Italian election covert action
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The Italian election covert action is what John Kiriakou identifies as the CIA's very first covert action. With the Communist Party ahead in the polls before the 1948 Italian election, the agency was authorized by Congress to spend 150,000 dollars to bribe Italian journalists into writing pro-conservative articles, and the Christian Democrats "just barely edged out" the more popular Communists. Kiriakou elsewhere dates the same operation to 1948, noting that from the CIA's creation under the 1947 National Security Act until the creation of congressional oversight committees in 1975, "the CIA did literally anything it wanted to do", the theft of the Italian election coming within months of the agency's founding. With the Communist Party ahead in the polls before the election, the agency spent 150,000 dollars to bribe Italian journalists into writing articles supporting the Christian Democrats, who then won "by a whisker." The CIA, Kiriakou says, "essentially stole" the election, and afterward began recruiting journalists around the world, the legal, foreign counterpart to the later domestic Operation Mockingbird.

Kiriakou frames Italy as the start of a long pattern rather than an isolated incident: "The CIA has always interfered in other countries' elections. It's been doing it since the Italian elections of 1947." He cites Iran, Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Greece as further examples of the same practice.

The price, and what came after

Kiriakou dates the agency's first covert action programme to 1949, two years after the National Security Act of 1947 created both the CIA and the National Security Council. The method he describes was crude: "it bribed journalists with $150,000 to write pro ... conservative Christian Democratic Party articles and to write anti-communist articles." The communists were ahead in the polls; the money went out; the Christian Democrats won.

What he stresses is the speed of the escalation from there: "five short years later, the CIA is overthrowing governments in the Dominican Republic, in Guatemala, in Cyprus, and all over the world. Without any plan for what comes next." Consequences were somebody else's problem, the agency's job was to remove the target, and the State Department could work out what followed.

See also

- Operation Mockingbird
- Radio and TV Martí
