The real story, according to Carpenter, is not that the Pentagon has suddenly discovered influencers.

It is that the national-security establishment has been cultivating supposedly independent voices for generations.

During the Cold War, the CIA built an enormous network involving journalists, news organizations and other information outlets around the world.

A 1977 New York Times investigation reported that the CIA had used hundreds of news and public-information organizations and individuals. The network was so extensive that one CIA official described even a “third-string guy in Quito” who could get material into a local newspaper.

The agency funded these foreign media assets.

And there was an obvious problem.

Information does not stay neatly inside national borders. Propaganda placed into a foreign publication can eventually be picked up by American journalists and presented to U.S. audiences as ordinary reporting.

The Times investigation reported that even some CIA officials worried about this “blow-back”—the possibility that misleading or false material planted overseas could eventually return to the United States through legitimate news channels.

That is the crucial distinction.

The government does not necessarily have to publish propaganda under its own name.

It can cultivate intermediaries who appear independent.

Once the original government connection disappears from view, the message acquires the appearance of outside confirmation.

Carpenter argues that this is the tradition into which today’s paid influencers fit.

@americanmajority