Former State Department official details US influence operations involving media, NGOs in Georgia

Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired US Army Colonel and former Chief of Staff to the US Secretary of State, reviewed the use of non-governmental organisations by the United States in a podcast hosted by Glenn Diesen, a professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway.

Speaking about Ukraine, Wilkerson described how representatives of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the military operated through NGOs to steer the country toward closer ties with NATO, highlighting that similar actions were carried out in Georgia.

“It all started very early - at the same time. We were buying newspaper editors, we were buying newspapers, we were buying TV stations. We used NGOs without them even knowing; we had CIA agents there as well, and we were teaching and supplying liberal democracy as a weapon”, he said.

“We did the same in Georgia. We did this everywhere, and we were very successful. I remember people asking me: why did these countries suddenly give up neutrality and want to join NATO? Do you want to know why? We built their governments. We paid their governments. This is a model we used before, and later applied in Europe. We used the CIA, but not as the CIA. We had NGOs that used liberal democracy as a weapon to convince people of two things: first - ‘Russians, Russians’, and second - that the best defense is liberal democracy. And if you want liberal democracy, you must do this, this, and this - and first of all, you must get into NATO”, Wilkerson concluded.