Operation Mockingbird

Mark Knight · May 23, 2005

Tim, you know damn well there is no "smoking gun" that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the CIA was involved. Does that mean they WEREN'T involved? If there was evidence that PROVED CIA involvement, we could just say "the CIA did it!", fold up our tents and all go home and sip ice tea on the veranda for the rest of our days.

By the same token, there is no evidence that DIRECTLY links Fidel Castro to the assassination, either. As with the CIA, we can INFER that there was some involvement, based upon SOME of the evidence...but if the evidence ever emerged that said conclusively that Fidel did it, we could likewise fold our tents and spend our golden years on the veranda, ice tea in hand.

By the very nature of the CIA, it is highly doubtful that ANY incriminating evidence was ever committed to paper. Therefore, it's likely that the ONLY evidence we will EVER have on CIA involvement will be contained in the statements of CIA personnel and those around them. Then the credibility of the claims hinges on the credibility of the individuals themselves. So if the credibility of the individuals is in doubt, then the credibility of the evidence for or against CIA involvement is in doubt.

Are the CIA witnesses more credible than the Castro witnesses? Or less? That's why we discuss this topic...because of something called "reasonable doubt." And with the knowledge of the existence of programs such as "Operation Mockingbird," we can infer that there MIGHT have been some manipulation of evidence--at least what was reported in the press--to suppress any confirmation of CIA involvement. Or, as someone else so aptly expressed the thought elsewhere on this forum: "The absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence."

Jim Root · May 23, 2005

Mark

Your comments are well stated.

It is my personal belief that Oswald had, at sometime, been used by US intelligence. That does not allow me, in my mind, to then transend over to believe that the US intelligence community therefore killed Kennedy any more than beliving that because Oswald's wifes friends neighbor helped him get a job at the TSBD building they, therefore were involved in the assassination of JFK.

But I disagree with you on this point:

"By the very nature of the CIA, it is highly doubtful that ANY incriminating evidence was ever committed to paper. "

I think the work of John Newman and Jefferson Morley shows that documents that deal with Oswald can teach us a great deal about what occured. The fact that he was being watched and monitored at the highest eschelons of the CIA should be an indicator that Oswald was a person of higher than ordinary interest.

It is not a matter of searching out documents, it is a matter of focusing on what documents to search out. For example, Hosty's note of November 4th was never, to my understanding, given an exhibit number and has therefore never been requested by researchers. Yet we now know that Hosty's September note made it to the office of Richard Helms. If his November note made it to Helm's office in a timely manner the CIA knew where Oswald was working before the assasination occured, they, it can be assumed, allowed the motorcade to pass the building and may never have provided information to the Secrete Service about this man.

Somewhere, hidden away, there may well be a document that will confirm if we are going in the right direction.

One place I would like to look is in the personal papers of Edwin Anderson Walker that are restricted from researchers indiffently while stored at the University of Texas. Why the restrictions and what did he know that we are not allowed to find out?

And the beat goes on.

Jim Root

Tim Gratz · May 27, 2005

To Mark:

I was not requesting "smoking gun" evidence. Simply ANY evidence pointing toward anyone in the CIA. In response to my repeated requests, no one ever offers any; all that is offered is generalizations, e.g. "I think the CIA did it".

As far as I know, all there is is Morales' drunken boast, and Hunt's possible presence in Dallas (per a memo that may or may not exist).

Is there anything else?

My evidence pointing toward Cuba, which I admit is not quite "smoking gun" (but I think it meets the "middle" evidentiary standard ("clear and convincing")) can be found on the thread "Ruby's Strange Motivation". (Post #43.)

(These threads are like meandering streams.)

Edited May 27, 2005 by Tim Gratz

John Simkin · May 27, 2005

I have in the past argued that in the early days of Operation Mockingbird it relied heavily on a group of CIA officials, journalists and politicians known as the “Georgetown Crowd”. This group included Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Joseph Alsop, Stewart Alsop, Cord Meyer, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Braden, Philip Graham, Katharine Graham, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, W. Averell Harriman, Chip Bohlen and Paul Nitze. This group became known as the Georgetown Crowd. Later this group included Ben Bradlee. LBJ also had access to this group via Philip and Katharine Graham.

Up to now I have been unable to find a direct link between this group and the JFK assassination cover-up. My copy of C. David Heyman’s The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club arrived this morning. Heyman covers this group. To my surprise it also included John Sherman Cooper. Maybe that is why LBJ selected him to join the Warren Commission.

Terry Mauro · May 29, 2005

I have in the past argued that in the early days of Operation Mockingbird it relied heavily on a group of CIA officials, journalists and politicians known as the “Georgetown Crowd”. This group included Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Joseph Alsop, Stewart Alsop, Cord Meyer, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Braden, Philip Graham, Katharine Graham, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, W. Averell Harriman, Chip Bohlen and Paul Nitze. This group became known as the Georgetown Crowd. Later this group included Ben Bradlee. LBJ also had access to this group via Philip and Katharine Graham.
Up to now I have been unable to find a direct link between this group and the JFK assassination cover-up. My copy of C. David Heyman’s The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club arrived this morning. Heyman covers this group. To my surprise it also included John Sherman Cooper. Maybe that is why LBJ selected him to join the Warren Commission.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Here's Robert Parry's P.O.V. on what happened to the media. Although I don't believe he goes back far enough in history, he does bring up a few points:

The Answer Is Fear

By Robert Parry

May 26, 2005

One benefit of the new AM progressive talk radio in cities around the United States is that the call-in shows have opened a window onto the concerns – and confusion – felt by millions of Americans trying to figure out how their country went from a democratic republic to a modern-day empire based on a cult of personality and a faith-based rejection of reason.

“What went wrong?” you hear them ask. “How did we get here?”

You also hear more detailed questions: “Why won’t the press do its job of holding George W. Bush accountable for misleading the country to war in Iraq? How could the intelligence on Iraq have been so wrong? Why do America’s most powerful institutions sit back while huge trade and budget deficits sap away the nation’s future?”

There are, of course, many answers to these questions. But from my 27 years in the world of Washington journalism and politics, I would say that the most precise answer can be summed up in one word: fear.

It’s not fear of physical harm. That's not how it works in Washington. For the professionals in journalism and in intelligence, it’s a smaller, more corrosive fear – of lost status, of ridicule, of betrayal, of unemployment. It is the fear of getting blackballed from a community of colleagues or a profession that has given your life much of its meaning and its financial sustenance.

Dynamic of Fear

What the American conservative movement has done so effectively over the last three decades is to perfect a dynamic of fear and inject it into the key institutions for generating or disseminating information.

This strategy took shape in the latter half of the 1970s amid the ashes of the Watergate scandal and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Conservatives were determined that those twin disasters – getting caught in a major political scandal and seeing the U.S. population turn against a war effort – should never happen again.

As I describe in Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, the initial targets of the Right's “war of ideas” were the national news media and the CIA’s analytical division – two vital sources of information at the national level.

The U.S. press was blamed for exposing President Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and for spreading dissension that undermined morale in the Vietnam War. The CIA analysts had to be brought under control because the driving rationale for the conservative power grab was to be an exaggerated threat assessment of America’s enemies.

If the American people saw the Soviet Union as a leviathan coming to swallow the United States, then they would surrender their tax dollars, their civil liberties and their common sense. Conversely, if the CIA analysts offered a nuanced view of the Soviet Union as a rapidly declining power falling farther behind the West technologically and desperately trying to keep control of its disintegrating sphere of influence, then Americans might favor a shift in priorities away from foreign dangers to domestic needs. Negotiation – not confrontation – would make sense.

Neocon Wars

So, one of the first battles fought in this historic neocon conquest of the U.S. government occurred largely behind the walls of the CIA, beginning in 1976 (under George H.W. Bush’s directorship) with the so-called “Team B” assault on the CIA’s fabled Kremlinologists. In the 1980s, this attack on the professional objectivity of the CIA’s analytical division intensified under the watchful eye of CIA Director William J. Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates.

Through bureaucratic bullying and purges, the neoconservatives eventually silenced CIA analysts who were reporting evidence of Soviet decline. Instead, a “politicized” CIA analytical division adopted worst-case scenarios about Soviet capabilities and intentions, estimates that supported the Reagan administration’s costly arms buildup and covert wars in the Third World.

The neocon strategy was so successful that the battered CIA analytical division largely blinded itself to the growing evidence of the coming Soviet collapse. Then, ironically, when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990, the neoconservatives were hailed as heroes for achieving the seemingly impossible – the supposedly sudden collapse of the Soviet Union – while the CIA’s analytical division was ridiculed for “missing” the Soviet demise. [For details, see Secrecy & Privilege.]

The second important target in these Neocon Wars was the U.S. national press corps. The strategy here was twofold: to build an ideologically conservative news media and to put consistent pressure on mainstream journalists who generated information that undercut the conservative message.

The so-called “controversializing” of troublesome mainstream journalists was aided and abetted by the fact that many senior news executives and publishers were either openly or quietly sympathetic to the neocons’ hard-line foreign policy agenda. That was even the case in news companies regarded as “liberal” – such as the New York Times, where executive editor Abe Rosenthal shared many neocon positions, or at Newsweek, where top editor Maynard Parker also aligned himself with the neocons.

In the 1980s, reporters who dug up hard stories that challenged the Reagan administration’s messaging found themselves under intense pressure, both externally from well-funded conservative attack groups and behind their backs from senior editors. Any false step – if it offended the Reagan-Bush White House – could prove fatal for a career.

The New York Times’ Central America correspondent Raymond Bonner was perhaps the highest profile journalist pushed out of a job because his reporting angered the neoconservatives, but he was far from alone. The Reagan administration even organized special “public diplomacy” teams to lobby bureau chiefs about ousting reporters who were deemed insufficiently supportive of government policies.

[For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]

Disproving Liberalism

Also, by popularizing accusations of “liberal media,” the conservatives both justified the existence of their own ideological news outlets and put mainstream news organizations in the constant position of trying to prove they weren’t liberal. To protect their careers, journalists made a point of writing stories that would please the Reagan-Bush White House.

Similarly, in the 1990s, mainstream journalists wrote more harshly about President Clinton than they normally would because they wanted to show that they could be tougher on a Democrat than a Republican. This approach was not journalistically sound – reporters are supposed to be equal-opportunity abusers – but it made psychological sense for journalists who knew how vulnerable they were, having seen how easily the careers of other capable journalists had been destroyed.

As the years wore on, the survivors of this bureaucratic Darwinism – who had avoided the Right’s wrath both in the worlds of journalism and intelligence analysis – rose to senior positions in their respective fields. The ethos shifted from truth-telling to career-protection. [For an extreme example of how this dynamic worked, see Consortiumnews.com's "America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb."]

The consequences of these changes in journalism and intelligence analysis became apparent when the neocons – the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams – returned to power under George W. Bush in 2001 and especially after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

As happened with the hyping of the Soviet threat in the mid-to-late 1980s, a pliant intelligence community largely served up whatever alarmist information the White House wanted about Iraq and other foreign enemies.

When an individual analyst did challenge the “group think,” he or she would be called unfit or accused of leftist sympathies, as occurred when State Department analysts protested Undersecretary of State John Bolton’s exaggerated claims about Cuba’s weapons of mass destruction. [see Consortiumnews.com’s “John Bolton & the Battle for Reality.”]

Meanwhile, in the mainstream media, news executives and journalists were petrified of accusations that they were “blaming America first” or didn’t sufficiently “support the troops.” Mainstream news outlets competed with conservative Fox News to wrap themselves in red, white and blue. News executives transformed their networks and newspapers into little more than conveyor belts for the Bush administration’s propaganda.

Poorly sourced allegations about Iraq’s supposed nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs were trumpeted on Page One of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Skeptical stories were buried deep inside.

This journalistic fear has lessened somewhat since the discovery by Bush’s own investigators that the U.S. claims about Iraq’s WMD were “dead wrong,” but the residual intimidation remains. News executives still realize it’s safer for their careers to downplay stories that cast a harsh light on Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq.

So, in May 2005, when the British press disclosed a secret government memo from July 2002 stating that everyone knew the Iraq WMD evidence was “thin” but that Bush had decided to go to war anyway – months earlier than the official story – these revelations were treated as old news in the U.S. press.

The Washington Post’s national security writer Walter Pincus used the so-called Downing Street Memo as a way to reexamine the evidence that some U.S. intelligence analysts were warning the Bush administration about the weak WMD case in 2002. But the Post’s editors followed their long-set pattern and stuck the article on Page A26. [Washington Post, May 22, 2005]

Reasons Why

On the progressive talk radio shows, both callers and hosts struggle to explain this phenomenon of downplaying important life-and-death stories.

Some put the fault on media profiteering that invests little money in investigative journalism and favors circuses like the Michael Jackson trial. Others blame corporate consolidation that wants to reward Bush for lucrative deregulation policies at the Federal Communications Commission.

Though there’s some truth in these analyses, I believe the more fundamental motivation is career fear.

The major U.S. news outlets didn’t shut their eyes about the Downing Street Memo because it lacked news interest. Indeed, many readers would have dropped 50 cents into a newspaper vending machine to read about how the nation was duped into war or they’d watch a penetrating segment about the issue on a TV news program.

But news executives judged that whatever financial gain they might receive from playing this story up was outweighed by the grief they would get from Bush administration defenders. So the news judgment was to play the story down.

Too many journalists had lost jobs over the preceding quarter century to take the risk. The neocons had instilled enough fear in the American news business – from executive suites to beat reporters – that nearly everyone wants to err on the side of not offending the powers that be.

Career fear trumped the profit motive.

What is perhaps even more troubling is that this fear is spreading to other institutions. Academia is now feeling the heat from conservatives who want to eliminate it as the last bastion of liberal thought. Corporate leaders also appear to be suffering from paralysis in the face of policies that are threatening the long-term future of the United States.

As New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman observed after traveling to American cities, CEOs are mostly staying on the sidelines in these crucial debates.

“America faces a huge set of challenges if it is going to retain its competitive edge,” Friedman wrote. “As a nation, we have a mounting education deficit, energy deficit, budget deficit, health care deficit and ambition deficit. …

“Yet, when I look around for the group that has both the power and interest in seeing America remain globally focused and competitive – America’s business leaders – they seem to be missing in action. … In part, this is because boardrooms tend to be culturally Republican – both uncomfortable and a little afraid to challenge this administration.” [NYT, May 25, 2005]

How to Build Courage

So, what’s the answer? If a big part of the problem is fear, how can fear be overcome?

It’s simply not enough to tell journalists, politicians and others that they must buck up and do the right thing, especially when people who do show courage are systematically destroyed and made into object lessons for colleagues left behind.

If individuals are expected to be courageous, there must be courageous institutions to surround and protect them. That’s why the creation of a counter-infrastructure – one that will take on both the powerful conservative infrastructure and the cowardly mainstream media – is so vital.

Examples of how this counter-dynamic could work can be found in the take-no-prisoners ethos of the anti-Bush Internet sites, or in the irreverent comedy of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” or in the unabashed liberalism of the fledgling progressive talk radio.

All have shown toughness in refusing to genuflect before Bush and his enormous political power.

Just as cowardice can come in small pieces, none seeming to be that important alone but which added together can destroy a worthy cause, so courage can build one piece on top of another until a solid foundation is established from which a mighty edifice can rise.

But it is urgent that progressives begin immediately to invest in the building blocks of this new infrastructure. It's the only hope for a healthy political balance to be restored.

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

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

John Simkin · June 14, 2005

I am pleased to announce that my campaign against the blocking of my page on Operation Mockingbird at Google has been successful. It has been restored to the Google database. (It now appears at 3rd in the ranking). So also has my page on Frank Wisner, the man who established Mockingbird. Another person blocked, Mary Pinchot Meyer, is also back in (although John McAdams’ CIA disinformation page is still ranked at number 1).

As I expected, the publicity being generated by this was causing Google more problems than it was worth. Especially my journalist friends who took up my case with Google.

What is important in all this is that the CIA thought it necessary to pressurize Google into removing these pages from its database. I am obviously on the right track in my research.

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

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

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

Daniel Brandt · June 17, 2005

Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer

Alongside those Greek morality plays and Biblical injunctions, we are also reminded by history itself that the use of unethical means to achieve a worthy end can be self-destructive. Power, by definition, is isolated from the correcting signals of external criticism. Or perhaps the feeling of fighting evil fits so comfortably, that it's difficult to shed even after objective circumstances change.

The history of U.S. intelligence since World War II follows both patterns. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor, had jurisdiction over wartime covert operations and propaganda in the fight against fascism. OSS chief William Donovan recruited heavily among social and academic elites. When the CIA was launched in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War, these pioneers felt that they had both the right and the duty to secretly manipulate the masses for the greater good.

OSS veteran Frank Wisner ran most of the early peacetime covert operations as head of the Office of Policy Coordination. Although funded by the CIA, OPC wasn't integrated into the CIA's Directorate of Plans until 1952, under OSS veteran Allen Dulles. Both Wisner and Dulles were enthusiastic about covert operations. By mid-1953 the department was operating with 7,200 personnel and 74 percent of the CIA's total budget.

Wisner created the first "information superhighway." But this was the age of vacuum tubes, not computers, so he called it his "Mighty Wurlitzer." The CIA's global network funded the Italian elections in 1948, sent paramilitary teams into Albania, trained Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan, and pumped money into the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the National Student Association, and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Key leaders and labor unions in western Europe received subsidies, and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were launched. The Wurlitzer, an organ designed for film productions, could imitate sounds such as rain, thunder, or an auto horn. Wisner and Dulles were at the keyboard, directing history.

The ethos of the fight against fascism carried over into the fight against godless communism; for these warriors, the Cold War was still a war. OSS highbrows had already embraced psychological warfare as a new social science: propaganda, for example, was divided into "black" propaganda (stories that are unattributed, or attributed to nonexistent sources, or false stories attributed to a real source), "gray" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is attributed to others), and "white" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is acknowledged as such).[1]

After World War II, these psywar techniques continued. C.D. Jackson, a major figure in U.S. psywar efforts before and after the war, was simultaneously a top executive at Time-Life. Psywar was also used with success during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, first in the Philippines and then in South Vietnam. In Guatemala, the Dulles brothers worked with their friends at United Fruit, in particular the "father of public relations," Edward Bernays, who for years had been lobbying the press on behalf of United. When CIA puppets finally took over in 1954, only applause was heard from the media, commencing forty years of CIA-approved horrors in that unlucky country.[2] Bernays' achievement apparently impressed Allen Dulles, who immediately began using U.S. public relations experts and front groups to promote the image of Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam's savior.[3]

The combined forces of unaccountable covert operations and corporate public relations, each able to tap massive resources, are sufficient to make the concept of "democracy" obsolete. Fortunately for the rest of us, unchallenged power can lose perspective. With research and analysis -- the capacity to see and understand the world around them -- entrenched power must constantly anticipate and contain potential threats. But even as power seems more secure, this capacity can be blinded by hubris and isolation.

Troublesome notes were heard from the Wurlitzer in the 1960s -- but not from American journalism, which had already sold its soul to the empire. Instead, the announcement that the emperor had no clothes was made by a new generation. Much that was dear to this counterculture was stylistic and superficial, and there were many within this culture itself, and certainly within the straight media, who mistook this excess baggage for its essence. Nevertheless, the youth culture's rumpled opposition was sufficient to slow down the machine and let in some light.

The ruling class failed to see the naked contradiction that they had created. They expected that the most-privileged, best-educated generation in history could be forcibly drafted to fight a dirty war against popular self-determination some 8,000 miles away -- a war that clearly had more to do with anticommunist ideology and corporate greed than it did with the defense of America. The elites didn't have a clue that this was even a problem; President Johnson's knee-jerk response to the student antiwar movement, for example, was to pressure the CIA into uncovering the nefarious (and nonexistent) foreign influences behind it.

Thus the crack in the culture that eventually encouraged American media to take a look at themselves. With rare exceptions,[4] it was the alternative press that began to question racism, police brutality, Vietnam, the defense establishment, and the JFK assassination. In 1967 Ramparts magazine exposed a portion of the CIA's covert funding network, whereupon the New York Times and Washington Post began naming more names. By then the Wurlitzer would never sound the same, particularly after the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King [see the interview with William Pepper on this site-risephoenix] and Robert Kennedy invited further suspicions.

The counterculture burned out once the war wound down, but it had already dented the lemming-like consensus that typified an earlier period. For roughly ten years, between 1967 and 1977, Americans learned something of their secret history. From the perspective of twenty additional years, the results were mixed and much remains secret. But it's scary to think of where we might be now if the counterculture had never happened.

During the last half of those ten years, sandwiched between Watergate coverage on one end, and Congressional investigations of the CIA on the other, the media showed some interest in examining their own intelligence connections. The first shoe was dropped by Jack Anderson in late August, 1973, when he revealed that Seymour Freidin, head of the Hearst bureau in London, was a CIA agent. Freidin, already in the news because the Republicans paid him $10,000 in 1972 to spy on the Democrats, confirmed Anderson's story. At that point William Colby, the new CIA director, was asked by the New York Times and the Washington Star-News if any of their staff were on the CIA payroll.

James (Scotty) Reston of the NYT was satisfied with an evasive answer, but when the Star-News editorial board met with Colby, they made some progress. The other shoe dropped with an article by Oswald Johnston on November 30: the Star-News learned from an "authoritative source" (Colby) that the CIA had some three dozen American journalists on its payroll. Johnston named only one -- Jeremiah O'Leary -- who was one of their own diplomatic correspondents. (The Star-News stopped publishing in 1981, at which point O'Leary joined Reagan's national security staff. From 1982 until his death in 1993, he was with the Washington Times.)

That was the first and last time that Colby was helpful on this topic. Some believe that the new director was under pressure from the "young Turks" (junior staffers) at the Agency, who were granted a mandate by Colby's predecessor to cough up the "family jewels" -- a list of illegal exploits that could be culled from the CIA's files. Already there were rumors that the CIA was guilty of illegal spying on the antiwar movement -- rumors that were confirmed a year later by Seymour Hersh, whose sources were some of these same "young Turks."

Why was Colby initially forthcoming on the issue of the CIA and the media, and why did he then start stonewalling? Some believe that he was attempting a "limited hangout" as the best way out of a position that made him nervous, while others feel that he was implicitly threatening to provide additional names in order to scare off the media. Colby had reason to be worried: by late 1973, investigative journalism was in the air because of Watergate -- an issue that had more than the usual share of CIA connections.

Colby's stonewalling continued for the remainder of his tenure, even as a Senate committee led by Frank Church desperately tried to squeeze more names out of him. George Bush [see Skull and Bones on this site, download Bush's Unauthorized Biography from a Swiss site--risephoenix] replaced Colby in January, 1976, and eventually agreed to a one-paragraph summary of each file of a CIA journalist, with names deleted. When the CIA said it was finished, the Church committee had over 400 summaries.

The committee staff was shocked at the extent of the CIA's activity in this area, and felt that they still didn't have the story. But they were running out of time, and expected that the Senate's new permanent oversight committee would continue their work. The Church committee's final report contained only a handful of vague and misleading pages on the CIA and the media. "It hardly reflects what was found," stated Senator Gary Hart. "There was a prolonged and elaborate negotiation [with the CIA] over what would be said."[5]

The House investigation of the CIA, under Otis Pike, had more problems than the Senate investigation. The full House voted to suppress its committee's final report under pressure from the executive branch, at which point Daniel Schorr [CFR-risephoenix] of CBS leaked a copy to the Village Voice. This report contained just twelve paragraphs on the topic of the CIA and the media, including the tidbit about the CIA's "frequent manipulation of Reuters wire service dispatches."[6] Another paragraph gave some idea of the scope of the CIA's efforts in this area:

Some 29 percent of Forty Committee-approved covert actions were for media and propaganda projects. This number is probably not representative. Staff has determined the existence of a large number of CIA internally-approved operations of this type, apparently deemed not politically sensitive. It is believed that if the correct number of all media and propaganda projects could be determined, it would exceed Election Support as the largest single category of covert action projects undertaken by the CIA.[7]

One enterprising researcher took this 29 percent figure, and extrapolating from figures on CIA expenditures for covert operations, found that the cost of propaganda in 1978 was around $265 million and involved 2,000 personnel. Comparing this to figures for other news agencies, he concluded that the CIA "uses far more resources in its propaganda operations than any single news agency.... In fact, the CIA propaganda budget is as large as the combined budgets of Reuters, United Press International and the Associated Press."[8]

CBS took Daniel Schorr off the air after he leaked the Pike committee report. This was most likely a convenient opportunity for William Paley, chairman of CBS, who didn't approve of Schorr's interest in the network's own CIA connection. Former CBS News president Sig Mickelson, who by 1976 was president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, said that in October 1954, Paley called him into his office for a friendly discussion with two CIA officials. Schorr mentioned this on Walter Cronkite's show, and in an op-ed piece for the New York Times (Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the late publisher of the Times, had been cozy with the CIA also). "There are executives and retired executives," Schorr wrote, "who could help dispel the cloud hanging over the press by coming forward to tell the arrangements they made with the CIA."[9]

Little had changed since 1974, when Michael J. Harrington, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, leaked Colby's closed-door testimony about CIA involvement in the 1973 coup in Chile. Harrington soon found himself the target of a formal Ethics Committee investigation; now Schorr was also their target. Apparently Congress was fearful that the executive branch might paint them as bungling and irresponsible when it came to keeping secrets, and then use this as a club to deprive them of access to information.

If Congress felt this way, it was more than simple paranoia. In 1976 the CIA began cranking up their Wurlitzer on the matter of Richard Welch, a station chief in Athens who was assassinated by urban guerrillas at the end of 1975. The CIA's exploitation of this timely tragedy had both an immediate target and a general target. Ostensibly the CIA was complaining about an obscure Washington magazine called CounterSpy, which had been printing CIA names. In the same spirit, Philip Agee's just-published diary of CIA tricks in Latin America was loaded with names, and was already an international sensation. But the general target of this campaign was more important -- the CIA managed to change the nature of the debate. Suddenly it was no longer a question of what dirty work the CIA might be doing, but rather a question of what happens when the press recklessly endangers the lives of our brave boys overseas.

The fact that Welch's name had been published by the East Germans five years earlier, and that he could be identified as a CIA officer from his listing in the unclassified 1973 State Department Biographic Register, were both ignored. In any case, it was hardly a secret in Athens -- the group that killed Welch had been stalking his predecessor, Stacy Hulse, until Welch moved into the Hulse residence five months earlier. Colby eventually admitted to a House subcommittee that Welch's cover was inexcusably weak, and that the publication of his name in an Athens newspaper had only an indirect effect on his assassination.[10]

Colby could say this two years later because by then his comments were destined for a back page. The battle to rein in the CIA was already lost. In 1982 Congress passed a controversial new law that made publication of CIA names a felony under certain conditions. Although these conditions rarely applied to journalists, the wide coverage on this issue served to intimidate most publishers and editors.

Today the CIA, which once issued an automatic "no comment" when asked anything by reporters, is playing an adept game of "soft cop, hard cop" public relations. In 1991 an internal CIA task force recommended a more active posture by the public affairs office when responding to requests for assistance (that year they handled 3,369 telephone inquires from reporters, provided 174 unclassified background briefings for them at Headquarters, and arranged 164 interviews with senior Agency officials).[11] The "hard cop" was discovered by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. In 1995 she was telephoned by Vin Swasey, CIA deputy director of public affairs, who strongly objected to an editorial because it included the names of nine former station chiefs in Guatemala.[12] Reuters was persuaded by Swasey's colleagues to run the story without the names.

The final months of 1977 produced three significant pieces of journalism on the CIA and the media, just before the issue was abandoned altogether. The first, by Joe Trento and Dave Roman, reported the connections between Copley Press and the CIA. Owner James S. Copley cooperated with the CIA for three decades. A subsidiary, Copley News Service, was used as a CIA front in Latin America, while reporters at the Copley-owned San Diego Union and Evening News were instructed to spy on antiwar protesters for the FBI. No less than 23 news service employees were simultaneously working for the CIA. James Copley, who died in 1973, was also a leading figure behind the CIA-funded Inter-American Press Association.[13]

The next article was by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. In a long piece in Rolling Stone, he came up with the figure of 400 American journalists over the past 25 years, based primarily on interviews with Church committee staffers. This figure included stringers and freelancers who had an understanding that they were expected to help the CIA, as well as a small number of full-time CIA employees using journalism as a cover. It did not include foreigners, nor did it include numerous Americans who traded favors with the CIA in the normal give-and-take between a journalist and his sources. In addition to some of the names already mentioned above, Bernstein supplied details on Stewart and Joseph Alsop, Henry Luce, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Hal Hendrix of the Miami News, columnist C.L. Sulzberger, Richard Salant of CBS, and Philip Graham and John Hayes of the Washington Post.

Bernstein concentrated more on the owners, executives, and editors of news organizations than on individual reporters. "Lets's not pick on some poor reporters, for God's sake," William Colby said at one point to the Church committee's investigators. "Let's go to the management. They were witting." Bernstein noted that Colby had specific definitions for words such as "contract employee," "agent," "asset," "accredited correspondent," "editorial employee," "freelance," "stringer," and even "reporter," and through careful use of these words, the CIA "managed to obscure the most elemental fact about the relationships detailed in its files: i.e., that there was recognition by all parties involved that the cooperating journalists were working for the CIA -- whether or not they were paid or had signed employment contracts."[14]

The reaction to Bernstein's piece among mainstream media was to ignore it, or to suggest that it was sloppy and exaggerated. Then two months later, the New York Times published the results of their "three- month inquiry by a team of Times reporters and researchers." This three-part series not only confirmed Bernstein, but added a wealth of far-ranging details and contained twice as many names. Now almost everyone pretended not to notice.

The Times reported that over the last twenty years, the CIA owned or subsidized more than fifty newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals and other communications facilities, most of them overseas. These were used for propaganda efforts, or even as cover for operations. Another dozen foreign news organizations were infiltrated by paid CIA agents. At least 22 American news organizations had employed American journalists who were also working for the CIA, and nearly a dozen American publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA. When asked in a 1976 interview whether the CIA had ever told its media agents what to write, William Colby replied, "Oh, sure, all the time."

Since domestic propaganda was a violation of the their charter, the CIA defined the predictable effects of their foreign publications as "blowback" or "domestic fallout," which they considered to be "inevitable and consequently permissible." But former CIA employees told the Times that apart from this unintended blowback, "some CIA propaganda efforts, especially during the Vietnam War, had been carried out with a view toward their eventual impact in the United States." The Times series concluded that at its peak, the CIA's network "embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals."[15]

By the time the Times series appeared, Congress was looking for a way out of the issue. Obligingly, Stansfield Turner promised that the CIA would avoid journalists "accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station." There were at least three problems with this that most press coverage overlooked: many stringers and freelancers are not accredited; it didn't cover any foreign-owned media; and as Gary Hart complained at the time, the new policy included a provision that allowed the CIA to unilaterally make exceptions whenever it wished.[16]

Within several years of this alleged policy, the new Reagan administration ignored it in favor of a shooting war in Central America, one component of which was an illegal CIA-administered propaganda war at home. Edgar Chamorro, a contra sympathizer in Miami with a background in public relations, was recruited by the CIA in late 1982. After two years of following the CIA's instructions regarding the manipulation of U.S. journalists and even members of Congress, Chamorro went public with his story.[17] By now Congress was clearly out-maneuvered, even though it alone held the purse strings that controlled funding for the war.

The inability of Congress to address the CIA-media problem in the 1970s meant that more powerful forces were at work. In fact, while Congress was wringing its left hand over illegal CIA activities, its right hand was helping the CIA overhaul its Wurlitzer. Ever since 1967, when the Katzenbach committee was tasked by Lyndon Johnson to study the problem of the CIA's use of domestic organizations, the agenda at the highest levels had been to remove such activities from the CIA's payroll and continue them under a new umbrella. In the unclassified portion of their report, this committee recommended giving money openly through a "public-private mechanism." "The CIA's big mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough," observed Gloria Steinem, who had been part of the CIA's global network.[18]

The Asia Foundation was given a large "severance payment" so that they could find private funding,[19] and the Congress for Cultural Freedom got over $4 million from the Ford Foundation.[20] [see Daniel Brandt's article on Philanthropies on this site--risephoenix] In 1971, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were spun off and funded separately by new legislation. While this hardly diminished the CIA's control of these radio stations, it did help public relations by facilitating "deniability."[21] Then in 1983, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy, with funding to carry on many of the activities that the CIA once carried out covertly within its own budget.

Bits and pieces of the old Wurlitzer were still evident everywhere: John Richardson, Jr. [CFR-see Coucil on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commision on this site--risephoenix], the new chairman of NED, had been president and CEO of Radio Free Europe during the 1960s, and some of the NED's dozens of grants were issued to groups that solicited aid for the contras.[22] "It is not necessary to turn to the covert approach," commented Colby in regard to the NED program. "Many of the programs which ... were conducted as covert operations [can now be] conducted quite openly, and consequentially, without controversy."[23] As if to prove his point, Colby's wife was soon a member of NED's board of directors.

Two major changes since the 1980s -- the collapse of socialism and the centralization of domestic and transnational media, suggest that the CIA now has everything well in hand. But it is far too early to tell. The pressure to stay competitive in the global marketplace could provoke economic nationalism in places where the CIA was once free to roam. France and Germany, for example, have recently expelled CIA agents. At the same time, the Soviet people are having second thoughts about all those benefits of U.S.-imposed capitalism. China remains aggressive and uncompromising; they may even tolerate less interference from us in their political process than we do from them.

It's a different world, and it's unfamiliar. A blue-ribbon panel of the Council on Foreign Relations suggested last year that the CIA be freed from some policy constraints on covert operations, such as the use of journalists and clergy as cover. This is alarming. Unlike the typical corporate-funded think tank, filled with pro-Pentagon pundits, the folks at CFR are either running the world or they know who does. For 70 years they've rarely recommended anything that has not become policy. Furthermore, they've thoroughly co-opted the major media (see sidebar).

There have also been official announcements that the CIA is mission-creeping into economic intelligence and computer-age information warfare. This might reflect a bit of nostalgia for the job security and moral clarity of the Cold War, or it could be a premonition that the American Century is over and the masses are expected to get uppity. Perhaps the First Amendment has always been something of a con -- a matter of "freedom," but only for those who own the presses, or for those who lived in an earlier century, before psywar and public relations experts.

Then again, stay tuned -- the credibility gap is back. A recent poll shows that Americans are fed up with mainstream news media. "Very favorable" ratings for television network news fell from 30 percent in 1985 to just 15 percent this year, and for large national newspapers it dropped 12 percent. A majority now believe that news stories are often inaccurate.[24]

After factoring in the new global economics and recalculating the prospects for the middle class, all bets are off. The poor performance of Congress and the press on the issue of journalists and the CIA may mean that the next time around, the elites will lack even the credibility to stage another co-opting charade of "oversight." That could prove beneficial, particularly if next the time threatens to be as inconsequential and diversionary as the last time.

-Notes-

1. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 70-71.

2. Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 111-114; Thomas P. McCann, An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit (New York: Crown Publishers, 1976), pp. 45-48.

3. Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA (Armonk NY and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 160-183.

4. The first anti-CIA book appeared in 1964: David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House). CIA director John McCone, and other officials acting under his direction, contacted the publisher in an effort to stop it.

5. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media," Rolling Stone, 20 October 1977, pp. 65-67.

6. "The CIA Report the President Doesn't Want You to Read," Village Voice, 20 February 1976, p. 40.

7. Ibid, p. 36.

8. Sean Gervasi, "CIA Covert Propaganda Capability," Covert Action Information Bulletin, No. 7, December 1979 - January 1980, pp. 18-20.

9. Daniel Schorr, Clearing the Air (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1978), pp. 204-206, 275-277.

10. Norman Kempster, "Identity of U.S. Spies Harder to Hide, Colby Says," Los Angeles Times, 28 December 1977, pp. 1, 8.

11. Central Intelligence Agency, Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence from the Task Force on Greater CIA Openness, 20 December 1991, 15 pages.

12. Allan Nairn, "The Country Team," The Nation, 5 June 1995, p. 780.

13. Joe Trento and Dave Roman, "The Spies Who Came In From the Newsroom," Penthouse, August 1977, pp. 44-46, 50.

14. Bernstein, p. 58.

15. John M. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treaster, "The CIA's 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World's Views," New York Times, 25 December 1977, pp. 1, 12; Terrence Smith, "CIA Contacts With Reporters," New York Times, p. 13; Crewdson and Treaster, "Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA," New York Times, 26 December 1977, pp. 1, 37; Crewdson and Treaster, "CIA Established Many Links to Journalists in U.S. and Abroad," New York Times, 27 December 1977, pp. 1, 40-41.

16. While it's true that Gary Hart's complaint was not widely covered (there's one paragraph in the Los Angeles Times on 16 December 1977, p. 2), it is still amazing that when this clause was rediscovered in early 1996, indignant columnists pretended that it had been a secret all along. The truth is, journalists haven't been doing their homework for the last 18 years. This led the Society of Professional Journalists to earn a flunking grade for their 23 February 1996 press release: "An executive order during the Carter administration was thought to have banned the practice [of the recruitment of journalists by the CIA]. After a Council on Foreign Relations task force recommended that the ban be reconsidered, it was revealed that a 'loophole' existed allowing the CIA director or his deputy to grant a waiver. After protests, Deutch refused to rule out the practice, saying in some cases it might be necessary." To rephrase this politely, it took 18 years for the SPJ to become aware of the fine print in the CIA's policy. This is probably due to poor reporting from newspapers such as the Washington Post, which the innocents at SPJ must think of as not only "liberal," but also competent. So why, when the Post's intelligence reporter, Walter Pincus, was told about the waiver last year, did he write it up as a scoop in the 22 February 1996 Washington Post??? Perhaps Pincus really didn't know. Or perhaps ever since Pincus took money from the CIA in the early 1960s, it has affected his reporting on this issue.

17. Edgar Chamorro, Packaging the Contras: A Case of CIA Disinformation (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987), 78 pages; Jacqueline Sharkey, "Back in Control," Common Cause Magazine, September/October 1986, pp. 28-40.

18. "CIA Subsidized Festival Trips: Hundreds of Students Were Sent to World Gatherings," New York Times, 21 February 1967.

19. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Dell Publishing, 1975), p. 179.

20. Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1989), pp. 224-225.

21. Marchetti and Marks, pp. 174-178.

22. John Kelly, "National Endowment for Reagan's Democracies," The National Reporter, Summer 1986, pp. 22-26; Council on Hemispheric Affairs and Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, National Endowment for Democracy (NED): A Foreign Policy Branch Gone Awry (Resource Center, Box 4506, Albuquerque NM 87196), 1990, 93 pages.

23. William Colby, "Political Action -- In the Open," Washington Post, 14 March 1982, p. D8.

24. Jack Nelson, "Major News Media Trusted Less, Poll Says," Los Angeles Times, 21 March 1997.

Tim Gratz · October 9, 2005

It must be remembered that from the end of WWII to the late eighties the Western democracies were indeed fighting a "cold war" against a totalitarian and repressive regime as evil as that of Nazi Germany (Stalin killed at least as many as Hitler; see Robert Conquest's books.) This regime had announced its intention to "bury" the western democracies and was doing its best to accomplish its objective.

Provided the articles were truthful, was it wrong for the CIA to attempt to "plant" pro-Western articles in the foreign press? If for no other reason to counter the disinformation being spread by the KGB. One could consider Operation Mockingbird as "covert public relations". I for one cannot see a moral objection for the CIA to, for instance, encourage a friendly Miami newsman to write a story about political or religious repression in Cuba, provided the article was factually accurate.

The cold war was in fact "cold" because it was in some part fought in the arena of public perception, particularly in the non-aligned countries.

Let me try a different hyypothetical. Would it have been wrong for the CIA to encourage stories about the successes of the Peace Corps?

It strikes me that to deny the US the right to encourage, even covertly, the placement of pro-Western news stories to counter anti-Western stories (many false) being planted by the KGB (see "The Sword and the Shield") would be like requiring the west to fight a hot war without bullets.

Journalists who encouraged the forces of democracy deserve commendation not condemnation, IMO.

A different issue is presented, of course, if the planted stories were false (witness, for instance, some of Maheu's shenanigans with fake "blue" movies of actors playing Communist leaders).

I see nothing nefarious about any agency of our government encouraging the placement of factually true pro-Western stories.

Edited October 9, 2005 by Tim Gratz

Mark Knight · October 10, 2005

Tim, journalists rely on tips on a daily basis...they don't simply write about events they have witnessed. So if they get a factual tip, and report on it, they are merely doing what journalists do. But Operation Mockingbird wasn't formed to merely provide news tips to reporters. Its reason to exist was to plant stories in the press that tended to provide a particular slant--or, in current terminology, "spin"--to the news being reported.

In my days as a broadcaster at one small station, I was the PSA [public-service announcement] director. All the proposed public service announcements were routed across my desk [OK, for the sake of accuracy, substitute the word "cubbyhole" for "desk"] prior to being aired. This was in the early 80's, and there was a lot of agency copy routed my way that was strictly propaganda for various foreign governments...such as the Soviet Union, other Eastern Bloc countries, and various dictatorial regimes around the world. Since there was no www.snopes.com website to access at the time, I had to do my best to research the factuality of the claims made. If there was any doubt as to the veracity of the message, the PSA was killed before it was ever aired.

In the case of Op Mockingbird, for example, sometimes stories about coups d'etat were in print 24 hours before they occurred, as per one of John Simkin's oft-cited examples. The "journalists" who put such stories in print obviously did no fact-checking, or else they would've known that the information was false at the time it was given to them. But under Op Mockingbird, facts weren't checked and yet stories ran, a practice that reputable editors simply wouldn't abide. This then implies that editors' objections were overruled, and reporters alone simply cannot do that; the orders would have had to originated somewhere higher up the "food chain." So that in and of itself adds some flesh to John's claims about Op Mockingbird.

So to suggest that Op Mockingbird may have only planted news tips that were true shows what I percieve to be a lack of understanding of true journalism. True information doesn't need someone high on the organizational chart to make sure it gets published; that level of control is only needed for unverifiable information or outright deception.

Tim Gratz · October 10, 2005

Very interesting post, Mark. Your background in journalism is interesting and obviously helpful in this regard.

John Simkin · October 10, 2005

It must be remembered that from the end of WWII to the late eighties the Western democracies were indeed fighting a "cold war" against a totalitarian and repressive regime as evil as that of Nazi Germany (Stalin killed at least as many as Hitler; see Robert Conquest's books.) This regime had announced its intention to "bury" the western democracies and was doing its best to accomplish its objective.
Provided the articles were truthful, was it wrong for the CIA to attempt to "plant" pro-Western articles in the foreign press? If for no other reason to counter the disinformation being spread by the KGB. One could consider Operation Mockingbird as "covert public relations". I for one cannot see a moral objection for the CIA to, for instance, encourage a friendly Miami newsman to write a story about political or religious repression in Cuba, provided the article was factually accurate.

The cold war was in fact "cold" because it was in some part fought in the arena of public perception, particularly in the non-aligned countries.

Let me try a different hyypothetical. Would it have been wrong for the CIA to encourage stories about the successes of the Peace Corps?

It strikes me that to deny the US the right to encourage, even covertly, the placement of pro-Western news stories to counter anti-Western stories (many false) being planted by the KGB (see "The Sword and the Shield") would be like requiring the west to fight a hot war without bullets.

Journalists who encouraged the forces of democracy deserve commendation not condemnation, IMO.

Going by your postings I can see why you are in favour of the CIA manipulating the media via Operation Mockingbird. However, I am rather surprised that you have admitted to this on this thread.

In his Senate report, “Select Committee to Study Government Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities” (April, 1976), Frank Church argued that there were several reasons why the CIA should not be involved in media manipulation. This report was signed by all members of the committee including the three Republicans, John Tower, Howard Baker and Barry Goldwater.

(1) That under the terms of the 1947 National Security Act it was illegal for the CIA to be engaged in operations directed at Americans within the United States. The committee pointed out that the reason for this prohibition was to protect the “American people from the possibility that the CIA might act in any way that would have an impact upon their rights” (see pages 135-139 of the report).

(2) Church’s investigation discovered that the CIA paid “journalists to devise and place propaganda” in the media. The CIA also planted smear stories about people they considered to be dangerous. For example, by using the Freedom of Information Act, William Turner discovered that the CIA established Operation Nightingale as part of the Mockingbird Project (see pages 299-300 of Rearview Mirror) that was used to smear critics of the Warren Commission report. Church believed this CIA activity was wrong for several reasons. For example, it was illegal (see point 1). A second reason was that the “diversity and legitimacy” of the media needs to be “rigorously protected”. The committee felt that the planting of propaganda by the CIA was undermining this process (see pages 179-180).

(3) Church points out that the CIA were unwilling to provide all the documents they sought in order to fully discover the way that the CIA manipulated the media. In fact, it mainly had to rely on information discovered by investigative journalists working for left-wing journals such as Ramparts and the Nation. However, the CIA did provide a list of 50 journalists who were “part of a network of several hundred individuals” who attempted to influence public opinion by placing “covert propaganda” in the media. William Colby, claimed in testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence (HSCI) that the CIA had focused its efforts on those people living abroad and therefore had not acted illegally. That was supported by the restricted list of names provided by the CIA to the HSCI. The suspicion was of course that this was the reason why the CIA was unwilling to name the full list of journalists working on their behalf.

The HSCI discovered that even if these stories were “planted” in foreign newspapers and journals, there was no way that this information could not be stopped coming back into the United States. In fact, several CIA agents testified that this so-called “fall-out” was a fully intended consequence of the operation (pages 199-200).

Over the years released documents show that the CIA was indeed using journalists to plant stories in the American media. This includes several journalists based in the Miami area. See for example the cases of Hal Hendrix and those journalists working for the Miami Herald in the 1960s. William Turner also provides the names of several journalists who he has discovered were working on behalf of the CIA and the FBI (The FBI of course had its own Operation Mockingbird. You can read about that in William Sullivan’s book, The Bureau – see pages 80-100).

(4) The discovery of the CIA’s covert book publishing programme revealed that Colby was lying about only targeting the foreign media. Well over a thousand different books were produced, subsidized or sponsored directly by the CIA between 1947 and 1967 (see pages 192-193). One example of this program was the Penkovskiy Papers published in 1965. The CIA established a trust fund and this was used to submit the manuscript to the publishers. The company published the book in good faith and was completely unaware that they were publishing the book on behalf of the CIA (page 194).

Church published details of a CIA document that was written by the chief of the agency’s propaganda unit in 1961 (see page 193 of report):

“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. Our control over the writer will have to be enforced usually be paying him for the time he works on the manuscript, or at least advancing him sums which he might have to repay… the (CIA) must make sure the actual manuscript will correspond with our operational and propagandistic intention.”

Church also discovered the person responsible for publishing this CIA fronted books in the 1960s. It was our old friend, E. Howard Hunt (page 198). Hunt was also in charge of persuading journalists to write good or bad reviews of books that the CIA had an “interest” in. For example, Hunt testified before the (HSCI) where he gave an account of how he arranged for a book by Edgar Snow to be reviewed in the New York Times by a CIA asset. This was done because it was felt that Edgar Snow had provided a “sympathetic view of the emerging China”.

(5) Church and his committee also raised the issue of taxpayers money to fund the publication to pro-CIA material. As this is done covertly, no financial records are kept. They therefore pointed out that this makes it impossible for Congress to evaluate the value of this work (page 250). Church pointed out that the funding of certain book companies enabled them to “compete unfairly” with other companies who were not receiving these subsidies (page 251).

(6) The CIA also had a program where right-wing, wealthy sympathizers, provided money for the publication of books. This group of supporters included Haroldson L. Hunt who paid for Michael Eddowes’s book, Khrushchev Killed Kennedy, to be published in 1975. As they title suggests, Eddowes argues that JFK was killed by the KGB. I wonder why the CIA and the right-wing extremists were pushing this theory? That of course is one of your pet theories (along with the Castro/Mafia did it postings).

(7) Frank Church’s committee discovered that Desmond FitzGerald had issued an order in 1967 preventing the CIA taking part in covert media operations in America. However, this order was ignored. As a result of the committee’s investigations, the CIA announced new guidelines in 1976: “Effective immediately, CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual 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.” (page 195).

However, as Church pointed out, only about half of the original 50 names were actually employed by the CIA. The rest only received “occasional gifts and reimbursements from the CIA” for their help. We now know that other journalists, for example, Hal Hendrix, received information from the CIA in return for their covert activities. These journalists were particularly useful and of course their names were not on the list submitted by the CIA.

George Bush, who was Director of the CIA when the Frank Church report was published, immediately promised that he would follow William Colby’s guidelines issued in 1973 that the agency would not undertake any activities in “which there is a risk of influencing domestic public opinion, either directly or indirectly.” Of course, Bush and those who have followed in his footsteps have not kept this promise.

Several researchers have claimed that Operation Mockingbird/Nightingale is still in existence. According to CIA document 1035-960 this includes employing “propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”

This can be seen by the way that the first two books published on the JFK assassination that suggested that Oswald had not been a lone gunman were treated. The authors of these books, Thomas Buchanan (Who Killed Kennedy?) and Joachim Joesten (Oswald, Assassin or Fall Guy?) were both falsely accused of being KGB agents by reviewers when their books were published in 1964. Of course, this is a similar tactic used by Tim Gratz.

Mark Lane explains in his book Plausible Denial how he had difficult getting Rush to Judgement published (pages 24 and 25) in the United States. Lane eventually got a British company, Bodley Head to publish his manuscript in 1966. This resulted in Holt, Rinehart and Winston agreeing to publish it in the United States. The company’s editor-in-chief, Arthur A. Cohen, later told Lane that the FBI ordered the American publisher to cancel the contract. It refused and it soon became the number-one-selling book in the United States. This was disastrous for Operation Mockingbird/Nightingale. Other publishers now attempted to make money out of other books that attacked the conclusions of the Warren Report.

Mark Lane has also been able to use the Freedom of Information Act to discover how the CIA attempted to control the reviews of Rush to Judgement. One document said:

"Employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passage to assets. Our play should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (i) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (ii) politically interested, (iii) financially interested, (v) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (v) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Edward Jay Epstein’s theory of attack, using the attached Fletcher Knebel article and Spectator piece for background.”

Lane goes on to point out that the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and all the other major newspapers followed this line in their reviews of Rush to Judgement. It was only Norman Mailer’s review in the Houston Post who did not “march in lockstep with the intelligence agencies’ effort to destroy the First Amendment” (page 72, Plausible Denial).

In his book Rearview Mirror, Bill Turner explains how the CIA used Jim Phelan and Edward Jay Epstein to publish articles attacking the work of Jim Garrison (pages 299-300). Turner also reveals how Life Magazine journalists, Dick Billings, Miguel Acoca and Sandy Smith were used to smear Jim Garrison with stories about him being linked to mobsters like Carlos Marcello. CIA assets were also out in force to write critical reviews of Oliver Stone’s JFK.

Turner also argues that books like Gerald Posner’s Case Closed relied heavily on help provided by the CIA. According to Turner, Posner told Jim Marrs that the book was commissioned by Robert Loomis after he was contacted by the CIA offering “full cooperation” in helping with the writing of the book. This included access to Yuri Nosenko, the KGB defector, who was arguing at that time that Oswald was a “lone-nut” and was not part of any conspiracy (page 300, Rearview Mirror).

Randon House editor, Robert Loomis, has been associated with the publication of several anti-conspiracy books. Loomis admitted to Publishers Weekly that he had a political agenda in publishing these books: “All the conspiracy theories have undermined the public’s belief in government. They (the public) believe that everybody’s in cahoots, that we have murderers in the CIA. That’s what has been accepted, and that, to me, is a crime.”

John Simkin · October 10, 2005