Operation Mockingbird

[Stan Wilbourne]

Ian Fleming a part of Operation Mockingbird?  What an incredible thought!  Of course we all know the absurd ideas he passed on to then sen Kennedy re how to deal with Fidel.

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I remember reading that JFK asked to meet the CIA's James Bond. He was introduced to William Harvey. I believe JFK was disappointed.

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John, I thought the guy that had the reputation of "Bond" was Ed Lansdale.

No?

[Jim Root]

John

I believe Ian Flemming and his brother were part of the XX group that controled the pre invassion deception (counterinelligence) plan against Nazi Germany. Is it not possible that, during the Cold War, the Brits had their own Operation Mockingbird that used former intelligence persons to produce the "company" line for public consumptions?

Would a Dr. Zhivago type character be a great introduction to the West of the "real" Soviets in a post Stalin world? Is it strange that governments might support that type of creativity?

Jim Root

[Larry Hancock]

Jim, I'm far from understanding exactly what the CIA was doing in this regard.

It's pretty easy to follow that they would have overseas projects to influence public opinion via the press. And that they would have used the media in various regime change or regime preservation operations - plenty of examples of that.

And as John points out, Wisner and company certainly had the contacts and the connections to inflence Eastern and media establishment types who were associated with them - best not to forget that during most of the cold war that wouldn't take anything more than an appeal to patriotism. It's also clear that many of the CIA honchos liked their contacts with the press and their ability to mold opinion (or cover up secrets) via the media (was it Wisner that refered to it as playing his Wurlitzer - something like that..I'm sure John will know. Of course who didn't, look at the Johnson tapes for of that.

One of the big questions from the Church report is whether the Agency was using reporters and writers as sources and informants - both internationally and in the U.S. (as they did with businessmen and scientists in Domestic Ops) or whether they were actually paying them to write articles and generate stories in the

U.S.?

Much of all the rest sounds like general CIA SOP - until you get into the dirty tricks of CHAOS in the 60's and 70's which were orders of magnitude beyond that.

It's the issue of actually paying writers and authors for general stories or books that blows me away - as described in the Phillips post....I just don't follow it at all plus it seems rather unnecessary. Targeted projects, sure, but just paying to have the Russians as the bad guys - seems like a waste of money?

-- Larry

Larry

Where do you think Ian Flemming's 007 would fit into this?  Did the British have a similar program?  What about the Soviets?

Just thoughts.

Jim root

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[Pat Speer]

(was it Wisner that refered to it as playing his Wurlitzer - something like that..

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Larry, you understate the case. It was Wisner's "MIGHTY wurlitzer." There have been some good articles written about this over the years. Bernstein wrote one for Rolling Stone. I think you're pretty much right on that these men saw it as their patriotic duty. I just don't picture Ben Bradlee or Joe Alsop cashing checks from one of Tracy Barnes' or Cord Meyer's cut-out companies, do you? The one guy I'd like to know more about is Hal Hendrix. Were his stories CIA plants? Or was he simply given more access than others because of his friendly attitude? I know he gave Seth Kantor info on Oswald long before anyone else had it. I think Hendrix also turned up in Chile around the time Allende was over-thrown. Has the CIA ever admitted to what extent he was working with them, and what extent he was working FOR them?

Edited May 12, 2005 by Pat Speer

[Larry Hancock]

Well said Pat, something that many younger folks have a hard time with is that for the OSS guys and the Eastern Establishment/Ivy League of the CIA this wasn't about work and about projects. It was a crusade, good vs. evil (and during the Stalin era in particular I'd probably agree to that). The experience in Eastern Europe after the war gave them the feeling it was a fight for survivial. Besides, networking and 'opinion shaping" were natural for these guys.

If you use Luce and Pawley as an example its plain to see that nobody had to pay them, you just fed them the right information at the right time - heck, read some of the CIA documents on Pawley and you find him bringing info to the agency. There were a host of influential volunteers to fight the red menace. Many of the original backers of the National Security movement were more rabid than the agency people - Pawley and Lindburgh come to mind. There was a whole network of volunteers on the periphery of the agency, even willing to fund dangles and other activities and feed back information.

You will find a good deal about Hendrix in my book and I think he's an excellant example....the Agency targeted him, fed him information that won him awards and made his reputation and he "went with the flow". He made a couple of mistakes including one in Chile, filed the news story before the news happened (always a risk for an inside guy I suppose, you want to jump the competion with the story but somebody slips the schedule on you, how embarassing...grin).

I've read any number of reports where the media refused to confront, challenge or even investigate not only CIA but the military for fear of jeapardizing their sources. Heck, when you are the CIA you don't need money to buy reporters, you use information. And all of them, Wisner, Dulles, Angleton - loved to meed with the press at lovely expense tab lunches.

-- Larry

(was it Wisner that refered to it as playing his Wurlitzer - something like that..

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Larry, you understate the case. It was Wisner's "MIGHTY wurlitzer." There have been some good articles written about this over the years. Bernstein wrote one for Rolling Stone. I think you're pretty much right on that these men saw it as their patriotic duty. I just don't picture Ben Bradlee or Joe Alsop cashing checks from one of Tracy Barnes' or Cord Meyer's cut-out companies, do you? The one guy I'd like to know more about is Hal Hendrix. Were his stories CIA plants? Or was he simply given more access than others because of his friendly attitude? I know he gave Seth Kantor info on Oswald long before anyone else had it. I think Hendrix also turned up in Chile around the time Allende was over-thrown. Has the CIA ever admitted to what extent he was working with them, and what extent he was working FOR them?

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[John Simkin]

Larry, you understate the case.  It was Wisner's "MIGHTY wurlitzer."  There have been some good articles written about this over the years.  Bernstein wrote one for Rolling Stone.  I think you're pretty much right on that these men saw it as their patriotic duty. I just don't picture Ben Bradlee or Joe Alsop cashing checks from one of Tracy Barnes' or Cord Meyer's cut-out companies, do you?

Bernstein’s article was very important as it named the journalists who had been working as CIA assets. Church’s committee did not do this. However, it did place these journalists into categories. Some were on the CIA payroll while others were willingly being manipulated. As Pat suggests, they mainly did this for patriotic reasons. I am convinced that others knew that they were taking part in a CIA disinformation program. Ben Bradlee falls into this category. I think it is highly unlikely that Bradlee ever received cash for his services. He was generously rewarded in other ways. For example, I believe his connections with the CIA (a relationship that dates back to the time he was a young reporter working in France) helped him in his career. I suspect that it was with CIA help that Bradlee became editor of the Washington Post. I will be arguing on another thread later this week (The real link between the assassination of JFK and Watergate) that Bradlee played a key role in directing the Watergate investigation away from what it was really all about (an attempt by figures in the intelligence community to expose the people behind the assassination of JFK).

[Tim Gratz]

John wrote:

I will be arguing on another thread later this week (The real link between the assassination of JFK and Watergate) that Bradlee played a key role in directing the Watergate investigation away from what it was really all about (an attempt by figures in the intelligence community to expose the people behind the assassination of JFK).

John, I am sure many of us are looking forward to your views re the above.

[Tim Gratz]

Question for John:

If the CIA, as an institution, wanted the "lone nut" conclusion of the WC to stand, and if, as you have argued, Jack Anderson was part of "Operation Mockingbird", why would Anderson be pushing Rosselli's theories? I agree that the CIA would not have wanted a full investigation, if for no other reason than it did not want its assassination plots exposed. But Anderson was exposing the very secrets the CIA wanted so desparately to hide. So at least on the assassination matter Anderson hardly seems a reliable spokesman for the CIA. He was "off the reservation" so to speak. Anderson may have been lucky indeed that Liddy did not whack him at the urging of Hunt.

[John Simkin]

Question for John:

If the CIA, as an institution, wanted the "lone nut" conclusion of the WC to stand, and if, as you have argued, Jack Anderson was part of "Operation Mockingbird", why would Anderson be pushing Rosselli's theories?  I agree that the CIA would not have wanted a full investigation, if for no other reason than it did not want its assassination plots exposed.  But Anderson was exposing the very secrets the CIA wanted so desparately to hide.  So at least on the assassination matter Anderson hardly seems a reliable spokesman for the CIA.  He was "off the reservation" so to speak.  Anderson may have been lucky indeed that Liddy did not whack him at the urging of Hunt.

The answer for this can be found in the Victor Marchetti article.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3841

As Marchetti explains the CIA sometimes leaks information to journalists in order to take the attention away from what really happened. For this to work the leak has to include some true facts. This is what the CIA was doing in the 1970s. They could no longer maintain the story of the lone gunman. As Trento points out in his article:

As part of its $5-million expenditure on the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, the committee contracted a Cambridge, Mass., sonics firm to review tape recordings made as shots were fired at the Kennedy motorcade.

The firm has provided the committee's technical staff with new evidence which shows that four shots and not three were fired at the Kennedy car. Sources say this would have made it impossible for Oswald to act alone.

As a result of the activities of former CIA agents such as Victor Marchetti and John Stonewell, there was a danger that the real story would emerge during 1978. This included information that CIA officials and agents had been involved in the assassination. Therefore it was necessary to supply journalists with two other possibilities. Rather than a CIA plot it was KGB/Castro or the Mafia that organized the assassination. Trento went with the former, Jack Anderson went with the latter. As we now know, G. Robert Blakey (and the HSCA) eventually went with the second of these theories.

It has to be remembered that Anderson was never totally under the control of the CIA. In fact, the main source of information for his stories came from the FBI. Anderson even speculates that Deep Throat was FBI because he was getting the same information as Bob Woodward. This is why Anderson sometimes published anti-CIA stories.

The FBI ran its own version of Operation Mockingbird. In his autobiography, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, William C. Sullivan spends a whole chapter on this topic (Flaking for the Bureau). Unlike the CIA, the FBI did not spend too much time trying to plant stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times. Although they did do this when the topic was hot enough to make its front page. As Sullivan points out “scores of Washington-based reporters printed stories we gave them, and they usually printed them under their own bylines. Some of them lived off us. It was an easy way to make a living. They were our press prostitutes”.

The FBI concentrated on controlling stories that appeared in “small dailies and weeklies”. Here they were guaranteed front page stories. Every time a newspaper printed a FBI planted story, Hoover sent a personal letter of thanks to the editor.

Sullivan goes into some detail about one particular story. In 1965 Joseph L. Rauh, vice-president of Americans for Democratic Action, attacked the FBI for not doing more to protect civil rights workers. The FBI immediately launched a press smear campaign against Rauh. A dossier was produced on Rauh and sent to FBI media assets. Sullivan claims this was sent to “a number of columnists, including Fulton Lewis, Paul Harvey, Bob Allen of the Hall Syndicate, Ray Cromley of Newspaper Enterprise Association, Ed Mowry of General Features and the Newhouse chain, Ed O’Brien of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Warren Rogers of Hearst and Ray McHugh of the Coply Press, amongst others.”

As with the CIA, the FBI realised that these stories were more likely to be believed if they came from left-wing or liberal journalists. In the case of the Rauh smear stories, Hoover recruited Morris Ernst to help defend the FBI against the charges made by Rauh. Ernst was at the time head of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that appeared to be even more left-wing than the Americans for Democratic Action. Hoover arranged for Ernst to write an article for the Reader’s Digest (at the time a very important source for moulding public opinion) praising the FBI record on civil rights. Ernst was rewarded by being made Hoover’s personal lawyer.

The FBI most important media asset was Walter Winchell. According to Sullivan: “Winchell was probably the first nationally known radio commentator developed by the FBI. We sent Winchell information regularly. He was our mouthpiece.”

What I am arguing is that both the CIA and the FBI were well placed to shape the public perception of the assassination of JFK. I will explaining this in more detail in a later posting.

[John Simkin]

In December, 1981, Howard Hunt was awarded $650,000 in damages as a result of Victor Marchetti’s article that suggested that a right-wing group within the CIA had been involved in the assassination of JFK. As a result the Washington Post reported the court’s decision in great detail.

At the second trial in January 1985 the jury found that Marchetti’s article had not libelled Hunt. This time the Washington Post did not publish a word on the court case. Even though it was a big story as it was partly the result of the statements made by Richard Helms, David Atlee Phillips and Marita Lorenz during the trial.

Leslie Armstrong, the foreperson of the jury, was interviewed on camera by a journalist working for a Miami television station. Armstrong said that the jury considered that the evidence presented in court showed that the CIA had killed JFK. That night Armstrong appeared during the television report on the court case. The passage where she explained the jury’s verdict was edited out. The television station was owned by the Washington Post.

The story was not picked up by any of the newspapers. Mark Lane also had great difficulty finding a publisher for his book on the trial (Plausible Denial). According to Lane: “virtually every book publisher in the United States refused to publish the book.”

[Jim Root]

A question to ponder

When Oswald travelled to the Soviet Union there were many newpapers, nationwide, that apparently carried the stroy of the "defecting Marine."

When he returned, much to Oswalds surprize, there was no press coverage (he was prepared to answer questions in two different ways) dispite the fact that a State Dept (?) rep was there to meet him and his family.

Was this an example of a minipulated press?

Jim Root

[John Simkin]

When Oswald travelled to the Soviet Union there were many newpapers, nationwide, that apparently carried the stroy of the "defecting Marine."

When he returned, much to Oswalds surprize, there was no press coverage (he was prepared to answer questions in two different ways) dispite the fact that a State Dept (?) rep was there to meet him and his family.

Was this an example of a minipulated press?

Yes. It would be great if someone would write a book about how the JFK assassination and related events were reported in the world's press.

[John Simkin]

Is Operation Mockingbird still in existence? The Frank Church report suggests that George Bush, the CIA director at the time (1976) promised it would be brought to an end. However, I don’t think we can take his word for this.

There was an interesting article in Thursday’s Guardian. It claims that the international journalists’ organization: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has been receiving money from the US State Department. This money has reached RSF via the Centre for a Free Cuba and the National Endowment for Democracy. The journalist Diana Barahona claims that the RSF had become part of a “neocon crusade against the Castro regime”.

[Shanet Clark]

John,

The New York Times today (may 22) had an interesting item about the passing of the CLARK CLIFFORD/ LLOYD CUTLER / EDWARD BENNETT WILLIAMS generation.

"An earlier more relaxed era had allowed lawyers like Mr. Cutler and Clark M. Clifford, Sol M. Linowitz and Edward Bennett Williams to shuttle between public and private work in ways that current ethics strictures would probably not permit.

The ebullient Mr. Williams was once simultaneously general counsel to President Ronald Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, counsel to the Washington Post and a friend to both William J. Casey, the CIA Director and Bob Woodward, the Post reporter who was investigating the situation."

from "A Dying Breed: In Washington, Twilight of the Lawyer-Gods" by Todd S. Purdum, NYT Week in Review.................

[Tim Gratz]

John wrote:

As a result of the activities of former CIA agents such as Victor Marchetti and John Stonewell, there was a danger that the real story would emerge during 1978. This included information that CIA officials and agents had been involved in the assassination.

I am blue in the face with repeated requests both here and on other threads for any PROOF of CIA involvement in the assassination. I understand there is Morales' "confession" while drunk, and a photo of a crowd of onlookers in Dealey Plaza, some of whom look like CIA agents.

Beyond these two items, the evidence is ?