“Operation Mockingbird [was] a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at promoting the views of the CIA within the media. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without portfolio for their country.“
~~  From Lifting the Veil Chapter VII on Operation Mockingbird

Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program that made a mockery of free press in the US. The existence of this program which spread CIA propaganda through the media was flatly denied until it was uncovered in Senate hearings in the mid-1970s. The CIA’s claims that it shut the program down in 1976 are undoubtedly a further deception. They simply shifted the operation to other parts of the agency as they had been caught red-handed.

Before the US Senate Church Committee revelations, the media and CIA colluded overtly in their media propaganda campaigns, as you will read below. As the public was quite incensed with these revelations, afterwards the collusion became covert and much more sophisticated. Nowadays media executives or journalists are very careful keep their CIA connections secret, yet there is plenty of evidence the techniques developed and used under Operation Mockingbird continue to be common practice.

Below the following essay on Operation Mockingbird are a wealth of footnotes with links to verify and explore further the information presented. This essay is taken from chapter seven of the incredibly well researched and revealing online book Lifting the Veil, available in its entirety on this webpage.

“About a third of the whole CIA budget went to media propaganda operations… We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year just for that… close to a billion dollars are being spent every year by the United States on secret propaganda.” – Testimony of William Schapp to Congress²⁵²

In 1948, the United States began the Marshall Plan, an initiative to help the devastated Europe recover from the War. The CIA decided to siphon funds to create the Office of Policy Coordination, which would become the covert action branch of the Agency.²⁵³ It was under this program that Operation Mockingbird, a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at promoting the views of the CIA within the media, began. From the onset, Operation Mockingbird was one of the most sensitive of the CIA’s operations, with recruitment of journalists and training of intelligence officers for propaganda purposes usually undertaken by Director Allen Dulles himself or his direct peers.²⁵⁴

It is a false belief that the CIA ‘infiltrated’ unwitting media institutions. The recruitment of journalists was frequently done with complicity from top management and ownership. Former CIA Director William Colby claimed during the Church Committee investigative hearings, “Lets go to the managements. They were witting.” Among the organizations that would lend their help to the propaganda efforts was the New York Times, Newsweek, Associated Press, and the Miami Herald. Providing cover to CIA agents was a part of the New York Times policy, set by their late publisher, Arthur Hays Salzberger.²⁵⁵

The investigative committee of Frank Church, officially titled “Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities”, uncovered a lot of evidence concerning Operation Mockingbird and came to the conclusion that:

“The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”²⁵⁶

Carl Bernstein, the reporter famous for his excellent investigation into the Watergate scandal, wrote that:

“(Joseph) Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go betweens with spies in Communist countries.

Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”²⁵⁷

While a majority of Mockingbird operations were overseas, the goal was to have important, hard-hitting stories to be circulated in the American press. Relationships with major United States media institutions certainly helped with this goal. Bernstein lists The New York Times, CBS and Time inc. as the most productive relationships the agency cultivated. They also created front organizations overseas who publicly maintained an appearance of free press but privately were operated by the agency. An example of this is the Rome Daily American, which was 40% owned by the CIA for three decades.²⁵⁸

Continue reading CIA Operation Mockingbird & Control of All Mainstream Media →