Toward the end of 2013, Dan Gabriel, BA ’01, worked as a CIA technical adviser for a major motion picture. In his day-to-day life, he runs a professional services company and trains, among others, Cuban dissidents to become journalists.

How did such a career come about?

As Features Editor at The GW Hatchet, Gabriel was very involved on campus. As a Journalism major, he learned about the world.

“Professor May opened my eyes up to journalism and reporting; Dr. Livingston opened my eyes up to beyond the borders of the US,” Gabriel said.

In 1998, Gabriel and a handful of other students accompanied Professor Steven Livingston on a trip to Northern Ireland. In the midst of much tension, the students learned about the recently signed Good Friday Peace Accord and how, through political communication, it was brought about and how, through journalism, it was reported.

“That’s what really piqued my interest in understanding political violence and the ways in which you can use information to accomplish different outcomes,” Gabriel said.

Gabriel graduated several months before the September 11^th attacks and witnessed how they changed the media landscape and foreign policy paradigm. He travelled to Cairo to study Arabic and came back to GW to get a master’s degree in International Affairs with a focus on Security Policy. Through George Fidas, a CIA officer on loan to the university, Gabriel submitted a resume to the CIA and was recruited in July 2003.

During his time at the CIA, Gabriel worked to understand the motivating factors and ideologies behind violent Islamic extremism, whether economic, religious or cultural. Through this understanding, he and his colleagues tried to learn how to counter such ideologies. In the early days of the counterinsurgency, Gabriel spent time in Iraq looking at how the US approach needed to change in order to incorporate local interests and put a face on American military involvement there. In Afghanistan, he analyzed more of the religious factors at hand.

Upon leaving the CIA in 2011, Gabriel founded Applied Memetics, a professional services company that works on communication and information solutions in conflict areas. One of his biggest and most favorite projects is called Havana Spring in Cuba, where dissidents are trained in the field of independent journalism, with the help of Web Stringers, a media company.

“They [the dissidents] were very much cognizant of the importance of winning the information war against the Castro regime and making sure the world understood what their plight was and the issue of democracy in Cuba,” Gabriel said. “Their motivation was to tell the story of average Cubans to people outside Cuba.”

One of Havana Spring’s successfully reported stories was of a recent cholera outbreak that was completely denied by the Cuban government.

Applied Memetics and Web Stringers are expanding this project to Ukraine, Georgia, central Asia and Burma—areas in which independent journalism is rare.

“The work that we’re doing in Cuba right now underscores the importance of the education that [SMPA students] are getting, the importance of the media and a free press, because it really is a foundation for everything,” Gabriel said. “It’s a serious job; it’s a serious mission; it’s a serious responsibility. There are people out in the world who would give anything to have an opportunity to run a blog or to be able to document government overreach, and they’re not able to.”

Web Stringers is currently looking for part-time workers and interns, and they could use some SMPA talent. To find out more information, email info@webstringers.com, and connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @danpgabriel.