Jack Anderson

[Dawn Meredith]

Another interesting connection with Jack Anderson was his employer, Philip Graham, who took over control of the Washington Post after the war (he married the owner’s daughter, Eugene Meyer, in 1940).

Both Anderson and Graham had been intelligence officers in the Far East during the war. It has been claimed that Graham had close links with the Central Intelligence Agency and it has been argued that he played an important role in Project Mockingbird, the CIA program to infiltrate the domestic American media. According to Katherine Graham, her husband worked overtime at the Post during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of his friends who had organized the ill-fated venture.

Graham became friends with LBJ in 1957 when he spent time on his ranch in Texas. Apparently LBJ had done this to get the support of the Washington Post in his bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1960. It was at this meeting that LBJ convinced the Grahams that he really supported civil rights. Although this meant doing it the Texas way (the Grahams were shocked by his constant use of the “N” word when he discussed this issue).

Graham was a supporter of the Democratic Party and played an important role in persuading JFK to accept LBJ as his running mate. However, in the 1960 presidential election Graham, despite being a supporter of the Democratic Party, refused to endorse Kennedy/Johnson.

Graham of course committed suicide just before JFK was assassinated. It was said he was suffering from depression. Had he discovered what the conspirators were planning to do? I cannot think of another example of a successful businessman that was not entangled in some sort of scandal killing himself.

The Washington Post was of course involved in exposing the Watergate scandal. I have for long time suspected that Deep Throat was CIA. Bob Woodward was of course a former officer in Naval Intelligence. Katherine Graham, who took over from her husband at the Washington Post, is said to have also taken over his job as head of Project Mockingbird.

Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics and the Death of JFK) argues that Nixon was removed with the help of the CIA because of his attempts to negotiate with China (whereas JFK was removed because of his willingness to negotiate with the Soviet Union in order to end the Cold War). It is not only the individuals involved in the Watergate break-in that are linked to the JFK assassination.

Here are a couple of extracts from articles that I found interesting about the Grahams.

Michael Hasty, Secret Admirers: The Bushes and the Washington Post (February, 2004)

In an article published by the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Henwood traced the Washington Post's Establishment connections to Eugene Meyer, who took control of the Post in 1933. Meyer transferred ownership to his daughter Katherine and her husband, Philip Graham, after World War II, when he was appointed by Harry S. Truman to serve as the first president of the World Bank. Meyer had been "a Wall Street banker, director of President Wilson's War Finance Corporation, a governor of the Federal Reserve System, and director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation," Henwood wrote.

Philip Graham, Meyer's successor, had been in military intelligence during the war. When he became the Post's publisher, he continued to have close contact with his fellow upper-class intelligence veterans - now making policy at the newly formed CIA - and actively promoted the CIA's goals in his newspaper. The incestuous relationship between the Post and the intelligence community even extended to its hiring practices. Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee also had an intelligence background; and before he became a journalist, reporter Bob Woodward was an officer in Naval Intelligence. In a 1977 article in Rolling Stone magazine about CIA influence in American media, Woodward's partner, Carl Bernstein, quoted this from a CIA official: "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from." Graham has been identified by some investigators as the main contact in Project Mockingbird, the CIA program to infiltrate domestic American media. In her autobiography, Katherine Graham described how her husband worked overtime at the Post during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of his friends from Yale who had organized the ill-fated venture.

After Graham committed suicide, and his widow Katherine assumed the role of publisher, she continued her husband's policies of supporting the efforts of the intelligence community in advancing the foreign policy and economic agenda of the nation's ruling elites. In a retrospective column written after her own death last year, FAIR analyst Norman Solomon wrote, "Her newspaper mainly functioned as a helpmate to the war-makers in the White House, State Department and Pentagon." It accomplished this function (and continues to do so) using all the classic propaganda techniques of evasion, confusion, misdirection, targeted emphasis, disinformation, secrecy, omission of important facts, and selective leaks.

Graham herself rationalized this policy in a speech she gave at CIA headquarters in 1988. "We live in a dirty and dangerous world," she said. "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

Doug Henwood, The Washington Post: The Establishment's Paper (January, 1990)

After World War II, when Harry Truman named this lifelong Republican as first president of the World Bank, Meyer made his son-in-law, Philip L. Graham, publisher of the paper. Meyer stayed at the Bank for only six months and returned to the Post as its chairman. But with Phil Graham in charge, there was little for Meyer to do. He transferred ownership to Philip and Katharine Graham, and retired.

Phil Graham maintained Meyer's intimacy with power. Like many members of his class and generation, his postwar view was shaped by his work in wartime intelligence; a classic Cold War liberal, he was uncomfortable with McCarthy, but quite friendly with the personnel and policies of the CIA. He saw the role of the press as mobilizing public assent for policies made by his Washington neighbors; the public deserved to know only what the inner circle deemed proper. According to Howard Bray's Pillars of the Post, Graham and other top Posters knew details of several covert operations--including advance knowledge of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion--which they chose not to share with their readers.

When the manic-depressive Graham shot himself in 1963, the paper passed to his widow, Katharine. Though out of her depth at first, her instincts were safely establishmentarian. According to Deborah Davis' biography, Katharine the Great, Mrs. Graham was scandalized by the cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s, and wept when LBJ fused to run for reelection in 1968. (After Graham asserted that the book as "fantasy," Harcourt Brace Jovanovich pulled 20,000 copies of Katharine the Great in 1979. The book as re-issued by National Press in 87.)

The Post was one of the last major papers to turn against the Vietnam War. Even today, it hews to a hard foreign policy line--usually to the right of The New York Times, a paper not known or having transcended the Cold War.

There was Watergate, of course, that model of aggressive reporting ed by the Post. But even here, Graham's Post was doing the establishment's work. As Graham herself said, the investigation couldn't have succeeded without the cooperation of people inside the government willing to talk to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

These talkers may well have included the CIA; it's widely suspected that Deep Throat was an Agency man (or men). Davis argues that Post editor Ben Bradlee knew Deep Throat, and may even have set him up with Woodward. She produces evidence that in the early 1950s, Bradlee crafted propaganda for the CIA on the Rosenberg case for European consumption. Bradlee denies working "for" the CIA, though he admits having worked for the U.S. Information Agency--perhaps distinction without a difference.

In any case, it's clear that a major portion of the establishment wanted Nixon out. Having accomplished this, there was little taste for further crusading. Nixon had denounced the Post as "Communist" during the 1950s. Graham offered her support to Nixon upon his election in 1968, but he snubbed her, even directing his allies to challenge the Post Co.'s TV license in Florida a few ears later. The Reagans were a different story--for one thing, Ron's crowd knew that seduction was a better way to get good press than hostility. According to Nancy Reagan's memoirs, Graham welcomed Ron and Nancy to her Georgetown house in 1981 with a kiss. During the darkest days of Iran-Contra, Graham and Post editorial page editor Meg GreenfieId - lunch and phone companions to Nancy throughout the Reagan years - offered the First Lady frequent expressions of sympathy. Graham and the establishment never got far from the Gipper.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

______________________________________----

GREAT stuff John. It makes me sick when I hear the Post and Times called 'liberal press". I have always wondered about Ben Bradlee for very personal reasons: In 1976 or so my then boyfriend, Harvey Yazijian, of the Assassination Information Bureau was on tv in a debate with Bradlee. Of course the subject was the assassination conspiracy and Bradley was just going NUTS. Even Gerald Posner can speak very rationally as he spouts his lying filth, but Bradlee became a total madman. I thought he was actually going to attack Harv physically on national tv. At the time it was "reported" that he (Bradley) just could not bear the thought of his good friend FJK being killed by a CONSPIRACY, and that was why his reaction was so personal and visceral. Your words now make total sense of that long ago tv debate.

Dawn

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

________________________________---

ps. Re: Mormans. Harv had a college friend who was in 76 a veep at the Chase Manhatten bank who informed us that there were "lots of Mormans in VERY high positions at the Chase". As a result Harvey and Jim Kostman did some serious Morman research culminating in an article for one of the skin mags (Penthouse maybe) on The CIA and the Mormons. (Back in those days only mags of this nature would publish such an article)

[James Richards]

Who supplied the FALs?  What dealer?  Thx

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Good question, Christy. Unfortunately I have no answer but the reference can be found in Rappleye and Becker's, 'All American Mafioso'.

James

[John Simkin]

Earlier in this thread I claimed that Project Mockingbird played an important role in the cover-up of the assassination of JFK. I have also argued that Philip Graham and Jack Anderson played an important role in this. You might like to read this article on Project Mockibgbird.

The CIA's Project MOCKINGBIRD: Ongoing Covert Control of the Media

by Alex Constantine

Who Controls the Media?

Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning, double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser . It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit __is a the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.

This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.

It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.

In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

"By the early 1950s," writes formerVillage Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst." The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to find in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA office memos of their pride in having placed "important assets" inside every major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field.

"World War III has begun," Henry's Luce's Life declared in March, 1947. "It is in the opening skirmish stage already." The issue featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the creation of an "American Empire," "world-dominating in political power, set up at least in part through coercion (probably including war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which one group of people ... would hold more than its equal share of power."

George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on Luce in 1947, explaining that "although avoiding typical Hitlerian phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking over the world and ruling it, began to appear in the press, whereas the organs of Wall Street were much more honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably leading to war if it brought greater commercial markets under the American flag."

On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between the CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of CBS. A firm believer in "all forms of propaganda" to foster loyalty to the Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the behest of his close friend, the busy grey eminence of the nation's media, Allen Dulles. Paley's designated go-between in his dealings with the CIA was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.

The CIA's assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who quit a year later, disgusted at the administration's political infighting. Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war strategist.

"Nixon," writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, took "a small boy's delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden microphones, the 'black' propaganda." Nixon especially enjoyed his visit to a Virginia training camp to observe Nazis in the "special forces" drilling at covert operations.

One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Blcher, the son of A German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that that he was trained by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence division, while still a civilian in his twenties. He served in a recon unit of the German Army until forced out for medical reasons in 1944, according to his wartime records. He worked briefly as an assistant director for Berlin-Film on a movie entitled One Day ..., and finished out the war flying with the Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy - his mission was the smuggling of Nazi loot out of the country. His exploits were, in part, the subject of Sayer and Botting's Nazi Gold, an account of the knockover of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.

In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer named Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva Peron, presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection from the wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS from Europe's Jews?). Hubert then met with Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver German marks worth $80 million. The loot financed the birth of the National Socialist Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi revival.

In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job at the Color Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living writing scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on a film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. Nine years later he returned to Buenos Aires, then Dsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Dsseldorf in 1982, von Blcher boasted to journalists, "I am chief shareholder of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed up by these people over their second bottle of brandy."

Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble from the drunken dreams of world-moving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like most American high-rollers, Annenberg lived a double life. Moses, his father, was a scion of the Capone mob. Both Moses and Walter were indicted in 1939 for tax evasions totalling many millions of dollars - the biggest case in the history of the Justice Department. Moses pled guilty and agreed to pay the government $8 million and settle $9 million in assorted tax claims, penalties and interest debts. Moses received a three-year sentence. He died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty Republican. On the campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush flew into Los Angeles to woo Reagan's kitchen cabinet. "This is the topping on the cake," Bush's regional campaign director told the Los Angeles Times. The Bush team met at Annenberg's plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands, California. It was at the Annenberg mansion that Nixon's cabinet was chosen, and the state's social and contributor registers built over a quarter-century of state political dominance by Ronald Reagan, whose acting career was launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

The commercialization of television, coinciding with Reagan's recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the intelligence world with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda and even prying in the age of Big Brother. George Orwell glimpsed the possibilities when he installed omniscient video surveillance technology in 1948, a novel rechristened 1984 for the first edition published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Brace. Operation Octopus, according to federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program that turned any television set with tubes into a broadcast transmitter. Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and visual images with the equipment as far as 25 miles away.

Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the time of his disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.

In 1952, at MCA, Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan - a screen idol recruited by MOCKINGBIRD's Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus - signed a secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on early television programming. In exchange, MCA made Reagan a part owner. Furthermore, historian C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987, reported that Reagan had "fed the names of suspect people in his organization to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned 'an informer's code number, T-10.' His FBI file indicates intense collaboration with producers to 'purge' the industry of subversives."

No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a former intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period UPI's Moscow correspondent. Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD's Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis.

Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a horror-film simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other organized-crime Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell Thomas threw in to launch the infamous Resorts International, the corporate front for Lansky's branch of the federally-sponsored mob family and the corporate precursor to Cap Cities. Another of the investors was James Crosby, a Cap Cities executive who donated $100,000 to Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. This was the year that Resorts bought into Atlantic City casino interests. Police in New jersey attempted, with no success, to spike the issuance of a gambling license to the company, citing Mafia ties.

In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics, founded the broadcasting company notorious for overt propagandizing and general spookiness. The company's chief counsel was OSS veteran William Casey, who clung to his shares by concealing them in a blind trust even after he was appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

"Black radio" was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The Invisible Government to describe the agency's intertwining interests in the emergence of the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who took to the airwaves. "Daily, East and West beam hundreds of propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor has given the hidden war a new importance," enthused one foreign correspondent.

A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda push. One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR), received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through private foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis of a television series that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People and Politics, a "study" of the American political system in 21 weekly installments.

In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into the film studios and labor unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the Army during the war by a criminal investigation of Chicago mobsters in the film industry. Rosselli, a CIA asset probably assassinated by the CIA, played sidekick to Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures mogul who visited Italy's Benito Mussolini in 1933, and upon his return to Hollywood remodeled his office after the dictator's. The only honest job Rosselli ever had was assistant purchasing agent (and a secret investor) at Eagle Lion productions, run by Bryan Foy, a former producer for 20th Century Fox. Rosselli, Capone's representative on the West Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia investments to Cohn. Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments with Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.

In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.

In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely with the intelligence services - in fact, 23 employees were full-time employees of the Agency.

Most consumers of the corporate media were - and are - unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. A network anchorman in time of national crisis is an instrument of psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from the national security sector's chamber of horrors. For this reason consumers of the corporate press have reason to examine their basic beliefs about government and life in the parallel universe of these United States.

[John Simkin]

You might find this interesting as well. Several of these journalists and publications crop up in the JFK assassination.

This is taken from Carl Bernstein's article entitled "The CIA & The Media" from Rolling Stone, 10/20/77.

CIA AND THE MEDIA

FBI Domestic Intelligence Activities

In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America's leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.

Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services -- from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading news organizations.

The history of the CIA's involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:

The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA. Although the agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 (primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalists are still posted abroad.

Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950's and 1960's with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Services. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

[...]

Appropriately, the CIA uses the term 'reporting' to describe much of what cooperating journalists did for the Agency. "We would ask them, 'Will you do us a favor?'" said a senior CIA official. "'We understand you're going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved all the streets? Where did you see planes? Were there any signs of military presence? How many Soviets did you see? If you happen to meet a Soviet, get his name and spell it right....Can you set up a meeting for us? Or arrange a message?'" Many CIA officials regarded these helpful journalists as operatives: the journalists tended to see themselves as trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors -- usually without pay -- in the national interest.

[...]

Two of the Agency's most valuable relationships in the 1960's, according to CIA officials, were with reporters who covered Latin America -- Jerry O'Leary of the Washington Star and Hal Hendrix of Miami News, a Pulitzer Prize winner who became a high official of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Hendrix was extremely helpful to the Agency in providing information about individuals in Miami's Cuban exile community.

[John Simkin]

This article by Steve Kangas (The Origins of the Overclass) suggests that Philip Graham had some interesting friends.

http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/L-overclass.html

Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents. People talk freely to journalists, and few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late 1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.

Perhaps no newspaper is more important to the CIA than the Washington Post, one of the nation's most right-wing dailies. Its location in the nation's capitol enables the paper to maintain valuable personal contacts with leading intelligence, political and business figures. Unlike other newspapers, the Post operates its own bureaus around the world, rather than relying on AP wire services. Owner Philip Graham was a military intelligence officer in World War II, and later became close friends with CIA figures like Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Helms. He inherited the Post by marrying Katherine Graham, whose father owned it.

MOCKINGBIRD was extraordinarily successful. In no time, the agency had recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate CIA propaganda. At least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA payroll, according to the CIA’s testimony before a stunned Church Committee in 1975. (The committee felt the true number was considerably higher.) The names of those recruited reads like a Who's Who of journalism:

* Philip and Katharine Graham (Publishers, Washington Post)

* William Paley (President, CBS)

* Henry Luce (Publisher, Time and Life magazine)

* Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Publisher, N.Y. Times)

* Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star)

* Hal Hendrix (Pulitzer Prize winner, Miami News)

* Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal)

* James Copley (Copley News Services)

* Joseph Harrison (Editor, Christian Science Monitor)

* C.D. Jackson (Fortune)

* Walter Pincus (Reporter, Washington Post)

* ABC

* NBC

* Associated Press

* United Press International

* Reuters

* Hearst Newspapers

* Scripps-Howard

* Newsweek

* magazine Mutual Broadcasting System

* Miami Herald

* Old Saturday Evening Post

* New York Herald-Tribune

[Dawn Meredith]

This article by Steve Kangas (The Origins of the Overclass) suggests that Philip Graham had some interesting friends. 

http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/L-overclass.html

Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents. People talk freely to journalists, and few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late 1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.

Perhaps no newspaper is more important to the CIA than the Washington Post, one of the nation's most right-wing dailies. Its location in the nation's capitol enables the paper to maintain valuable personal contacts with leading intelligence, political and business figures. Unlike other newspapers, the Post operates its own bureaus around the world, rather than relying on AP wire services. Owner Philip Graham was a military intelligence officer in World War II, and later became close friends with CIA figures like Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Helms. He inherited the Post by marrying Katherine Graham, whose father owned it.

MOCKINGBIRD was extraordinarily successful. In no time, the agency had recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate CIA propaganda. At least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA payroll, according to the CIA’s testimony before a stunned Church Committee in 1975. (The committee felt the true number was considerably higher.) The names of those recruited reads like a Who's Who of journalism:

    * Philip and Katharine Graham (Publishers, Washington Post)

    * William Paley (President, CBS)

    * Henry Luce (Publisher, Time and Life magazine)

    * Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Publisher, N.Y. Times)

    * Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star)

    * Hal Hendrix (Pulitzer Prize winner, Miami News)

    * Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal)

    * James Copley (Copley News Services)

    * Joseph Harrison (Editor, Christian Science Monitor)

    * C.D. Jackson (Fortune)

    * Walter Pincus (Reporter, Washington Post)

    * ABC

    * NBC

    * Associated Press

    * United Press International

    * Reuters

    * Hearst Newspapers

    * Scripps-Howard

    * Newsweek

    * magazine Mutual Broadcasting System

    * Miami Herald

    * Old Saturday Evening Post

* New York Herald-Tribune

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

______________________________________----

John

Have you considered doing an article for a US entitity on this subject? Rolling Stone published the article you cite above, they might be willing to to an update.

Kids read RS and need to know who and what the media really is and how it got this way. I have not looked at Penthouse mag in over two decades but they were another group that had several good articles on the nature of the conspiracy. One exceptionally good piece by Jeff Gerth on Richard Nixon and Organized Crime was published by them in 1974.

The so -caled "leftist" magazines won't touch this subject, but perhaps a magazine like Mother Jones MIGHT. Worth a try, but its readership is confined to people who already know a lot of this sort of thing. It's really a catch 22, can you imagine submitting such a piece for Time mag?? Playboy might, Heff has never been afraid to take on controversey.

Point being: An article that will reach the greatest number of totally ignorant Americans on who truly controls the media.

Dawn

[Chris Cox]

John or anybody. Would appreciate greatly full Bernstein article if anyone has a pdf or knows where on web it is. Thanks.

[Harry J.Dean]

John, you are correct about Harvey being the source for some of the information in the 1967 Drew Pearson article.

I found this interesting datum in "Live By the Sword"":

"In the fall of 1968, columnist Jack Anderson submitted a secret report to President-elect George Bush in which he provided more details about his initial 1967 disclosure of the anti-Castro assassination plot's and Robert Kennedy's links to them.  Anderson informed the President [sic] that his sources included not only Johnny Rosselli, but the CIA's William Harvey, as well as other high-ranking Agency officers. Anderson also admitted that he was provided with copies of 'two memos from the CIA's most sensitive files, which summarize the whole operation.'

"The disclosure of Harvey as a source comes as no surpise, because, accotrding to the CIA's own documents, Harvey was professionally associated with the law firm of Rosselli's attorney, Ed Morgan."

The secret Anderson report to President-Elect Bush is found on pages 444-445 of "Live By theSword".  There were several other items in that report that I will be posting in the thread "Did Fidel Do It"

I think Anderson is still alive.  Someone should interview him.  Query what were the two top-secret CIA memos he reviewed (presumably given to him by Harvey)?  Does he still have copies of them?

Now, I was able to add to your comments that your judgment that Harvey was probably a source of some of the information in the 1967 Anderson column was "right on".

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Jack Anderson is an interesting character and deserves his own thread. He is still alive but is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. I suspect he will be unwilling to talk to us about the case.

For many years Anderson was considered to be a fearless investigative reporter. I have to admit he was one of my heroes. I first began having doubts about him when I read his biography of Drew Pearson (Confessions of a Muckraker).

Anderson went to work for Pearson after the war. He became his assistant and providing information to Pearson about corrupt politicians and businessmen. Pearson was on the left and refused some of the material Anderson gave him. Some of this information came from Joseph McCarthy who was a friend of Anderson. When McCarthy was discredited Anderson also became one of his critics.

Anderson was also close to LBJ. Pearson thought LBJ was a crook and despite Anderson’s pleas he refused to help him in his campaigns. However, Pearson did agree to call off his investigation of LBJ’s relationship with George and Herman Brown.

When Pearson died Anderson replaced him at the Washington Post. He was considered to be a liberal campaigning journalist. However, his reputation was hurt by the publication of the LBJ tapes. It became clear that Anderson was being used by LBJ to smear his opponents. In most cases Anderson’s stories were true (in many cases they were coming from Hoover), however, they were being used to keep LBJ’s critics quiet. LBJ had files on every person in Congress. Robert Kennedy tells an interesting story of how LBJ tried to use these files on those who were asking questions about the Bobby Baker case in 1963.

I believe that Anderson was CIA. I suspect he was recruited to the secret services while in China during the war. Pearson was the most dangerous investigative journalist in America in the 1940s. It make sense for the security services to infiltrate his operation. Anderson became Pearson’s assistant when he came back from China.

It was Anderson who persuaded Pearson to expose the corruption of Owen Brewster, chairman of the Senate War Investigating Committee was being paid by Pan American Airways (Pan Am) to persuade the United States government to set up an official worldwide monopoly under its control. Brewster was destroyed by these stories. He was obviously corrupt and deserved to go.

However, Brewster was doing some important work investigating corruption in the armaments industry. This included investigating the activities of LBJ's friends in Texas. Brewster was also investigating Howard Hughes who was awarded two contracts, of $18m and $22m each, to create and build two revolutionary aircraft - a giant plywood cargo seaplane that could carry thirty-five tons of men and weapons (HK-1), and a very fast photo-reconnaissance aircraft (F-11). This was the real reason why Hughes wanted to get Bewster.

The information that was used by Pearson to destroy Brewster came from Howard Hughes. As the owner of Trans World Airlines, Hughes posed a serious threat to this plan. Hughes claimed that Brewster had approached him and suggested he merge Trans World with Pan Am. I have now come to the conclusion that Howard was part of the LBJ Texan Network.

Anderson was ideally placed to help LBJ and the CIA with the “Mafia did it” theory ("Plan B"). This he did very well. As I suspected, Anderson was working closely with William Harvey on this. I think he was also working with LBJ in covering up the assassination of JFK.

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

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Mormon bishop, Jeffrey Willis a long time CIA personal director, while no stranger to public controversy Willis was forced {in one case} to face the cameras personally rather than relying on CIA public relations staff. His comments revealed

that Many other CIA men were LDS Ward members, and that he had sought public relations advise from an old friend, newspaper columnist Jack Anderson himself

a member of the Silver Springs,Maryland, Ward.

Larry Bush, an official at the Agriculture Department explained in 1981 that

Washington Saints 'Mormons' refer to themselves, among themselves, as a

Sisterhood. It's a term with roots at the CIA where the Church is well represented. CIA agents also refer to one another as "Sisters".

George Bush 'Sr' learned to appreciate the Mormon Sisterhood within the larger

CIA Sisterhood when he served as director of Central Intelligence. At that time he worked closely General, Brent Scowcroft at the Ford White House. For Scowcroft

the Bush cabinet-level appointment capped a long carreer serving those at the seat of power from Nixon, Ford and Reagan.

Even before taking the oath of office, Bush named Scowcroft,Roger Porter and Steve Studdert, all Mormons to top White House posts in foreign affairs, domestic policy and political scheduling. The Sisterhood was overjoyed.

While Scowcroft,Porter and Studdert were the most visable Mormons running the government as the Bush administration began, they were three among hundreds,

perhaps thousands of DC Saints with influential positions in the federal government. Furthermore , similar Mormon 'knots' thrive at the state, county and local levels throughout the U.S. .

Mormon elder,James Fletcher, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration {NASA}, visited the Sterling Ward House to read a letter

from the Twelve Mormon Church Apostles ordering the Saints to oppose a constitutional amendment.The letter was then sent to Mormon lawmakers on Capitol Hill,Saints on the White House staff,and throughout the federal bureaucracy

killing chances for ratification.

Mormon Political Manifesto.....Saints must consult their ecclesiactical superiors to

obtain permission before accepting Any appointment that might interfere with

their religious duties.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

AD ON;

The resulting power elite - a tightly knit, almost exclusively white male assemblage of jurists, journalists, FBI agents, CIA executives, Interior Department managers, Pentagon brass, corporation chiefs, and ranking White House officials. Mormons make up a substantial management of the United States Government.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

General Brent Scowcroft {Mormon} is still in there leading the way as a

Senior member of Bush junior's, National Security Team along with other

LDS Church members.

[John Simkin]

John

Have you considered doing an article for a US entitity on this subject? Rolling Stone published the article you cite above, they might be willing to to an update.

Kids read RS and need to know who and what the media really is and how it got this way.  I have not looked at Penthouse mag in over two decades but they were another  group that had several good articles on the nature of the conspiracy. One exceptionally good piece by Jeff Gerth on Richard Nixon and Organized Crime was published by them in 1974.

The so -caled "leftist" magazines won't touch this subject, but perhaps a magazine like Mother Jones MIGHT. Worth a try, but its readership is confined to people who already know a lot of this sort of thing. It's really a catch 22, can you imagine submitting such a piece for Time mag?? Playboy might, Heff has never been afraid to take on controversey.

Point being: An article that will reach the greatest number of totally ignorant Americans on who truly controls the media.

I will be writing a piece on my website about how it relates to the JFK assassination. I will also be including details in my seminar on JFK, the CIA and organized crime. However, I do not have the time, or expertise, to write about the long-term impact of Operation Mockingbird on the American media. There is definitely a need for such an article. So also is an investigation into if it is still operational. It would be good if someone like Seymour Hersh could take on such a project. I know Robin Ramsay the editor of Lobster Magazine (a journal that investigates the intelligence services). I will contact him and see if he is interested in covering this story.

[John Simkin]

John or anybody.  Would appreciate greatly full Bernstein article if anyone has a pdf or knows where on web it is.  Thanks.

An edited version can be found here:

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/Medi...the%20Media.htm

http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/media/ciamedia.htm

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/P...E/ciamedia.html

Other linking articles can be found here:

http://www.geocities.com/cpa_blacktown/200...8mediaoverb.htm

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/P...ockingbird.html

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

http://jeremybigwood.net/JBsPUBS/original%20sidebar.htm

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/8425/CIAPRESS.HTM

[Chris Cox]

thanks for all the links, John

Lobster has been one of those sources I've never been able to locate, but see all the time ex.- in the PIR references. Is there a source where we can get back copies of Lobster or a subscription service offered by Ramsay directly?

[John Simkin]

Lobster has been one of those sources I've never been able to locate, but see all the time ex.- in the PIR  references.  Is there a source where we can get back copies of Lobster or a subscription service offered by Ramsay directly?

You can subscribe here:

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/

I will send you Robin's contact details by email.

[James Richards]

For those who are interested, the attached image shows Jack Anderson on the left, Drew Pearson in the middle and Fred Blumenthal on the right. This is circa 1949.

James

[James Richards]

In this article linked below, there is mention of a plot to murder Jack Anderson; a conspiracy of sorts from inside Nixon's administration.

Does anyone have any details on this?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Jul27.html

James

[James Richards]

In this article linked below, there is mention of a plot to murder Jack Anderson; a conspiracy of sorts from inside Nixon's administration.

Does anyone have any details on this?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Jul27.html

James

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

After some Googling, I found the following written by Don Fulsom.

BTW, I just love the way Liddy leads with his chin. What a moron. With all his misguided macho histrionics, I'm surprised he wasn't snapped up by WWE's Smackdown.

James

*****************************

Of all the illegal activities undertaken by President Nixon's secret agents E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, one stands out as particularly sordid — the planned assassination of newspaper columnist Jack Anderson, Nixon's arch foe in the media. Nixon-era stories by Anderson about mobster Johnny Roselli (the Mafia's liaison with the CIA) and various Mob/CIA plots infuriated the president and led to White House discussions about the columnist's murder.

The plot against Anderson came to light in 1975 when The Washington Post reported that — "according to reliable sources" — Hunt told associates after the Watergate break-in that he was ordered to kill the columnist in December 1971 or January 1972. The plan allegedly involved the use of poison obtained from a CIA physician. The Post reported that the assassination order came from a "senior official in the Nixon White House," and that it was "canceled at the last minute . . . "

In an affidavit about a key meeting on the matter with his White House boss, Hunt said Charles Colson "seemed more than usually agitated, and I formed the impression that he had just come from a meeting with President Nixon."

Liddy admitted that he and Hunt had "examined all the alternatives and very quickly came to the conclusion the only way you're going to be able to stop (Anderson) is to kill him . . . And that was the recommendation." Shortly after the Watergate break-in in 1972, Liddy offered to be assassinated himself, if that would help the cover-up. He told White House counsel John Dean: "This is my fault … And if somebody wants to shoot me on a street corner, I'm prepared to have that done." In a 1980 legal case, Liddy testified that there even came a time during the Nixon presidency "when I felt I might well receive" instructions to kill E. Howard Hunt — adding, "I was prepared, should I receive those orders, to carry them out immediately."

Edited January 20, 2005 by James Richards