Retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005, spoke about what he described as CIA involvement with media outlets and non-governmental organizations.

In a conversation with Glenn Diesen, a professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Wilkerson claimed that similar methods were used in multiple countries, including Ukraine and Georgia.

According to Wilkerson,

“We were buying newspaper editors, we were buying newspapers, we were buying television stations, we were buying communicators in general. We were using NGOs against them—often without their knowledge—many of which had been infiltrated by the CIA. We were teaching them; we were weaponizing liberal democracy.

We did it in Georgia, we did it everywhere, and we were very successful. I remember people asking me, ‘Why do you think these countries suddenly abandoned neutrality and wanted to join NATO?’

Would you like to know why? We built their governments, we paid for their governments, just as surely as Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon funded labor union heads, newspaper editors, and business leaders in Chile to remove Santiago’s government.”

Wilkerson presented these remarks as his personal account of past U.S. foreign-policy practices.