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Operation Mockingbird


John Simkin

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John wrote:

Frank Wisner and Philip Graham. Interestingly both Graham (1963) and Wisner (1965) committed suicide in the same way (shotgun to the head).

This was the same method used by Hemingway to kill himself in 1961. A very thoughtless way to commit suicide since it leaves quite a mess for the survivors to discover and clean!

Edited by Tim Gratz
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John wrote:

Frank Wisner and Philip Graham. Interestingly both Graham (1963) and Wisner (1965) committed suicide in the same way (shotgun to the head).

A very thoughtless way to commit suicide since it leaves quite a mess for the survivors to discover and clean!

It would be thoughtless if you committed suicide. However, I don't suspect murderers worry about such things.

Another connection was that they both did it in their holiday homes.

According to an interview giving by Deborah Davis (one of the journalists at Ramparts who first exposed details of Operation Mockingbird) after the publication of her book (Katharine the Great - a book the CIA tried to suppress), she found evidence that Edward Bennett Williams organized the death of Philip Graham. He was at the time Graham's lawyer. Later he became a close friend of Katharine Graham. Williams was also Bobby Baker's lawyer. Later he defended John Connolly when he was accused of corruption. At the time of the accusation Connolly was favourite to replace Spiro Agnew as Vice President. As a result the job went to Gerald Ford, a man who had been compromised by Fred Black, in a bugged hotel room, during the Baker investigation in 1963. Ford then appears on the Warren Commission and then appears to cover up for Nixon. Williams was also involved with Ben Bradlee in the CIA operation to expose Watergate.

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John wrote:

Frank Wisner and Philip Graham. Interestingly both Graham (1963) and Wisner (1965) committed suicide in the same way (shotgun to the head).

A very thoughtless way to commit suicide since it leaves quite a mess for the survivors to discover and clean!

It would be thoughtless if you committed suicide. However, I don't suspect murderers worry about such things.

Another connection was that they both did it in their holiday homes.

According to an interview giving by Deborah Davis (one of the journalists at Ramparts who first exposed details of Operation Mockingbird) after the publication of her book (Katharine the Great - a book the CIA tried to suppress), she found evidence that Edward Bennett Williams organized the death of Philip Graham. He was at the time Graham's lawyer. Later he became a close friend of Katharine Graham. Williams was also Bobby Baker's lawyer. Later he defended John Connolly when he was accused of corruption. At the time of the accusation Connolly was favourite to replace Spiro Agnew as Vice President. As a result the job went to Gerald Ford, a man who had been compromised by Fred Black, in a bugged hotel room, during the Baker investigation in 1963. Ford then appears on the Warren Commission and then appears to cover up for Nixon. Williams was also involved with Ben Bradlee in the CIA operation to expose Watergate.

John.

Great thread. There's some very provocative ideas in your research. I must admit that as a novice researcher, I had never heard of the Suite 8F group before. Now that I've had a look at their history, I believe there's a strong chance that they could have organised the assassination and employed Operation Mockingbird in the aftermath. Kennedy's proposal to scrap the oil depletion allowance was, I believe, both his bravest and also his most foolish initiative. If I were him I would never have telegraphed my punches to such a wealthy, powerful and dangerous group (what happened to Mattei?). Instead, with the great benefit of hindsight, it would have been much wiser to say nothing (or even lie--it wouldn't be a first for a politician) and then implement the policy after winning in 64, his final term.

In Robert Dallek's "Kennedy--an unfinished life" the author describes the deep misgivings of both Sorenson and Bobby about JFK's decision to give LBJ the #2 spot on the ticket, citing a betrayal of his earlier undertaking to union and liberal groups not to do this. LBJ suddenly changed from being a strident critic to a stauch supporter. "It's my only chance to be President" said LBJ. However, I'm not so certain JFK was "persuaded" by Graham and co., although it's a possibility. He might just have wanted to make certain of carrying Texas and the south---Kennedy knew this would probably be his only chance to be President, too.

I think the link between the Suite 8F group, Johnson and the Georgetown group could be the key to the assassination. I would also like to read "The Invisible Government".

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In 1970, Angus Mackenzie launched a left-wing newspaper with his brother and two friends. According to one website: "It was one of more than 500 alternative periodicals produced by the counterculture. Most were harassed and infiltrated by local police, as well as by the FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence. Mackenzie and many other editors were arrested numerous times on trumped-up charges."

In the early 1990s Mackenzie decided to get his own back. Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Mackenzie filed requests to learn more about Operation Mockingbird and other CIA covert activities. In 1994 Mackenzie apparently died of a brain tumor. His family published the book, Secrets: The CIA's War at Home from his notes in 1997.

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See the following for my problems with getting information out on Operation Mockingbird:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3544

The best account of Operation Mockingbird can apparently be found in Alex Constantine's book, Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A. I ordered it six weeks ago and I am still waiting for it. I have been informed by the bookseller that the book has gone missing at Heathrow Airport.

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While I am not a firm believer in a vast conspiracy, I do find much of the media response to the Kennedy assassination suspicious. I recently went to a library, for instance, and skimmed through all the Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, Life and Look magazines from the assassination to April 1964. I was surprised to see mucho bad info, and a total lack of co-ordination. After the release of the Warren Report, on the other hand, the media worked largely in unison. I suspect Mockingbird was in effect. The New York Times book, the Witnesses, which was made up of selections of WC testimony, was released to support the Warren Report. No extra shots, no men on the knoll, no Ruby meeting with Oswald...only the testimony we were supposed to believe. Anyhow, I think John would be interested to know that of the 20 or so exhibits they deemed worthy of inclusion, one was an FBI review of Thomas Buchanan's Who Killed Kennedy? CE 2585. On an earlier thread about this book I mentioned this exhibit, but failed to note the CE number. I find it intriguing that the FBI, which couldn't be bothered to look at the autopsy report until Rankin pressured them into it, found the time to write book reports, and that the New York Times deemed this worthy of publication in a book purportedly devoted to actual testimony.

Edited by Pat Speer
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There is also evidence that Operation Mockingbird was controlling the media in the UK. Some of the CIA money went to the International Publishing Corporation (IPC). This was the group that published the UK's leading left of centre newspaper, The Daily Mirror. Cecil King, chairman of IPC, was involved in the MI5 plot to overthrow the government of Harold Wilson. When Ramparts disclosed the existence of Operation Mockingbird in 1967, Encounter ceased to receive funds from the CIA. Interestingly, it was taken over by IPC.

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John wrote:

When Ramparts disclosed the existence of Operation Mockingbird in 1967, Encounter ceased to receive funds from the CIA. Interestingly, it was taken over by IPC.

Regarding Encounter, see the following from The Nation magazine:

Volume: 205 • Issue #: 0010 • Date: October 02, 1967

Lasky-Lasch Exchange

Abstract:

Presents a letter to the editor commenting on the article "The Cultural Cold War," by Christopher Lasch; Response by Christopher Lasch about the criticism made on his article.

Selections from Full Text:

...Lasch quotes a sentence from the former CIA official Thomas Braden to the effect that "[an] agent became an editor of Encounter...

Edited by Tim Gratz
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Interesting article.

Is Robin Webb still alive?

intestate

Of, relating to, or being an individual who has died without leaving a valid will. In such a case, the estate of the deceased is distributed according to the laws of the state in which he or she resided.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/08_22_01/...ton_post_s.html

Eulogies for Washington Post's Publisher Ignore Sordid Past, Intelligence Connections

Longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee once said of his publisher, Katharine Graham, that she had "the guts of a burglar." In fact, she may have had even more guts than that. The mainstream media was most reticent about reporting the circumstances surrounding a strange incident in the life of the recently de ceased publisher.

Exclusive To American Free Press

By Michael Collins Piper

A legendary figure in the global media monopoly died on July 17-the very day American Free Press was born.

Katharine Meyer Graham, longtime publisher of The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine and grande dame of a multi-billion dollar major media empire, died of injuries from a fall in Sun Valley, Idaho, several days before.

At the time of her accident, Mrs. Graham-a longtime figure in the powerful Bilderberg group-and a host of other luminaries of the plutocratic media elite were engaged in a high-level meeting held annually in Sun Valley that-at least until Mrs. Graham's accident-received little or no publicity in the mainstream press controlled by those elite media power-brokers who attend that gathering.

While there is no evidence that the death of the 83-year-old Mrs. Graham was anything other than an accident, the truth is that there still remain questions about the supposed "suicide" of her husband, Philip Graham, who preceded her as head of the Post empire. In fact, Graham's death was quite convenient for a lot of people -and saved a lot of people a lot of grief.

Although the media monopoly spent many column inches eulogizing Mrs. Graham, the full story of her husband's demise was largely unmentioned, other than to portray her as a simple housewife who had succeeded to a powerful position in the face of tragedy.

A bit of historical background is necessary to understand why somebody may have found it necessary to arrange for a staged "suicide" for Philip Graham.

The daughter of Wall Street wheeler-dealer and leading Zionist financier Eugene Meyer, who bought The Washington Post in 1933-just shortly after resigning as a governor of the Federal Reserve System-Katharine Meyer married poor-boy-turned-Harvard lawyer Philip Graham in 1940.

In just six years, after Meyer assumed the first presidency of the new World Bank, appointed by President Harry Truman, Meyer named his son-in-law publisher and editor-in-chief of the Post. In 1948, Meyer transferred his actual control of the Post stock to his daughter and her husband. However, Katharine received only 30 percent of the stock. Her husband received 70 percent of the stock, his purchase financed by his father-in-law who trusted Graham and believed quite simply that no man should have to be burdened with working for his own wife.

Under Philip Graham's stewardship, the Post blossomed and its empire expanded, including the purchase of the then-moribund Newsweek magazine and other media properties.

Following the establishment of the CIA in 1947, Graham also forged close ties to the CIA to the point that he was described by author Deborah Davis, as "one of the architects of what became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA"-a CIA project known as Operation Mockingbird.

According to Davis, the CIA link was integral to the Post's rise to power: "Basically the Post grew up by trading information with the intelligence agencies." In short, Graham made the Post into an effective and influential propaganda conduit for the CIA.

Despite all this, there was, by the time of Eugene Meyer's death in 1959, a growing gulf between Graham and his wife and his father-in-law, who was having second thoughts about turning his empire over to Graham.

The Post publisher took a mistress, Robin Webb, whom he set up in a large house in Washington and a farm outside of the city. A heavy drinker who reportedly had manic-depressive tendencies, Graham, in some respects, was his own worst enemy, stridently abusive to his wife, both privately and publicly.

Katharine Graham's biographer, Deborah Davis, has pointed out that Philip Graham had also started rattling the CIA:

He had begun to talk, after his second breakdown, about the CIA's manipulation of journalists. He said it disturbed him. He said it to the CIA . . . He turned against the newsmen and politicians whose code was mutual trust and, strangely, silence. The word was that Phil Graham could not be trusted.

Graham was actually under surveillance by somebody. Davis has noted that one of Graham's assistants "recorded his mutterings on scraps of paper."

There are those, however, who have suggested that Graham's legendary "mental breakdown" that developed over the next several years was more a consequence of the psychiatric treatments to which he was subjected more so than any illness itself. One writer has speculated that Graham may have been the victim of the CIA's now-infamous experiments in the use of mind-altering drugs.

The Graham split was a major social and political upheaval in Washington, considering the immense power of the newspaper and its intimate ties to the CIA-and the plutocratic elite.

In his biography of Graham's friend and Washington Post attorney Edward Bennett Williams, the aforementioned Evan Thomas wrote that: "Georgetown society was quickly split into 'Phil People' and 'Kay People'" and that while "publicly, Williams was a Phil Person . . . as [Kay] later discovered, she need not have been fearful."

Graham startled Williams by saying that not only did he plan to divorce Katharine but that he wanted to re-write his own 1957 will and give everything "Kay" stood to inherit to his mistress, Robin Webb-effectively depriving Katharine of her controlling interest in the powerful newspaper.

Although Williams kept putting off Graham's demand for a divorce, the will, as Thomas admitted, "was a trickier matter." Three times in the spring of 1963 Graham re-wrote his original will of 1957. Each of Graham's 1963 revisions reducing his wife's share and expanding the share he intended for his mistress. Ultimately, the last version cut out Katharine Graham altogether.

A nasty fight was looming. Katharine obviously knew something was afoot because, as Deborah Davis reports, Mrs. Graham "told [her own attorney] Clark Clifford that the divorce settlement must assign control of The Washington Post, and all of the Post companies, exclusively to her."

Matters finally came to a head when Philip attended a newspaper publishers convention in Arizona and delivered a blistering speech attacking the CIA and exposing "insider" secrets about official Washington-even to the point of exposing his friend John Kennedy's affair with Mary Meyer, the wife of a top CIA official, Cord Meyer (no relation to Katharine Graham).

At that point, Katharine flew to Phoenix and snatched up her husband who was captured after a struggle, put in a straitjacket and sedated. He was then flown to an exclusive mental clinic in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Md.

On the morning of Aug. 3, 1963, Katharine Graham reportedly told friends that Philip was "better" and coming home.

She drove to the clinic and picked up her husband and drove him to their country home in Virginia. Later that day, while "Kay" was reportedly napping in her second floor room, her husband died of a shotgun blast in a bathtub downstairs.

Although the police report of the incident was never made public, the death was ruled a suicide. Deborah Davis described the aftermath:

During probate, Katharine's lawyer challenged the legality of the last will, and Edward Bennett Williams, wishing to retain the Post account, now testified that Phil had not been of sound mind when he had drawn up Phil's final will for him. As a result, the judge ruled that Phil had died intestate. Williams helped Katharine take control of the Post with no significant legal problems and ensured that the final will, which left The Washington Post to another woman, never entered the public record.

In her critical biography of Mrs. Graham, Davis never once suggested that Philip had been murdered but has said in interviews that "there's some speculation that either [Katharine] arranged for him to be killed or somebody said to her, 'don't worry, we'll take care of it' " and that "there's some speculation that it might have even been Edward Bennett Williams."

Under Katharine Graham's rule, The Washington Post grew more powerful than ever, and in 1974 played the pivotal role in the destruction of Richard Nixon who was evidently perceived as a danger to the CIA and to the plutocratic elite.

In her book, Katharine the Great-which Mrs. Graham worked hard to suppress-Deborah Davis perhaps provided the real key to Watergate, charging that the Post's famed Watergate source-"Deep Throat"-was almost certainly Richard Ober, the right-hand man of James Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief and longtime liaison to Israel's Mossad.

Miss Davis revealed that Ober was in charge of a joint CIA-Israeli counterintelligence desk established by Angleton inside the White House. From this listening post, Ober (at Angleton's direction) provided inside information to the Post about Watergate that helped bring down the Nixon administration.

All told, considering the record of Katharine Graham and her Washington Post empire, Washington humorist Art Buchwald probably wasn't far off from the truth when he told the Washington elite who gathered for Mrs. Graham's 70th birthday: "There's one word that brings us all together here tonight. And that word is fear."

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg1/

There's a pretty good article [wish she had said 'shot' instead of 'stabbed' concerning the murder of Mary Meyer] in which Deborah Davis is interviewed - July of 2001. Interesting choice of subjects for her next work.

Q: What you do now? You've got the book out. Are you a reporter?

A: I'm writing a book on Henry and Clare Booth Luce, which is going to be a further investigation of mediapolitics. But it's going to be a much broader scope book. It's going to be about Time magazine and how it transformed American culture. And it's going to be a psychological portrait of Henry Luce and Clare Booth Luce and how these people projected their own needs to be powerful on to this enormously successful, influential magazine. It is really one of the most-- I want to use the word Thought Control--it really worked on peoples' minds in a way that nothing else had before it.

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This interview actually took place in 1992. I have done a search of the web and I cannot find any evidence of her book on Henry Luce being published.

The interview contains the following:

Kenn Thomas: This is an extraordinary story to me considering the flap that one hears about JFK's liaisons with Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner, Mary Pinchot Meyer's name it's not a name that's brought up a lot. You indicate in the book that she had a diary and that it may still exist, that James Angleton took it. There's so much to this story that never gets talked about. May we explore it a little bit more?

Deborah Davis: Mary Pinchot Meyer, after she divorced Cord Meyer, moved to Washington and she was living in Ben Bradlee's garage, which had been made into an art studio and this is where she was living. And when she was killed on this tow path, James Angleton showed up at the garage at the studio. There's two versions of the story that I've heard. One is that he searched for the diary and found it and took it away, and the other is that Ben Bradlee handed it to him and he took it away. Supposedly he burned it, but people that knew Angleton say he never burned anything, he saved everything. So supposedly it still exists. Angleton is dead now, so if anybody has it it's probably his widow.

Kenn Thomas: There's no Freedom of Information way of accessing it I guess.

Deborah Davis: Not unless it's in official government files. It's a sketchbook. Bradlee talked about this in an interview with David Frost a couple of months ago and he said that it was just a sketch book and he's seen it and it only has sketches in it and a few pages of writing, but it wasn't a diary per se. Now I trust Bradlee about as far as I can throw him.

Kenn Thomas: NBC did a series on the JFK assassination this week and the last thing they did was roll a list of people who had been killed that were somehow connected to the JFK assassination and there Mary Meyer's name rolled by.

Deborah Davis : She was alive for another year. I don't know what went on in that year. Maybe she was trying to expose something. That's something that also worth looking into. There's a man right now doing a book on Mary Meyer which should be very interesting. His name is Leo Damore and I'm very much looking forward to reading that book. I'm sure it's going to have a lot of new information in it. It's not out yet but it will be soon.

Leo Damore's book was never published. He apparently committed suicide in 1995.

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This question may have already been answered in the discussions of Operation Mockingbird in this thread and elsewhere, in which case I missed it. I'm curious as to who gave Operation Mockingbird its name. Is there some documentary evidence that Wisner or others involved in the operation called it that? When was the term coined and by whom?

I have the same curiosity about Operation Northwoods. We've all heard about it, but who named it that? If you look at the actual document that proposed this operation, it's called the "Cuba Project." There is no reference to Northwoods. So how did it get that name? (The question is rhetorical, since it's really Operation Mockingbird that I'm asking about here.)

Ron

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This question may have already been answered in the discussions of Operation Mockingbird in this thread and elsewhere, in which case I missed it. I'm curious as to who gave Operation Mockingbird its name. Is there some documentary evidence that Wisner or others involved in the operation called it that? When was the term coined and by whom?

Interesting question. The first reference to Operation Mockingbird appears to have been in the Ramparts article on February 1967. The article does not use the term Mockingbird. However, it did report that the CIA, via Cord Meyer, had been funding journals such as Encounter. The CIA found out about this proposed story in December 1966. According to released documents, the CIA used 200 clandestine service case officers to try and keep this story from being published.

The existence of Operation Mockingbird was confirmed by the publication of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (April, 1976). Once again the name Mockingbird was not used. Nor were any of the newspapers or journals named though Frank Church claims that the CIA were paying at least 50 journalists working for US media organizations.

The following year Carl Bernstein wrote about the CIA control of the American media for Rolling Stone Magazine. He did name newspapers and journalists. However, he did not name Ben Bradlee or the Washington Post. I suspect Bernstein discovered this information during his Watergate investigations. Understandably, he was not willing to “out” the newspaper that had just won the Pulitizer Prize for investigative journalism. However, I do believe he told Deborah Davis about the role that Phil Graham and Ben Bradlee had played in this CIA operation. I also believe it was Bernstein who told Davis about the identity of Deep Throat.

Davis published these details in her book Katharine the Great (1979). She appears to have been the first one to use the term Operation Mockingbird. The book was heavily edited. This included the removal of information that Ben Bradlee was working for Operation Mockingbird in the early 1950s. Even so, the CIA was able to put pressure on the publishers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich to recall all copies from the bookshops and have them shredded. Some survived (I in fact own a copy). Davis took her publishers to court and won the case in 1983. The book was republished by a small company later that year. However, it was not until much later (as a result of information obtained by the Freedom of Information Act) that the next edition included the story about Ben Bradlee.

In 1992 Davis said she was working on a book about Operation Mockingbird. It was going to concentrate on the role that Henry Luce played in this (Bernstein had said in his Rolling Stone article that Luce had played a major role in this CIA operation). The book has never appeared. I am not sure what has happened to Davis. I cannot find any evidence that she published anymore books after Katharine the Great.

I am not sure if the CIA operation to control the media has ever been officially called Mockingbird. I suspect this operation began before the CIA was formed. I believe it evolved out of the OSS policy of manipulating the media during the elections in Europe following the war. When this policy failed, for example in the UK in 1945, the money was used to manipulate left of centre newspapers such as the Daily Mirror and to steer the Labour Government to the right. This money was supplied by Tom Braden while working with the OSS. He carried on this job while head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division. Cord Meyer was Braden’s deputy until he replaced him in November 1954.

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