Active measures
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Active measures is the name John Kiriakou uses for the CIA division responsible for propaganda. Asked in 2026 what the agency actually does at the level of managing whole populations, he identified it as one specific division: "It's called active measures. It's propaganda. It's controlling the news media. It's controlling the national debate on XYZ issue."

Structure

The branch had a mirror. By his account the agency ran "an active measures branch and then you had anti-active measures branches", one planning American propaganda, the other planning how to counter the other side's. He characterises the combined work as "all about the propaganda and it's all about combating propaganda ... a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week process." Asked whether the analyst in Three Days of the Condor, reading all day in a bookstore front, was real or exaggerated, his answer was that it was real, and that this was what active measures looked like when he joined.

What it looked like in practice

Kiriakou says he saw the propaganda machine working "every day", and that the individual operations were often trivial: "It can be something as stupid as a pirate radio station in Yemen playing jazz", the intended effect being that "young Yemeni men will say, 'Wow, what cool music. That makes me want to be pro-American.'" He confirms that was an actual operation, and adds his own assessment of the category: "99 times out of 100, it's a stupid idea."

Renaming

The unit did not disappear; it was renamed. Describing the CIA's political action group, "the CIA's lead clandestine propaganda arm ... the group that is able to put propagandists in place around the world, keep them funded, and then supply to them the propaganda to be released", Kiriakou notes that "it used to be called the active measures group," and that when the Berlin Wall came down "it changed its name like everything else did." He describes the successor group as financing the international arms of the Democratic and Republican national committees, and says he ran into both in Kuwait within weeks of the end of the 1991 war, when "there wasn't even any food and half the country was on fire, but the DNC and the RNC are there and they're flush with money."

The term also travels in the other direction. Kiriakou uses it for what foreign services do, describing Iranian "active measures" including coup plotting, and pallets of weapons in waterproof containers washing up twice on the shore while he was living in Bahrain.

See also

- CIA media revolving door
- CovertAction Magazine
