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Virtually Every Major News Organization Allows The News To Be Censored By Govern

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September 24, 2017, 10:45:16 pm Psalm 51:17 says: The specific rule pertaining to the national anthem is found on pages A62-63 of the league rulebook. It states: “The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem. “During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking. The home team should ensure that the American flag is in good condition. It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country. Failure to be on the field by the start of the National Anthem may result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violations of the above, including first offenses.”
September 20, 2017, 04:32:32 am Christian40 says: "The most popular Hepatitis B vaccine is nothing short of a witch’s brew including aluminum, formaldehyde, yeast, amino acids, and soy. Aluminum is a known neurotoxin that destroys cellular metabolism and function. Hundreds of studies link to the ravaging effects of aluminum. The other proteins and formaldehyde serve to activate the immune system and open up the blood-brain barrier. This is NOT a good thing."
http://www.naturalnews.com/2017-08-11-new-fda-approved-hepatitis-b-vaccine-found-to-increase-heart-attack-risk-by-700.html
September 19, 2017, 03:59:21 am Christian40 says: bbc international did a video about there street preaching they are good witnesses
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Author Topic: Virtually Every Major News Organization Allows The News To Be Censored By Govern  (Read 1987 times)
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« on: July 24, 2012, 02:17:28 pm »

The New York Times Admits That Virtually Every Major News Organization Allows The News To Be Censored By Government Officials

In one of the most shocking articles that the New York Times has ever put out, a New York Times reporter has openly admitted that virtually every major mainstream news organization allows government bureaucrats and campaign officials to censor their stories.  For example, almost every major news organization in the country has agreed to submit virtually all quotes from anyone involved in the Obama campaign or the Romney campaign to gatekeepers for "quote approval" before they will be published.  If the gatekeeper in the Obama campaign does not want a certain quote to get out, the American people will not see it, and the same thing applies to the Romney campaign.  The goal is to keep the campaigns as "on message" as possible and to avoid gaffes at all cost.  But this kind of thing is not just happening with political campaigns.  According to the New York Times, "quote approval" has become "commonplace throughout Washington".  In other words, if you see a quote in the newspaper from someone in the federal government then it is safe to say that a gatekeeper has almost certainly reviewed that quote and has approved it.  This is another sign that "the free and independent media" in this country is a joke.  What we get from the mainstream media is a very highly filtered form of propaganda, and that is one reason why Americans are turning away from the mainstream media in droves.  People want the truth, and more Americans than ever realize that they are not getting it from the mainstream media.

The following quote comes from the recent article in the New York Times mentioned above and it is absolutely jaw dropping....

The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.

They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.

Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review.

The verdict from the campaign — an operation that prides itself on staying consistently on script — is often no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.
This is an article that everyone needs to read.  If you have not read it yet, you can find it right here.

What all of this means is that both the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign essentially have "veto power" over any quotes from those campaigns that we see in the newspapers.

According to the New York Times, virtually every major news organization has agreed to submit their quotes for "quote approval"....

It was difficult to find a news outlet that had not agreed to quote approval, albeit reluctantly. Organizations like Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Reuters and The New York Times have all consented to interviews under such terms.
This is absolutely disgusting, and it goes against everything that our media is supposed to stand for.

The following is what Joseph Farah had to say when he learned about this story....

All I can say about these people I once considered “colleagues” is that I am so ashamed of them. I am mortified. They are humiliating themselves and a vital institution for any free society.

It seems the biggest threat to the American tradition of a free and independent press is not government coercion. It’s the willing submission of the press to being handled and managed by government and politicians.
Keep in mind that Joseph Farah has been working in the world of journalism for decades.  He is deeply saddened to see what is happening to a profession that he deeply loves.

But he is not the only one.

Just check out what Dan Rather had to say during a speech back in 2009....

“At my age and stage I've finally reached the point where I don't have to kiss up to anybody,” he said. “What a wonderful feeling it is.”

Even so, his talk emphasized what he believes is the erosion of quality journalism, because of the corporatization, politicization, and “trivialization” of news. Those three factors, Rather argued, have fueled the “dumbing down and sleezing up of news” and the decline of “great American journalism.”

Likening media consolidation to that of the banking industry, Rather claimed that “roughly 80 percent” of the media is controlled by no more than six, and possibly as few as four, corporations.
And Dan Rather is right.  The control over the media in the United States is more tightly concentrated than ever before.

Back in the early 1980s, approximately 50 corporations essentially had nearly total control of the media in the United States.

Today, just six monolithic media corporations dominate virtually everything you watch, hear and read.

These six gigantic corporations own television networks, publishing houses, movie studios, newspapers, radio stations, music labels and video game companies.  Most Americans are absolutely addicted to information and entertainment, and those six massive corporations supply the vast majority of the information and entertainment that Americans take in.

The amount of control that those six corporate giants have is absolutely incredible.  For example, the average American watches 153 hours of television a month.  If you can beam 153 hours of "programming" into someone's head each month, that gives you an awesome amount of influence over that person.

The six monolithic corporations mentioned above are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal.

There are some areas of the media that are not completely dominated by those corporations, but even control over those areas is becoming more highly concentrated than ever.

For example, Clear Channel now owns over 1000 radio stations across the United States.  The power that Clear Channel has over the radio industry in America is absolutely staggering.

Even control over the Internet is becoming much more concentrated.  Giant corporations such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are increasingly controlling what we see and hear online.

But it really is the "big six" that dominate most of what we see, hear and read on a daily basis.

In a previous article, I detailed a portion of the vast media holdings of these gigantic corporations....

--------------------------------------------------

Today, six colossal media giants tower over all the rest.  Much of the information in the chart below comes from mediaowners.com.  The chart below reveals only a small fraction of the media outlets that these six behemoths actually own....

Time Warner

Home Box Office (HBO)
Time Inc.
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
CW Network (partial ownership)
TMZ
New Line Cinema
Time Warner Cable
Cinemax
Cartoon Network
TBS
TNT
America Online
MapQuest
Moviefone
Castle Rock
Sports Illustrated
Fortune
Marie Claire
People Magazine

Walt Disney

ABC Television Network
Disney Publishing
ESPN Inc.
Disney Channel
SOAPnet
A&E
Lifetime
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Buena Vista Theatrical Productions
Buena Vista Records
Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Miramax Films
Touchstone Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Pixar Animation Studios
Buena Vista Games
Hyperion Books

Viacom

Paramount Pictures
Paramount Home Entertainment
Black Entertainment Television (BET)
Comedy Central
Country Music Television (CMT)
Logo
MTV
MTV Canada
MTV2
Nick Magazine
Nick at Nite
Nick Jr.
Nickelodeon
Noggin
Spike TV
The Movie Channel
TV Land
VH1

News Corporation

Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Fox Television Stations
The New York Post
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Beliefnet
Fox Business Network
Fox Kids Europe
Fox News Channel
Fox Sports Net
Fox Television Network
FX
My Network TV
MySpace
News Limited News
Phoenix InfoNews Channel
Phoenix Movies Channel
Sky PerfecTV
Speed Channel
STAR TV India
STAR TV Taiwan
STAR World
Times Higher Education Supplement Magazine
Times Literary Supplement Magazine
Times of London
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
20th Century Fox International
20th Century Fox Studios
20th Century Fox Television
BSkyB
DIRECTV
The Wall Street Journal
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Interactive Media
FOXTEL
HarperCollins Publishers
The National Geographic Channel
National Rugby League
News Interactive
News Outdoor
Radio Veronica
ReganBooks
Sky Italia
Sky Radio Denmark
Sky Radio Germany
Sky Radio Netherlands
STAR
Zondervan

CBS Corporation

CBS News
CBS Sports
CBS Television Network
CNET
Showtime
TV.com
CBS Radio Inc. (130 stations)
CBS Consumer Products
CBS Outdoor
CW Network (50% ownership)
Infinity Broadcasting
Simon & Schuster (Pocket Books, Scribner)
Westwood One Radio Network

NBC Universal

Bravo
CNBC
NBC News
MSNBC
NBC Sports
NBC Television Network
Oxygen
SciFi Magazine
Syfy (Sci Fi Channel)
Telemundo
USA Network
Weather Channel
Focus Features
NBC Universal Television Distribution
NBC Universal Television Studio
Paxson Communications (partial ownership)
Trio
Universal Parks & Resorts
Universal Pictures
Universal Studio Home Video

----------------------------------------------------------

Please keep in mind that the list above is not exhaustive.  It only contains a sampling of the companies that those six corporate giants own.

So are you starting to get an idea of how powerful they are?

If you ever wondered why the version of "the news" that you get is so similar no matter where you turn, it is because control of the news is concentrated in just a very few hands.

So who controls the "big six" media corporations?

Would it surprise you to know that the boards of directors of those big media corporations have a tremendous amount of overlap with the boards of directors of large banks, large oil companies and large pharmaceutical companies?

The following is from the Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting website....

Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a variety of other large corporations, including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care and pharmaceutical companies and technology companies.
You can find a list that shows how these boards of directors overlap and interlock right here.

The giant media corporations are not going to criticize the establishment because they are the establishment.

The messages that these media behemoths pound into our heads are going to be the messages that the establishment wants pounded into our heads.

Anyone that believes that the mainstream media is "independent" and that it does not have "an agenda" is being delusional.

Of course it is also worth mentioning that much of what we get from the mainstream media is also often directly controlled by the federal government.

Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein fame) has discovered that hundreds of American journalists have worked directly for the CIA.

Not that the federal government and the establishment are opposed to one another.  The truth is that they very much work together hand in hand.  But sometimes the federal government has slightly different priorities than the corporate establishment does.

In any event, the key point to take away from all this is that the news and entertainment that we all enjoy on a daily basis if very highly censored and very highly controlled.

It is imperative that we understand that those that own and control the media are trying to shape society in a certain way.  They want to impose their values and their vision of the future on all the rest of us.

You will notice that none of the major news organizations speak out against the "Big Brother" police state control grid that is going in all around us.

Instead, they insist that all of this added "security" will keep us safe even as our liberties and freedoms are being badly eroded.

You will notice that none of the major news organizations speak out against the population control agenda of the global elite.

Instead, they insist that more "family planning" will help the environment and make the world a more prosperous place for all of us.

You will notice that none of the major news organizations speak out against the Federal Reserve and none of them are warning us about the financial collapse that is rapidly approaching.

Instead, they tell us to keep having faith in the system and they promise us that everything is going to be okay.

Well, you can mindlessly believe the corporate media if you want, but I believe that in this day and age it is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves.

Don't be a mindless robot for anyone.

Think for yourself and make your own decisions.

The truth is out there and you can find it if you are willing to go search for it.



http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/the-new-york-times-admits-that-virtually-every-major-news-organization-allows-the-news-to-be-censored-by-government-officials
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« Reply #1 on: July 24, 2012, 02:20:28 pm »

Yep, this has been going on for many years now - in Fritz Springmeyer's "Be Wise as serpents", he said how pretty much all of the "news" for the present day and "breaking" is pre-written.
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« Reply #2 on: September 26, 2012, 08:10:26 pm »

Media 'rigging' presidential election



Two-dozen conservative activists and media personalities on Tuesday urged members of their respective groups to switch off the “biased news media,” claiming in an open letter that establishment media are “out of control with a deliberate and unmistakable leftist agenda.”

Though these groups frequently complain about a left-leaning media bias, they claimed in the letter that the political slant this cycle is unprecedented.

“In the quarter century since the Media Research Center was established to document liberal media bias, there has never been a more brazen and complete attempt by the liberal so-called ‘news’ media to decide the outcome of an election,” wrote Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, and other conservative leaders.

rest: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/26/conservative-leaders-claim-unprecedented-media-bias-this-election-cycle/
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« Reply #3 on: September 26, 2012, 08:47:46 pm »

Media 'rigging' presidential election

Two-dozen conservative activists and media personalities on Tuesday urged members of their respective groups to switch off the “biased news media,” claiming in an open letter that establishment media are “out of control with a deliberate and unmistakable leftist agenda.”

Though these groups frequently complain about a left-leaning media bias, they claimed in the letter that the political slant this cycle is unprecedented.

“In the quarter century since the Media Research Center was established to document liberal globalist media bias, there has never been a more brazen and complete attempt by the liberal so-called ‘news’ media to decide the outcome of an election,” wrote Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, and other conservative leaders.

rest: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/26/conservative-leaders-claim-unprecedented-media-bias-this-election-cycle/

Fixed! Seriously - before the Iraq war started, pretty much ALL news media networks were biased toward being pro-war(with of course FOX News being the most biased). And less not forget all the subtle pro-Catholic slants from all of the news media networks as well.

As for the word liberal, I believe it means generous, in terms of its meaning from the King James Bible.
http://1828.mshaffer.com/d/search/word,liberal
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« Reply #4 on: October 04, 2012, 03:48:16 am »



Chris Matthews Freaks Out At Obama: "What Was He Doing?"

"Tonight wasn't an MSNBC debate tonight, was it?" Chris Matthews said after the first Obama-Romney presidential debate concluded on Wednesday night.

"I don't know what he was doing out there. He had his head down, he was enduring the debate rather than fighting it. Romney, on the other hand, came in with a campaign. He had a plan, he was going to dominate the time, he was going to be aggressive, he was going to push the moderator around, which he did effectively, he was going to relish the evening, enjoying it," Matthews said.

"Here's my question for Obama: I know he likes saying he doesn't watch cable television but maybe he should start. Maybe he should start. I don't know how he let Romney get away with the crap he throughout tonight about Social Security," Matthews complained.

Matthews then demanded that President Obama start watching cable news, specifically his program.

"Where was Obama tonight? He should watch -- well, not just Hardball, Rachel, he should watch you, he should watch the Reverend Al [Sharpton], he should watch Lawrence. He would learn something about this debate. There's a hot debate going on in this country. You know where it's been held? Here on this network is where we're having the debate," Matthews said.

"We have our knives out," Matthews said, admitting his network is trying their best to defend Obama and his policies. "We go after the people and the facts. What was he doing tonight? He went in there disarmed."

"He was like, 'Oh an hour and half? I think I can get through this thing. And I don't even look at this guy.' Whereas Romney -- I love the split-screen -- staring at Obama, addressing him like prey. He did it just right. 'I'm coming at an incumbent. I got to beat him. You've got to beat the champ and I'm going to beat him tonight. And I don't care what this guy, the moderator, whatever he thinks he is because I'm going to ignore him," Matthews said.

"What was Romney doing?" Matthews asked. "He was winning."

"If he does five more of these nights, forget it," Matthews added. "Obama should watch MSNBC, my last point. He will learn something every night on this show and all these shows. This stuff we're watching, it's like first grade for most of us. We know all this stuff."

vid: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/10/03/chris_matthews_freaks_out_at_obama_after_debate_romney_was_winning.html
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« Reply #5 on: October 04, 2012, 09:18:13 am »

Chris Matthews Freaks Out At Obama: "What Was He Doing?"

"Tonight wasn't an MSNBC debate tonight, was it?" Chris Matthews said after the first Obama-Romney presidential debate concluded on Wednesday night.

"I don't know what he was doing out there. He had his head down, he was enduring the debate rather than fighting it. Romney, on the other hand, came in with a campaign. He had a plan, he was going to dominate the time, he was going to be aggressive, he was going to push the moderator around, which he did effectively, he was going to relish the evening, enjoying it," Matthews said.

"Here's my question for Obama: I know he likes saying he doesn't watch cable television but maybe he should start. Maybe he should start. I don't know how he let Romney get away with the crap he throughout tonight about Social Security," Matthews complained.


I watched like a few minutes of the debate - pretty much it was nothing more than a WWF dog and pony show, where Romney looked "energetic", and Obama looked like he had "deer in the headlights". I didn't hear either candidate expose the Federal Reserve, and I doubt neither did during their entire time.

With that being said, Matthews should realize both Romney and Obama are one and the same.
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« Reply #6 on: November 02, 2013, 07:50:35 am »

Guess What Michelle Obama Reportedly Does When She Sees Something She Doesn’t Like on Her ‘Favorite’ MSNBC Show

How would you feel if you knew the president’s wife were watching your TV show, and when she saw something she didn’t like, fired off an email to one of the most powerful and most feared people in the government? According to a new book, that’s exactly what’s happening.
 
The new book “Double Down: Game Change 2012,” which makes the claim that President Barack Obama considered dropping Vice President Joe Biden from the ticket during the 2012 campaign, also talks about first lady Michelle Obama’s monitoring of the media.
 
In a segment Friday on MSNBC “Morning Joe,” Politico’s Mike Allen reported that one of Michelle Obama’s favorite television programs is on the liberal news network.
 
“Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (both MSNBC contributors) reveal one of Mrs. Obama’s favorite television programs, something that she watches religiously while she’s working out. And while she’s doing it, she emails Valerie Jarrett when she doesn’t like what’s being said,” Allen said.
 
Of course, the hosts asked which show the first lady watches. Allen replied, “Morning Joe.”
 
Co-host Joe Scarborough immediately covered his face and apologized, saying, “Oh Mrs. Obama, I am so sorry.”

Mika Brzezinski began wagging a finger at her co-host and said he “really ought to take back everything you said this morning.”

The Joe and Mika conversation included a few more apologies and Scarborough’s realization, “I gotta be nice now,” followed by Brzezinski’s, “Yes you do, FLOTUS is watching.” There were also random mentions of “emails from Valerie” throughout the remainder of the show.
 
So who exactly is Valerie Jarrett? She’s a senior adviser to the president and the woman whom Congressman Jason Chaffetz once said has her “tentacles” in virtually everything in the White House. Jarrett is also the person National Review referred to as the Obama adviser who is “never challenged.”

video: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/01/new-book-reveals-how-michelle-obama-and-valerie-jarrett-team-up-when-first-lady-sees-something-she-doesnt-like-on-her-favorite-msnbc-show/
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« Reply #7 on: November 03, 2013, 05:09:36 am »

Freedom of the press, eh?  Roll Eyes
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« Reply #8 on: February 17, 2021, 11:17:07 am »

News Corp and Google Agree To Global Partnership On News

Long-term Deal Involves Payment For Premium Content For Google News Showcase;

Will Yield Substantial Benefits For Journalism And Society

New York, NY (February 17, 2021) – News Corp announced today that it has agreed to an historic multi-year partnership with Google to provide trusted journalism from its news sites around the world in return for significant payments by Google.

Among the News Corp publications joining Google News Showcase will be The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, and the New York Post; in the UK: The Times and The Sunday Times, and The Sun; and in Australia a range of news platforms, including The Australian, news.com.au, Sky News, and multiple metropolitan and local titles.

The landmark three-year agreement also includes the development of a subscription platform, the sharing of ad revenue via Google’s ad technology services, the cultivation of audio journalism and meaningful investments in innovative video journalism by YouTube.

Robert Thomson, Chief Executive of News Corp, said that the deal would have “a positive impact on journalism around the globe as we have firmly established that there should be a premium for premium journalism.

“I would like to thank Sundar Pichai and his team at Google who have shown a thoughtful commitment to journalism that will resonate in every country. This has been a passionate cause for our company for well over a decade and I am gratified that the terms of trade are changing, not just for News Corp, but for every publisher.

“The deal simply would not have been possible without the fervent, unstinting support of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, and the News Corp Board. For many years, we were accused of tilting at tech windmills, but what was a solitary campaign, a quixotic quest, has become a movement, and both journalism and society will be enhanced.

“Particular thanks are certainly due to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Rod Sims and his able team, along with the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who have stood firm for their country and for journalism.”

https://newscorp.com/2021/02/17/news-corp-and-google-agree-to-global-partnership-on-news/
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« Reply #9 on: September 30, 2024, 09:56:46 am »

How the C.I.A. completely took over the mainstream media with OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD……



Editor’s Note:

Perhaps the greatest unknown fact about life on Planet Earth concerns the MEDIA, and in particular, the Mainstream Media (MSM). This original World Wide Web of illusion-producing media corporations was put into place at a time when very few understood the influence it would exert over every square inch of the planet. Truly, one of the most powerful forces in the realm of men is the power of language. Being cognizant of this, the true owners of the MSM have completely co-opted and compromised this power/force … … … because they know that “whoever controls the media controls the world”.
(SOURCE: Whoever Controls The Media Controls The World)

In 2024, who could rationally disagree with the previous excerpt?

Now notoriously known as the CIA’s Mockingbird Media, the MSM is universally scorned as the primary organ of Governmental & Corporate propaganda and prevarication that it truly is.

However what very few folks understand is that the entire MSM was completely taken over with the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency on September 18, 1947.  For the very first mission of the C.I.A. was to exert complete command and control over every single major news platform in the USA, which they did without anyone knowing about it.

Remember, the C.I.A. is well known throughout global intelligence circles as THE COMPANY for a very good reason: it controls all other companies within the Western sphere of power and influence worldwide.

In point of fact, no corporate (or governmental entity) is beyond its reach; and the C.I.A. will do anything necessary to control the narrative of any alternative news media that it does not rule to some degree. See: The C.I.A. created the ‘Conspiracy Theory’ meme to shut down the Truth Movement

So, you can imagine how much THE COMPANY hates Alt Media content like this:

N.B. The following exposé fleshes out just one piece of the skeleton of this long ago media takeover by the C.I.A. (which is actually the enforcement arm of both the National Security State and Military Industrial Complex).

Operation Mockingbird
By John Simkin (john@spartacus-educational.com) © September 1997 (updated August 2014).
Spartacus Educational

In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it 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 American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) : “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 is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird’s “principal operative”.

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 willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), C. D. Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), Walter Winchell (New York Daily Mirror), Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, William Allen White, Edgar Ansel Mowrer (Chicago Daily News), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Whitelaw Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Jerry O’Leary (Washington Star), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles L. Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh, the author of A Very Private Woman, (1998) 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 such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Helen Rogers Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Dorothy Schiff (New York Post), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Barry Bingham (Louisville Courier-Journal) and James S. Copley (Copley News Services).

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 looked for ways to help convince the public of the dangers of communism. In 1954 Wisner arranged for the funding 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 and Guatemala.

Henry Luce, the owner of a large media empire, became a key figure in Operation Mockingbird. David Halberstam has pointed out in The Powers That Be (1979): “Luce’s politics hardened in the postwar years and Time had become increasingly Republican in its tone. He had been stunned by Truman’s defeat of Dewey in 1948. Then in the fall of 1949 China had fallen, the Democratic administration had failed to save Chiang, and that was too much; Truman, and even more Acheson, would have to pay the price. Time was now committed and politicized, an almost totally partisan instrument. The smell of blood was in the air. There was a hunger now in Luce to put a Republican back in power. It was as if Luce, between elections, stood as the leader of the opposition, a kingmaker who had failed to produce a king. The fall of China and the rise of a post-war anti-Communist mood had produced the essential issue to use against the Democrats: softness on Communism.”

Luce used his magazines to get Dwight D. Eisenhower elected as president. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed Clare Booth Luce ambassador to Italy; the first American woman ambassador to a major country. Claudio Accogli, a Italian historian, argues that luce was heavily involved in covert anti-communist activities with local cia personnel. Larry Hancock adds: “With no-holds barred political activism and heavy spending (including the support of the SIFAR/Italian Army Secret Service), Luce and the CIA managed to block the probable takeover of the center-left governments, an alliance between Christian Democrats (DC) and the Socialist Democratic Party (PSI).”

Jonathan P. Herzog, the author of The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War (2011), has argued that Luce was motivated by his religious faith: “While he counted anti-Communists like Mundt, Cardinal Spellman, and Chambers as allies, he viewed the Communist threat differently. In his view, it was a symptom and not a disease. Like his wife, Clare, he understood faith as a psychological imperative sought by all people. If religious faith waned, other dogmas would take its place. The success of Communism, then, was not attributable to its message but rather to the fact that it offered people the spiritual certainty they no longer found in Christianity. All the shocking anti-Communist propaganda and shopworn tributes to democracy that America could muster would fail to arrest the Marxian surge. But if Americans filled the spiritual vacuum, if they made religious faith commensurate with military and economic power, then Communism would dissipate.”

Warren Hinckle has argued: “Henry Luce believed that a morally slanted press was a responsible press… Life, the flagship picture book of the Luce fleet, afforded photojournalism some of its finest moments, while the text accompanying the pictures that were worth thousands of words was slanted with an ideological warp sufficient to stir Caxton in his grave.” The cartoonist, Herbert Block, was equally critical: “Luce’s unique contribution to American journalism… is that he placed into the hands of the people yesterday’s newspaper and today’s garbage homogenized into one neat package.

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Thomas Braden, head of the of 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.”

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 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 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 to the smear 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 both came to his defence and refused to permit a FBI interrogation of Meyer.

Joseph McCarthy did not realise 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.

Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. People like Henry Luce was 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. This including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times.

Frank Wisner was also interested in influencing Hollywood. As Hugh Wilford points out in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008): “Fortunately for the CIA, two factors predisposed the major Hollywood studios that dominated the industry to take a responsible position in the cultural Cold War. One was a strong tendency toward self-censorship, the result of many years’ experience avoiding the commercially disastrous effects of giving offense to either domestic pressure groups like the American Legion or foreign audiences. The other was the fact that the men who ran the studios were intensely patriotic and anticommunist – they saw it as their duty to help their government defeat the Soviet threat.”

Frank Wisner was helped by the fact that the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, was carrying out an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as “friendly witnesses”. During their interviews they named nineteen people who they accused of holding left-wing views.

One of those named, Bertolt Brecht, a playwright, gave evidence and then left for East Germany. Ten others: Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any questions and were sent to prison and were blacklisted from the industry.

The CIA and FBI also provided right-wing television producer, Vincent Harnett, with information about left-wing figures in the industry. In June 1950 Harnett published Red Channels, a pamphlet listing the names of 151 writers, directors and performers who they claimed had been members of subversive organisations before the Second World War but had not so far been blacklisted.

Lee J. Cobb was one of those actors who was originally blacklisted but eventually cooperated with the HUAC: “When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit – being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That’s minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HCUA did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn’t borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it’s worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn’t worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I’d do it. I had to be employable again.”

According to Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper? (2000), Frank Wisner recruited several important figures for Operation Mockingbird. This included former OSS filmmaker John Ford and studio bosses Cecil B. DeMille (Paramount Pictures) and Darryl Zanuck (Twentieth Century-Fox).

Another important figure in this group was Howard Hughes, the boss of RKO Pictures. As Charles Higham points out in Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (2004), this was also good for business: “Hughes’s crusade against Communism” was “exacerbated by his desire to have Hughes Aircraft profit from the Korean and any future anti-Soviet wars”. For example, in June 1950, General Ira Eaker “signed an across-the-board agreement giving Hughes a monopoly in interceptors for the U.S. Air Force… despite the fact that it was in breach of the Sherman anti-monopolies act… By the end of 1950, the war had made Hughes even richer than before.”

Another important figure in this conspiracy was C. D. Jackson. He had joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1943. The following year he was appointed Deputy Chief at the Psychological Warfare Division at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). After the war, he became Managing Director of Time-Life International. When it became clear that Dwight D. Eisenhower stood a good chance of becoming president, the CIA arranged for Jackson to join his campaign. This involved Jackson writing speeches for Eisenhower. Jackson was rewarded in February 1953 by being appointed as Special Assistant to the President. This included the role of Eisenhower’s liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon.

According to the Eisenhower Presidential Library files in Abilene, Kansas, Jackson’s “area responsibility was loosely defined as international affairs, cold war planning, and psychological warfare. His main function was the coordination of activities aimed at interpreting world situations to the best advantage of the United States and her allies and exploiting incidents which reflected negatively on the Soviet Union , Communist China and other enemies in the Cold War.”

Jackson was also involved in Operation Mockingbird. This was revealed after the death of Jackson. On December 15, 1971, Mrs. C.D. Jackson gave her husband’s papers to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. This included details that Jackson was in contact with a CIA agent in Hollywood’s Paramount Studios. The agent is not named by Jackson but Frances Stonor Saunders claims in Who Paid the Piper? (2000) that it was Carleton Alsop, a CIA agent employed by Frank Wisner. There is no doubt that Alsop was one of the CIA agents working at Paramount. However, Hugh Wilford argues in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008) that it was a senior executive at Paramount, Lugi G. Laraschi, was the most important CIA figure at the studio. Laraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship at the studio, whose job was to “iron out any political, moral or religious problems”. Other studios, including MGM and RKO, had similar officers, and were probably CIA placements. In a private letter to Sherman Adams, Jackson claims the role of these CIA placements was “to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with the proper subtlety”.

Although the main objective of Operation Mockingbird was to influence the production of commercial films the CIA also occasionally initiated film projects. The best documented instance of this concerns an animated version of Animal Farm, a satirical allegory about Stalinism by George Orwell. The book was highly popular when it was published in 1945 and it was only natural that the studios should be interested in making a film of the book. The problem for the CIA was that Orwell was a socialist whose book attacked both communism and capitalism. Therefore, it was important to make a film that restricted it to a condemnation of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union.

In 1950 Wisner’s OPC arranged for Joe Bryan to recruit anti-communist documentary-maker Louis de Rochemont to produce a movie version of the tale. It was decided to get the film made in Britain to disguise CIA involvement in the project. Rochemont employed the British animation studio of husband and wife John Halas and Joy Batchelor to make the film. Most of the funding came from a CIA shell corporation, Touchstone. E. Howard Hunt was one of those agents involved in the production of the film whose role was to remove the socialist elements in Orwell’s allegory.

One unnamed member of the OPC sent a letter to John Halas called for the addition of scenes showing the other farms (that represented capitalist countries) in a more flattering light. The most important demand was to change the ending of Animal Farm. The CIA did not like the scene where the pigs and dogs face a liberation-style uprising of the other animals. The letter included the following: “It is reasonable to expect that if Orwell were to write the book today, it would be considerably different and that the changes would tend to make it even more positively anti-Communist and possibly somewhat more favorable to the Western powers.”

One of the main concerns of the CIA was the portrayal of race-relations in Hollywood movies. It was argued that the left was using this issue to undermine the idea that America was a democracy based on equal rights. Letters from Jackson sent to the producers of films called for scenes showing African Americans mixing on equal terms with whites. One of Jackson’s proposals involved “planting black spectators in a crowd watching a golf game in the Martin and Lewis comedy The Caddy”.

In 1955 Graham Greene published The Quiet American. The novel is set in Vietnam and involves the relationship between Thomas Fowler and Alden Pyle. Fowler is a veteran British journalist in his fifties, who has been covering the war in Vietnam for over two years. Pyle, the “Quiet American” of the title, is officially an aid worker, but is really employed by the CIA. It is believed that the Pyle character is partly based on that of Edward Lansdale.

Greene had worked for the British Secret Service during the Second World War. Although a fairly successful novelist at the time, Greene was also employed by The Times and Le Figaro as a journalist. Between 1951 to 1954 spent a long period of time in Saigon. In 1953 Lansdale became a CIA advisor on special counter-guerrilla operations to French forces against the Viet Minh.

While it is true that Graham Greene admitted that he never had the “misfortune to meet” Lansdale, the two men did know a lot about each other. Lansdale recalls that in 1954 he had dinner with Peg and Tilman Durdin at the Continental Hotel in Saigon. Greene was also there having a meal with several French officers. Lansdale claims that after he and the Durdins were leaving, Greene said something in French to his companions and the men began booing him.

Lansdale definitely thought that Pyle was based on him. He told Cecil B. Currey on 15th February, 1984: “Pyle was close to Trinh Minh Thé, the guerrilla leader, and also had a dog that went with him everywhere – and I was the only American close to Trinh Minh Thé and my poodle Pierre went everything with me.”


In the book Pyle is sent to Vietnam by his government, ostensibly as a member of the American Economic Mission, but that assignment was only a cover for his real role as a CIA agent. According to one critic “Pyle was the embodiment of well-meaning American-style politics, and he blundered through the intrigue, treachery, and confusion of Vietnamese politics, leaving a trail of blood and suffering behind him.” As Fowler points out in the novel, Pyle was attempting to “win the East for Democracy”. However, according to Fowler, what the people of Vietnam really wanted was “enough rice” to eat. What is more: “They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.”

When the book was published in the United States in 1956 it was condemned as anti-American. Pyle (Lansdale) is portrayed as someone whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions. It was criticized by The New Yorker for portraying Americans as murderers.

The director, producer and screenwriter, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was chosen to make the film of The Quiet American. He visited Saigon in 1956 and was introduced to Edward Lansdale, whose cover was working at the International Rescue Committee’s office. The most controversial scene in the book is the bombing of a Saigon square in 1952 by a Vietnamese associate of Lansdale’s, General Trinh Minh Thé. In the novel, Greene suggests that Pyle/Lansdale, was behind the bombing. Lansdale suggested to Mankiewicz that the film should show that the bombing was “actually having been a Communist action”.

When he returned home Mankiewicz wrote to John O’Daniel, the chairman of the American Friends of Vietnam that he intended to completely change the anti-American attitude of Greene’s book. This included the casting of Second World War hero, Audie Murphy, as Alden Pyle.

In a letter that Edward Lansdale wrote to Ngo Dinh Diem he praised Mankiewicz’s treatment of the story as “an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel of despair” and “that it will help win more friends for you and Vietnam in many places in the world where it is shown.”

As Hugh Wilford pointed out: “It was a brilliantly devious maneuver of postmodern literary complexity: by helping to rewrite a story featuring a character reputedly based on himself, Lansdale had transformed an anti-American tract into a cinematic apology for U.S. policy – and his own actions-in Vietnam.”

Graham Greene was furious with Mankiewicz’s treatment of his novel. “Far was it from my mind, when I wrote The Quiet American that the book would become a source of spiritual profit to one of the most corrupt governments in Southeast Asia.”

In 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower established the 5412 Committee in order to keep 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 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.

Dwight Eisenhower became concerned about CIA covert activities and in 1956 appointed David 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 20th 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 handling 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.

It has been argued by Larry Hancock, the author of Someone Would Have Talked (2006), that Virginia Prewett was a close associate of David Attlee Phillips and was involved in promoting the activities of Alpha 66, led by Antonio Veciana: “Virginia Prewett appears to have been one of Phillips’ significant media contacts and certainly one of the most consistent sources of media coverage for Alpha 66 activities. The other major source was Life magazine, part of the Luce Media family managed by Claire Booth Luce’s husband Henry Robinson “Harry” Luce (a member of the Citizens Committee to Free Cuba, along with Phillips’ friends Hal Hendrix and Paul Bethel). Articles by Prewitt and editorials by Time-Life provided the strongest challenge to the Kennedy position on Cuba and were quite consistent with the type of embarrass and back-to-the wall agendas Veciana attributed to Maurice Bishop.”

In September, 1963, Hal Hendrix joined Scripps-Howard News Service as a Latin American specialist. Instead of moving to Washington he remained in Miami “where his contacts were”. In an article on 24th September, 1963, Hendrix was able to describe and justify the coup that overthrew Juan Bosch, the president of Dominican Republic. The only problem was the coup took place on the 25th September. Some journalists claimed that Hendrix must have got this information from the CIA.

A few hours after John F. Kennedy had been killed, Hendrix provided background information to a colleague, Seth Kantor, about Lee Harvey Oswald. This included details of his defection to the Soviet Union and his work for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This surprised Kantor because he had this information before it was released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation later that evening.

Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia

William E. Kelly later explained: “Seith Kantor, a local Dallas reporter who was in the Press Bus in the motorcade, knew something was wrong as they rode through Dealey Plaza, but the bus driver refused to follow the rest of the motorcade to Parkland Hospital and instead drove to their original destination, the Dallas Trade Mart. Once there however, Kantor got a ride to Parkand Hospital, where he interviewed a number of local Dallas officials and had a brief conversation with Jack Ruby, who had frequently fed Kantor interesting leads he developed into feature articles. While the Warren Commission rejected Kantor’s sworn testimony that Ruby was at Parkland, Kantor did make some phone calls, including one to his editor at the Scripps-Howard News Service (SHNS), and there are records of these calls. Years later, in 1975, Kantor learned that the records of one of the phone calls on that day was classified for reasons of national security, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and obtained them to find out the big secret. He discovered that after taking to his editor, he was told to call another SHNS correspondent in Florida, Harold “Hal” Hendrix. From Florida, Hendrix supplied Kantor with detailed background information on Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just been arrested and named as the chief suspect in the assassination. Hendrix had more information in Florida than Kantor did at the scene of the crime, and we later learn why Kantor’s call to Hendrix was considered worthy of being classified for reasons of national security.”

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Charles Douglas Jackson purchased the Zapruder Film on behalf of Henry Luce. The author, David Lifton, points out in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2004) that: “Abraham Zapruder in fact sold the film to Time-Life for the sum of $150,000 – about $900,000 dollars in today’s money… Moreover, although Life had a copy of the film, it did little to maximize the return on its extraordinary investment. Specifically, it did not sell this unique property – as a film – to any broadcast media or permit it to be seen in motion, the logical way to maximize the financial return on its investment… A closer look revealed something else. The film wasn’t just sold to Life – the person whose name was on the agreement was C. D. Jackson.” Luce published individual frames of Zapruder’s film but did not allow the film to be screened in its entirety.

Soon after the assassination Charles Douglas Jackson also successfully negotiated with Marina Oswald the exclusive rights to her story. Peter Dale Scott argues in his book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1996) that Jackson, on the urging of Allen Dulles, employed Isaac Don Levine, a veteran CIA publicist, to ghost-write Marina’s story. This story never appeared in print.

In 1963, John McCone, the director of the CIA, discovered that Random House intended to publish Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross. McCone discovered that the book intended to look at his links with the Military Industrial Congress Complex. The authors also claimed that the CIA was having a major influence on American foreign policy. This included the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954). The book also covered the role that the CIA played in the Bay of Pigs operation, the attempts to remove President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam.

McCone called in Wise and Ross to demand deletions on the basis of galleys the CIA had secretly obtained from Random House. The authors refused to made these changes and Random House decided to go ahead and publish the book. 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. McCone now formed a special group to deal with the book and tried to arrange for it to get bad reviews. It was the first full account of America’s intelligence and espionage apparatus. In the book Wise and Ross argued that the “Invisible Government is made up of many agencies and people, including the intelligence branches of the State and Defense Departments, of the Army, Navy and Air Force”. However, they claimed that the most important organization involved in this process was the CIA.

John McCone 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 discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, was planning to publish that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association. 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.

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. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer’s when he was a liberal activist after the war.

Further details of Operation Mockingbird was 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 the cost of misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.

Frank Church showed that it was CIA policy to use clandestine handling of journalists and authors to get information published initially in the foreign media in order to get it disseminated in the United States. Church quotes from one document written by the Chief of the Covert Action Staff on how this process worked (page 193). For example, he writes: “Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publicans or booksellers.” Later in the document he writes: “Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability”. Church goes onto report that “over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967”. All these books eventually found their way into the American market-place. Either in their original form (Church gives the example of the Penkovskiy Papers) or repackaged as articles for American newspapers and magazines.

In another document published in 1961 the Chief of the Agency’s propaganda unit wrote: “The advantage of our direct contact with the author is that we can acquaint him in great detail with our intentions; that we can provide him with whatever material we want him to include and that we can check the manuscript at every stage… (the Agency) must make sure the actual manuscript will correspond with our operational and propagandistic intention.”

Church quotes Thomas H. Karamessines as saying: “If you plant an article in some paper overseas, and it is a hard-hitting article, or a revelation, there is no way of guaranteeing that it is not going to be picked up and published by the Associated Press in this country” (page 198).

By analyzing CIA documents Church was able to identify over 50 U.S. journalists who were employed directly by the Agency. He was aware that there were a lot more who enjoyed a very close relationship with the CIA who were “being paid regularly for their services, to those who receive only occasional gifts and reimbursements from the CIA” (page 195).

Church pointed out that this was probably only the tip of the iceberg because the CIA refused to “provide the names of its media agents or the names of media organizations with which they are connected” (page 195). Church was also aware that most of these payments were not documented. This was the main point of the Otis Pike Report. If these payments were not documented and accounted for, there must be a strong possibility of financial corruption taking place. This includes the large commercial contracts that the CIA was responsible for distributing. Pike’s report actually highlighted in 1976 what eventually emerged in the 1980s via the activities of CIA operatives such as Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, Ted Shackley, Raphael Quintero, Richard Secord and Felix Rodriguez.

Church also identified E. Howard Hunt as an important figure in Operation Mockingbird. He points out how Hunt arranged for books to be reviewed by certain writers in the national press. He gives the example of how Hunt arranged for a “CIA writer under contract” to write a hostile review of a Edgar Snow book in the New York Times (page 198).

Church comes up with this conclusion to his examination of this issue: “In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.”

In February, 1976, George 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.

Carl Bernstein, who had worked with Bob Woodward in the investigation of Watergate, provided further information about Operation Mockingbird in an article in The Rolling Stone in October, 1977. Bernstein claimed that over a 25 year period over 400 American journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA: “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 it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad.”

It is almost certain that Bernstein had encountered Operation Mockingbird while working on his Watergate investigation. For example, Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great) has argued that Deep Throat was senior CIA official, Richard Ober, who was running Operation Chaos for Richard Nixon during this period.

On 18th September, 1976, Orlando Letelier, who served as foreign minister under Salvador Allende, was traveling to work at the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington when a bomb was ignited under his car. Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, a 25 year old woman who was campaigning for democracy in Chile, both died of their injuries.

According to Gaeton Fonzi, the author of The Last Investigation (1993), Virginia Prewett, who was working for the Council for Inter-American Security, a right-wing think tank, attacked the journalists who assumed that Chilean generals were involved in murdering Letelier. “She, too, suggested that Letelier may have been sacrificed by leftists to turn world opinion and U.S. policy against the Pinochet regime.”

According to researchers such as Steve Kangas, Angus Mackenzie and Alex Constantine, Operation Mockingbird was not closed down by the CIA in 1976. For example, in 1998 Kangas argued that CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife ran “Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world.” On 8th February, 1999, Kangas was found dead in the bathroom of the Pittsburgh offices of Scaife. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: “Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas’ past?

Primary Sources
(1) Thomas Braden, Saturday Evening Post  (20th May, 1967)
In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our (CIA) projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society’s approving Medicare.

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2024/09/30/how-the-c-i-a-completely-took-over-the-mainstream-media-with-operation-mockingbird/
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