by Kit Klarenberg
Part 3 - “Prohibited, Covert Propaganda”
JSOC’s involvement in that CIA dirty war is particularly notable given this period gave rise to the very concept of “perception management” as a legitimate form of psychological warfare to be waged by the CIA, Pentagon, and other government agencies against the domestic population.
The overriding objective of this Reagan administration push was to falsely paint the murderous Contras as heroic freedom fighters. In reality, the Contras, with CIA direction, funding and arms, deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, slaughtered priests, nuns, labor activists, students, peasants and indigenous citizens.
In turn, the social democratic Sandinistas were transformed into viciously repressive autocrats, ruling Nicaragua with an iron fist and transforming their country into a “beachhead” for Soviet invasion of the U.S. Similar propaganda messaging has been employed in every American proxy war since, from Yugoslavia to Ukraine. All this activity, the full extent of which may never be known, represented egregious violations of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which places strict restrictions on the domestic dissemination of state propaganda.
The overriding objective of this Reagan administration push was to falsely paint the murderous Contras as heroic freedom fighters. In reality, the Contras, with CIA direction, funding and arms, deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, slaughtered priests, nuns, labor activists, students, peasants and indigenous citizens.
In turn, the social democratic Sandinistas were transformed into viciously repressive autocrats, ruling Nicaragua with an iron fist and transforming their country into a “beachhead” for Soviet invasion of the U.S. Similar propaganda messaging has been employed in every American proxy war since, from Yugoslavia to Ukraine. All this activity, the full extent of which may never be known, represented egregious violations of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which places strict restrictions on the domestic dissemination of state propaganda.
Take, for instance, the Office of Public Diplomacy, a dedicated pro-Contra propaganda unit run by Reagan’s top National Security Council aide Oliver North, who was simultaneously working with cocaine traffickers to arm the Nicaraguan “rebels.” The unit was found to have broken a welter of U.S. laws by separate official investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal. The U.S. Comptroller General, for example, concluded the Office engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda…beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.”
Yet, despite such damning findings, the “perception management” techniques honed by these assorted units, and many of the formal and informal structures contemporaneously created to disseminate CIA, Pentagon, and White House propaganda, did not go anywhere.
Two decades later, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld’s leadership struck upon the bright idea of creating the Office of Strategic Influence to deliberately plant “misleading” black propaganda in the foreign media, which would then be picked up by the U.S. media.
In a perverse twist, precisely this strategy was used by British foreign intelligence service MI6 as far back as 1998 to lay the foundations for the Iraq War. Under “Operation Mass Appeal”, the agency circulated dubious or even fabricated “intelligence” to editors and journalists on its payroll the world over, influencing the output of leading international news outlets. The spooks sought to “shape public opinion about Iraq and the threat posed by WMD.”
Two decades later, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld’s leadership struck upon the bright idea of creating the Office of Strategic Influence to deliberately plant “misleading” black propaganda in the foreign media, which would then be picked up by the U.S. media.
In a perverse twist, precisely this strategy was used by British foreign intelligence service MI6 as far back as 1998 to lay the foundations for the Iraq War. Under “Operation Mass Appeal”, the agency circulated dubious or even fabricated “intelligence” to editors and journalists on its payroll the world over, influencing the output of leading international news outlets. The spooks sought to “shape public opinion about Iraq and the threat posed by WMD.”
The Office of Strategic Influence operated in secret from its launch in October 2001 until February of the next year, when the mainstream media caught wind of its existence. Due to intense outcry, just a week later, it was officially shuttered at Rumsfeld’s request. Yet, at a November 2002 press conference, the defense secretary made unguarded remarks starkly indicating it very much lived on thereafter:
The Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And ‘oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall.’ I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have.
The Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And ‘oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall.’ I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine, I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have.
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