A few days ago Karen Hughes, the official in charge of improving America’s image in the Islamic world, announced a new public relations offensive — for the South Pacific.

It’s hard to imagine Polynesians swooning to al Qaeda’s pitch, but Hughes told Pacific Island leaders at a Washington reception on May 7 that her Office of Public Diplomacy in the State Department would soon open an office in Suva, the capital of Fiji.

While Hughes was tending to the Pacific, Congress was looking at the specific, in this case the Bush administration’s Arabic language satellite television network that, as it turns out, is run by people who don’t speak Arabic.

Frank Wisner had to be spinning in his sealed casket.

Sixty years ago, at the dawn of the Cold War, the CIA’s propaganda wizard was cranking up his“Mighty Wurlitzer,” as it became known, a global covert information operation designed to counter Soviet subversion in Western Europe, which lay in ruins at the end of World War II.

At its mightiest, but unknown to Americans, Wisner’s wurlitzer pumped out anti-Soviet, pro-West messages through an astonishing web of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television networks, think tanks, cultural organizations, union leaders and politicians here and abroad, some owned wholly by the CIA, others in silent partnership.

At least 400 American reporters and media executives, some paid agents, some volunteers — and some of them ardent, well-known liberals — were secretly collaborating with the CIA to spread bad news about the Soviets and good news about the United States, some of it concocted by the spy agency, according to news reports and congressional investigations in the 1970s.

Some people think the clandestine agit-prop program contributed mightily to discrediting the Soviets and their stooges in East Europe.

Others would say the open, State Department-financed tours of Louis Armstrong and other American musicians, writers and artists — not to mention the Soviets own bad behavior, like invading Czechoslovakia in 1968 — did more to win the world’s hearts and minds than all the CIA’s secret programs combined.

In any event, the expose of the CIA’s under-the-table ties to journalists in 1976 provoked a mass revulsion here and abroad, handing America’s critics a propaganda victory of their own.

Today, if the CIA is running an equivalent operation, it’s about the only secret the administration has been able to keep.

Meanwhile, our open efforts at romancing foreign public opinion have pretty much been a bust, if the polls are any guide.

In the more than two years since Bush’s former campaign message-manager Karen Hughes has been at work, foreign approval of the United States has plunged.

The invasion of Iraq, of course, may have made her job impossible.

“It’s the policy, stupid,” the House Foreign Affairs Committee heard a few weeks ago, according to Mike Pence, R-Ind.

But the chaos at the U.S.-financed Alhurra TV station, which is supposed to broadcast the American side of the story in Arabic across the Middle East, seems emblematic of our message programs.

Hughes is not directly responsible for Alhurra, but she sits on the board of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent agency that administers the station, and she has an interest in keeping it in tune with other U.S. efforts to counter the echo chamber of pro-jihad media in the Middle East.

Last week, a Foreign Relations subcommittee helmed by longtime New York City-area Congressman Gary L. Ackerman heard how the board learned from a listener that the station was airing a live speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah denouncing the United States and Israel.

In December it also broadcast uncritical pieces from a Holocaust-denial conference hosted by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran.

It also quoted the unfiltered sentiment of some non-Zionist Orthodox Jews that Israel did “not have a right to exist,” the panel heard.

Evidently Alhurra (“the Free One”) didn’t think it necessary to air even a minimal critical analysis of these events, as is journalistic custom — not to mention, one would think, a minimal requirement of a station financed by the U.S. to get its message out.

“Wasn’t anybody watching the store?” Ackerman asked Alhurra executive Joaquin Blaya, a Chilean expatriot who made a fortune in Spanish language broadcasting here.

As it turned out, according to Blaya and other government witnesses, Alhurra, set up in 2003, did not employ Arabic-speaking news managers who could pull the plug on its reporters’ inexperience — or mischief, as it has been suggested. It didn’t even have an assignment desk to control what stories the reporters worked on.

Blaya and the others said they had put new structures in place on the board, including a new president for news, to monitor what was on the air.

But none of the new managers, or anyone on the broadcasting board, Blaya admitted, spoke Arabic.

“How do you monitor it if you don’t know what’s being said?” Ackerman asked, incredulous.

Blaya was contrite in the face of the tongue lashing that Ackerman and other panel members dealt out.

But in the corridor after the hearing, Blaya insisted that “Alhurra would lose all credibility if it did not give air time to people who disagree with American policy,” according to a report by New York Times reporter Helene Cooper.

“That’s the difference between a free media and propaganda,” he said.

Indeed, according to its Web site , Alhurra “is dedicated to presenting accurate, balanced and comprehensive news.”

But in a telephone interview with me the next day, Ackerman said that’s a misreading of Alhurra’s purpose.

“The terrorists already have a TV station,” he said, referring to Hezbollah’s al-Manar.

“We don’t need to . . . promote the good works of the terrorists’ organizations.”

Alhurra’s job is to focus on “the American perspective of things” in the Middle East, he said.

And that’s not propaganda, he insisted.

“We have guidelines to protect the interests [of the United States], and telling the truth is paramount among them,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ackerman didn’t sound confident that Alhurra could be straightened out.

“They rattle off a whole bunch of good things that they do,” he said of witnesses from the State Department and the broadcasting board. “My concern is do we have a measurement tool?”

Given the criticism of Alhurra and other U.S. media aimed at Islamic listeners, I asked Ackerman, should maybe the U.S. borrow the playbook from the late Frank Wisner’s Mighty Wurlitzer?

“No, I do not,” he said. “I would not be in favor of that. We have to be transparent.”

Why? I asked.

“Why? Because we have to have credibility.”

But given America’s low standing among Muslims, I asked, wouldn’t the messages we want to get out have more credibility if the U.S. hand were hidden?

“And when someone discovers it?” Ackerman retorted.

“That’s problematic, isn’t it? he added.

“We cause enough outrage. We don’t need secret programs to blow up in our face.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.