Operation Mockingbird was a secret campaign by the United States Central
Intelligence Agency 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 network to help present the CIA's views,
and 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
History In 1948, Frank Wisner was appointed
director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards, OSP was
renamed the Office of Policy Coordination, 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". 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." 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. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer
became Mockingbird's "principal operative."
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, Henry Luce, Arthur Hays
Sulzberger, Alfred Friendly, Jerry O'Leary, Hal Hendrix, Barry Bingham,
Sr., James Copley and Joseph Harrison. The Office of Policy Coordination 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. According to Alex Constantine, 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 and Guatemala. Thomas Braden, head of the International
Organizations Division, 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."
= Directorate for Plans = 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, 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. 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.
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. 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. = Guatemala =
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. 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 considered rising
third-world liberationist movements as potential threats to their 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 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. 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". 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".
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, Barnes planted editorials about political
candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA. = First exposure =
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 and Iran 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. 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. 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. 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." Ramparts published the account in March
1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled "NSA and the CIA". 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. 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." = Church Committee investigations =
Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Senator
Frank Church investigations 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."
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.
= "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, and June 15, 1963, the CIA installed telephone taps
on two Washington-based news reporters. See also
Judith Miller Propaganda in the United States
Radio Liberty James Risen
Robertson Panel White propaganda
Special Activities Division Further reading
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. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How
the CIA Played America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN
978-0-674-02681-0. References
External links Carl Bernstein's 1977 article for
Rolling Stone "The CIA and the Media" CIA "Family Jewels" Report