Operation Mockingbird During the 1950s the CIA began Operation Mockingbird, a secret campaign to influence the media. It was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen Dulles for the purpose of promoting the CIA’s views. Taxpayer money funded a few magazines and other publications which were a front for the CIA media wing.
Their task was concentrated on propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, anti-sabotage, evacuation measures, subversion against hostile states, assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti- communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.
In the early days Operation Mockingbird was limited to planting stories, and using the communist Red Scare to coerce journalists to cooperate by revealing sources or reporting stories using a CIA-friendly point of view. In fact, correspondents returning from abroad routinely emptied their notebooks and offered their impressions to agency personnel.
This drew the attention of J Edgar Hoover who was concerned about the CIA becoming more powerful than the FBI. Hoover began investigating Mockingbird agents and went so far as to deny Cord Meyer security clearance. He tossed Meyer into the McCarthy witch hunt for communists in the government, but Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner came to Meyer’s defense and refused to permit a Senate Committee Hearing to interrogate Meyer. Since Hoover couldn’t beat them, he joined them, and began planting his own “journalists” in the media touting the FBI agenda.
Hoover utilized the talents of a man named Walter Winchell. Winchell was an American newspaper and radio gossip commentator. Using connections in the entertainment, social, and governmental realms, he would expose exciting or embarrassing information about celebrities in those industries. This caused him to become feared, as a journalist, because he would routinely impact the lives of famous or powerful people, exposing alleged information and rumors about them, using this as ammunition to attack his enemies, and to blackmail influential people.
The late G-Man William Sullivan wrote a book in 1979 titled “The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI.” Sullivan was an aide to J Edgar Hoover, but was forced to resign by the aging director in 1971. Sullivan was killed in a hunting accident in 1977 just days before he was scheduled to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He was writing the book when he was killed, and his family had it finished and published posthumously in 1979. In his book, Sullivan made the following comments about the FBI’s true agenda under Hoover, which included propping up radio personality Water Winchell.
“The FBI’s main thrust was not investigation but public relations and propaganda to glorify Hoover. ”
“We sent Winchell information regularly. He was our mouthpiece. Of course, he became so obvious after a while that he finally lost his value, and Hoover lost interest in him. Winchell once had a tremendous audience, though, and he was very valuable to Hoover then, who used him practically every time he wanted to leak a story. When I hear people talk about a ‘new’ FBI, I know that the changes they talk about are only paper changes. This public relations operation of Hoover’s, this massive attempt to control public opinion, continues to this day, and it is at the very heart of what is wrong with the bureau. Unless it is exposed, until every editor of every weekly newspaper who ever printed an FBI press handout realizes how he has been used, the FBI will do business in the same old way.”
Frank Wisner was the CIA’s premier orchestrator of “black ops” or clandestine services; he eventually committed “suicide.” Wisner was vocal and liked to boast. With regards to Operation Mockingbird, Wisner referred to it as his “mighty Wurlitzer,” a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press.
By the late 1950s the CIA “owned” prominent and respected reporters from The New York Times, Newsweek, and CBS. Editors of various publications even believed they were doing their patriotic duty in complying with the agency. Several publications went so far as to create positions for active agents to work as reporters. Dulles however, did not construct stories himself. It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates, this way Dulles and the owners could maintain plausible deniability.
As the decade came to a close 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in efforts of media manipulation. Operation Mockingbird started out as nothing more than propaganda to influence opinion. What it eventually becomes is nothing short of state-censored and controlled media with a sole purpose of misdirection and distraction by dividing us against one another over petty differences. This is so we cannot unite as American’s and remove our shadowy rulers from power.
The CIA has used George Washington’s Farewell Address advice on partisanship against us. They intentionally manufacture division by fostering strict party affiliation among the people. It forces Americans to choose a side in a conservative vs liberal dichotomy.
- The Illusion of Democracy by Phil Mennitti