John A. Gentry

CIA helped publish some books, for example, and made some pamphlets and contributed to non-communist youth going to conventions in Europe and so on.

But by Soviet standards, this activity was trivial.

And, as best I can tell, almost all of it was ended

in the mid-1970s.

So Congress got a hold of some of the real abuses of CIA and FBI in the Army in the 1960s and said, enough, we're not doing any more of this.

So the CIA, as a good bureaucracy, said, we're not going to do things that are going to get us into trouble with Congress.

So they basically quit doing this.

So the malign influence operations

are basically being conducted around the world by states that want to change the system.

So you have Norway, for example, that says, gee, we'd really like you to know about our

our salmon industry or, you know, we've got great hydropower and we're a green country and so on.

So they have some, in essence, propaganda operations to let the world know about what Norway's doing that's good.

But that's a fundamentally different thing than what we've been talking about.

Well, let's come back to that when we talk about the politicization issue, because that's been asserted.

And my view is that there's a relationship, but it's not quite what's been asserted publicly.

Well, two big ones, but not as big, are Iran.

The Iranians are doing information operations by many standards.

A lot of it through cyber operations.

And the North Koreans are doing some, too.

So here you've got the big four intelligence targets of the CIA now publicly identified going back, what, five years ago now.