Operation Mockingbird
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Operation Mockingbird is a secret campaign by the United
States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the
1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was
later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. The
organization recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network
to help present the CIA's views. It funded some student and cultural organizations
and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign
media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating
units of the CIA.
In addition to earlier exposés of CIA activities in foreign
affairs, in 1966, Ramparts magazine published an article revealing that the
National Student Association was funded by the CIA. The United States Congress
investigated the allegations and published a report in 1976. Other accounts
were also published. The media operation was first called Mockingbird in
Deborah Davis's 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and The
Washington Post.[1]
In 1948, Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office
of Special Projects (OSP). Soon afterwards, OSP was renamed the Office of
Policy Coordination (OPC), which became the CIA's covert action branch. Wisner
was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda,
economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage,
demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states,
including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of
indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free
world".[2] Later that year, Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to
influence foreign media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham from The Washington
Post to run the project within the industry. According to Deborah Davis in
Katharine the Great, "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members
of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications
vehicles."[3]
In 1951, Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer to join the
CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and
had been spying on the liberal internationalist organizations he had been a
member of in the late 1940s.[4] According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became
Mockingbird's "principal operative."[5]
"I’m proud they asked me and proud to have done
it" - Joseph Alsop [6]
After 1953, the network was overseen by CIA Director Allen
Dulles, by which time Operation Mockingbird had major influence over 25
newspapers and wire agencies. The usual methodology was placing reports
developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting
reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceding
reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services.
These networks were run by people with well-known liberal but pro-American big
business and anti-Soviet views such as William S. Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time
and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly
(managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), Hal
Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr. (Louisville Courier-Journal), James
Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science
Monitor).[7]
The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by
siphoning off funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Some of this money was used
to bribe journalists and publishers. Frank Wisner was constantly looking for
ways to help convince the public of the dangers of Soviet communism. In 1954,
Wisner arranged for the funding of a Hollywood production of Animal Farm as an
animated allegory based on the book written by George Orwell.[8]
According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion
of the Free Press by the CIA, first chapter of Virtual Government: CIA Mind
Control Operations in America, p. 42), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried
and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts".
Wisner was able to constrain newspapers from reporting about certain events,
including the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran (see: Operation
Ajax) and Guatemala (see: Operation PBSUCCESS).[9]
Thomas Braden, head of the International Organizations
Division (IOD), played an important role in Operation Mockingbird. Many years
later he revealed his role in these events:
"If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present,
say, to someone in Europe—a Labour leader—suppose he just thought, This man can
use fifty thousand dollars, he's working well and doing a good job—he could
hand it to him and never have to account to anybody... There was simply no
limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and
no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the
war—the secret war... It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first. Journalists
were a target, labor unions a particular target—that was one of the activities
in which the communists spent the most money."[10]
Directorate for Plans[edit]
In August 1952, the Office of Policy Coordination which
dealt with covert action such as paramilitary or psychological influence
operations, and the Office of Special Operations which dealt with espionage and
counter-espionage, were merged under the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP), Allen
W. Dulles. When Dulles became head of the CIA in 1953, Frank Wisner became head
of this new organization and Richard Helms became his chief of operations.
Mockingbird became the responsibility of the DDP.[11]
J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the CIA's growing power.
Institutionally, the organizations were very different, with the CIA holding a
more politically diverse group in contrast to the more conservative FBI. This
was reflected in Hoover's description of the OPC as "Wisner's gang of
weirdos". Hoover began having investigations done into Wisner's people. He
found that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s.
This information was passed to Senator Joseph McCarthy who started making
attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair
that Frank Wisner had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war. Hoover
claimed that Caradja was a Soviet agent.[12]
McCarthy, as part of his campaign against government, began
accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy
claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists", and said he
would root out a hundred of them. One of his first targets was Cord Meyer, who
was still working for Operation Mockingbird. In August 1953, Richard Helms,
Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer that McCarthy had accused him of being a
communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was unwilling to give
Meyer "security clearance", without referring to any evidence against
him. Allen W. Dulles and Frank Wisner both came to his defense and refused to
permit an FBI interrogation of Meyer.[13]
With the network in authority in the CIA threatened, Wisner
was directed to unleash Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack
Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all engaged in intensely negative
coverage of McCarthy. According to Jack Anderson, his political reputation was
permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.[14]
Guatemala[edit]
Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of
President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala during Operation PBSUCCESS. Dulles
restrained certain journalists from traveling to Guatemala, including Sydney
Gruson of the New York Times.[15] As the CIA's wealth and power increased, its
aggressive focus toward the Soviet Union soon began not only heating up the
Cold War but also disrupting relations with America's European allies.
They[who?] considered rising third-world liberationist movements as potential
threats to their[who?] political systems.
Consequently, even in the wake of Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles's pledge during the 1952 presidential campaign to "roll back
the Iron Curtain", American covert action operations came under scrutiny
almost as soon as Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated in 1953. He soon set up an
evaluation operation called Solarium, which had three committees playing
analytical games to see which plans of action should be continued. In 1955,
President Eisenhower established the 5412 Committee in order to keep more of a
check on the CIA's covert activities. The committee (also called the Special
Group) included the CIA director, the national security adviser, and the deputy
secretaries at State and Defense. They were to determine whether covert actions
were "proper" and in the national interest. Richard B. Russell,
chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee was also included in the
group. As Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible
deniability", CIA-planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412
Committee for review.
Ultimately, Eisenhower became concerned that CIA covert
activities were being poorly coordinated with American foreign policy. He
thought they might have expressed senior corporate interests of upper-class
families of the North-Eastern Establishment. In 1956, he appointed David K. E.
Bruce as a member of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign
Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA). Eisenhower asked Bruce to write a report on
the CIA. It was presented to Eisenhower on 20 December 1956. Bruce argued that
the CIA's covert actions were "responsible in great measure for stirring
up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exists in many countries in
the world today".[16] Bruce was also highly critical of Mockingbird. He
argued: "what right have we to go barging around in other countries buying
newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate
for this, that, or the other office".[16]
After Richard M. Bissell, Jr. lost his post as Deputy
Director for Plans in 1962, Tracy Barnes took over the running of Mockingbird.
According to Evan Thomas in his book The Very Best Men (1995), Barnes planted
editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA.
First exposure[edit]
In 1964, Random House published Invisible Government by
David Wise and Thomas Ross. The book exposed the role of the CIA in foreign
policy. This included CIA coups in Guatemala (Operation PBSUCCESS) and Iran
(Operation Ajax) and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. It also revealed the CIA's
attempts to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations
taking place in Laos and Vietnam. The CIA considered buying up the entire
printing of Invisible Government, but this idea was rejected when Random House
pointed out that if this happened, they would have to print a second edition.[2]
John McCone, the new director of the CIA, tried to prevent
Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting
Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed, and NBC broadcast this
critical documentary.
In June 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of
the Directorate for Plans and took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966,
FitzGerald learned that Ramparts had discovered that the CIA had been secretly
funding the National Student Association and was considering publishing an
account.[17] When the magazine advised the CIA it had "lost control of the
information", and would likely be forced to publicize, FitzGerald ordered
a plan to either neutralize the campaign and/or wind-down Mockingbird.
He appointed Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against
Ramparts. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men:
"I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing.
The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things
in mind, some of which we carried off."[18]
Ramparts published the account in March 1967. The article,
written by Sol Stern, was entitled "NSA and the CIA".[citation
needed] As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student Association,
Stern exposed the wide system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe,
Asia, and South America. It named Cord Meyer as a key figure in this campaign,
which included the funding of the literary journal Encounter.[10] Applewhite
managed to control some of the account by steering references away from leftist
organizations and toward most of the few conservative organizations backed by
the CIA.
In May 1967, Thomas Braden published "I'm Glad the CIA
is 'Immoral'", in the Saturday Evening Post. He defended the activities of
the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden said that the
CIA had kept these activities secret from Congress. As he wrote: "In the
early 1950s, when the Cold War was really hot, the idea that Congress would
have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch
Society's approving Medicare."[19]
Church Committee investigations[edit]
Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a
result of the Senator Frank Church investigations (Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975.
According to the Congress report published in 1976:
"The CIA currently maintains a network of several
hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the
CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert
propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large
number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news
agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other
foreign media outlets."[citation needed]
In February 1976, George H. W. Bush, the recently appointed
Director of the CIA, announced a new policy: "Effective immediately, the
CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or
part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper,
periodical, radio or television network or station." He added that the CIA
would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of
journalists.[20]
"Family Jewels" report
According to the "Family Jewels" report, released
by the National Security Archive on June 26, 2007, during the period from March
12, 1963 to June 15, 1963, the CIA installed telephone taps on two
Washington-based news reporters.[21]
See also
CIA influence on public opinion
Congress for Cultural Freedom
James Risen
Judith Miller
Propaganda in the United States
Psychological Operations
Radio Liberty
Robertson Panel
Special Activities Division
Sharyl Attkisson
White propaganda
Further reading[edit]
Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington
Post by Deborah Davis, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. This book makes many
claims about Katharine Graham, then owner of the Washington Post, and her
cooperation with Operation Mockingbird.
Wilford, Hugh (2008). The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA
Played America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02681-0.
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Davis, Deborah (1979). Katherine The Great:
Katherine Graham and The Washington Post. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN
0151467846.
^ Jump up to: a b David Wise and Thomas Ross (1964).
Invisible Government.
Jump up ^ Deborah Davis (1979). Katharine the Great. pp.
137–138.
Jump up ^ Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World
Federalism to the CIA. pp. 42–59.
Jump up ^ Deborah Davis (1979). Katharine the Great. p. 226.
Jump up ^ Carl Bernstein, CIA and the Media, People, 1977
Jump up ^ Carl Bernstein (20 October 1977). "CIA and
the Media". Rolling Stone Magazine.
Jump up ^ Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early
Years of the CIA. p. 33.
Jump up ^ Alex Constantine (1997). Virtual Government: CIA
Mind Control Operations in America. Feral House. ISBN 9780922915453.
^ Jump up to: a b Thomas Braden, interview included in the
Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA.
1975.
Jump up ^ John Ranelagh (1986). The Agency: The Rise and
Decline of the CIA. pp. 198–202.
Jump up ^ Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early
Years of the CIA. pp. 98–106.
Jump up ^ Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World
Federalism to the CIA. pp. 60–84.
Jump up ^ Jack Anderson (1979). Confessions of a Muckraker.
pp. 208–236.
Jump up ^ Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early
Years of the CIA. p. 117.
^ Jump up to: a b Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The
Early Years of the CIA. pp. 148–150.
Jump up ^ Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World
Federalism to the CIA. pp. 86–89.
Jump up ^ Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early
Years of the CIA. p. 330.
Jump up ^ Thomas Braden (20 May 1967). "I'm Glad the
CIA is 'Immoral'". Saturday Evening Post.
Jump up ^ Mary Louise (2003). Mockingbird: CIA Media
Manipulation.
Jump up ^ Family Jewels, PDF page 5, para. 3
External links[edit]
Carl Bernstein's 1977 article for Rolling Stone "The
CIA and the Media"
CIA "Family Jewels" Report
This page was last modified on 9 October 2016, at 18:41.
