Radio and TV Martí
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Radio and TV Martí are U.S. government broadcasters created to beam anti-communist programming at Cuba. John Kiriakou rode the plane that transmits Radio Martí from international airspace in 2011 while with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and says its content is mostly Spanish-language baseball, which Cubans tune in for while ignoring the jammed, propaganda-heavy TV Martí. Because a sliver of Florida's southwest coast could pick up the Dish Network feed of TV Martí, the Obama administration, rather than change the frequency, made it legal to propagandize Americans in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, which Kiriakou says also reopened the door to recruiting American journalists. Kiriakou visited Cuba itself years later; see Kiriakou's Cuba trip.

The audience study

Kiriakou conducted a study of the broadcasters for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while serving as its chief investigator, flying to Cuba for the purpose. His finding on TV Martí was that essentially nobody watches it, the one place it can reliably be seen is the waiting room of the U.S. consulate, so the audience consists of Cubans sitting down to apply for a visa, who get a Spanish-language soap opera. Radio Martí fares better only because of the baseball.

He sets the Martí operation inside the general rule it eventually broke. Voice of America is, in his description, the U.S. government's propaganda news outlet, beamed overseas so that everyone abroad receives the official American point of view, and it had always been illegal to aim that apparatus inward. "As Americans, we're not allowed to watch our own government's propaganda." The Dish Network leak along the Florida coast was a violation of that rule, and the response was to change the rule rather than the signal.

A companion failure in Yemen

Kiriakou offers a parallel case from his Senate Foreign Relations Committee years, on his fifth trip to Yemen in 2011. The defense attaché there described, with some pride, a programme funding a Yemeni radio station modelled on NPR, playing American jazz and running a call-in show so that young Yemeni men could phone in and discuss it, the theory being that exposure to American jazz would produce pro-American sentiment. Kiriakou's assessment at the time was that nobody would listen. Nobody did, and the station was shut down after a year.

See also

- Operation Mockingbird
- Italian election covert action
