Tag Archives: Carl Bernstein

Why the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird is Widely Misunderstood

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By Alex Constantine

Source: Constantine Report

In November, Newsweek, one of the most trusted news sources in the land, referred to Operation Mockingbird (CIA influence on the media, and, in many cases, infiltration) as “a supposed Cold War-era CIA program that is frequently referenced by QAnon conspiracy theorists.” (Source) Newsweek, of course, and the Washington Post were hubs in the Mockingbird network, so denial and misrepresentation are understandable.

But in the real world of CIA shenanigans …

Sourcewatch: “Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.

“The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis’ 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. But Davis’ book, alleging that the media had been recruited (infiltrated) by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was itself controversial and has since been shown to have had a number of erroneous assertions. More evidence of Mockingbird’s existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate “plumber” E. Howard Hunt and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008).”

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_CIA_and_journalism

Carl Bernstein wrote about the program at length in Rolling Stone, and he waasn’t a QAnon adherent. Neither were the many journalists who have documented the history of the CIA-media relationship.

A misunderstanding about the code name Mockingbird has led some investigative reporters to dispute the operation’s existence. An FOIA request is submitted to the CIA for any related records. The Agency responds that it has no files under that code name. The journalist does receive documents on a Project Mockingbird, but that was an unrelated media surveillance op, and had nothing to do with Wurlitzers pumping out military-industrial propaganda. The journalist does his research, he finds that the CIA has, in fact, influenced public opinion via the news media, but where is the nomenclature Operation Mockingbird?

The journalist then brow-beats “conspiracy theorists” for falling into rabbit holes.

The fault lies with the reporter who doesn’t do essential homework on the origins of the bird. Officially, there is no  “Operation Mockingbird,” for the simple reason that the CIA didn’t exist when the it was conceived. Truman signed the Agency into existence in 1947. Allen Dulles, who would be appointed as its director, christened Operation Mockingbird the year before the Agency was born. His ambition to control men’s minds was a glint in his eye at the time. Cold war loomed, and he considered propaganda to be a priority. Dulles began lining up publishers, editors and journalists for an undertaking he thought of as mass mind control.

Nearly all of the CIA’s mind control files were destroyed in January, 1973 at the direction of DCI Richard Helms, so it’s possible that OM documents were among them. (Source: “Joint Hearings Before the Select Committee on Intelligence,” August 3, 1977, p. 3.)

By the time the CIA was repurposed from the obsolete postwar OSS, Operation Mockingbird was already well underway. As CIA director, Dulles pressed on with his objective to manipulate the common volk with dodgy news copy and op-ed treatises. It was a Dulles initiative before the CIA took Mockingbird under its wing.

Frank Wisner, the notorious Nazi recruiter, was selected to oversee the program. Wisner was recruited by Dean Acheson 1947 for a slot in the State Department’s Office of Occupied Territories. Shortly thereafter, the CIA created a the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the covert operations division of the Agency,  and Wisner was put in charge of the off-the-books media operation. (“Project Mockingbird,” the CIA journalist surveillance op, may well have been a sub-program.) So Mockingbird was a going concern by 1950, the year given by SourceWatch, among others, for its inception. Another common misunderstanding is the assumption that, because the CIA interacts with the media, all news is “fake news.” It isn’t. The overwhelming majority of journalists are independent of control beyond the editor’s desk. The lion’s share of all news reports are accurate enough — with the exception of the ultra-conservative echo chamber. But “fake news” is planted in the public print. Reader’s Digest, for instance, was a Mockingbird disinformation outlet for decades, and still prints propaganda. But the magazine wasn’t filled cover-to-cover with CIA perception management. One or two articles on Cold War topics were dropped into a mix of compressed books, human interest pieces, recipes, dieting tips, and the usual Digest  mom’s-jowls content. In some instances, paid CIA assets wrote the political articles. It’s the occasional planted story that warps public opinion. It’s not all that heavy-handed, a poison pill not a sledge hammer.

Newsweek was (and is) among the magazines most useful to the Operation. The code name may be unofficial, but infiltration of the media is not hard to prove, and it doesn’t take a complicit news weekly to know which way the wind blows.

The Propaganda Ministry Known as “the Free Press”

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

As I have reported on many occasions, the presstitutes constitute not a free press but a Ministry of Propaganda for the government and ruling oligarchic interests. Ben Norton explains that the New York Times gets permission from Washington before it prints a story:

The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.

He explains that CIA control and manipulation of the media has a long tradition, a tradition exposed by journalists who know:

Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled “The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.”

Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had “secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Bernstein wrote:

“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.”

Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.

However, he added, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”

These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government — or at least for the US national security state.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51828.htm 

Udo Ulfkotte, an editor of the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Explained in his book, Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalism), that no significant journalist in Europe is free of CIA influence. The English language edition, Journalists For Hire: How The CIA Buys The News, has been suppressed. A few copies managed to escape destruction.  Two are currently available on Amazon, one for $910.99 and one for $1,994.99.

As I have often reported, in the “Western democracies” truth is suppressed and controlled explanations are put in its place. Western peoples are largely unaware of the agendas of the national security state and ruling elites.  People in all walks of life serve these agendas without knowing it. Those who try to inform them are usually dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”  Obviously, there can be no democracy when the electorate is kept in the dark.