Operation Mockingbird
Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence media beginning in the late 1940s.
The CIA's secret activities, covert missions, and connections of control are all done under the pretense and protection of national security with no accountability whatsoever, at least in their minds. Considering the public is held accountable for everything we think, say, and do there is something seriously wrong with this picture. The CIA is the President's secret army, who have been and continue to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority, to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.
The "old boy network" of socializing, talking shop, and tapping each other for favors outside the halls of government made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies, thus the systematic infiltration and takeover of the media.
Under the guise of 'American' objectives and lack of congressional oversight, the CIA accomplish their exploits by using every trick in the book (and they know quite a few) that they actually teach in the notorious "School of the Americas", nicknamed the "School of Dictators" and "School of Assassins" by critics. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that 6 million people had died by 1987 as a result of CIA covert operations, called an "American Holocaust" by former State Department official William Blum. In 1948, the CIA recreated its covert action wing called the Office of Policy Coordination with Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner as its first director. Another early elitist who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 was Allen Dulles, a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other trusts, corporations, and cartels.
Starting in the early days of the Cold War (late 40's), the CIA began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide.
Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.
Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that they have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry reported the first breaking stories about Iran-Contra for Associated Press that were largely ignored by the press and congress, then moving to Newsweek he witnessed a retraction of a true story for political reasons. In 'Fooling America: A Talk by Robert Parry' he said, "The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people."
Major networks are primarily controlled by giant corporations that are obligated by law, to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations which are often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism. There were around 50 corporations a couple of decades ago, which was considered monopolistic by many and yet today, these companies have become larger and fewer in number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration of ownership and power reduces the diversity of media voices, as news falls into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries that interferes in newsgathering, because of conflicts of interest. Mockingbird was an immense financial undertaking with funds flowing from the CIA largely through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) founded by Tom Braden with Pat Buchanon of CNN's Crossfire.
Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a variety of other large corporations including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care, pharmaceutical, and technology companies. Until the 1980's, media systems were generally domestically owned, regulated, and national in scope. However, pressure from the IMF, World Bank, and US government to deregulate and privatize, the media, communication, and new technology resulted in a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful transnational media corporations (mostly US based), working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda.
One must also remember the The House of Rothschild bought Reuters news service in the 1800's. Within the last 20 years, Reuters bought the Associated Press and so on, many believe they play a major role to this day in everything that is aired on the news on many of the mainstream new networks with exception to only a small handful that aren’t in the absolute mainstream. A family with a nett worth of 12 times the money that is in circulation today has the capacity to do a great many things, buying up the media is only a minute part of what they have done throughout their history.
The first tier of the nine giant firms that dominate the world are Time Warner/AOL, Disney/ABC, Bertelsmann, Viacom/CBS, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation/Fox, General Electric/NBC, Sony, Universal/Seagram, Tele-Communications, Inc. or TCI and AT&T. This is just the head of the octopus which has its second and third tier tentacles working together in unison or feigned division. This would include The Washington Post/Newsweek, The New York Times/Weekly Standard, Tribune Co., US News, Gannett/USA Today, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Knight-Ridder, etcetera. A good site to visit for more information is Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a public interest media watchdog group, at www.fair.org/index.html, www.fair.org/mediafiles/index.html and www.fair.org/extra/9711/gmg.html. Media propaganda tactics include blackouts, misdirections, expert opinions to echo the Establishment line, smears, defining popular opinions, mass entertainment distractions, and Hobson's Choice (the media presents the so-called conservative and liberal positions).
This was uncovered in 1975 and 1976 Church hearings. The Church Committee published fourteen reports on the formation of U.S. intelligence agencies, their operations, and the alleged abuses of law and of power that they had committed, together with recommendations for reform, some of which were put in place. Many documents can be found and are now public record, however if you think this an indication that it is all over, think again.
An example of media control in more modern times would be the Arab spring, notably the Events in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia etc.
In March 2011, CNN sent a four person team to Bahrain to cover the Arab Spring. Once there, the crew was subjected to extreme intimidation amongst other things, but they were able to record some fantastic footage. As Glenn Greenwald of the UK’s Guardian writes in his article from today:
“In the segment, Lyon interviewed activists as they explicitly described their torture at the hands of government forces, while family members recounted their relatives’ abrupt disappearances. She spoke with government officials justifying the imprisonment of activists. And the segment featured harrowing video footage of regime forces shooting unarmed demonstrators, along with the mass arrests of peaceful protesters. In sum, the early 2011 CNN segment on Bahrain presented one of the starkest reports to date of the brutal repression embraced by the US-backed regime.
Despite these accolades and despite the dangers their own journalists and their sources endured to produce it, CNN International (CNNi) never broadcast the documentary. Even in the face of numerous inquiries and complaints from their own employees inside CNN, it continued to refuse to broadcast the program or even provide any explanation for the decision. To date, this documentary has never aired on CNNi.
Having just returned from Bahrain, Lyon says she “saw first-hand that these regime claims were lies, and I couldn’t believe CNN was making me put what I knew to be government lies into my reporting.”
After Lyon’s crew returned from Bahrain, CNN had no correspondents regularly reporting on the escalating violence. In emails to her producers and executives, Lyon repeatedly asked to return to Bahrain. Her requests were denied, and she was never sent back. She thus resorted to improvising coverage by interviewing activists via Skype in an attempt, she said, “to keep Bahrain in the news”.
In March 2012, Lyon was laid off from CNN as part of an apparent unrelated move by the network to outsource its investigative documentaries.
“At this point,” Lyon said, “I look at those payments as dirty money to stay silent. I got into journalism to expose, not help conceal wrongdoing, and I’m not willing to keep quiet about this any longer, even if it means I’ll lose those payments.”
In most Arab Spring Western Narratives, for non US compliant states, the use of unverified footage and false stories has been a key element in the media warfare used by Anti-Assad militants and countries. TV stations like Al Arabia, Al Jazeera, CNN and the BBC have been exposed on several occasions now for using false information and unverified stories to support their narrative. A number of investigative journalists and reporters have been fired from these stations for reporting the true happenings in Syria based on eyewitness accounts in Syria and other countries like Bahrain, Libya and Saudi Arabia.
This can also be seen when you see footage of Syrian citizens telling CNN and BBC reporters to go away because they are lying about what is happening in Syria and effecting their lives gravely.
Operation HM/Chaos
Forbidden by the National Security Act of 1947 from operating within the United States, the CIA nevertheless launched a domestic spying program dubbed MHCHAOS aimed at the U.S. anti- war underground press of the 1960s and 1970s. The operation was international in scope and supposedly focused on whether anti-war publications were financed by foreign, communist sources. In fact, points out Mackenzie, MHCHAOS, like the FBI's COINTELPRO, was designed to gather information on American citizens deemed by these federal agencies to be potentially subversive.
Because MHCHAOS was patently illegal, CIA officers participating in it were required to sign secrecy agreements swearing never to divulge any information about the operation. To violate a secrecy agreement was to risk federal prosecution. Mackenzie argues that such secrecy contracts became a favorite government tool, used to muzzle disclosures by ex-Agency personnel about questionable or illegal CIA activities.
One of the several secrecy agreements that the Agency eventually required its personnel to sign stipulated that any articles, books or speeches they might write that deal with intelligence activities must be preapproved by the CIA. When challenged in court that this type of contract constituted censorship and violates First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and press, the CIA, says Mackenzie, argued that this was not a censorship issue: "The United States was seeking neither to stop publication nor to censor. Rather, the United States was seeking 'specific performance' of a contract. This rather clever attempt to sidestep the obvious conflict between censorship and the First Amendment was persuasive to the judge.''
Another key ruling favoring the government arose out of the publication in 1977 of former CIA officer Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval," criticizing Agency activities relating to the American withdrawal from Vietnam. Snepp refused to submit the manuscript to the CIA censors prior to publication. The Agency took Snepp to court and obtained a ruling requiring Snepp to pay all profits from the book to the government and submit future writings on intelligence for CIA prepublication review. Says Mackenzie: "This decision gave the CIA the authority to institutionalize its censorship program. It would provide the precedent for censorship to be extended to more than fifty other federal agencies.''
The chief remaining barrier to keeping details of CIA domestic espionage from the public was the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). So, in 1982, the Agency moved to create an exemption from the FOIA for counter-intelligence files, such as the records of MHCHAOS. Mackenzie details how this was accomplished with the surprising cooperation of American Civil Liberties Union executives Mark Lynch and Morton Halperin. The new FOIA exemption coincided with the issuance by the Rion Directive (NSDD 84), which was designed to prohibit federal employees from leaking classified information to the press. Mackenzie maintains that the chief result of NSDD 84 has been to discourage potential government whistle blowers.
In the end, Mackenzie suggests, the pattern of censorship that began with the CIA frantically trying to keep secret its illegal domestic spying operations has spread to agencies of the federal government, creating a culture of bureaucratic secrecy that resembles the one generated by Great Britain's Official Secrets Act, but previously unknown in the United States, with its strong tradition of constitutionally protected free speech.
In Mackenzie, the United States lost prematurely one of its fiercest First Amendment defenders: "Almost a decade after the end of the Cold War,'' he writes in his conclusion, "espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom .... The issue is principle .... Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of that cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.''
Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence media beginning in the late 1940s.
The CIA's secret activities, covert missions, and connections of control are all done under the pretense and protection of national security with no accountability whatsoever, at least in their minds. Considering the public is held accountable for everything we think, say, and do there is something seriously wrong with this picture. The CIA is the President's secret army, who have been and continue to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority, to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.
The "old boy network" of socializing, talking shop, and tapping each other for favors outside the halls of government made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies, thus the systematic infiltration and takeover of the media.
Under the guise of 'American' objectives and lack of congressional oversight, the CIA accomplish their exploits by using every trick in the book (and they know quite a few) that they actually teach in the notorious "School of the Americas", nicknamed the "School of Dictators" and "School of Assassins" by critics. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that 6 million people had died by 1987 as a result of CIA covert operations, called an "American Holocaust" by former State Department official William Blum. In 1948, the CIA recreated its covert action wing called the Office of Policy Coordination with Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner as its first director. Another early elitist who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 was Allen Dulles, a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other trusts, corporations, and cartels.
Starting in the early days of the Cold War (late 40's), the CIA began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide.
Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and Crossbones" Society.
Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that they have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry reported the first breaking stories about Iran-Contra for Associated Press that were largely ignored by the press and congress, then moving to Newsweek he witnessed a retraction of a true story for political reasons. In 'Fooling America: A Talk by Robert Parry' he said, "The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people."
Major networks are primarily controlled by giant corporations that are obligated by law, to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations which are often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism. There were around 50 corporations a couple of decades ago, which was considered monopolistic by many and yet today, these companies have become larger and fewer in number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration of ownership and power reduces the diversity of media voices, as news falls into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries that interferes in newsgathering, because of conflicts of interest. Mockingbird was an immense financial undertaking with funds flowing from the CIA largely through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) founded by Tom Braden with Pat Buchanon of CNN's Crossfire.
Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a variety of other large corporations including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care, pharmaceutical, and technology companies. Until the 1980's, media systems were generally domestically owned, regulated, and national in scope. However, pressure from the IMF, World Bank, and US government to deregulate and privatize, the media, communication, and new technology resulted in a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful transnational media corporations (mostly US based), working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda.
One must also remember the The House of Rothschild bought Reuters news service in the 1800's. Within the last 20 years, Reuters bought the Associated Press and so on, many believe they play a major role to this day in everything that is aired on the news on many of the mainstream new networks with exception to only a small handful that aren’t in the absolute mainstream. A family with a nett worth of 12 times the money that is in circulation today has the capacity to do a great many things, buying up the media is only a minute part of what they have done throughout their history.
The first tier of the nine giant firms that dominate the world are Time Warner/AOL, Disney/ABC, Bertelsmann, Viacom/CBS, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation/Fox, General Electric/NBC, Sony, Universal/Seagram, Tele-Communications, Inc. or TCI and AT&T. This is just the head of the octopus which has its second and third tier tentacles working together in unison or feigned division. This would include The Washington Post/Newsweek, The New York Times/Weekly Standard, Tribune Co., US News, Gannett/USA Today, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Knight-Ridder, etcetera. A good site to visit for more information is Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a public interest media watchdog group, at www.fair.org/index.html, www.fair.org/mediafiles/index.html and www.fair.org/extra/9711/gmg.html. Media propaganda tactics include blackouts, misdirections, expert opinions to echo the Establishment line, smears, defining popular opinions, mass entertainment distractions, and Hobson's Choice (the media presents the so-called conservative and liberal positions).
This was uncovered in 1975 and 1976 Church hearings. The Church Committee published fourteen reports on the formation of U.S. intelligence agencies, their operations, and the alleged abuses of law and of power that they had committed, together with recommendations for reform, some of which were put in place. Many documents can be found and are now public record, however if you think this an indication that it is all over, think again.
An example of media control in more modern times would be the Arab spring, notably the Events in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia etc.
In March 2011, CNN sent a four person team to Bahrain to cover the Arab Spring. Once there, the crew was subjected to extreme intimidation amongst other things, but they were able to record some fantastic footage. As Glenn Greenwald of the UK’s Guardian writes in his article from today:
“In the segment, Lyon interviewed activists as they explicitly described their torture at the hands of government forces, while family members recounted their relatives’ abrupt disappearances. She spoke with government officials justifying the imprisonment of activists. And the segment featured harrowing video footage of regime forces shooting unarmed demonstrators, along with the mass arrests of peaceful protesters. In sum, the early 2011 CNN segment on Bahrain presented one of the starkest reports to date of the brutal repression embraced by the US-backed regime.
Despite these accolades and despite the dangers their own journalists and their sources endured to produce it, CNN International (CNNi) never broadcast the documentary. Even in the face of numerous inquiries and complaints from their own employees inside CNN, it continued to refuse to broadcast the program or even provide any explanation for the decision. To date, this documentary has never aired on CNNi.
Having just returned from Bahrain, Lyon says she “saw first-hand that these regime claims were lies, and I couldn’t believe CNN was making me put what I knew to be government lies into my reporting.”
After Lyon’s crew returned from Bahrain, CNN had no correspondents regularly reporting on the escalating violence. In emails to her producers and executives, Lyon repeatedly asked to return to Bahrain. Her requests were denied, and she was never sent back. She thus resorted to improvising coverage by interviewing activists via Skype in an attempt, she said, “to keep Bahrain in the news”.
In March 2012, Lyon was laid off from CNN as part of an apparent unrelated move by the network to outsource its investigative documentaries.
“At this point,” Lyon said, “I look at those payments as dirty money to stay silent. I got into journalism to expose, not help conceal wrongdoing, and I’m not willing to keep quiet about this any longer, even if it means I’ll lose those payments.”
In most Arab Spring Western Narratives, for non US compliant states, the use of unverified footage and false stories has been a key element in the media warfare used by Anti-Assad militants and countries. TV stations like Al Arabia, Al Jazeera, CNN and the BBC have been exposed on several occasions now for using false information and unverified stories to support their narrative. A number of investigative journalists and reporters have been fired from these stations for reporting the true happenings in Syria based on eyewitness accounts in Syria and other countries like Bahrain, Libya and Saudi Arabia.
This can also be seen when you see footage of Syrian citizens telling CNN and BBC reporters to go away because they are lying about what is happening in Syria and effecting their lives gravely.
Operation HM/Chaos
Forbidden by the National Security Act of 1947 from operating within the United States, the CIA nevertheless launched a domestic spying program dubbed MHCHAOS aimed at the U.S. anti- war underground press of the 1960s and 1970s. The operation was international in scope and supposedly focused on whether anti-war publications were financed by foreign, communist sources. In fact, points out Mackenzie, MHCHAOS, like the FBI's COINTELPRO, was designed to gather information on American citizens deemed by these federal agencies to be potentially subversive.
Because MHCHAOS was patently illegal, CIA officers participating in it were required to sign secrecy agreements swearing never to divulge any information about the operation. To violate a secrecy agreement was to risk federal prosecution. Mackenzie argues that such secrecy contracts became a favorite government tool, used to muzzle disclosures by ex-Agency personnel about questionable or illegal CIA activities.
One of the several secrecy agreements that the Agency eventually required its personnel to sign stipulated that any articles, books or speeches they might write that deal with intelligence activities must be preapproved by the CIA. When challenged in court that this type of contract constituted censorship and violates First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and press, the CIA, says Mackenzie, argued that this was not a censorship issue: "The United States was seeking neither to stop publication nor to censor. Rather, the United States was seeking 'specific performance' of a contract. This rather clever attempt to sidestep the obvious conflict between censorship and the First Amendment was persuasive to the judge.''
Another key ruling favoring the government arose out of the publication in 1977 of former CIA officer Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval," criticizing Agency activities relating to the American withdrawal from Vietnam. Snepp refused to submit the manuscript to the CIA censors prior to publication. The Agency took Snepp to court and obtained a ruling requiring Snepp to pay all profits from the book to the government and submit future writings on intelligence for CIA prepublication review. Says Mackenzie: "This decision gave the CIA the authority to institutionalize its censorship program. It would provide the precedent for censorship to be extended to more than fifty other federal agencies.''
The chief remaining barrier to keeping details of CIA domestic espionage from the public was the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). So, in 1982, the Agency moved to create an exemption from the FOIA for counter-intelligence files, such as the records of MHCHAOS. Mackenzie details how this was accomplished with the surprising cooperation of American Civil Liberties Union executives Mark Lynch and Morton Halperin. The new FOIA exemption coincided with the issuance by the Rion Directive (NSDD 84), which was designed to prohibit federal employees from leaking classified information to the press. Mackenzie maintains that the chief result of NSDD 84 has been to discourage potential government whistle blowers.
In the end, Mackenzie suggests, the pattern of censorship that began with the CIA frantically trying to keep secret its illegal domestic spying operations has spread to agencies of the federal government, creating a culture of bureaucratic secrecy that resembles the one generated by Great Britain's Official Secrets Act, but previously unknown in the United States, with its strong tradition of constitutionally protected free speech.
In Mackenzie, the United States lost prematurely one of its fiercest First Amendment defenders: "Almost a decade after the end of the Cold War,'' he writes in his conclusion, "espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom .... The issue is principle .... Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of that cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.''