The last time he went to Yemen, in 2011, John Kiriakou says he met the American defence attaché and asked what he was working on.
‘We have this great idea’
The answer, he recalls, was that they had this great idea: they had developed a propaganda programme modelled on NPR. It was going to play jazz on the radio, and it was going to have call-in shows for young Yemenis. [1] [2]
Kiriakou’s reaction, as he reports it, was immediate: what kind of stupid idea was that? Whose stupid idea was that? [2] And of course, he says, it lasted about two weeks and then it shuttered, because nobody is going to listen to that silliness. What a waste of money and time. [2]
In a second telling the details are fuller and the framing is the attaché’s own pride in the project. Kiriakou was in Yemen in 2011 with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on his fifth trip to the country, when the defence attaché offered him what he called his “SCOP” — a word Kiriakou says he hates. The scheme was a US-funded radio station modelled on NPR that played American jazz and ran a call-in show so that young Yemeni men could ring in and talk about the jazz. Its object, as Kiriakou understood it, was to make listeners pro-American: “Oh, Americans have jazz — so I’m going to be pro-American now.” His reaction was that it was a terrible idea and nobody would listen. “And nobody did.”[3][4][5] How long it survived differs between the two accounts: about two weeks in one, a year in the other.[2][4]
The alternative he argues for
The anecdote is the negative case in an argument Kiriakou has made for years: that if you want to really fight terrorism, you do it through economic development — you develop these economies to the point where these men have jobs and do not need to make jihad against the Americans, and are not interested in doing so. [6] The European Union countries, he says, have that long-term view; the United States does not. [1]
His positive example, from the same conversation, is the Sanaa sewer project — the water treatment plant and sewer system that Dutch and Italian money took fifteen years to build for the Yemeni capital. [7] [6]
Yemen over twenty years
Kiriakou frames both stories inside a longer observation about the country. He had been to Yemen five times over the years, he says, starting in 1990 and running through 2011 — and every time he went, it was worse than the previous time. [8] [7] His comparable objection to American broadcast propaganda aimed at Cuba is set out in Radio and TV Martí.