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.[1][2][3] 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.”[4] He notes it long had to stay outwardly focused, until the 2011 NDAA made it legal to propagandize Americans.[5][6]
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.[7]