Operation Mockingbird
Encyclopedia
Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency
campaign to influence 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. Davis' book, detailing how the media had been recruited and infiltrated by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was controversial and not always accurate. 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).
was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects (OSP). Soon afterwards OSP was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination
(OPC). This became the covert action
branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda
, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage
, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist
elements in threatened countries of the free world."
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence foreign media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham from The Washington Post
to run the project within the industry. According to Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great
; "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times
, Newsweek
, CBS
and other communications vehicles." Wisner referred to this apparatus as a "Mighty Wurlitzer
", referencing the theater organ capable of controlling diverse pipes, instruments, and sound effects from a central console.
In 1951, Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer
to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal
internationalist
organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative".
In 1977, a People
article by Alexander Butler alleged that one of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop
, whose foreign affairs articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by People Magazine to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop
who headed the international bureau of New York Herald Tribune
, Ben Bradlee foreign affairs correspondent for Newsweek
, James Reston
for the international section of the New York Times, Charles Douglas Jackson
foreign photo-journalist for Time Magazine, and international correspondents such as Walter Pincus
of the Washington Post, Charles Bartlett
of the Chattanooga Times and William C. Baggs
and Herb Gold of The Miami News
. According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
Congressional hearings in 1976 proved CIA had been paying of editors and reporters in most mainstream media outlets
After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceeding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services. These networks were run by people with well-known liberal but pro-American big business and anti-Soviet views such as William Paley
(CBS), Henry Luce
(Time
and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger
(New York Times), Alfred Friendly
(managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star
), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr.
, (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor).
The Office of Policy Coordination
(OPC) was funded by siphoning of funds intended for the Marshall Plan
. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers. Frank Wisner was constantly looking for ways to help convince the public of the dangers of Soviet communism
. In 1954, Wisner arranged for the funding of the Hollywood production of Animal Farm
, the animated allegory based on the book written by George Orwell
.
According to Alex Constantine
(Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts". Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran
(See: Operation Ajax
) and Guatemala
(See: Operation PBSUCCESS
).
Thomas Braden
, head of the International Organizations Division (IOD), played an important role in Operation Mockingbird. Many years later he revealed his role in these events:
which dealt with covert-action such as paramilitary or psychological influence operations, and the Office of Special Operations which dealt with espionage and counter-espionage were merged under the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP). Frank Wisner
became head of this new organization and Richard Helms
became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DDP.
J. Edgar Hoover
became jealous of the CIA's growing power. Institutionally, the organizations were also very different with the CIA holding a more politically diverse albeit machievallian group in contrast to the more beaucratically hide-bound and conservative FBI. This was reflected in Hoover's description of the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos". Hoover subsequently began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to Joseph McCarthy
who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair that Frank Wisner
had with Princess Caradja
in Romania
during the war. Hoover claimed that Caradja was a Soviet
agent.
Joseph McCarthy
also began accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists", and claimed he intended to root out a hundred of them. One of his first targets was Cord Meyer
, who was still working for Operation Mockingbird. In August, 1953, Richard Helms
, Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer that Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation
added credibility to the accusation by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and Frank Wisner
both came to his defense and refused to permit an FBI interrogation of Meyer.
Joseph McCarthy
did not realize what he was taking on. Contrary to statutory and legal limitations, once the network in auhority in the CIA saw its interests threatened, Wisner was directed to unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson
, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann
and Ed Murrow all engaged in intensely negative coverage of McCarthy, whose political reputation was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.
Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán
in Guatemala
during Operation PBSUCCESS
. Allen W. Dulles was even able to keep uncontrolled and especially Soviet sympathetic left-wing journalists from travelling to Guatemala, including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times. As the CIA's wealth and power increased, its aggressive focus toward the Soviet Union soon began not only heating up the Cold War
but also in disrupting relations with America's European allies which saw rising third-world liberationist movements as the ultimate threat to Western Civilization.
Consequently, even in the wake of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' 1952 presidential campaign pledge to "roll back the Iron Curtain
", American covert action operations came under scrutiny almost as soon as Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated in 1953. He soon set up an evaluation operation called Solarium, which had three committees playing analytical games to see which plans of action should be continued. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower
established the 5412 Committee in order to keep more of a check on the CIA's covert activities. The committee (also called the Special Group
) included the CIA director, the national security adviser, and the deputy secretaries at State and Defence and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were "proper" and in the national interest. It was also decided to include Richard B. Russell
, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee
. However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible deniability" planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee.
Ultimately, Eisenhower became concerned that CIA covert activities were being poorly coordinated with American foreign policy and might even being working primarily for senior corporate interests centered on upper-class families of the North-Eastern Establishment, and in 1956 appointed David K. E. Bruce
as a member of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA). Eisenhower asked Bruce to write a report on the CIA. It was presented to Eisenhower on 20 December 1956. Bruce argued that the CIA's covert actions were "responsible in great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exists in many countries in the world today." Bruce was also highly critical of Mockingbird. He argued: "what right have we to go barging around in other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office."
After Richard M. Bissell, Jr.
lost his post as Deputy Director for Plans in 1962, Tracy Barnes
took over the running of Mockingbird. According to Evan Thomas (The Very Best Men) Barnes planted editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA.
published Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross
. The book exposed the role the CIA was playing in foreign policy. This included the CIA coups in Guatemala
(Operation PBSUCCESS
) and Iran
(Operation Ajax
) and the Bay of Pigs Invasion
. It also revealed the CIA's attempts to overthrow President Sukarno
in Indonesia
and the covert operations taking place in Laos
and Vietnam
. The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government but this idea was rejected when Random House
pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition.
John McCone
, the new director of the CIA, also attempted to stop Edward Yates
from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company
(NBC). This attempt at censorship
failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary.
In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald found out that Ramparts
, another CIA backed left-wing publication, had discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association
and was considering publishing. When the magazine stated it had lost control of the information, and would likely be forced to publicize, FitzGerald ordered a plan to either nuetralize the campaign and/or wind-down Mockingbird. Accordingly, he appointed Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas
for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."
Nonetheless, this dirty tricks campaign failed to nuetralize Ramparts publishing this story in March 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern
, was entitled NSA and the CIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student Association
it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe
, Asia
, and South America
. It named Cord Meyer
as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary journal Encounter
. However, the campaign by Applewhite managed to steer many of the citations away from leftist organizations and toward most the few conservative organizations backed by the CIA. Those organizations which were exposed, were unsurprisingly ones which could not be linked to Ramparts, itself a CIA proprietary organization.
In May 1967, Thomas Braden
responded to this by publishing an article entitled, "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'", in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress
. As he pointed out in the article: "In the early 1950s, when the Cold War
was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society
's approving Medicare
."
Meyer
's role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy
. The book was highly critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia
, especially in its critique toward how the agency subverted French control of the opium trade. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer's when he was a liberal activist after the war.
investigations (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
) in 1975. According to the Congress
report published in 1976:
Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.
In February 1976, George H. W. Bush
, the recently appointed Director of the CIA, announced a new policy: "Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station." However, he added that the CIA would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.
" report, released by the National Security Archive
on June 26, 2007, during the period from March 12, 1963 and June 15, 1963, the CIA installed telephone taps on two Washington-based news reporters.
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
campaign to influence foreign media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
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. Davis' book, detailing how the media had been recruited and infiltrated by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was controversial and not always accurate. 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
White House Plumbers
The White House Plumbers, sometimes simply called the Plumbers, were a covert White House Special Investigations Unit established July 24, 1971 during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Its task was to stop the leaking of classified information to the news media...
" E. Howard Hunt
E. Howard Hunt
Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. was an American intelligence officer and writer. Hunt served for many years as a CIA officer. Hunt, with G...
and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008).
History
In 1948, Frank WisnerFrank Wisner
Frank Gardiner Wisner was head of Office of Strategic Services operations in southeastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the head of the Directorate of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s....
was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects (OSP). Soon afterwards OSP was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination
Office of Policy Coordination
The Office of Policy Coordination was a United States covert psychological operations and paramilitary action organization. Created as an independent office in 1948, it was merged with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951....
(OPC). This became the covert action
Covert action
Covert action may refer to:*Covert operation, several HUMINT techniques used by intelligence agencies*Covert Action, a game designed by Sid Meier*Covert Action , a film directed by Romolo Guerrieri*CovertAction Quarterly, an anti-CIA magazine...
branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage
Sabotage
Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening another entity through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction. In a workplace setting, sabotage is the conscious withdrawal of efficiency generally directed at causing some change in workplace conditions. One who engages in sabotage is...
, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
elements in threatened countries of the free world."
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence foreign media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham from The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
to run the project within the industry. According to Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great
Katharine the Great
Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post is an unauthorized biography of Katharine Graham, the newspaper owner, authored by Deborah Davis, and initially released in 1979....
; "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
and other communications vehicles." Wisner referred to this apparatus as a "Mighty Wurlitzer
Wurlitzer
The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, usually referred to simply as Wurlitzer, was an American company that produced stringed instruments, woodwinds, brass instruments, theatre organs, band organs, orchestrions, electronic organs, electric pianos and jukeboxes....
", referencing the theater organ capable of controlling diverse pipes, instruments, and sound effects from a central console.
In 1951, Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer
Cord Meyer
Cord Meyer, Jr. was an American Central Intelligence Agency official.-Early life:Meyer's father, Cord Meyer Sr., was a diplomat and former real estate developer. His grandfather, also called Cord Meyer, was a property developer and a chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee. He was...
to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
internationalist
Internationalist
Internationalist may refer to:* Internationalism , a movement to increase cooperation across national borders* Internationalist, socialists opposed to World War I* The Internationalist Review, an e-journal founded in Maastricht...
organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative".
In 1977, a People
People
People is a plurality of human beings or other beings possessing enough qualities constituting personhood. It has two usages:* as the plural of person or a group of people People is a plurality of human beings or other beings possessing enough qualities constituting personhood. It has two usages:*...
article by Alexander Butler alleged that one of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop
Joseph Alsop
Joseph Wright Alsop V was an American journalist and syndicated newspaper columnist from the 1930s through the 1970s.-Early years:...
, whose foreign affairs articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by People Magazine to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop
Stewart Alsop
Stewart Johonnot Oliver Alsop was an American newspaper columnist and political analyst.Born and raised in Avon, Connecticut, Alsop attended Groton School and Yale University...
who headed the international bureau of New York Herald Tribune
New York Herald Tribune
The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...
, Ben Bradlee foreign affairs correspondent for Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, James Reston
James Reston
James Barrett Reston , nicknamed "Scotty," was an American journalist whose career spanned the mid 1930s to the early 1990s. He was associated for many years with the New York Times.-Life:...
for the international section of the New York Times, Charles Douglas Jackson
Charles Douglas Jackson
General Charles Douglas Jackson was an expert on psychological warfare who served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and later as Special Assistant to the President in the Eisenhower administration....
foreign photo-journalist for Time Magazine, and international correspondents such as Walter Pincus
Walter Pincus
Walter Haskell Pincus is a national security journalist for The Washington Post. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in association with other Washington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media...
of the Washington Post, Charles Bartlett
Charles L. Bartlett (journalist)
Charles L. Bartlett was awarded the 1956 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for his original disclosures that lead to the resignation of Harold E. Talbott as Secretary of the Air Force. He started the Washington D.C...
of the Chattanooga Times and William C. Baggs
Bill Baggs
William Calhoun "Bill" Baggs was editor of The Miami News from 1957 until his death in 1969. Bill Baggs was one of a group of Southern editors who campaigned for civil rights for African-Americans in the 1950s and 1960s...
and Herb Gold of The Miami News
The Miami News
The Miami News was the dominant evening newspaper in Miami, Florida for most of the 20th century, its chief concurrent competitor being the morning-edition of The Miami Herald. The paper started publishing in May 1896 as a weekly called The Miami Metropolis. The Metropolis had become a daily paper...
. According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
Congressional hearings in 1976 proved CIA had been paying of editors and reporters in most mainstream media outlets
After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceeding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services. These networks were run by people with well-known liberal but pro-American big business and anti-Soviet views such as William Paley
William Paley
William Paley was a British Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology, which made use of the watchmaker analogy .-Life:Paley was Born in Peterborough, England, and was...
(CBS), Henry Luce
Henry Luce
Henry Robinson Luce was an influential American publisher. He launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines that transformed journalism and the reading habits of upscale Americans...
(Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger
Arthur Hays Sulzberger
Arthur Hays Sulzberger was the publisher of The New York Times from 1935 to 1961. During that time, daily circulation rose from 465,000 to 713,000 and Sunday circulation from 745,000 to 1.4 million; the staff more than doubled, reaching 5,200; advertising linage grew from 19 million to 62 million...
(New York Times), Alfred Friendly
Alfred Friendly
Alfred Friendly was an American journalist, editor and writer for the Washington Post. He began his career as a reporter with the Post in 1939 and became Managing Editor in 1955. In 1967 he covered the Mideast War for the Post in a series of articles for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for...
(managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star
Washington Star
The Washington Star, previously known as the Washington Star-News and the Washington Evening Star, was a daily afternoon newspaper published in Washington, D.C. between 1852 and 1981. For most of that time, it was the city's newspaper of record, and the longtime home to columnist Mary McGrory and...
), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr.
Barry Bingham, Sr.
George Barry Bingham, Sr., CBE, was the patriarch of a family that dominated local media in Louisville for several decades in the 20th century....
, (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor).
The Office of Policy Coordination
Office of Policy Coordination
The Office of Policy Coordination was a United States covert psychological operations and paramilitary action organization. Created as an independent office in 1948, it was merged with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951....
(OPC) was funded by siphoning of funds intended for the Marshall Plan
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was the large-scale American program to aid Europe where the United States gave monetary support to help rebuild European economies after the end of World War II in order to combat the spread of Soviet communism. The plan was in operation for four years beginning in April 1948...
. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers. Frank Wisner was constantly looking for ways to help convince the public of the dangers of Soviet communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
. In 1954, Wisner arranged for the funding of the Hollywood production of Animal Farm
Animal Farm (1954 film)
Animal Farm is a 1954 British animated film by Halas and Batchelor, based on the book of the same name by George Orwell. It was the first British animated feature released worldwide, though Handling Ships was the first British animated feature ever made...
, the animated allegory based on the book written by George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
.
According to Alex Constantine
Alex Constantine
Alex Constantine is an American author, investigative journalist, radio commentator and musician. His work focuses on fascism, political corruption, Big Business and organized crime. His work provided the premise for several BBC documentaries. In 2005, he was a featured speaker Alex Constantine is...
(Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts". Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
(See: Operation Ajax
Operation Ajax
The 1953 Iranian coup d'état was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States under the name TPAJAX Project...
) and Guatemala
Guatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
(See: Operation PBSUCCESS
Operation PBSUCCESS
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the democratically-elected President of Guatemala....
).
Thomas Braden
Thomas Braden
Thomas Wardell Braden was an American journalist, best remembered as the author of Eight is Enough, which spawned a popular television program, and was co-host of the CNN show Crossfire...
, head of the International Organizations Division (IOD), played an important role in Operation Mockingbird. Many years later he revealed his role in these events:
- "If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in EuropeEuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
—a Labour leader—suppose he just thought, This man can use fifty thousand dollars, he's working well and doing a good job - he could hand it to him and never have to account to anybody... There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war—the secret war.... It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first. Journalists were a target, labor unions a particular target—that was one of the activities in which the communists spent the most money."
Part of the Directorate for Plans
In August 1952, the Office of Policy CoordinationOffice of Policy Coordination
The Office of Policy Coordination was a United States covert psychological operations and paramilitary action organization. Created as an independent office in 1948, it was merged with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951....
which dealt with covert-action such as paramilitary or psychological influence operations, and the Office of Special Operations which dealt with espionage and counter-espionage were merged under the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP). Frank Wisner
Frank Wisner
Frank Gardiner Wisner was head of Office of Strategic Services operations in southeastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the head of the Directorate of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s....
became head of this new organization and Richard Helms
Richard Helms
Richard McGarrah Helms was the Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. He was the only director to have been convicted of lying to the United States Congress over Central Intelligence Agency undercover activities. In 1977, he was sentenced to the maximum fine and received a suspended...
became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DDP.
J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
became jealous of the CIA's growing power. Institutionally, the organizations were also very different with the CIA holding a more politically diverse albeit machievallian group in contrast to the more beaucratically hide-bound and conservative FBI. This was reflected in Hoover's description of the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos". Hoover subsequently began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair that Frank Wisner
Frank Wisner
Frank Gardiner Wisner was head of Office of Strategic Services operations in southeastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the head of the Directorate of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s....
had with Princess Caradja
Catherine Caradja
Princess Catherine Olympia Caradja was a celebrated Romanian aristocrat and philanthropist. Born in Bucharest, she grew up in England and France, and lived in Romania from 1908 to 1952, when she escaped from the communist regime on a Danube boat...
in Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
during the war. Hoover claimed that Caradja was a Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
agent.
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
also began accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists", and claimed he intended to root out a hundred of them. One of his first targets was Cord Meyer
Cord Meyer
Cord Meyer, Jr. was an American Central Intelligence Agency official.-Early life:Meyer's father, Cord Meyer Sr., was a diplomat and former real estate developer. His grandfather, also called Cord Meyer, was a property developer and a chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee. He was...
, who was still working for Operation Mockingbird. In August, 1953, Richard Helms
Richard Helms
Richard McGarrah Helms was the Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. He was the only director to have been convicted of lying to the United States Congress over Central Intelligence Agency undercover activities. In 1977, he was sentenced to the maximum fine and received a suspended...
, Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer that Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
added credibility to the accusation by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and Frank Wisner
Frank Wisner
Frank Gardiner Wisner was head of Office of Strategic Services operations in southeastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the head of the Directorate of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s....
both came to his defense and refused to permit an FBI interrogation of Meyer.
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
did not realize what he was taking on. Contrary to statutory and legal limitations, once the network in auhority in the CIA saw its interests threatened, Wisner was directed to unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson
Drew Pearson (journalist)
Andrew Russell Pearson , known professionally as Drew Pearson, was one of the best-known American columnists of his day, noted for his muckraking syndicated newspaper column "Washington Merry-Go-Round," in which he attacked various public persons, sometimes with little or no objective proof for his...
, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann was an American intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War...
and Ed Murrow all engaged in intensely negative coverage of McCarthy, whose political reputation was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.
Guatemala
Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of PresidentPresident of Guatemala
The title of President of Guatemala has been the usual title of the leader of Guatemala since 1839, when that title was assumed by Mariano Rivera Paz...
Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán
Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán
Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as Defense Minister of Guatemala from 1944–1951, and as President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954....
in Guatemala
Guatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
during Operation PBSUCCESS
Operation PBSUCCESS
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the democratically-elected President of Guatemala....
. Allen W. Dulles was even able to keep uncontrolled and especially Soviet sympathetic left-wing journalists from travelling to Guatemala, including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times. As the CIA's wealth and power increased, its aggressive focus toward the Soviet Union soon began not only heating up the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
but also in disrupting relations with America's European allies which saw rising third-world liberationist movements as the ultimate threat to Western Civilization.
Consequently, even in the wake of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' 1952 presidential campaign pledge to "roll back the Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain
The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989...
", American covert action operations came under scrutiny almost as soon as Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated in 1953. He soon set up an evaluation operation called Solarium, which had three committees playing analytical games to see which plans of action should be continued. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army...
established the 5412 Committee in order to keep more of a check on the CIA's covert activities. The committee (also called the Special Group
NSC 5412/2 Special Group
The NSC 5412/2 Special Group, often referred simply as the Special Group, was an initially secret, but later public, subcommittee of the United States National Security Council responsible for coordinating government covert operations...
) included the CIA director, the national security adviser, and the deputy secretaries at State and Defence and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were "proper" and in the national interest. It was also decided to include Richard B. Russell
Richard Russell, Jr.
Richard Brevard Russell, Jr. was a Democratic Party politician from the southeastern state of Georgia. He served as state governor from 1931 to 1933 and United States senator from 1933 to 1971....
, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee
United States Senate Committee on Armed Services
The Committee on Armed Services is a committee of the United States Senate empowered with legislative oversight of the nation's military, including the Department of Defense, military research and development, nuclear energy , benefits for members of the military, the Selective Service System and...
. However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible deniability" planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee.
Ultimately, Eisenhower became concerned that CIA covert activities were being poorly coordinated with American foreign policy and might even being working primarily for senior corporate interests centered on upper-class families of the North-Eastern Establishment, and in 1956 appointed David K. E. Bruce
David K. E. Bruce
David Kirkpatrick Este Bruce was an American diplomat, and the only American to serve as Ambassador to France, the Republic of Germany and the United Kingdom.-Biography:...
as a member of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA). Eisenhower asked Bruce to write a report on the CIA. It was presented to Eisenhower on 20 December 1956. Bruce argued that the CIA's covert actions were "responsible in great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exists in many countries in the world today." Bruce was also highly critical of Mockingbird. He argued: "what right have we to go barging around in other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office."
After Richard M. Bissell, Jr.
Richard M. Bissell, Jr.
Richard Mervin Bissell, Jr. was an American Central Intelligence Agency officer responsible for major projects such as the U-2 spy plane and the Bay of Pigs Invasion.-Early years:...
lost his post as Deputy Director for Plans in 1962, Tracy Barnes
Tracy Barnes
Charles Tracy Barnes was a senior staff member at the United States' Central Intelligence Agency , serving as principal manager of CIA operations in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion....
took over the running of Mockingbird. According to Evan Thomas (The Very Best Men) Barnes planted editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA.
First exposure
In 1964, Random HouseRandom House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
published Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross
Thomas Ross
Thomas Ross was a Representative to the United States Congress from Pennsylvania.Son of Mary Ross and John Ross , Thomas Ross was born in Easton, Northampton County, Pennsylvania. He attended the Doylestown, Pennsylvania, schools. He graduated from Princeton College in 1823...
. The book exposed the role the CIA was playing in foreign policy. This included the CIA coups in Guatemala
Guatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
(Operation PBSUCCESS
Operation PBSUCCESS
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the democratically-elected President of Guatemala....
) and Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
(Operation Ajax
Operation Ajax
The 1953 Iranian coup d'état was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States under the name TPAJAX Project...
) and the Bay of Pigs Invasion
Bay of Pigs Invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful action by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba, with support and encouragement from the US government, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The invasion was launched in April 1961, less than three months...
. It also revealed the CIA's attempts to overthrow President Sukarno
Sukarno
Sukarno, born Kusno Sosrodihardjo was the first President of Indonesia.Sukarno was the leader of his country's struggle for independence from the Netherlands and was Indonesia's first President from 1945 to 1967...
in Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...
and the covert operations taking place in Laos
Laos
Laos Lao: ສາທາລະນະລັດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ປະຊາຊົນລາວ Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south and Thailand to the west...
and Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
. The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government but this idea was rejected when Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition.
John McCone
John McCone
John Alexander McCone was an American businessman and politician who served as Director of Central Intelligence during the height of the Cold War.- Background :...
, the new director of the CIA, also attempted to stop Edward Yates
Edward Yates
Edward J. Yates was an American television director who was the director of the ABC television program American Bandstand from 1952 until 1969....
from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
(NBC). This attempt at censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary.
In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald found out that Ramparts
Ramparts (magazine)
Ramparts was an American political and literary magazine, published from 1962 through 1975.-History:Founded by Edward M. Keating as a Catholic literary quarterly, the magazine became closely associated with the New Left after executive editor Warren Hinckle hired Robert Scheer as managing editor...
, another CIA backed left-wing publication, had discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association
National Student Association
The United States National Student Association, a confederation of American college and university student governments, was founded in 1947 at a conference at the University of Wisconsin. It established its first headquarters in Madison, not far from the U. of Wisconsin campus...
and was considering publishing. When the magazine stated it had lost control of the information, and would likely be forced to publicize, FitzGerald ordered a plan to either nuetralize the campaign and/or wind-down Mockingbird. Accordingly, he appointed Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas
Evan Thomas
Evan Welling Thomas III is an American journalist and author. He currently teaches journalism at Princeton University.-Life and career:Thomas was born in Huntington, New York and was raised in Cold Spring Harbor, New York...
for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."
Nonetheless, this dirty tricks campaign failed to nuetralize Ramparts publishing this story in March 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern
Sol Stern
Sol Stern is a senior fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to its quarterly magazine City Journal. He is the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice , and has written extensively on education reform...
, was entitled NSA and the CIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student Association
National Student Association
The United States National Student Association, a confederation of American college and university student governments, was founded in 1947 at a conference at the University of Wisconsin. It established its first headquarters in Madison, not far from the U. of Wisconsin campus...
it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
, and South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
. It named Cord Meyer
Cord Meyer
Cord Meyer, Jr. was an American Central Intelligence Agency official.-Early life:Meyer's father, Cord Meyer Sr., was a diplomat and former real estate developer. His grandfather, also called Cord Meyer, was a property developer and a chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee. He was...
as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary journal Encounter
Encounter (magazine)
Encounter was a literary magazine, founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and early neoconservative author Irving Kristol. The magazine ceased publication in 1991...
. However, the campaign by Applewhite managed to steer many of the citations away from leftist organizations and toward most the few conservative organizations backed by the CIA. Those organizations which were exposed, were unsurprisingly ones which could not be linked to Ramparts, itself a CIA proprietary organization.
In May 1967, Thomas Braden
Thomas Braden
Thomas Wardell Braden was an American journalist, best remembered as the author of Eight is Enough, which spawned a popular television program, and was co-host of the CNN show Crossfire...
responded to this by publishing an article entitled, "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'", in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
. As he pointed out in the article: "In the early 1950s, when the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society
John Birch Society
The John Birch Society is an American political advocacy group that supports anti-communism, limited government, a Constitutional Republic and personal freedom. It has been described as radical right-wing....
's approving Medicare
Medicare (United States)
Medicare is a social insurance program administered by the United States government, providing health insurance coverage to people who are aged 65 and over; to those who are under 65 and are permanently physically disabled or who have a congenital physical disability; or to those who meet other...
."
Meyer
Cord Meyer
Cord Meyer, Jr. was an American Central Intelligence Agency official.-Early life:Meyer's father, Cord Meyer Sr., was a diplomat and former real estate developer. His grandfather, also called Cord Meyer, was a property developer and a chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee. He was...
's role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy
Alfred W. McCoy
Alfred William McCoy is a historian of Southeast Asia. He is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. McCoy graduated from the Kent School in 1964. He earned his B.A...
. The book was highly critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
, especially in its critique toward how the agency subverted French control of the opium trade. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer's when he was a liberal activist after the war.
Church Committee investigations
Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Frank ChurchFrank Church
Frank Forrester Church III was an American lawyer and politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a United States Senator from Idaho from 1957 to 1981....
investigations (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
Church Committee
The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975. A precursor to the U.S...
) in 1975. According to the Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
report published in 1976:
- "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."
Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.
In February 1976, George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States . He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States , a congressman, an ambassador, and Director of Central Intelligence.Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to...
, the recently appointed Director of the CIA, announced a new policy: "Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station." However, he added that the CIA would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.
"Family Jewels" Report
According to the "Family JewelsFamily Jewels (Central Intelligence Agency)
The Family Jewels is the informal name used to refer to a set of reports that detail activities conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Considered illegal or inappropriate, these actions were conducted over the span of decades, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s...
" report, released by the National Security Archive
National Security Archive
The National Security Archive is a 501 non-governmental, non-profit research and archival institution located in the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.. Founded in 1985 by Scott Armstrong, it archives and publishes declassified U.S. government files concerning selected topics of US...
on June 26, 2007, during the period from March 12, 1963 and June 15, 1963, the CIA installed telephone taps on two Washington-based news reporters.
See also
- Encounter magazineEncounter (magazine)Encounter was a literary magazine, founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and early neoconservative author Irving Kristol. The magazine ceased publication in 1991...
- Cord MeyerCord MeyerCord Meyer, Jr. was an American Central Intelligence Agency official.-Early life:Meyer's father, Cord Meyer Sr., was a diplomat and former real estate developer. His grandfather, also called Cord Meyer, was a property developer and a chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee. He was...
- Judith MillerJudith Miller (journalist)Judith Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, formerly of the New York Times Washington bureau. Her coverage of Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction program both before and after the 2003 invasion generated much controversy...
- Propaganda in the United StatesPropaganda in the United StatesPropaganda in the United States comes from governments and private entities of various kinds. Propaganda is information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to influence opinions and encite action...
- Radio Liberty
- James RisenJames RisenJames Risen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist for The New York Times who previously worked for the Los Angeles Times. He has written or co-written many articles concerning U.S...
- Robertson PanelRobertson PanelThe Robertson Panel was a committee commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952 in response to widespread reports of unidentified flying objects, especially in the Washington, D.C. area. The panel was briefed on U.S...
- White propagandaWhite propagandaWhite propaganda is propaganda which truthfully states its origin. It is the most common type of propaganda. It generally comes from an openly identified source, and is characterized by gentler methods of persuasion than black propaganda and grey propaganda...
Further reading
- Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington PostKatharine the GreatKatharine the Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post is an unauthorized biography of Katharine Graham, the newspaper owner, authored by Deborah Davis, and initially released in 1979....
by Deborah Davis, Harcourt Brace JovanovichHarcourt Trade PublishersHarcourt was a United States publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. The company was based in San Diego, California, with an Editorial / Sales / Marketing / Rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida.In 2007, the U.S...
, 1979. This book makes many claims about Katharine GrahamKatharine GrahamKatharine Meyer Graham was an American publisher. She led her family's newspaper, The Washington Post, for more than two decades, overseeing its most famous period, the Watergate coverage that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon...
, then owner of the Washington Post, and her cooperation with Operation Mockingbird.