Friday, June 14, 2013
Operation Mockingbird: A Look at CIA Infiltration of the Media
"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 in 1999, referencing revelations from the Church Committee in 1975The primary documents for the Church Committee can be found here, with a lot of fascinating info!
In 1948, the United States began the Marshall Plan, an initiative to help the devastated Europe recover from the War. The CIA found that pure economic recovery was not enough, and decided to siphon funds to create the Office of Policy Coordination, would would become the covert action branch of the CIA. It was under this program that Operation Mockingbird, a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at promoting the views of the CIA within the media, began.
The director of the CIA at the time was Allen Dulles, a fascinating figure. Dulles at one point in his career served as a lawyer for IG Farben, a German chemical industry conglomerate which had set up factories adjacent to concentration camps in Europe for the purpose of utilizing slave labor. He was instrumental in allowing Reinhard Gehlen, notorious and vicious war criminal, to retain his Eastern Front Intelligence infrastructure after WWII. I mention all of this because it is important to understand what kind of leadership was operating the CIA when they began to utilize the propaganda machine that was perfected by the Nazis on a domestic level.
From the onset, Operation Mockingbird was one of the most sensitive of the CIA's undertakings, with recruitment of journalists and training of intelligence officers for propaganda purposes usually undertaken by Dulles himself, or his direct peers.
It is a false belief that the CIA 'infiltrated' journalism organizations. The recruitment of journalists was frequently done with complicity from top management and ownership of news institutions. William Colby, famous CIA operative, claimed during the Church committee, "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.
All in all, 25 major publications would be providing cover for CIA operatives, with 400 operatives being a low estimate to the number of people employed by the operation. Many were famous journalists such as Joseph Alsop, who has proudly defended his involvement with the program ever since it came to light. Journalists would plant fabricated stories, cover international events with a purpose of casting the CIA's agenda in a positive light, and sometimes even recruit operatives to work for the agency.
The CIA would also set up international 'front organizations' that would produce propaganda without being publicly tied to the agency. An example of this is the Rome Daily American, which was 40% owned by the CIA for three decades.
The CIA usage of domestic propaganda continued unabated until 1973, when disclosure of the operation caused a public backlash. At this time, the CIA cut ties with over 100 journalists, though they retained many of their more important contacts.
There is no certainty about how long Mockingbird lasted, or if it is still in effect today, perhaps under a different name. Much of what we know of the first 25 years of the program came from revelations of the Church Committee in 1975. The operations of Mockingbird were considerably secretive before the exposure from the committee and became immensely secretive afterwords.
Unfortunately, it is still possible to see frequent evidence of CIA in the media in modern times. For example, the Washington Post and New York Times have had information of a secret CIA base in Saudi Arabia used to launch drone strikes into Yemen, and have known about it since at least 2011, though they opted to not disclose this to the public at the request of the CIA.
We have learned that the CIA has played important advisory roles in films such as Black Hawk Down and Zero Dark Thirty. They offer equipment for use in filming, including significant assets such as state-of-the-art helicopters and aircraft carriers, in exchange for portraying the agency in a good light. The history of the CIA and Hollywood goes back many decades as well, such as their funding of the film Animal Farm in 1954.
They are completely open about their involvement in the Media today but offer no insight into how deep their involvement goes.
Beyond this, we are left to connect the dots ourselves. Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC in 2003 for opposing the Iraq war, the only news anchor at the time to do so. More recently, Amber Lyon was fired from CNN for providing accurate reporting on Bahrain, a US puppet state, which was abusing its citizens during Arab Spring.
Stay tuned for part II, where I will analyze the medias ability and willingness to manufacture consent for government policies.
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