Everything about Operation Mockingbird totally explained
Operation Mockingbird was a
Central Intelligence Agency operation to influence domestic and foreign
media, whose activities were made public during the
Church Committee investigation in 1975 (published 1976).
The word
Mockingbird was first used by Deborah Davis in
Katharine the Great (1979). Deep in the pages of his 2007 memoir
American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond,
E. Howard Hunt pulls open the curtain on covert history and details the existence of “Project Mockingbird,” in which print and broadcast media players were used for both propaganda and active intelligence gathering inside the
United States, a direct violation of what was then its technical legal function.
History
In 1948,
Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects (OSP). Soon afterwards OSP was renamed the
Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the
espionage and
counter-intelligence 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 the domestic and 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."
In 1951,
Allen W. Dulles persuaded
Cord Meyer to join the CIA. However, there's evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the
liberal organizations he'd been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative".
In 1977, Rolling Stone alleged that one of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was
Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by
Rolling Stone Magazine to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included
Stewart Alsop (
New York Herald Tribune),
Ben Bradlee (
Newsweek),
James Reston (
New York Times),
Charles Douglas Jackson (
Time Magazine),
Walter Pincus (
Washington Post),
William C. Baggs (
The Miami News),
Herb Gold (
The Miami News) and
Charles Bartlett (
Chattanooga Times). 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.
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. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing 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).
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:
» "If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in
Europe—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 of Plans
In August 1952, the
Office of Policy Coordination and the
Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged to form the
Directorate of Plans (DPP).
Frank Wisner became head of this new organization and
Richard Helms became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DPP.
J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the CIA's growing power. He described the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It didn't 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'd against Meyer.
Allen W. Dulles and
Frank Wisner both came to his defense and refused to permit an FBI interrogation of Meyer.
Joseph McCarthy didn't realize what he was taking on. Wisner unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy.
Drew Pearson,
Joe Alsop,
Jack Anderson,
Walter Lippmann and
Ed Murrow all went into attack mode and McCarthy was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.
Guatemala
Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of
President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in
Guatemala during
Operation PBSUCCESS. People like
Henry Luce were able to censor stories that appeared too sympathetic towards the plight of Arbenz. Allen W. Dulles was even able to keep
left-wing journalists from travelling to Guatemala, including
Sydney Gruson of the
New York Times.
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 inauguarated 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.
Eisenhower became concerned about CIA covert activities 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 Bissell lost his post as Director of 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.
First exposure
In 1964,
Random House 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 operation. 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'd have to print a second edition. FitzGerald ordered
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."
This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop 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.
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. 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 Church investigations (
Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975. According to the
Congress 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, the recently appointed Director of the CIA announced a new policy: "Effective immediately, the CIA won't 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 Jewels" 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Operation Mockingbird'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://operation_mockingbird.totallyexplained.com">Operation Mockingbird Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
