplies the propaganda they release. It works through or finances entities like the National Endowment for Democracy and the international arms of the Democratic and Republican National Committees, which Kiriakou encountered, "flush with money," in Kuwait weeks after the 1991 war ended, "when there wasn't even any food and half the country was on fire." He notes it long had to stay outwardly focused, until the 2011 NDAA made it legal to propagandize Americans.

Kiriakou has offered a hypothetical, Cold-War-era example of the group's work to illustrate how it operates: an officer overseas receiving a cable warning that communists were projected to win an Italian election, with instructions to "steal the election for the conservatives." The response, in his telling, would be to spend roughly $150,000 recruiting journalists, planting stories, and engineering a conservative win.

Active measures, and their hit rate

Asked whether he saw the propaganda machine at work at the CIA, Kiriakou answers "every day" and supplies the term of art: "There's even a word for it. It's called active measures." His illustration is deliberately unglamorous, "something as stupid as a pirate radio station in Yemen playing jazz so that young Yemeni men will say, 'Wow, what cool music. That makes me want to be pro-American.'" He confirms it was a real operation, and gives the practice's success rate as he saw it: "99 times out of 100, it's a stupid idea."

See also

- Operation Mockingbird
- National Endowment for Democracy
