CIA, Search-Engines and JFK Assassination

[John Simkin]

When I produce a page on any aspect of history, within a few days it is ranked in the first five at Google and other second-generation search-engines (this is because of the large number of websites - 136,000 - that link to my website). This includes people like J. Edgar Hoover (that one gives me a lot of pleasure).

This is also true of most of the characters I have written about concerning the JFK assassination. However, if my views on the CIA are correct, I would expect they must be involved in manipulating search-results. This is only logical. After all, they have been doing this in other forms of media since the late 1940s.

I told you about how my page on Bernardo De Torres was removed from the Google database. After making a fuss it was returned to the database.

Over the last couple of days I have been carrying out some research into the rankings of suspects in the JFK assassination. In most cases they appear in the top five. This is true of all search-engines except of MSN Search. They seem to be running a complete boycott of my pages on the JFK assassination (although I still score highly on other topics).

However, all of the major search-engines, except AltaVista, are keeping certain of my pages off the first page of search-results. It would seem that the CIA don’t want people to find out about what I have discovered about certain characters. This obviously gives us a clue to the characters the CIA are protecting.

The following list of suspects appear near the top of searches (the vast majority being ranked in the top 3): David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, Richard Bissell, Gerry Hemming, William Seymour, Bobby Baker, J. Edgar Hoover, Fred Black, Tracy Barnes, Lucien Conein, Roy Hargraves, William Harvey, Howard K. Davis, Eugenio Martinez, John Martino, Roland Masferrer, Clint Murchison, Gordon Novel, William (Rip) Robertson, Johnny Roselli, Felipe Vidal Santiago, Manuel Artime, Ted Shackley, George Smathers, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Eladio del Valle, Santo Trafficante, Antonio Veciana, Malcolm (Mac) Wallace, Mitchell WerBell, Jake Esterline, Dennis Harber, Loran Hall, Charles Willoughby, Dave Yarras, Chauncey Holt, Tony Varona, Virgilio Gonzalez, Herminio Diaz Garcia, Charles Harrelson, James Files, Tony Cuesta, Billie Sol Estes, David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Loy Factor, Rolando Cubela, Clifton Carter, Bernard L. Barker and Desmond FitzGerald.

That leaves us with the interesting question: Who is the CIA protecting? Here is the list: Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer, Mary Pinchot Meyer, E. Howard Hunt, Edward Bennett Williams, Philip Graham and Katharine Graham.

Why should they be protecting these people? The thing they all have in common is Operation Mockingbird (this is another page of mine that does not appear in the search-rankings). Operation Mockingbird was of course the CIA operation to control the media. It is still clearly in operation. Now it is concentrating on controlling the web pages people visit.

It would seem that only AltaVista is not under CIA control.

[Guest]

It would seem that only AltaVista is not under CIA control.

Either that or the others haven't spidered your site yet, or you have neglected to submit some pages to certain search engines, or you have missed out meta tags on some pages.

Most likely the CIA though

[John Simkin]

Either that or the others haven't spidered your site yet, or you have neglected to submit some pages to certain search engines, or you have missed out meta tags on some pages.

   

Google’s spider arrives at my website every two days. (Other search-engines come on average every four days). This is based on the size of your site and your Google rankings. Every time it visits, he puts every page on my site into its database. I have a facility on my website to check this. This is why I complained to Google about the removal of the Bernardo de Torres page from the database (it had originally been ranked number one). I brought this to their attention. They could not explain it and restored it to the database.

As I have said, the reason why I am ranked so high is that I have so many sites linked to mine. The BBC have more links than I have and so when they have a “named” page they usually rank higher than me. However, there are other factors involved. One includes the amount of internal and external links that your page has. The quality of these links are also taken into consideration. For example, on my key pages, I link to other high-ranking pages. Most people do not do that as they are reluctant to promote the competition. However, it is a factor in the ranking system. You are being thanked for your generosity, or in other words, you are improving the service you are providing for your visitors.

Therefore, if you type in “First World War” into Google my site comes 2nd out of 42,080,000 pages. First World War.Com comes 1st (it is because of its domain name). The BBC comes fourth.

The same is true when you type in Queen Victoria (2nd 4,080,000). It is also true of any other historical character or topic I have written about: Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Second World War, Spanish Civil War, etc.

Now if you type in “Frank Wisner” you only get 177,000 pages but my page does not appear on the first page. Those that do, are small sites that do not have large numbers of websites linked to it (this can be checked out here:

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm

Unlike with the Bernardo de Torres case, they have not removed from the database. What they have done is to find a way to rank it lower than would normally be the case with one of my pages. The way they do this is to look for the phrase “Operation Mockingbird” on the page. That is the thing that Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer, Mary Pinchot Meyer, E. Howard Hunt, Edward Bennett Williams, Philip Graham and Katharine Graham all have in common.

Operation Mockingbird was the highly secret CIA program started by Frank Wisner in 1948. The program was identified by Frank Church in the 1976 Senate report: “Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. As a result of this report, George Bush, the Director of the CIA at the time 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.”

This did not bring Operation Mockingbird to an end. It still goes on. In the past it concentrated on newspaper and book publishing. Today it concentrates on modern methods of information gathering. It cannot be seen to ban websites. For example, there are 86,000 web pages that includes the phrase “Operation Mockingbird”. Instead it concentrates on ensuring that certain pages do not appear at the top of the list. Therefore, despite my high ranking with searches like the First World War with its 42 million pages, I do not appear on the first few pages of searches on Operation Mockingbird (if you do not appear on the first few pages you are unlikely to be seen. However, I have found a way round this. I have posted about Operation Mockingbird on this forum and JFK Lancer. Those pages are ranked on the second page of Google. Clearly, these forums have yet to come to the attention of the CIA.

[Shanet Clark]

The following list of suspects appear near the top of searches (the vast majority being ranked in the top 3):

David Morales,

David Atlee Phillips,

Richard Bissell,

Gerry Hemming,

William Seymour,

Bobby Baker,

J. Edgar Hoover,

Fred Black,

Tracy Barnes,

Lucien Conein,

Roy Hargraves,

William Harvey,

Howard K. Davis,

Eugenio Martinez,

John Martino,

Roland Masferrer,

Clint Murchison,

Gordon Novel,

William (Rip) Robertson,

Johnny Roselli,

Felipe Vidal Santiago,

Manuel Artime,

Ted Shackley,

George Smathers,

Sergio Arcacha Smith,

Eladio del Valle,

Santo Trafficante,

Antonio Veciana,

Malcolm (Mac) Wallace,

Mitchell WerBell,

Jake Esterline,

Dennis Harber,

Loran Hall,

Charles Willoughby,

Dave Yarras,

Chauncey Holt,

Tony Varona,

Virgilio Gonzalez,

Herminio Diaz Garcia,

Charles Harrelson,

James Files,

Tony Cuesta,

Billie Sol Estes,

David Ferrie,

Guy Banister,

Loy Factor,

Rolando Cubela,

Clifton Carter,

Bernard L. Barker and

Desmond FitzGerald.

That leaves us with the interesting question: Who is the CIA protecting? Here is the list:

Frank Wisner,

Cord Meyer,

Mary Pinchot Meyer,

E. Howard Hunt,

Edward Bennett Williams,

Philip Graham and

Katharine Graham.

unquote

This would tend to support the seriousness of the recent threads on these individuals......

Edited March 28, 2005 by Shanet Clark

[John Simkin]

That leaves us with the interesting question: Who is the CIA protecting? Here is the list: Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer, Mary Pinchot Meyer, E. Howard Hunt, Edward Bennett Williams, Philip Graham and Katharine Graham.

Why should they be protecting these people? The thing they all have in common is Operation Mockingbird (this is another page of mine that does not appear in the search-rankings). Operation Mockingbird was of course the CIA operation to control the media. It is still clearly in operation. Now it is concentrating on controlling the web pages people visit.

It would seem that only AltaVista is not under CIA control.

Operation Mockingbird and Frank Wisner were top of the rankings on Sunday at AltaVista on Sunday. Now they do not appear in AltaVista searches.

I have also discovered that the inclusion of Operation Mockingbird on my index page on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy has also had a dramatic impact on its search-engine rankings. It used to be listed in the top three, now it is nowhere to be found.

I have had to take drastic action. This should solve this problem. I will report back in a week’s time. If this does not work, it will mean that pages are being dealt with on an individual basis.

In the meantime, take a look at this article by David Guyatt that links Operation Mockingbird to the JFK assassination. It actually appears higher than my page on the subject even though the page is untitled and is a site with only 404 links.

http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm

[Shanet Clark]

I have been familiar with

OPERATION INSLAW,

INLET,

BLUESKY,

ECHELON,

MK/ULTRA,

CHAOS,

COINTELPRO,

ARTICHOKE,

PAPERCLIP,

DUSTBIN,

ASHCAN,

ZR/RIFLE and

PHOENIX for quite some time.......

OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD

is a very hot potato evidently and of course, John Simkin is to be applauded for exposing this ongoing propaganda and manipulation activity.....

These unethical, counter-productive US illegal domestic intelligence operations need more scrutiny, both in historical enquiry and in real-time journalism.

Edited March 29, 2005 by Shanet Clark

[John Simkin]

Despite various attempts to manipulate Google’s rankings, I have been unable to get my page on Operation Mockingbird onto the first page. Frank Wisner and Mary Pinchot Meyer also appear to be protected. Although key figures in Mockingbird such as Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Thomas Braden and Richard Ober do appear in the first few web pages ranked.

I noticed that when doing a search for Operation Mockingbird the Wikipedia entry always appeared near the top (Wikipedia entries always do). On 6th April it said: “Operation Mockingbird is the name of a CIA project that may or may not have existed. It has been mentioned in several books and web sites, but its existence has not yet been determined. Some believe the operation is merely an urban legend or a conspiracy theory.”

So I decided to change it and instead gave a detailed and page referenced account of Mockingbird. I also added a link to my own web page. Despite calls to have the page removed it is still there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm

However, while doing a search via Google this morning I discovered that the Wikipedia entry for Operation Mockingbird has been removed. Further evidence that the CIA is manipulating search-results. Interestingly, the Forum thread that I started on Operation Mockingbird is currently in 8th place. I wonder how long this will last.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3054

Another interesting thing is that if you do a UK Google search for Operation Mockingbird my page appears in second place in the rankings.

[Shanet Clark]

I will tell the group and the public what I told John in a personal message.

I keep pretty close tabs on the relation between the google search engine results and certain key words I am most interested......I have monitored a few unique phrases and recently my results show a downgrading of ED FORUM weight visavis the prominence of the search results.

Certain unique phrases I posted on the ED FORUM were very highly placed until about April, when they sank deeply into the results, or were not found at all.

OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD, as represented by the known efforts of Ben Bradlee and Cord Meyer, is certainly a "Real" and not imaaginary PROGRAM of domestic press and media manipulation by the US intelligence agency.

This is the chilling environment that John Kennedy lived amongst in Georgetown At Washington DC< and this is the context of the assassination in Dallas.

John Simkin's has apparently stumbled onto something larger and more grotesque than the simple killing of an elected president.

>>>>>>>>>

[John Simkin]

Last week the Guardian (circulation 440,000) published an article on Wikipedia claiming that in 1999 it became the first free encyclopaedia on the web. I wrote to the newspaper and explained this was not true as the Spartacus Educational Encyclopaedia started in September, 1997.

I then went on to look at the reliability of Wikipedia. I used the subject of Operation Mockingbird to illustrate my point. I also then explained in some detail of how the CIA are manipulating Google search rankings.

The Guardian published my letter today. However, all reference to Operation Mockingbird and the CIA had been removed.

[Antti Hynonen]

John Simkin Posted Today, 09:23 AM

  Last week the Guardian (circulation 440,000) published an article on Wikipedia claiming that in 1999 it became the first free encyclopaedia on the web. I wrote to the newspaper and explained this was not true as the Spartacus Educational Encyclopaedia started in September, 1997.

I then went on to look at the reliability of Wikipedia. I used the subject of Operation Mockingbird to illustrate my point. I also then explained in some detail of how the CIA are manipulating Google search rankings.

The Guardian published my letter today. However, all reference to Operation Mockingbird and the CIA had been removed.

John, I commend you on the action you have taken. Well done.

Some things are too hot to handle. "However, all reference to Operation Mockingbird and the CIA had been removed."

[Guest Stephen Turner]

John.

Your page on Frank Wisner, is currently ranked 15th on Google. Most of the entries that have a higher ranking, are about Wisner's son working for Enron. HMMMM.

[Dawn Meredith]

Despite calls to have the page removed it is still there.

_______________________

Calls from whom? It's amazing to think that NSA types are sitting around monitering SINGLE pages on the web!! But I have long wondered how long such freedom of information will be permitted. First they give us McAdams and his ilk to confuse those interested in learning the truth, now it's becoming outright cencorship.

But then again, itsn't that just what Operation Mockingbird IS?: CIA control of the media, and the net has become the "media", as a news source for many.

Dawn

[Dan Moorhouse]

Very interesting.

I've just done a google search for Operation Mocking bird to see what came up. The Education Forum was in the top 10 but John's site wasn't. That suprisies me as John's material is normally in the top 3 for most history based key word searches. (Actually, the Spartacus site wasn't in the top 70 results)

Odd, and it lends itself to the theory that things are being manipulated. However a look through some of the pages that are being ranked in the top 10 suggests that they're far from complimentary of the CIA either. (Quotes follow) Without reading them all in any great depth I can only assume that the inference is that they are ok as they may criticise etc but don't actually point the finger for any particular crime (such as the JFK assassination)?

Number 1:

In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself.

Number 2:

The CIA is the President's secret army, who have been and continue to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority, to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.

[John Simkin]

Very interesting.

I've just done a google search for Operation Mocking bird to see what came up. The Education Forum was in the top 10 but John's site wasn't. That suprisies me as John's material is normally in the top 3 for most history based key word searches. (Actually, the Spartacus site wasn't in the top 70 results)

Odd, and it lends itself to the theory that things are being manipulated. However a look through some of the pages that are being ranked in the top 10 suggests that they're far from complimentary of the CIA either. (Quotes follow) Without reading them all in any great depth I can only assume that the inference is that they are ok as they may criticise etc but don't actually point the finger for any particular crime (such as the JFK assassination)?

You are right to suggest that most of the other pages quoted are indeed written by critics of the CIA. However, what these pages lack is a full history of Operation Mockingbird. Nor do they provide documentary evidence that this actually existed. Most of these pages have been written by or are based on the work of Alex Constantine, a radical journalist who does not have a good reputation for accurate research. This is why on 6th April Wikipedia said: “Operation Mockingbird is the name of a CIA project that may or may not have existed. It has been mentioned in several books and web sites, but its existence has not yet been determined. Some believe the operation is merely an urban legend or a conspiracy theory.” It then went on to say that Alex Constantine was the source of the story.

At this time Wikipedia’s entry was ranked number one. This entry was having an important influence on the way people were perceiving Operation Mockingbird. In fact, the existence of Operation Mockingbird was first revealed in Frank Church’s Senate report in April, 1976 (Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities pages 191-201).

Further research by people like Carl Bernstein, Deborah Davis, Angus Mackenzie and Steve Kangas have enabled the journalists and media outlets involved in Mockingbird to be named.

I therefore decided to write the entry for Operation Mockingbird on Wikipedia. Unlike other Wikipedia entries I gave full page references for my history of this CIA operation. In this way I was able to get my interpretation of Mockingbird at the top of Google’s rankings. I must say I was unprepared for their next move. This was to remove the Wikipedia’s entry from Google’s rankings. Although it does provide a link to a mirror Wikipedia that includes the original entry for Operation Mockingbird.

http://www.four54.com/deheus/petrik/demo/wikipedia/

As you say, you can also get to my text by the link to the Education Forum (ranked 7th). My text has also been taken by the owners of the ParaPolitics website and this is ranked 10th.

One of the interesting aspects of this story is that if you do a search of Google UK my page is ranked at the top. This includes a higher ranking of another UK page that is untitled from the Deep Black Lies website. Yet this page appears on the 4th page on the worldwide Google search-engine.

http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm

The NameBase page on Operation Mockingbird is also suffering from this discrimination:

http://www.namebase.org/xoea/Operation-Mockingbird.html

This is not the first time it has happened to me. My page on CIA operative Bernardo de Torres was ranked 1st at Google for many months. However, it suddenly was removed from the Google database. So also had another page produced by the NameBase website.

http://www.namebase.org/main1/Bernardo-De-torres.html

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKtorres.htm

I decided to hit back by writing about this on several forums. I also told the story to several journalists who began making inquiries. Although Google refused to respond to my emails they decided that it was best to restore these two pages to its database.

I now intend to use my journalist friends to write an account of Operation Mockingbird and Google. If I was Google I would do what they did with my Bernardo de Torres page. One of the reasons people use Google is that believe it is offering an unbiased service. If the public discover Google is allowing the CIA to manipulate its database, it will undermine its credibility and give an advantage to its other rivals (as long as they can prove their rankings is not being influenced by the intelligence services).

[John Simkin]

Members might be interested in this article at Google Watch:

http://www.google-watch.org/jobad.html

It is interesting that Daniel Brandt, the man behind Google Watch, also runs NameBase, the other website being targeted by Google.