“They have no damn right,” former Vice President Joe Biden said on Feb. 16, denouncing Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
“It’s our sovereign right to be able to conduct our elections unfettered. Period.”
Biden spoke for many Americans who are indignant over the mounting evidence of a multifaceted effort by the Kremlin to sow discord among Americans and tilt the election in favor of Donald Trump.
There is some irony to this. The United States has been covertly interfering in other nations’ politics – including elections – for at least three-quarters of a century. It still does today. Latin America, the focus of my own research, has been a frequent target.
Rather then using Facebook and Twitter to create make-believe organizations, the CIA organized front groups. Rather than creating bots to spread fake news, the CIA bribed foreign journalists, financed foreign newspapers and set up false flag radio stations. The disruptive goals of information warfare have not changed over the decades, only the technology has.
Here are just a few of the most notorious examples of U.S. election meddling.
The origins of Washington’s political warfare – known then as psychological operations, or psy-ops – trace back to the beginning of the Cold War.
The U.S. feared that Western European Communist parties would ascend to power by winning elections. One of the very first covert actions by the CIA’s new operational wing, directed by Frank Wisner, was a concerted effort to prevent the Italian Communist Party from winning the 1948 election. Washington funneled several million dollars to the conservative, pro-American Christian Democrats.
Former CIA officer F. Mark Wyatt explained, “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets, what have you.”
Whether the CIA’s support made the difference or not, Washington interpreted the Christian Democrats’ victory as a huge success. The agency used it as proof of concept for a model of political manipulation that the CIA continued to employ in Italy for the next several decades and replicated around the world.
Wisner built a network of foreign journalists, newspapers and magazines known officially as the Propaganda Assets Inventory. Wisner liked to call it his “Mighty Wurlitzer,” after Wurlitzer-brand organs. It was a propaganda instrument so powerful, it could play any tune to audiences worldwide.