CIA Operation Mockingbird Document Collection
A compilation of many controversial documents culled from dozens of internet sources and FOIA filings. Operation Mockin
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Table of contents :
Operation Mockingbird-An Overview and History-12
Anderson Cooper, CIA Operative_ apfn.org-5
Bought and Paid for Central Bankster-Owned LameStreamMedia and their _Propaganda Matrix_-6
CIA AND THE MEDIA How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up BY CARL BERNSTEIN-21
CIA Disinformation in Action- Operation Mockingbird and the Washington Post-Whale.to-19
CIA Propaganda and Disinformation integratingdarkandlight.com-6
CIA's Family Jewels-
Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD by Alex Constantine-4
Friends_of_Liberty_-_Pipeline_News_disagrees_w_Fahey_on_Bob_Nova
How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C-23
MOCKINGBIRD_The_Subversion_Of_The_Free_Press_By_The_CIA
MOCKINGBIRDTheSubversionOfTheFreePressByTheCIA-67
MOCKINGBIRDTheSubversionOfTheFreePressByTheCIA-WhatReallyHappened-22
Operation Mockingbird - [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S
Operation Mockingbird - 9_11 Review-28
OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD - AFPN.COM Parts 1-4-
OPERATION_MOCKINGBIRD_Part_1
SIGHTINGS Operation Mockingbird The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA-22
The_CIAs_Project_MOCKINGBIRD_-_Ongoing_Covert_Control_of_the_Med
Operation Mockingbird - Parts 1-3-71
Operation Mockingbird - SPARTACUS-EDUCATIONAL.COM-38
Operation Mockingbird - BlackHistoryMonth2014.com
Operation Mockingbird - CIA Media Manipulation-28
Operation Mockingbird-27
Operation_Mockingbird_-_The_Subversion_Of_Americas_Free_Press_By
Pipe Dreams_ the CIA, Drugs, and the Media
Operation_Mockingbird_The_CIA_and_Propaganda
Operation Mockingbird - CIA owns the Media _ 911Blogger
Operation Mockingbird - Factbites-7
Operation Mockingbird - THE-á MIGHTY-á WURLITZER-á PLAYS-á ON by Gary Webb Chapter 14 from In the Buzzsaw edited by Kristina Borjesson
Operation Mockingbird (CIA_FBI control of the media--The Mighty Wurlitzer)-3
Operation Mockingbird The CIA's Operation Mockingbird Manipulated Media-5
Operation Mockingbird_ CIA Media Manipulation-3
Operation Mockingbird_ The CIA and Propaganda-4
Operation Mockingbird-CIA-5
Operation_Mockingbird_-_CIA_Media_Manipulation
Operation_Mockingbird_-_Government_Control_of_Mainstream_Media
Operation_Mockingbird_CIA_Controls_The_Mainstream_Media
Operation_Mockingbird_Exposed_Congressional_Hearing_Proves_The_C
Operation_Mockingbird_New_York_Times_confesses_to_role_in_subver
SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird - The Constantine Report
SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird
Stepford Spook and the New Operation Mockingbird-2
SUBVERTING THE MEDIA - DeepBlackLies-5
Talk_Operation Mockingbird - SourceWatch-5
The CIA and journalism - SourceWatch
TheAmericanMediaisControlled-6
UK_Gay_News_-_Operation_Mockingbird_County_Rallies_to_Aid_Dying_
Citation preview
Operation Mockingbird An Overview and History
Article with Links at: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counterintelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency . Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous antiCommunist elements in threatened countries of the free world." Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham ( Washington Post ) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt , Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop , Joseph Alsop and James Reston , were recruited from within the Georgetown Set . According to Deborah Davis ( 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 organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis , Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative". One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop , whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop ( New York Herald Tribune ), Ben Bradlee ( Newsweek ), James Reston ( New York Times ), C. D. Jackson ( Time Magazine ), Walter Pincus ( Washington Post ), William C. Baggs ( Miami News ), Herb Gold ( Miami News ) and Charles Bartlett ( Chattanooga Times ). According to Nina Burleigh ( A Very Private Woman ) these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner . The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
After 1953 the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles , director of the Central Intelligence Agency . By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with wellknown rightwing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce ( Time Magazine 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 CourierJournal ), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison ( Christian Science Monitor ). The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning of funds intended for the Marshall Plan . Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers. Frank Wisner was constantly looked for ways to help convince the public of the dangers of communism. In 1954 Wisner arranged for the funding the Hollywood production of Animal Farm , the animated allegory based on the book written by George Orwell . According to Alex Constantine ( Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA ), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts". Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala. Thomas Braden , head of the of 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." In August, 1952, the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged to form the Directorate of Plans (DPP). Frank Wisner became head of this new organization and Richard Helms became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DPP. J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the CIA's growing power. He described the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in leftwing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to 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.
Joseph McCarthy also began accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists" and claimed he intended to 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 Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added to the smear by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and both came to his defence and refused to permit a FBI interrogation of Meyer. Joseph McCarthy did not realise what he was taking on. Wisner unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson , Joe Alsop , Jack Anderson , Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all went into attack mode and McCarthy was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner. Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. People like Henry Luce was able to censor stories that appeared too sympathetic towards the plight of Arbenz. Allen W. Dulles was even able to keep leftwing journalists from travelling to Guatemala. This including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times . Frank Wisner was also interested in influencing Hollywood. As Hugh Wilford points out in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008): “Fortunately for the CIA, two factors predisposed the major Hollywood studios that dominated the industry to take a responsible position in the cultural Cold War. One was a strong tendency toward selfcensorship, the result of many years' experience avoiding the commercially disastrous effects of giving offense to either domestic pressure groups like the American Legion or foreign audiences. The other was the fact that the men who ran the studios were intensely patriotic and anticommunist they saw it as their duty to help their government defeat the Soviet threat." Frank Wisner was helped by the fact that the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) , chaired by J. Parnell Thomas , was carrying out an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses". During their interviews they named nineteen people who they accused of holding leftwing views. One of those named, Bertolt Brecht , a playwright, gave evidence and then left for East Germany . Ten others: Herbert Biberman , Lester Cole , Albert Maltz , Adrian Scott , Samuel Ornitz , Dalton Trumbo , Edward Dmytryk , Ring Lardner Jr ., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any questions and were sent to prison and were blacklisted from the industry. The CIA and FBI also provided rightwing television producer, Vincent Harnett , with information about leftwing figures in the industry. In June 1950 Harnett published Red Channels , a pamphlet listing the names of 151 writers, directors and performers who they
claimed had been members of subversive organisations before the Second World War but had not so far been blacklisted. Lee J. Cobb was one of those actors who was originally blacklisted but eventually cooperated with the HUAC : “When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HCUA did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again.” According to Frances Stonor Saunders , the author of Who Paid the Piper? (2000), Frank Wisner recruited several important figures for Operation Mockingbird. This included former OSS filmmaker John Ford and studio bosses Cecil B. DeMille (Paramount Pictures) and Darryl Zanuck (Twentieth CenturyFox). Another important figure in this group was Howard Hughes, the boss of RKO Pictures. As Charles Higham points out in Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (2004) , this was also good for business: “Hughes’s crusade against Communism” was “exacerbated by his desire to have Hughes Aircraft profit from the Korean and any future antiSoviet wars”. For example, in June 1950, General Ira Eaker "signed an acrosstheboard agreement giving Hughes a monopoly in interceptors for the U.S. Air Force… despite the fact that it was in breach of the Sherman antimonopolies act… By the end of 1950, the war had made Hughes even richer than before.” Another important figure in this conspiracy was C. D. Jackson . He had joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1943. The following year he was appointed Deputy Chief at the Psychological Warfare Division at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). After the war, he became Managing Director of TimeLife International . When it became clear that Dwight D. Eisenhower stood a good chance of becoming president, the CIA arranged for Jackson to join his campaign. This involved Jackson writing speeches for Eisenhower. Jackson was rewarded in February 1953 by being appointed as Special Assistant to the President. This included the role of Eisenhower's liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon. According to the Eisenhower Presidential Library files in Abilene , Kansas , Jackson's "area responsibility was loosely defined as international affairs, cold war planning, and psychological warfare. His main function was the coordination of activities aimed at interpreting world situations to the best advantage of the United States and her allies and exploiting incidents which reflected negatively on the Soviet Union , Communist China and other enemies in the Cold War." Jackson was also involved in Operation Mockingbird. This was revealed after the death of C. D. Jackson . On December 15, 1971, Mrs. C.D. Jackson gave her husband’s papers to the Dwight
D. Eisenhower Library. This included details that Jackson was in contact with a CIA agent in Hollywood's Paramount Studios . The agent is not named by Jackson but Frances Stonor Saunders claims in Who Paid the Piper? (2000) that it was Carleton Alsop , a CIA agent employed by Frank Wisner . There is no doubt that Alsop was one of the CIA agents working at Paramount. However, Hugh Wilford argues in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008) that it was a senior executive at Paramount, Lugi G. Laraschi , was the most important CIA figure at the studio. Laraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship at the studio, whose job was to “iron out any political, moral or religious problems”. Other studios, including MGM and RKO , had similar officers, and were probably CIA placements. In a private letter to Sherman Adams , Jackson claims the role of these CIA placements was “to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with the proper subtlety”. Although the main objective of Operation Mockingbird was to influence the production of commercial films the CIA also occasionally initiated film projects. The best documented instance of this concerns an animated version of Animal Farm , a satirical allegory about Stalinism by George Orwell . The book was highly popular when it was published in 1945 and it was only natural that the studios should be interested in making a film of the book. The problem for the CIA was that Orwell was a socialist whose book attacked both communism and capitalism. Therefore, it was important to make a film that restricted it to a condemnation of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union . In 1950 Wisner’s OPC arranged for Joe Bryan to recruit anticommunist documentarymaker Louis de Rochemont to produce a movie version of the tale. It was decided to get the film made in Britain to disguise CIA involvement in the project. Rochemont employed the British animation studio of husband and wife John Halas and Joy Batchelor to make the film. Most of the funding came from a CIA shell corporation, Touchstone. E. Howard Hunt was one of those agents involved in the production of the film whose role was to remove the socialist elements in Orwell’s allegory. One unnamed member of the OPC sent a letter to John Halas called for the addition of scenes showing the other farms (that represented capitalist countries) in a more flattering light. The most important demand was to change the ending of Animal Farm . The CIA did not like the scene where the pigs and dogs face a liberationstyle uprising of the other animals. The letter included the following: “It is reasonable to expect that if Orwell were to write the book today, it would be considerably different and that the changes would tend to make it even more positively antiCommunist and possibly somewhat more favorable to the Western powers.” One of the main concerns of the CIA was the portrayal of racerelations in Hollywood movies. It was argued that the left was using this issue to undermine the idea that America was a democracy based on equal rights. Letters from Jackson sent to the producers of films called for scenes showing African Americans mixing on equal terms with whites. One of Jackson’s proposals involved “planting black spectators in a crowd watching a golf game in the Martin and Lewis comedy The Caddy”.
In 1955 Graham Greene published The Quiet American . The novel is set in Vietnam and involves the relationship between Thomas Fowler and Alden Pyle. Fowler is a veteran British journalist in his fifties, who has been covering the war in Vietnam for over two years. Pyle, the “Quiet American” of the title, is officially an aid worker, but is really employed by the CIA. It is believed that the Pyle character is partly based on that of Edward Lansdale . Greene had worked for the British Secret Service during the Second World War . Although a fairly successful novelist at the time, Greene was also employed by The Times and Le Figaro as a journalist. Between 1951 to 1954 spent a long period of time in Saigon. In 1953 Lansdale became a CIA advisor on special counterguerrilla operations to French forces against the Viet Minh . While it is true that Graham Greene admitted that he never had the "misfortune to meet" Lansdale, the two men did know a lot about each other. Lansdale recalls that in 1954 he had dinner with Peg and Tilman Durdin at the Continental Hotel in Saigon . Greene was also there having a meal with several French officers. Lansdale claims that after he and the Durdins were leaving, Greene said something in French to his companions and the men began booing him. Lansdale definitely thought that Pyle was based on him. He told Cecil B. Currey on 15th February, 1984: "Pyle was close to Trinh Minh Thé, the guerrilla leader, and also had a dog that went with him everywhere and I was the only American close to Trinh Minh Thé and my poodle Pierre went everything with me." In the book Pyle is sent to Vietnam by his government, ostensibly as a member of the American Economic Mission, but that assignment was only a cover for his real role as a CIA agent. According to one critic "Pyle was the embodiment of wellmeaning Americanstyle politics, and he blundered through the intrigue, treachery, and confusion of Vietnamese politics, leaving a trail of blood and suffering behind him." As Fowler points out in the novel, Pyle was attempting to "win the East for Democracy". However, according to Fowler, what the people of Vietnam really wanted was "enough rice" to eat. What is more: "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want." When the book was published in the United States in 1956 it was condemned as antiAmerican. Pyle (Lansdale) is portrayed as someone whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions. It was criticized by The New Yorker for portraying Americans as murderers. The director, producer and screenwriter, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was chosen to make the film of The Quiet American . He visited Saigon in 1956 and was introduced to Edward Lansdale , whose cover was working at the International Rescue Committee’s office. The most controversial scene in the book is the bombing of a Saigon square in 1952 by a Vietnamese associate of Lansdale’s, General Trinh Minh Thé . In the novel, Greene suggests that Pyle/Lansdale, was behind the
bombing. Lansdale suggested to Mankiewicz that the film should show that the bombing was “actually having been a Communist action”. When he returned home Mankiewicz wrote to John O’Daniel , the chairman of the American Friends of Vietnam that he intended to completely change the antiAmerican attitude of Greene’s book. This included the casting of Second World War hero, Audie Murphy , as Alden Pyle. In a letter that Edward Lansdale wrote to Ngo Dinh Diem he praised Mankiewicz’s treatment of the story as “an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel of despair” and “that it will help win more friends for you and Vietnam in many places in the world where it is shown." As Hugh Wilford pointed out: “It was a brilliantly devious maneuver of postmodern literary complexity: by helping to rewrite a story featuring a character reputedly based on himself, Lansdale had transformed an antiAmerican tract into a cinematic apology for U.S. policy and his own actionsin Vietnam.” Graham Greene was furious with Mankiewicz’s treatment ofhis novel. "Far was it from my mind, when I wrote The Quiet American that the book would become a source of spiritual profit to one of the most corrupt governments in Southeast Asia." In 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower established the 5412 Committee in order to keep 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 Defence and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were "proper" and in the national interest. It was also decided to include Richard B. Russell , chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible deniability" planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee.
The Very Best Men
The Mighty Wurlitzer
Dwight Eisenhower became concerned about CIA covert activities and in 1956 appointed David 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 20th 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 handling money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office." After Richard Bissell lost his post as Director of Plans in 1962, Tracy Barnes took over the running of Mockingbird. According to Evan Thomas ( The Very Best Men ) Barnes planted editorials about political candidates who were regarded as proCIA. In 1963, John McCone , the director of the CIA, discovered that Random House intended to publish Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross . McCone discovered that the book intended to look at his links with the Military Industrial Congress Complex . The authors also claimed that the CIA was having a major influence on American foreign policy. This included the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954). The book also covered the role that the CIA played in the Bay of Pigs operation, the attempts to remove President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam . John McCone called in Wise and Ross to demand deletions on the basis of galleys the CIA had secretly obtained from Random House. The authors refused to made these changes and Random House decided to go ahead and publish the book. 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. McCone now formed a special group to deal with the book and tried to arrange for it to get bad reviews.
Katharine the Great
A Personal History
Invisible Government was published in 1964. It was the first full account of America's intelligence and espionage apparatus. In the book Wise and Ross argued that the "Invisible Government is made up of many agencies and people, including the intelligence branches of the State and Defense Departments, of the Army, Navy and Air Force". However, they claimed that the most important organization involved in this process was the CIA . John McCone also attempted to stop Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary. In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald discovered that Ramparts , a leftwing publication, was planning to publish that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. 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." This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing this story 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 it exposed the whole system of antiCommunist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. It named Cord Meyer as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary journal Encounter .
In May 1967 Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article entitled, I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral, in the Saturday Evening Post , where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress. As he pointed out in the
article: "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." Meyer's role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy . The book was highly critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer's when he was a liberal activist after the war. Further details of Operation Mockingbird was revealed as a result of the 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." Church argued that the cost of misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year. Frank Church showed that it was CIA policy to use clandestine handling of journalists and authors to get information published initially in the foreign media in order to get it disseminated in the United States. Church quotes from one document written by the Chief of the Covert Action Staff on how this process worked (page 193). For example, he writes: “Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publicans or booksellers.” Later in the document he writes: “Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability”. Church goes onto report that “over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967”. All these books eventually found their way into the American marketplace. Either in their original form (Church gives the example of the Penkovskiy Papers ) or repackaged as articles for American newspapers and magazines. In another document published in 1961 the Chief of the Agency’s propaganda unit wrote: “The advantage of our direct contact with the author is that we can acquaint him in great detail with our intentions; that we can provide him with whatever material we want him to include and that we can check the manuscript at every stage… (the Agency) must make sure the actual manuscript will correspond with our operational and propagandistic intention.” Church quotes Thomas H. Karamessines as saying: “If you plant an article in some paper overseas, and it is a hardhitting article, or a revelation, there is no way of guaranteeing that it is not going to be picked up and published by the Associated Press in this country” (page 198). By analyzing CIA documents Church was able to identify over 50 U.S. journalists who
were employed directly by the Agency. He was aware that there were a lot more who enjoyed a very close relationship with the CIA who were “being paid regularly for their services, to those who receive only occasional gifts and reimbursements from the CIA” (page 195). Church pointed out that this was probably only the tip of the iceberg because the CIA refused to “provide the names of its media agents or the names of media organizations with which they are connected” (page 195). Church was also aware that most of these payments were not documented. This was the main point of the Otis Pike Report . If these payments were not documented and accounted for, there must be a strong possibility of financial corruption taking place. This includes the large commercial contracts that the CIA was responsible for distributing. Pike’s report actually highlighted in 1976 what eventually emerged in the 1980s via the activities of CIA operatives such as Edwin Wilson , Thomas Clines , Ted Shackley , Raphael Quintero , Richard Secord and Felix Rodriguez . Church also identified E. Howard Hunt as an important figure in Operation Mockingbird. He points out how Hunt arranged for books to be reviewed by certain writers in the national press. He gives the example of how Hunt arranged for a “CIA writer under contract” to write a hostile review of a Edgar Snow book in the New York Times (page 198). Church comes up with this conclusion to his examination of this issue: “In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.” In February, 1976, George 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 fulltime or parttime news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” However, he added that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Carl Bernstein , who had worked with Bob Woodward in the investigation of Watergate , provided further information about Operation Mockingbird in an article in The Rolling Stone in October, 1977. Bernstein claimed that over a 25 year period over 400 American journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA : "Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadorswithoutportfolio 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 it the derringdo of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, fulltime CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad."
It is almost certain that Bernstein had encountered Operation Mockingbird while working on his Watergate investigation. For example, Deborah Davis ( Katharine the Great ) has argued that Deep Throat was senior CIA official, Richard Ober , who was running Operation Chaos for Richard Nixon during this period. According to researchers such as Steve Kangas , Angus Mackenzie and Alex Constantine , Operation Mockingbird was not closed down by the CIA in 1976. For example, in 1998 Kangas argued that CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife ran "Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world." On 8th February, 1999, Kangas was found dead in the bathroom of the Pittsburgh offices of Richard Mellon Scaife. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine , (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: "Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Mockingbird4.htm
Anderson Cooper, CIA Operative?
apfn.org
Not only is CNN “journalist” Anderson Cooper the great-great grandson of robber baron Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt and the son of trust fund baby and designer jean hucksteress Gloria Vanderbilt, he is also a CIA operative, according to Radar Online. “Following his sophomore and junior years at Yale—a well-known recruiting ground for the CIA—Cooper spent his summers interning Thursday September 07th 2006, at the agency’s monolithic headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in a program for students interested in intelligence work. His involvement 10:27 am with the agency ended there, and he chose not to pursue a job with the agency after graduation, according to a CNN spokeswoman, who confirmed details of Cooper’s CIA involvement to Radar.” Or did he? As revealed during the Church Committee investigation in 1975, the CIA had a long-standing relationship with the corporate media, dubbed “Operation Mockingbird” by Deborah Davis, former Village Voice writer and author of Katherine The Great (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991). In her book, Davis quotes Philip Graham, the late editor Washington Post, as saying: “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.” Of course, Cooper, a bona fide Ritchie Rich, doesn’t need a couple hundred dollars a month, but may be doing the CIA’s work for other reasons, or he may be “owned” by the spook agency, as Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles owned “respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers,” according to a CIA source cited by Davis (see Alex Constantine, Tales from the Crypt: The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird). “Media assets … 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,” writes Mary Louise for Prison Planet. “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.” Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA… the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and Page 1 of 15
disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, May 07, 2015 09:22:18PM MDT
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disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations. According to Steve Kangas, the late journalist who mysteriously committed suicide (shot twice in the head, à la Gary Webb) in the offices of CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife, the “CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars…. Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well.” No doubt Anderson Cooper’s “interests and goals are one and the same” as the CIA and the ruling elite. However, this does not mean he is actually a snoop agency mole inserted in CNN. Nonetheless, his supposed flirtation with the agency, and his Ivy League background, specifically at Yale, are suspicious, to say the least. http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=555 Media contacts According to Carl Bernstein 400 reporters were working for the CIA as part of Operation Mockingbird. These include, but are not limited to: CBS (William S. Paley) Chattanooga Times (Charles Bartlett) Christian Science Monitor (Joseph Harrison) Copley News Services (James Copley) Louisville Courier-Journal (Barry Bingham, Sr.) The Miami News (William C. Baggs, Herb Gold, Hal Hendrix) Newsweek (Ben Bradlee) New York Herald Tribune (Stewart Alsop) New York Times (Arthur Hays Sulzberger) Time Magazine (Alfred Friendly, Charles Douglas Jackson, Henry Luce) Washington Post (Walter Pincus) Washington Star (Jerry O'Leary) Carl Bernstein. The CIA and the Media, Rolling Stone Magazine, October 20, 1977. Operation Mockingbird. A detailed article with internal links on the individuals involved and external links to other articles on the subject. Operation Mockingbird, SourceWatch. Alex Constantine. The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA, What Really Happened. Disinfopedia - Operation Mockingbird. This site compiles many of the allegations made regarding Operation Mockingbird on the web. Discussion about Operation Mockingbird and Search Engines
CIA LEAK: JUDITH MILLER OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD ASSET! http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/10-18-05/discussion.cgi.24.html Propaganda Page 2 of 15
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Propaganda Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source new!
Propaganda is a specific type of message presentation directly aimed at influencing the opinions of people, rather than impartially providing information. Literally translated from the Latin gerundive as "things which must be disseminated," in some cultures the term is neutral or even positive, while in others the term has acquired a strong negative connotation. Its connotations can also vary over time. For instance, in English, "propaganda" was originally a neutral term used to describe the dissemination of information in favor of a certain cause. Over time, however, the term acquired the negative connotation of disseminating false or misleading information in favor of a certain cause. Strictly speaking, a message does not have to be untrue to qualify as propaganda, but it may omit so many pertinent truths that it becomes highly misleading. In English the term propaganda overlaps with distinct terms like indoctrination (ideological views established by repetition rather than verification) and mass suggestion (broader strategic methods). In practice, the terms are often used synonymously. Historically, the most common use of the term propaganda is in political contexts; in particular to refer to certain efforts sponsored by governments, political groups, and other often covert interests. In the early 20th century the term was also used by the founders of the nascent public relations industry to describe their activities; this usage died out around the time of World War II. Individually propaganda functions as self-deception. Culturally it works within religions, politics, and economic entities like those which both favor and oppose globalization. At the left, right, or mainstream, propaganda knows no borders; as is detailed by Roderick Hindery. Hindery further argues that debates about most social issues can be productively revisited in the context of asking "what is or is not propaganda?" Not to be overlooked is the link between propaganda, indoctrination, and terrorism. Mere threats to destroy are often as socially disruptive as physical devastation itself. See also religious terrorism. Purpose of propaganda The aim of propaganda is to influence people's opinions actively, rather than merely to communicate the facts about something. For example, propaganda might be used to garner either support or disapproval of a certain position, rather than to simply present the position. What separates propaganda from "normal" communication is in the subtle, often insidious, ways that the message attempts to shape opinion. For example, propaganda is often presented in a way that attempts to deliberately evoke a strong emotion, especially by suggesting illogical (or non-intuitive) relationships between concepts. An appeal to one's emotions is, perhaps, a more obvious propaganda method than those utilized by some other more subtle and insidious forms. For instance, propaganda may be transmitted indirectly or implicitly, through an ostensibly fair and balanced debate or argument. This can be done to great effect in conjunction with a broadly targeted, broadcast news format. In such a setting, techniques like, "red herring", and other ploys (such as Ignoratio elenchi), are often used to divert the audience from a critical issue, while the intended message is suggested through indirect means. This sophisticated type of diversion utilizes the appearance of lively debate within, what is actually, a carefully focused spectrum, to generate and justify deliberately conceived assumptions. This technique avoids the distinctively biased appearance of one sided rhetoric, and works by presenting a contrived premise for an argument as if it were a universally accepted and obvious truth, so that the audience naturally assumes to be Page 3 of 15 Mayit 07, 2015 09:22:18PM MDT
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works by presenting a contrived premise for an argument as if it were a universally accepted and obvious truth, so that the audience naturally assumes it to be correct. By maintaining the range of debate in such a way that it appears inclusive of differing points of view, so as to suggest fairness and balance, the suppositions suggested become accepted as fact. Here is such an example of a hypothetical situation in which the opposing viewpoints are supposedly represented: the hawk (see: hawkish) says, "we must stay the course", and the dove says, "The war is a disaster and a failure", to which the hawk responds, "In war things seldom go smoothly and we must not let setbacks affect our determination", the dove retorts, "setbacks are setbacks, but failures are failures." As one can see, the actual validity of the war is not discussed and is never in contention. One may naturally assume that the war was not fundamentally wrong, but just the result of miscalculation, and therefore, an error, instead of a crime. Thus, by maintaining the appearance of equitable discourse in such debates, and through continuous inculcation, such focused arguments succeed in compelling the audience to logically deduce that the presupposions of debate are unequivocal truisms of the given subject. The method of propaganda is essential to the word's meaning as well. A message does not have to be untrue to qualify as propaganda. In fact, the message in modern propaganda is often not blatantly untrue. But even if the message conveys only "true" information, it will generally contain partisan bias and fail to present a complete and balanced consideration of the issue. Another common characteristic of propaganda is volume (in the sense of a large amount). For example, a propagandist may seek to influence opinion by attempting to get a message heard in as many places as possible, and as often as possible. The intention of this approach is to a) reinforce an idea through repetition, and b) exclude or "drown out" any alternative ideas. In English, the word "propaganda" now carries strong negative (as well as political) connotations, although it has not always done so. It was formerly common for political organizations to refer to their own material as propaganda. Other languages do not necessarily regard the term as derogatory and hence usage may lead to misunderstanding in communications with non-native English speakers. For example, in Portuguese and some Spanish language speaking countries, particularly in the Southern Cone, the word "propaganda" usually means the most common manipulation of information—"advertising". Famed public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays in his classic studies eloquently describes propaganda as the purpose of communications. In Crystallizing Public Opinion, for example, he dismisses the semantic differentiations (“Education is valuable, commendable, enlightening, instructive. Propaganda is insidious, dishonest, underhanded, misleading.”) and instead concentrates on purposes. He writes (p. 212), “Each of these nouns carries with it social and moral implications. . . . The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education,’ really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda.” The reason propaganda exists and is so widespread is because it serves various social purposes, necessary ones, often popular yet potentially corrupting. Many institutions such as media and government itself are literally propaganda-addicts, co-dependent on each other and the fueling influence of the propaganda system that they help create and maintain. Propagandists have an advantage through knowing what they want to promote and to whom, and although they often resort to various two-way forms of communication this is done in order to make sure their one-sided purposes are achieved. Special kt 10:37, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
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Types of propaganda Propaganda shares techniques with advertising and public relations. In fact, advertising and public relations can be thought of as propaganda that promotes a commercial product or shapes the perception of an organization, person or brand, though in post-WWII usage the word "propaganda" more typically refers to political or nationalist uses of these techniques or to the promotion of a set of ideas. Propaganda also has much in common with public information campaigns by governments, which are intended to encourage or discourage certain forms of behavior (such as wearing seat belts, not smoking, not littering and so forth). Again, the emphasis is more political in propaganda. Propaganda can take the form of leaflets, posters, TV and radio broadcasts and can also extend to any other medium. In the case of the United States, there is also an important legal distinction between advertising (a type of overt propaganda) and what the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of the United States Congress, refers to as "covert propaganda." Journalistic theory generally holds that news items should be objective, giving the reader an accurate background and analysis of the subject at hand. On the other hand, advertisements generally present an issue in a very subjective and often misleading light, primarily meant to persuade rather than inform. If the reader believes that a paid advertisement is in fact a news item, the message the advertiser is trying to communicate will be more easily "believed" or "internalized." Such advertisements are considered obvious examples of "covert" propaganda because they take on the appearance of objective information rather than the appearance of propaganda, which is misleading. Federal law specifically mandates that any advertisement appearing in the format of a news item must state that the item is in fact a paid advertisement. The Bush Administration has come under fire for allegedly producing and disseminating covert propaganda in the form of television programs, aired in the United States, which appeared to be legitimate news broadcasts and did not include any information signifying that the programs were not generated by a private-sector news source. Propaganda, in a narrower use of the term, connotates deliberately false or misleading information that supports or furthers a political cause or the interests of those in power. The propagandist seeks to change the way people understand an issue or situation for the purpose of changing their actions and expectations in ways that are desirable to the interest group. Propaganda, in this sense, serves as a corollary to censorship in which the same purpose is achieved, not by filling people's minds with approved information, but by preventing people from being confronted with opposing points of view. What sets propaganda apart from other forms of advocacy is the willingness of the propagandist to change people's understanding through deception and confusion rather than persuasion and understanding. The leaders of an organization know the information to be one sided or untrue, but this may not be true for the rank and file members who help to disseminate the propaganda. More in line with the religious roots of the term, it is also used widely in the debates about new religious movements (NRMs), both by people who defend them and by people who oppose them. The latter pejoratively call these NRMs cults. Anti-cult activists and countercult activists accuse the leaders of what they consider cults of using propaganda extensively to recruit followers and keep them. Some social scientists, such as the late Jeffrey Hadden, and
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affiliated scholars accuse ex-members of "cults" who became vocal critics May 07,and 2015the 09:22:18PM MDT
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CESNUR affiliated scholars accuse ex-members of "cults" who became vocal critics and the anti-cult movement of making these unusual religious movements look bad without sufficient reasons. Propaganda is a mighty weapon in war. In this case its aim is usually to dehumanize and create hatred toward a supposed enemy, either internal or external. The technique is to create a false image in the mind. This can be done by using special words, special avoidance of words or by saying that the enemy is responsible for certain things he never did. Most propaganda wars require the home population to feel the enemy has inflicted an injustice, which may be fictitious or may be based on facts. The home population must also decide that the cause of their nation is just. Propaganda is also one of the methods used in psychological warfare, which may also involve false flag operations. The term propaganda may also refer to false information meant to reinforce the mindsets of people who already believe as the propagandist wishes. The assumption is that, if people believe something false, they will constantly be assailed by doubts. Since these doubts are unpleasant (see cognitive dissonance), people will be eager to have them extinguished, and are therefore receptive to the reassurances of those in power. For this reason propaganda is often addressed to people who are already sympathetic to the agenda. This process of reinforcement uses an individual's predisposition to self-select "agreeable" information sources as a mechanism for maintaining control. Propaganda can be classified according to the source and nature of the message. White propaganda generally comes from an openly identified source, and is characterized by gentler methods of persuasion, such as standard public relations techniques and one-sided presentation of an argument. Black propaganda is identified as being from one source, but is infact from another. This is most commonly to disguise the true origins of the propaganda, be it from an enemy country or from an organization with a negative public image. Gray propaganda Is propaganda without any identifiable souce or author. In scale, these different types of propaganda can also be defined by the potential of true and correct information to compete with the propaganda. For example, opposition to white propaganda is often readily found and may slightly discredit the propaganda source. Opposition to gray propaganda, when revealed (often by an inside source), may create some level of public outcry. Opposition to black propaganda is often unavailable and may be dangerous to reveal, because public cognizance of black propaganda tactics and sources would undermine or backfire the very campaign the black propagandist supported. Propaganda may be administered in very insidious ways. For instance, disparaging disinformation about history, certain groups or foreign countries may be encouraged or tolerated in the educational system. Since few people actually double-check what they learn at school, such disinformation will be repeated by journalists as well as parents, thus reinforcing the idea that the disinformation item is really a "well-known fact," even though no one repeating the myth is able to point to an authoritative source. The disinformation is then recycled in the media and in the educational system, without the need for direct governmental intervention on the media. Such permeating propaganda may be used for political goals: by giving citizens a false impression of the quality or policies of their country, they may be incited to rejectMay certain Page 6 of 15 07, 2015 09:22:18PM MDT
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may be used for political goals: by giving citizens a false impression of the quality or policies of their country, they may be incited to reject certain proposals or certain remarks or ignore the experience of others. See also: black propaganda, marketing, advertising History of propaganda Etymology In late Latin, propaganda meant "things to be propagated". In 1622, shortly after the start of the Thirty Years' War, Pope Gregory XV founded the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide ("Congregation for Propagating the Faith"), a committee of Cardinals with the duty of overseeing the propagation of Christianity by missionaries sent to non-Catholic countries. Therefore, the term itself originates with this Roman Catholic Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (sacra congregatio christiano nomini propagando or, briefly, propaganda fide), the department of the pontifical administration charged with the spread of Catholicism and with the regulation of ecclesiastical affairs in non-Catholic countries (mission territory). The actual Latin stem propagand- conveys a sense of "that which ought to be spread". Originally the term was not intended to refer to misleading information. The modern political sense dates from World War I, and was not originally pejorative. Propaganda has been a human activity as far back as reliable recorded evidence exists. The writings of Romans like Livy are considered masterpieces of pro-Roman statist propaganda. The Behistun Inscription, made around 515 BCE and detailing the rise of Darius I to the Persian throne, can also be seen as an early example of propaganda. 19th and 20th centuries' propaganda Gabriel Tarde's Laws of Imitation (1890) and Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1897) were two of the first codifications of propaganda techniques, which influenced many writers afterward, including Sigmund Freud. Hitler's Mein Kampf is heavily influenced by Le Bon's theories. Journalist Walter Lippman, in Public Opinion (1922) also worked on the subject, as well as psychologist Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud, early in the 20th century. During World War I, Lippman and Bernays were hired by then United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to participate in the Creel Commission, the mission of which was to sway popular opinion in favor of entering the war, on the side of the United Kingdom. The Creel Commission provided themes for speeches by "four-minute men" at public functions, and also encouraged censorship of the American press. The Commission was so unpopular that after the war, Congress closed it down without providing funding to organize and archive its papers. The war propaganda campaign of Lippman and Bernays produced within six months such an intense anti-German hysteria as to permanently impress American business (and Adolf Hitler,
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others) with the potential of large-scale propaganda to control public opinion. May 07,Bernays 2015 09:22:18PM MDT
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among others) with the potential of large-scale propaganda to control public opinion. Bernays coined the terms "group mind" and "engineering consent", important concepts in practical propaganda work. The current public relations industry is a direct outgrowth of Lippman's and Bernays' work and is still used extensively by the United States government. For the first half of the 20th century Bernays and Lippman themselves ran a very successful public relations firm. World War II saw continued use of propaganda as a weapon of war, both by Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the British Political Warfare Executive, as well as the United States Office of War Information. In the early 2000s, the United States government developed and freely distributed a video game known as America's Army. The stated intention of the game is to encourage players to become interested in joining the U.S. Army. According to a poll by I for I Research, 30% of young people who had a positive view of the military said that they had developed that view by playing the game. Russian revolution Russian revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries distinguished two different aspects covered by the English term propaganda. Their terminology included two terms: агитация (agitatsiya), or agitation, and пропаганда, or propaganda, see agitprop (agitprop is not, however, limited to the Soviet Union, as it was considered, before the October Revolution, to be one of the fundamental activity of any Marxist activist; this importance of agit-prop in Marxist theory may also be observed today in trotskyists circles, who insist on the importance of leaflets distribution). Soviet propaganda meant dissemination of revolutionary ideas, teachings of Marxism, and theoretical and practical knowledge of Marxist economics, while agitation meant forming favorable public opinion and stirring up political unrest. These activities did not carry negative connotations (as they usually do in English) and were encouraged. Expanding dimensions of state propaganda, the Bolsheviks actively used transportation such as trains, aircraft and other means. Josef Stalin's regime built the largest fixed-wing aircraft of the 1930s, Tupolev ANT-20, exclusively for this purpose. Named after the famous Soviet writer Maxim Gorky who had recently returned from fascist Italy, it was equipped with a powerful radio set called "Voice from the sky", printing and leaflet-dropping machinery, radiostations, photographic laboratory, film projector with sound for showing movies in flight, library, etc. The aircraft could be disassembled and transported by railroad if needed. The giant aircraft set a number of world records. Nazi Germany Most propaganda in Germany was produced by the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Propagandaministerium, or "Promi" (German abbreviation)). Joseph Goebbels was placed in charge of this ministry shortly after Hitler took power in 1933. All journalists, writers, and artists were required to register with one of the Ministry's subordinate chambers for the press, fine arts, music, theater, film, literature, or radio. The Page 8 of 15
Nazis believed in propaganda as a vital tool in achieving their goals. Adolf Hitler , 2015 09:22:18PM MDT May 07,
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The Nazis believed in propaganda as a vital tool in achieving their goals. Adolf Hitler, Germany's Führer, was impressed by the power of Allied propaganda during World War I and believed that it had been a primary cause of the collapse of morale and revolts in the German home front and Navy in 1918 (see also: Dolchstoßlegende). Hitler would meet nearly every day with Goebbels to discuss the news and Goebbels would obtain Hitler's thoughts on the subject; Goebbels would then meet with senior Ministry officials and pass down the official Party line on world events. Broadcasters and journalists required prior approval before their works were disseminated. Nazi propaganda before the start of World War II had several distinct audiences: German audiences were continually reminded of the struggle of the Nazi Party and Germany against foreign enemies and internal enemies, especially Jews. Ethnic Germans in countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and the Baltic states were told that blood ties to Germany were stronger than their allegiance to their new countries. Potential enemies, such as France and the United Kingdom, were told that Germany had no quarrel with the people of the country, but that their governments were trying to start a war with Germany. All audiences were reminded of the greatness of German cultural, scientific, and military achievements. Until the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad on February 4, 1943, German propaganda emphasized the prowess of German arms and the supposed humanity German soldiers had shown to the peoples of occupied territories. Pilots of the Allied bombing fleets were depicted as cowardly murderers, and Americans in particular as gangsters in the style of Al Capone. At the same time, German propaganda sought to alienate Americans and British from each other, and both these Western belligerents from the Soviets. After Stalingrad, the main theme changed to Germany as the sole defender of what they called "Western European culture" against the "Bolshevist hordes". The introduction of the V-1 and V-2 "vengeance weapons" was emphasized to convince Britons of the hopelessness of defeating Germany. On June 23, 1944, the Nazis permitted the Red Cross to visit concentration camp Theresienstadt in order to dispel rumours about the Final Solution to the Jewish question. In reality, Theresienstadt was a transit camp for Jews en route to extermination camps, but in a sophisticated propaganda effort, fake shops and cafés were erected to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort. The guests enjoyed the performance of a children's opera, Brundibar, written by inmate Hans Krása. The hoax was so successful for the Nazis that they went on to make a propaganda film at Theresienstadt. Shooting of the film began on February 26, 1944. Directed by Kurt Gerron, it was meant to show how well the Jews lived under the "benevolent" protection of the Third Reich. After the shooting, most of the cast, and even the filmmaker himself, were deported to the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Goebbels committed suicide shortly after Hitler on April 30, 1945. In his stead, Hans Fritzsche, who had been head of the Radio Chamber, was tried and acquitted by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Cold Page 9 of 15
War propaganda
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Cold War propaganda The United States and the Soviet Union both used propaganda extensively during the Cold War. Both sides used film, television, and radio programming to influence their own citizens, each other, and Third World nations. The United States Information Agency operated the Voice of America as an official government station. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which were in part supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, provided grey propaganda in news and entertainment programs to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union respectively. The Soviet Union's official government station, Radio Moscow, broadcast white propaganda, while Radio Peace and Freedom broadcast grey propaganda. Both sides also broadcast black propaganda programs in periods of special crises. In 1948, the United Kingdom's Foreign Office created the IRD (Information Research Department) which took over from wartime and slightly post-war departments such as the Ministry of Information and dispensed propaganda via various media such as the BBC and publishing. The ideological and border dispute between the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China resulted in a number of cross-border operations. One technique developed during this period was the "backwards transmission," in which the radio program was recorded and played backwards over the air. (This was done so that messages meant to be received by the other government could be heard, while the average listener could not understand the content of the program.) Soviet propaganda appeared in Soviet Union education, as well. Propaganda went so far in school that it sometimes even interfered with learning. When one learned history, one would never learn any history except for Russia's, but even that was not at all valid. There were often lies spread about how life in America and other Western countries was, and how rich the U.S.S.R. was compared to them. Also, the Soviets used classic novels, such as the American favorite Uncle Tom's Cabin to spread communist propaganda. The overall motif and message was twisted to an anti-American message and was fed to the schools. In the Americas, Cuba served as a major source and a target of propaganda from both black and white stations operated by the CIA and Cuban exile groups. Radio Habana Cuba, in turn, broadcast original programming, relayed Radio Moscow, and broadcast The Voice of Vietnam as well as alleged confessions from the crew of the USS Pueblo. One of the most insightful authors of the Cold War was George Orwell, whose novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are virtual textbooks on the use of propaganda. Though not set in the Soviet Union, these books are about totalitarian regimes in which language is constantly corrupted for political purposes. These novels were used for explicit propaganda. The CIA, for example, secretly commissioned an animated film adaptation of Animal Farm in the 1950s with small changes to the original story to suit its own needs. Special kt 11:23, 15 August 2006 (UTC) Afghanistan In the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, psychological operations tactics were employed to demoralize the Taliban and to win the sympathies of the Afghan population. At least six EC-130E Commando Solo aircraft were used to jam local radio transmissions and transmit replacement propaganda messages. Page 10 ofLeaflets 15
were also dropped throughout Afghanistan, offering rewards for Osama bin07,Laden and May 2015 09:22:18PM MDT
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Leaflets were also dropped throughout Afghanistan, offering rewards for Osama bin Laden and other individuals, portraying Americans as friends of Afghanistan and emphasizing various negative aspects of the Taliban. Another shows a picture of Mohammed Omar in a set of crosshairs with the words "We are watching". Iraq During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf repeatedly claimed Iraqi forces were decisively winning every battle. Even up to the overthrow of the Iraqi government at Baghdad, he maintained that the United States would soon be defeated, in contradiction with all other media. Due to this, he quickly became a cult figure in the West, and gained recognition on the website WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com The Iraqis, misled by his propaganda, on the other hand, were shocked when instead Iraq was defeated. In November 2005, various media outlets, including The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, alleged that the United States military had manipulated news reported in Iraqi media in an effort to cast a favorable light on its actions while demoralizing the insurgency. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman in Iraq, said the program is "an important part of countering misinformation in the news by insurgents", while a spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the allegations of manipulation were troubling if true. The Department of Defense has confirmed the existence of the program. More recently, The New York Times (see external links below) published an article about how the Pentagon has started to use contractors with little experience in journalism or public relations to plant articles in the Iraqi press. These articles are usually written by US soldiers without attribution or are attributed to a non-existent organization called the "International Information Center." Planting propaganda stories in newspapers was done by both the Allies and Central Powers in the First World War and the Axis and Allies in the Second; this is the latest version of this technique. Techniques of propaganda generation A number of techniques which are based on social psychological research are used to generate propaganda. Many of these same techniques can be found under logical fallacies, since propagandists use arguments that, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid. Some time has been spent analyzing the means by which propaganda messages are transmitted. That work is important but it is clear that information dissemination strategies only become propaganda strategies when coupled with propagandistic messages. Identifying these messages is a necessary prerequisite to study the methods by which those messages are spread. That is why it is essential to have some knowledge of the following techniques for generating propaganda: Appeal to authority: Appeals to authority cite prominent figures to support a position idea, argument, or course of action. Appeal to fear: Appeals to fear seek to build support by instilling fear in the general population, for example, Joseph Goebbels exploited Theodore Kaufman's Germany Must Perish! to claim that the Allies sought the extermination of the German people. Argumentum ad nauseam: Uses tireless repetition. An idea once repeated enough Page 11 of 15
times, is taken as the truth. Works best when media sources are limited and by Maycontrolled 07, 2015 09:22:18PM MDT
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times, is taken as the truth. Works best when media sources are limited and controlled by the propagator. Bandwagon: Bandwagon and inevitable-victory appeals attempt to persuade the target audience to take the course of action that "everyone else is taking." Inevitable victory: invites those not already on the bandwagon to join those already on the road to certain victory. Those already or at least partially on the bandwagon are reassured that staying aboard is their best course of action. Join the crowd: This technique reinforces people's natural desire to be on the winning side. This technique is used to convince the audience that a program is an expression of an irresistible mass movement and that it is in their best interest to join. Black-and-White fallacy: Presenting only two choices, with the product or idea being propagated as the better choice. (Eg. You can have an unhealthy, unreliable engine, or you can use Brand X oil) Common man: The "plain folks" or "common man" approach attempts to convince the audience that the propagandist's positions reflect the common sense of the people. It is designed to win the confidence of the audience by communicating in the common manner and style of the target audience. Propagandists use ordinary language and mannerisms (and clothe their message in face-to-face and audiovisual communications) in attempting to identify their point of view with that of the average person. Direct order: This technique hopes to simplify the decision making process. The propagandist uses images and words to tell the audience exactly what actions to take, eliminating any other possible choices. Authority figures can be used to give the order, overlapping it with the Appeal to authority technique, but not necessarily. The Uncle Sam "I want you" image is an example of this technique. Euphoria: The use of an event that generates euphoria or happiness in lieu of spreading more sadness, or using a good event to try to cover up another. Or creating a celebrateable event in the hopes of boosting morale. Euphoria can be used to take one's mind from a worse feeling. i.e. a holiday or parade. Falsifying information: The creation or deletion of information from public records, in the purpose of making a false record of an event or the actions of a person during a court session, or possibly a battle, etc. Pseudoscience is often used in this way. Flag-waving: An attempt to justify an action on the grounds that doing so will make one more patriotic, or in some way benefit a group, country, or idea. The feeling of patriotism which this technique attempts to inspire may diminish or entirely omit one's capability for rational examination of the matter in question. Glittering generalities: Glittering generalities are emotionally appealing words applied to a product or idea, but which present no concrete argument or analysis. A famous example is the campaign slogan "Ford has a better idea!" Intentional vagueness: Generalities are deliberately vague so that the audience may supply its own interpretations. The intention is to move the audience by use of undefined phrases, without analyzing their validity or attempting to determine their reasonableness or application. The intent is to cause people to draw their own interpretations rather than simply being presented with an explicit idea. In trying to "figure out" the propaganda, the audience foregoes judgment of the ideas presented. Their validity, reasonableness and application is not considered.
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Obtain disapproval or Reductio ad Hitlerum: This technique is used to persuade a target audience to disapprove of an action or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated, feared, or held in contempt by the target audience. Thus if a group which supports a certain policy is led to believe that undesirable, subversive, or contemptible people support the same policy, then the members of the group may decide to change their original position. Oversimplification: Favorable generalities are used to provide simple answers to complex social, political, economic, or military problems. Rationalization: Individuals or groups may use favorable generalities to rationalize questionable acts or beliefs. Vague and pleasant phrases are often used to justify such actions or beliefs. Red herring: Presenting data that is irrelevant, then claiming that it validates your argument. Scapegoating: Assigning blame to an individual or group that isn't really responsible, thus alleviating feelings of guilt from responsible parties and/or distracting attention from the need to fix the problem for which blame is being assigned. Slogans: A slogan is a brief, striking phrase that may include labeling and stereotyping. Although slogans may be enlisted to support reasoned ideas, in practice they tend to act only as emotional appeals. Opposing slogans about warfare in Iraq or the Middle East, for example, such as "blood for oil" or "cut and run," are considered by some to have stifled debate. On the other hand, the names of the military campaigns, such as "enduring freedom" or "just cause", may also be regarded to be slogans, devised to prevent free thought on the issues. Stereotyping or Name Calling or Labeling: This technique attempts to arouse prejudices in an audience by labeling the object of the propaganda campaign as something the target audience fears, hates, loathes, or finds undesirable. For instance, reporting on a foreign country or social group may focus on the stereotypical traits that the reader expects, even though they are far from being representative of the whole country or group; such reporting often focuses on the anecdotal. Testimonial: Testimonials are quotations, in or out of context, especially cited to support or reject a given policy, action, program, or personality. The reputation or the role (expert, respected public figure, etc.) of the individual giving the statement is exploited. The testimonial places the official sanction of a respected person or authority on a propaganda message. This is done in an effort to cause the target audience to identify itself with the authority or to accept the authority's opinions and beliefs as its own. See also, damaging quotation Transfer: Also known as association, this is a technique of projecting positive or negative qualities (praise or blame) of a person, entity, object, or value (an individual, group, organization, nation, patriotism, etc.) to another in order to make the second more acceptable or to discredit it. It evokes an emotional response, which stimulates the target to identify with recognized authorities. Often highly visual, this technique often utilizes symbols (for example, the Swastika used in Nazi Germany, originally a symbol for health Page 13 of 15
and prosperity) superimposed over other visual images. An example of common use09:22:18PM of May 07, 2015 MDT
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and prosperity) superimposed over other visual images. An example of common use of this technique in America is for the President to be filmed or photographed in front of the American flag. Unstated assumption: This technique is used when the propaganda concept the propagandist want to transmit would seem less credible if explicitly stated. It is instead repeatedly assumed or implied. Virtue words: These are words in the value system of the target audience which tend to produce a positive image when attached to a person or issue. Peace, happiness, security, wise leadership, freedom, etc. are virtue words. See ""Transfer"". See also: doublespeak, meme, cult of personality, spin, demonization, factoid Techniques of propaganda transmission Common media for transmitting propaganda messages include news reports, government reports, historical revision, junk science, books, leaflets, movies, radio, television, and posters. In the case of radio and television, propaganda can exist on news, current-affairs or talk-show segments, as advertising or public-service announce "spots" or as long-running advertorials. The magazine Tricontinental, issued by the Cuban OSPAAAL organization, folds propaganda posters and places one in each copy, allowing a very broad distribution of pro-Fidel Castro propaganda. Ideally a propaganda campaign will follow a strategic transmission pattern to fully indoctrinate a group. This may begin with a simple transmission such as a leaflet dropped from a plane or an advertisement. Generally these messages will contain directions on how to obtain more information, via a web site, hotline, radio program, et cetera. The strategy intends to initiate the individual from information recipient to information seeker through reinforcement, and then from information seeker to opinion leader through indoctrination. A successful propaganda campaign includes this cyclical meme-reproducing process. The Propaganda Model The propaganda model is a theory advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that alleges systemic biases in the mass media and seeks to explain them in terms of structural economic causes. First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views the private media as businesses selling a product — readers and audiences (rather than news) — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Ownership of the medium Medium's funding sources Sourcing Flak Anti-communist ideology
The first three (ownership, funding, and sourcing) are generally regarded by the authors as Page 14 ofbeing 15
the most important.
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being the most important. Although the model was based mainly on the characterization of United States media, Chomsky and Herman believe the theory is equally applicable to any country that shares the basic economic structure and organizing principles which the model postulates as the cause of media biases. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Chomsky stated that the new filter replacing communism would be terrorism and Islam. http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Propaganda
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The Bought and Paid for Central Bankster-Owned LameStreamMedia and their "Propaganda Matrix"
blogspot.com
Important: Please see my companion piece on how often the MainStreamMedia is caught completely and obviously lying.. often on national tell-a-vision.
My favorite analogy about the LameStreamMedia is that the former Soviet Union was a very poor country. They could only afford 2 state propaganda organs: Pravda and Izvestia. In Russian Pravda means "Truth" and Izvestia is loosely translated as "The News". The running joke in the Soviet Union was: There is no truth in Pravda and there is no news in Izvestia. We are a very wealthy country... We have 6 major propaganda organs.
This article illustrates how the organized crime oligarchy that controls the country and much of the world has been using their almost complete control of virtual everything the average person sees on a given day to weave an artificially-created reality with regard to politics/economics/history when they are not distracting the population with sports & mindless entertainment, corrupting their morals, predicatively programing them, or practicing other propaganda crimes. The first part of the article below offers a number of media ownership charts that detail how a small handful of six corporations own and control, essentially, every major television station, cable network, radio station, magazine publisher, magazine distributor, book publisher, chain book store, theme park, record company, major internet property, movie studio and theater chain. The second part of the article details how the organized crime oligarchy is able to influence control of the content through a handful of organizations that give key journalists in the MainStreamMedia food chain their marching orders and control editorial approval and content. For activists and those wanting to wake up others, we suggest printing out the 2006 Media Ownership Chart and then running it through the printer again while printing the Media Ownership and Bilderberg, CFR, and CIA Operation Mockingbird Control of the Media document on the same page which will then give you one document, with overview, and link to this article that you can share with others.
Download a High Res Printable PDF Version Here
Media Ownership Chart - 2006 but still relevant today Print Over Document with Overview and Link to This Article: Media Ownership and Bilderberg, CFR, and CIA Page 1 ofOperation 6
Mockingbird Control of the Media
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CIA Operation Mockingbird Control of the Media Directions: Print the 2006 Media Ownership Chart PDF 1st, then run that same sheet of paper through the printer again while printing the document: Media Ownership and Bilderberg, CFR, and CIA Operation Mockingbird Control of the Media on the same page to create a one-page overview with link to this article.
Download the Complete Chart in High Res PDF Here.
Download Full Chart in PDF Here.
Download Full Chart Here.
Central Bankster control of the media extends past ownership of the production and distribution mechanisms of the physical infrastructure to control of the content. The main identifiable vehicles for creating/managing/controlling the content of MainStreamMedia are: Operation Mockingbird - A CIA program that was made public during the Church committee hearings in 1975 where it was disclosed that the CIA had hundreds of foreign journalists on the payroll. A quote from the commission: "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." If the CIA was doing something so corrupt, illegal, and unconstitutional in 1975 then it would be naive to think that they aren't still operating the same network today. Resources: PrisonPlanet.com analysis, Wikipedia, Operation Mockingbird - An Overview and History
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The Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, and Trilateral Commission Media Puppets Members of The Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission dominate key positions in America's government, military, industries, media outlets and educational foundations and institutions. The following is a partial list of current CFR members and the positions of influence they hold in society. The CFR's membership is limited to 3,000, and there are only 325 Trilateral Commission members. ________________________________________ BB = Member of the Bilderberg Group (The "Generals") CFR = Member of the Council on Foreign Relations TC = Member of the Trilateral Commission
The LameStreamMedia Deceivers/Traitors/Judas Goats
CBS: Laurence A. Tisch, CEO -- CFR Roswell Gilpatric -- CFR James Houghton -- CFR, TC Henry Schacht -- CFR, TC Dan Rather -- CFR Richard Hottelet -- CFR Frank Stanton -- CFR NBC/RCA: John F. Welch, CEO -- CFR Jane Pfeiffer -- CFR Lester Crystal -- CFR, TC R.W. Sonnenfeidt -- CFR, TC John Petty -- CFR Tom Brokaw -- CFR David Brinkley -- CFR John Chancellor -- CFR Marvin Kalb -- CFR Irving R. Levine -- CFR Herbert Schlosser -- CFR Peter G. Peterson -- CFR John Sawhill -- CFR ABC: Thomas S. Murphy, CEO -- CFR Barbara Walters -- CFR John Connor -- CFR Diane Sawyer -- CFR John Scall -- CFR Public Broadcast Service: Robert Mcneil -- CFR Jim Lehrer -- CFR Page 3 of 6
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http://involuntaryservant.blogspot.com/2009/03/bought-and-paid-for-central-bankster.html Robert Mcneil -- CFR
Jim Lehrer -- CFR C. Hunter-Gault -- CFR Hodding Carter III -- CFR Daniel Schorr -- CFR Associated Press: Stanley Swinton -- CFR Harold Anderson -- CFR Katharine Graham -- CFR, TC Reuters: Michael Posner -- CFR Baltimore Sun: Henry Trewhitt -- CFR Washington Times: Arnaud De Borchgrave -- CFR Children's TV Workshop (Sesame Street): Joan Ganz Cooney, Pres. -- CFR Cable News Network (CNN): W. Thomas Johnson, Pres. -- TC Daniel Schorr -- CFR U.S. News & World Report: David Gergen -- TC New York Times Co.: Richard Gelb -- CFR William Scranton -- CFR, TC John F. Akers, Dir. -- CFR Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Dir. -- CFR George B. Munroe, Dir. -- CFR Donald M. Stewart, Dir. -- CFR Cyrus R. Vance, Dir. -- CFR A.M. Rosenthal -- CFR Seymour Topping -- CFR James Greenfield -- CFR Max Frankel -- CFR Jack Rosenthal -- CFR John Oakes -- CFR Harrison Salisbury -- CFR H.L. Smith -- CFR Steven Rattner -- CFR Richard Burt -- CFR Flora Lewis -- CFR Time, Inc.: Ralph Davidson -- CFR Donal M. Wilson -- CFR Henry Grunwald -- CFR Alexander Heard -- CFR Sol Linowitz -- CFR Thomas Watson, Jr. -- CFR Strobe Talbott -- CFR Newsweek/Washington Post: Katharine Graham -- CFR N.4Deb. Page of 6
Katzenbach -- CFR
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N. Deb. Katzenbach -- CFR Robert Christopher -- CFR Osborne Elliot -- CFR Phillip Geyelin -- CFR Murry Marder -- CFR Maynard Parker -- CFR George Will -- CFR, TC Robert Kaiser -- CFR Meg Greenfield -- CFR Walter Pincus -- CFR Murray Gart -- CFR Peter Osnos -- CFR Don Oberdorfer -- CFR Dow Jones & Co (Wall Street Journal): Richard Wood -- CFR Robert Bartley -- CFR, TC Karen House -- CFR National Review: Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. -- CFR Readers Digest: George V. Grune, CEO -- CFR William G. Bowen, Dir. -- CFR Syndicated Columnists Geogia Anne Geyer -- CFR Ben J. Wattenberg -- CFR Resources: Chart of Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, and CFR Media/Govt'/Military/Banking/Commercial Domination, What Do We Do About It? Turn off the LameStreamMedia - Turn off their TeeVee programs, take out their bookmarks, delete their RSS, stop listening to their podcasts, stop seeing their movies, don't shop in their book stores, cancel cable TeeVee (but not the self-directed high speed internet :-), cancel their magazines and newspapers, etc. Expose this system of control to others and get them to turn off the LameStreamMedia as well. Find what I call "The Authentic Voices" on the Internet who are exposing the truth http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ - Best Alternative News Aggregator http://www.InfoWars.com - Alex Jones' news site http://www.prisonplanet.tv/- Alex Jones' Documentary Films - Subscribe today! http://www.dollarcollapse.com/ - Best Financial News Aggregator http://www.gata.org/ - Information on the manipulation of the gold market http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/ - Hundreds of prominent skeptics http://www.madcowprod.com - MadCowMorningNews by Independent Journalist Daniel Hopsicker Covers Intelligence Agency Drug Dealing http://www.danielhopsicker.tv - MadCow Videos http://www.involuntaryservant.blogspot.com/ Page 5 of 6
- My humble effort
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http://www.involuntaryservant.blogspot.com/ - My humble effort http://www.youtube.com/user/EtienneBoetie - My humble YouTube Channel
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http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
Carl Bernstein
carlbernstein.com
THE CIA AND THE MEDIA How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up BY CARL BERNSTEIN
After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted below. THE CIA AND THE MEDIA BY CARL BERNSTEIN 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 twenty‑five 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 journalist‑operatives are still posted abroad. ■ Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism. Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. 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, Page 1 of 21
Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and03:34:04AM the old MDT Oct 10, 2016
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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. The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress. The general outlines of what happened are indisputable; the specifics are harder to come by. CIA sources hint that a particular journalist was trafficking all over Eastern Europe for the Agency; the journalist says no, he just had lunch with the station chief. CIA sources say flatly that a well‑known ABC correspondent worked for the Agency through 1973; they refuse to identify him. A high‑level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements. The Agency’s special relationships with the so‑called “majors” in publishing and broadcasting enabled the CIA to post some of its most valuable operatives abroad without exposure for more than two decades. In most instances, Agency files show, officials at the highest levels of the CIA usually director or deputy director) dealt personally with a single designated individual in the top management of the cooperating news organization. The aid furnished often took two forms: providing jobs and credentials “journalistic cover” in Agency parlance) for CIA operatives about to be posted in foreign capitals; and lending the Agency the undercover services of reporters already on staff, including some of the best‑known correspondents in the business. In the field, journalists were used to help recruit and handle foreigners as agents; to acquire and evaluate information, and to plant false information with officials of foreign governments. Many signed secrecy agreements, pledging never to divulge anything about their dealings with the Agency; some signed employment contracts., some were assigned case officers and treated with. unusual deference. Others had less structured relationships with the Agency, even though they performed similar tasks: they were briefed by CIA personnel before trips abroad, debriefed afterward, and used as intermediaries with foreign agents. 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 is? Or relay 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. “I’m proud they asked me and proud to have done it,” said Joseph Alsop who, like his late brother, columnist Stewart Alsop, undertook clandestine tasks for the Agency. “The notion that a newspaperman doesn’t have a duty to his country is perfect balls.” From the Agency’s perspective, there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community. As Stuart Loory, former Los Angeles Times correspondent, has written in the Columbia Journalism Review: ‘If even one American overseas carrying a press card is a paid informer for the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect .... If the crisis of confidence faced by the news business—along with the government—is to be overcome, journalists must be willing to focus on themselves the same spotlight they so relentlessly train on others!’ But as Loory also noted: “When it was reported... that newsmen themselves were on the payroll of the CIA, the story caused a brief stir, and then was dropped.” Page 2 of 21
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During the 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of the Agency’s involvement with the press became apparent to several members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the staff. But top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report. The multivolurne report contains nine pages in which the use of journalists is discussed in deliberately vague and sometimes misleading terms. It makes no mention of the actual number of journalists who undertook covert tasks for the CIA. Nor does it adequately describe the role played by newspaper and broadcast executives in cooperating with the Agency. THE AGENCY’S DEALINGS WITH THE PRESS BEGAN during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting‑and‑cover capability within America’s most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover. American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against “global Communism.” Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner, publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. “Let’s not pick on some poor reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee’s investigators. “Let’s go to the managements. They were witting.” In all, about twenty‑five news organizations including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency. In addition to cover capability, Dulles initiated a “debriefing” procedure under which American correspondents returning from abroad routinely emptied their notebooks and offered their impressions to Agency personnel. Such arrangements, continued by Dulles’ successors, to the present day, were made with literally dozens of news organizations. In the 1950s, it was not uncommon for returning reporters to be met at the ship by CIA officers. “There would be these guys from the CIA flashing ID cards and looking like they belonged at the Yale Club,” said Hugh Morrow, a former Saturday Evening Post correspondent who is now press secretary to former vice‑president Nelson Rockefeller. “It got to be so routine that you felt a little miffed if you weren’t asked.” CIA officials almost always refuse to divulge the names of journalists who have cooperated with the Agency. They say it would be unfair to judge these individuals in a context different from the one that spawned the relationships in the first place. “There was a time when it wasn’t considered a crime to serve your government,” said one high‑level CIA official who makes no secret of his bitterness. “This all has to be considered in the context of the morality of the times, rather than against latter‑day standards—and hypocritical standards at that.” Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue. Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. “You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it,” said one Agency official. “They were genuinely motivated and highly susceptible Page 3 of 21
to intrigue and being on the inside. Then in the Fifties and Sixties there was national Octa10, 2016 03:34:04AM MDT
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susceptible to intrigue and being on the inside. Then in the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces—shredded the consensus and threw it in the air.” Another Agency official observed: “Many journalists didn’t give a second thought to associating with the Agency. But there was a point when the ethical issues which most people had submerged finally surfaced. Today, a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency.” From the outset, the use of journalists was among the CIA’s most sensitive undertakings, with full knowledge restricted to the Director of Central Intelligence and a few of his chosen deputies. Dulles and his successors were fearful of what would happen if a journalist‑operative’s cover was blown, or if details of the Agency’s dealings with the press otherwise became public. As a result, contacts with the heads of news organizations were normally initiated by Dulles and succeeding Directors of Central Intelligence; by the deputy directors and division chiefs in charge of covert operations—Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer Jr., Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Karamessines and Richard Helms himself a former UPI correspondent); and, occasionally, by others in the CIA hierarchy known to have an unusually close social relationship with a particular publisher or broadcast executive.1 James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency’s head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist‑operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files. The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told ‘You’re going to he a journalist,’” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400‑some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency. The Agency’s relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories: ■ Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations—usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis. This group includes many of the best‑known journalists who carried out tasks for the CIA. The files show that the salaries paid to reporters by newspaper and broadcast networks were sometimes supplemented by nominal payments from the CIA, either in the form of retainers, travel expenses or outlays for specific services performed. Almost all the payments were made in cash. The accredited category also includes photographers, administrative personnel of foreign news bureaus and members of broadcast technical crews.) Two of the Agency’s most valuable personal relationships in the 1960s, according to CIA officials, were with reporters who covered Latin America—Jerry O’Leary of the Washington Star and Hal Hendrix of the 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. O’Leary was considered a valued asset in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Agency files contain lengthy reports of both men’s activities on behalf of the CIA. O’Leary maintains that his dealings were limited to the normal give‑and‑take that goes on between reporters abroad and their sources. CIA officials dispute the contention: “There’s no question Jerry reported for us,” said one. “Jerry did assessing and spotting [of prospective agents] but he was better as a reporter Page 4 of 21
for us.” Referring to O’Leary’s denials, the official added: “I don’t know what in he’s Octthe 10, world 2016 03:34:04AM MDT
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reporter for us.” Referring to O’Leary’s denials, the official added: “I don’t know what in the world he’s worried about unless he’s wearing that mantle of integrity the Senate put on you journalists.” O’Leary attributes the difference of opinion to semantics. “I might call them up and say something like, ‘Papa Doc has the clap, did you know that?’ and they’d put it in the file. I don’t consider that reporting for them.... it’s useful to be friendly to them and, generally, I felt friendly to them. But I think they were more helpful to me than I was to them.” O’Leary took particular exception to being described in the same context as Hendrix. “Hal was really doing work for them,” said O’Leary. “I’m still with the Star. He ended up at ITT.” Hendrix could not be reached for comment. According to Agency officials, neither Hendrix nor O’Leary was paid by the CIA. ■ Stringers2 and freelancers. Most were payrolled by the Agency under standard contractual terms. Their journalistic credentials were often supplied by cooperating news organizations. some filed news stories; others reported only for the CIA. On some occasions, news organizations were not informed by the CIA that their stringers were also working for the Agency. ■ Employees of so‑called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty‑five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. One such publication was the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s. The Daily American went out of business this year, ■ Editors, publishers and broadcast network executives. The CIAs relationship with most news executives differed fundamentally from those with working reporters and stringers, who were much more subject to direction from the Agency. A few executives—Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times among them—signed secrecy agreements. But such formal understandings were rare: relationships between Agency officials and media executives were usually social—”The P and Q Street axis in Georgetown,” said one source. “You don’t tell Wilharn Paley to sign a piece of paper saying he won’t fink.” ■ Columnists and commentators. There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as “known assets” and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects. Three of the most widely read columnists who maintained such ties with the Agency are C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, Joseph Alsop, and the late Stewart Alsop, whose column appeared in the New York Herald‑Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. CIA files contain reports of specific tasks all three undertook. Sulzberger is still regarded as an active asset by the Agency. According to a senior CIA official, “Young Cy Sulzberger had some uses.... He signed a secrecy agreement because we gave him classified information.... There was sharing, give and take. We’d say, ‘Wed like to know this; if we tell you this will it help you get access to so‑and‑so?’ Because of his access in Europe he had an Open Sesame. We’d ask him to just report: ‘What did so‑and‑so say, what did he look like, is he healthy?’ He was very eager, he loved to cooperate.” On one occasion, according to several CIA officials, Sulzberger was given a briefing paper by the Agency which ran almost verbatim under the columnist’s byline in the Times. “Cycame out and said, ‘I’m thinking of doing a piece, can you give me some background?’” a CIA officer said. “We gave it to Cy as a background piece and Cy gave it to the printers and put his name on it.” Sulzberger denies that any incident occurred. “A lot of baloney,” he said. Sulzberger claims that he was never formally “tasked” by the Agency and that he “would never get caught near the spook business. My relations were totally informal—I had a goodmany friends,” he said. “I’m sure they consider me an asset. They can ask me questions. They find out you’re going to Slobovia and they say, Page 5 of‘Can 21
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say, ‘Can we talk to you when you get back?’ ... Or they’ll want to know if the head of the Ruritanian government is suffering from psoriasis. But I never took an assignment from one of those guys.... I’ve known Wisner well, and Helms and even McCone [former CIA director John McCone] I used to play golf with. But they’d have had to he awfully subtle to have used me. Sulzberger says he was asked to sign the secrecy agreement in the 1950s. “A guy came around and said, ‘You are a responsible newsman and we need you to sign this if we are going to show you anything classified.’ I said I didn’t want to get entangled and told them, ‘Go to my uncle [Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then publisher of the New York Times] and if he says to sign it I will.’” His uncle subsequently signed such an agreement, Sulzberger said, and he thinks he did too, though he is unsure. “I don’t know, twenty‑some years is a long time.” He described the whole question as “a bubble in a bathtub.” Stewart Alsop’s relationship with the Agency was much more extensive than Sulzberger’s. One official who served at the highest levels in the CIA said flatly: “Stew Alsop was a CIA agent.” An equally senior official refused to define Alsop’s relationship with the Agency except to say it was a formal one. Other sources said that Alsop was particularly helpful to the Agency in discussions with, officials of foreign governments—asking questions to which the CIA was seeking answers, planting misinformation advantageous to American policy, assessing opportunities for CIA recruitment of well‑placed foreigners. “Absolute nonsense,” said Joseph Alsop of the notion that his brother was a CIA agent. “I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close. I dare say he did perform some tasks—he just did the correct thing as an American.... The Founding Fathers [of the CIA] were close personal friends of ours. Dick Bissell [former CIA deputy director] was my oldest friend, from childhood. It was a social thing, my dear fellow. I never received a dollar, I never signed a secrecy agreement. I didn’t have to.... I’ve done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen. Alsop is willing to discuss on the record only two of the tasks he undertook: a visit to Laos in 1952 at the behest of Frank Wisner, who felt other American reporters were using anti‑American sources about uprisings there; and a visit to the Phillipines in 1953 when the CIA thought his presence there might affect the outcome of an election. “Des FitzGerald urged me to go,” Alsop recalled. “It would be less likely that the election could be stolen [by the opponents of Ramon Magsaysay] if the eyes of the world were on them. I stayed with the ambassador and wrote about what happened.” Alsop maintains that he was never manipulated by the Agency. “You can’t get entangled so they have leverage on you,” he said. “But what I wrote was true. My view was to get the facts. If someone in the Agency was wrong, I stopped talking to them—they’d given me phony goods.” On one occasion, Alsop said, Richard Helms authorized the head of the Agency’s analytical branch to provide Alsop with information on Soviet military presence along the Chinese border. “The analytical side of the Agency had been dead wrong about the war in Vietnam—they thought it couldn’t be won,” said Alsop. “And they were wrong on the Soviet buildup. I stopped talking to them.” Today, he says, “People in our business would be outraged at the kinds of suggestions that were made to me. They shouldn’t be. The CIA did not open itself at all to people it did not trust. Stew and I were trusted, and I’m proud of it.” MURKY DETAILS OF CIA RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIVIDUALS and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency’s use of journalists for intelligence purposes. They include: ■ The New York Times. The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times Page 6 of 21cover
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Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible. Sulzberger was especially close to Allen Dulles. “At that level of contact it was the mighty talking to the mighty,” said a high‑level CIA official who was present at some of the discussions. “There was an agreement in principle that, yes indeed, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions. It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates.... The mighty didn’t want to know the specifics; they wanted plausible deniability. A senior CIA official who reviewed a portion of the Agency’s files on journalists for two hours onSeptember 15th, 1977, said he found documentation of five instances in which the Times had provided cover for CIA employees between 1954 and 1962. In each instance he said, the arrangements were handled by executives of the Times; the documents all contained standard Agency language “showing that this had been checked out at higher levels of the New York Times,” said the official. The documents did not mention Sulzberger’s name, however—only those of subordinates whom the official refused to identify. The CIA employees who received Times credentials posed as stringers for the paper abroad and worked as members of clerical staffs in the Times’ foreign bureaus. Most were American; two or three were foreigners. CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency’s working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions. Sulzberger informed a number of reporters and editors of his general policy of cooperation with the Agency. “We were in touch with them—they’d talk to us and some cooperated,” said a CIA official. The cooperation usually involved passing on information and “spotting” prospective agents among foreigners. Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, according to CIA officials—a fact confirmed by his nephew, C.L. Sulzberger. However, there are varying interpretations of the purpose of the agreement: C.L. Sulzberger says it represented nothing more than a pledge not to disclose classified information made available to the publisher. That contention is supported by some Agency officials. Others in the Agency maintain that the agreement represented a pledge never to reveal any of the Times’ dealings with the CIA, especially those involving cover. And there are those who note that, because all cover arrangements are classified, a secrecy agreement would automatically apply to them. Attempts to find out which individuals in the Times organization made the actual arrangements for providing credentials to CIA personnel have been unsuccessful. In a letter to reporter Stuart Loory in 1974, Turner Cadedge, managing editor of the Times from 1951 to 1964, wrote that approaches by the CIA had been rebuffed by the newspaper. “I knew nothing about any involvement with the CIA... of any of our foreign correspondents on the New York Times. I heard many times of overtures to our men by the CIA, seeking to use their privileges, contacts, immunities and, shall we say, superior intelligence in the sordid business of spying and informing. If any one of them succumbed to the blandishments or cash offers, I was not aware of it. Repeatedly, the CIA and other hush‑hush agencies sought to make arrangements for ‘cooperation’ even with Times management, especially during or soon after World War II, but we always resisted. Our motive was to protect our credibility.”
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to Wayne Phillips, a former Timesreporter, the CIA invoked Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s name Oct 10, 2016 03:34:04AM MDT
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According to Wayne Phillips, a former Timesreporter, the CIA invoked Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s name when it tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952 while he was studying at Columbia University’s Russian Institute. Phillips said an Agency official told him that the CIA had “a working arrangement” with the publisher in which other reporters abroad had been placed on the Agency’s payroll. Phillips, who remained at the Times until 1961, later obtained CIA documents under the Freedom of Information Act which show that the Agency intended to develop him as a clandestine “asset” for use abroad. On January 31st, 1976, the Times carried a brief story describing the ClAs attempt to recruit Phillips. It quoted Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the present publisher, as follows: “I never heard of the Times being approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son of the late Mr. Sulzberger.” The Times story, written by John M. Crewdson, also reported that Arthur Hays Sulzberger told an unnamed former correspondent that he might he approached by the CIA after arriving at a new post abroad. Sulzberger told him that he was not “under any obligation to agree,” the story said and that the publisher himself would be “happier” if he refused to cooperate. “But he left it sort of up to me,” the Times quoted its former reporter as saying. “The message was if I really wanted to do that, okay, but he didn’t think it appropriate for a Times correspondent” C.L. Sulzberger, in a telephone interview, said he had no knowledge of any CIA personnel using Times cover or of reporters for the paper working actively for the Agency. He was the paper’s chief of foreign service from 1944 to 1954 and expressed doubt that his uncle would have approved such arrangements. More typical of the late publisher, said Sulzberger, was a promise made to Allen Dulles’ brother, John Foster, then secretary of state, that no Times staff member would be permitted to accept an invitation to visit the People’s Republic of China without John Foster Dulles’ consent. Such an invitation was extended to the publisher’s nephew in the 1950s; Arthur Sulzberger forbade him to accept it. “It was seventeen years before another Times correspondent was invited,” C.L. Sulzberger recalled. ■ The Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS was unquestionably the CIAs most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS President William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well‑known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA3; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings. The details of the CBS‑CIA arrangements were worked out by subordinates of both Dulles and Paley. “The head of the company doesn’t want to know the fine points, nor does the director,” said a CIA official. “Both designate aides to work that out. It keeps them above the battle.” Dr. Frank Stanton, for 25 years president of the network, was aware of the general arrangements Paley made with Dulles—including those for cover, according to CIA officials. Stanton, in an interview last year, said he could not recall any cover arrangements.) But Paley’s designated contact for the Agency was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News between 1954 and 1961. On one occasion, Mickelson has said, he complained to Stanton about having to use a pay telephone to call the CIA, and Stanton suggested he install a private line, bypassing the CBS switchboard, for the purpose. According to Mickelson, he did so. Mickelson is now president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, both of which were associated with the CIA for many years. In 1976, CBS News president Richard Salant ordered an in‑house investigation of the network's dealings with the CIA. Some of its findings were first disclosed by Robert Scheer in the Los Angeles Times.) But Salant's Page 8 of 21
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Salant's report makes no mention of some of his own dealings with the Agency, which continued into the 1970s. Many details about the CBS‑CIA relationship were found in Mickelson's files by two investigators for Salant. Among the documents they found was a September 13th, 1957, memo to Mickelson fromTed Koop, CBS News bureau chief in Washington from 1948 to 1961. It describes a phone call to Koop from Colonel Stanley Grogan of the CIA: "Grogan phoned to say that Reeves [J. B. Love Reeves, another CIA official] is going to New York to be in charge of the CIA contact office there and will call to see you and some of your confreres. Grogan says normal activities will continue to channel through the Washington office of CBS News." The report to Salant also states: "Further investigation of Mickelson's files reveals some details of the relationship between the CIA and CBS News.... Two key administrators of this relationship were Mickelson and Koop.... The main activity appeared to be the delivery of CBS newsfilm to the CIA.... In addition there is evidence that, during 1964 to 1971, film material, including some outtakes, were supplied by the CBS Newsfilm Library to the CIA through and at the direction of Mr. Koop4.... Notes in Mr. Mickelson's files indicate that the CIA used CBS films for training... All of the above Mickelson activities were handled on a confidential basis without mentioning the words Central Intelligence Agency. The films were sent to individuals at post‑office box numbers and were paid for by individual, nor government, checks. ..." Mickelson also regularly sent the CIA an internal CBS newsletter, according to the report. Salant's investigation led him to conclude that Frank Kearns, a CBS‑TV reporter from 1958 to 1971, "was a CIA guy who got on the payroll somehow through a CIA contact with somebody at CBS." Kearns and Austin Goodrich, a CBS stringer, were undercover CIA employees, hired under arrangements approved by Paley. Last year a spokesman for Paley denied a report by former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr that Mickelson and he had discussed Goodrich's CIA status during a meeting with two Agency representatives in 1954. The spokesman claimed Paley had no knowledge that Goodrich had worked for the CIA. "When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA," Mickelson said in a recent interview. "He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and film arrangements. I assumed this was a normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating—though the Goodrich matter was compromising. At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley's cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite tile denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant's investigators. "It wouldn't do any good," said one CBS executive. "It is the single subject about which his memory has failed." Salant discussed his own contacts with the CIA, and the fact he continued many of his predecessor's practices, in an interview with this reporter last year. The contacts, he said, began in February 1961, "when I got a phone call from a CIA man who said he had a working relationship with Sig Mickelson. The man said, 'Your bosses know all about it.'" According to Salant, the CIA representative asked that CBS continue to supply the Agency with unedited newstapes and make its correspondents available for debriefingby Agency officials. Said Salant: "I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes. This went on for a number of years—into the early Seventies." In 1964 and 1965, Salant served on a super-secret CIA task force which explored methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to the People's Republic of China. The other members of the four‑man study team were Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University; William Griffith, then professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology., and John Haves, then vice‑president of the Washington Post Company for radio‑TV5. The principal government officials associated with the project were Cord Meyer of the CIA; McGeorge Bundy, then special to the MDT Page 9 of 21 Oct assistant 10, 2016 03:34:04AM
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for radio‑TV5. The principal government officials associated with the project were Cord Meyer of the CIA; McGeorge Bundy, then special assistant to the president for national security; Leonard Marks, then director of the USIA; and Bill Moyers, then special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and now a CBS correspondent. Salant's involvement in the project began with a call from Leonard Marks, "who told me the White House wanted to form a committee of four people to make a study of U.S. overseas broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain." When Salant arrived in Washington for the first meeting he was told that the project was CIA sponsored. "Its purpose," he said, "was to determine how best to set up shortwave broadcasts into Red China." Accompanied by a CIA officer named Paul Henzie, the committee of four subsequently traveled around the world inspecting facilities run by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty both CIA‑run operations at the time), the Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio. After more than a year of study, they submitted a report to Moyers recommending that the government establish a broadcast service, run by the Voice of America, to be beamed at the People's Republic of China. Salant has served two tours as head of CBS News, from 1961‑64 and 1966‑present. At the time of the China project he was a CBS corporate executive.) ■ Time and Newsweek magazines. According to CIA and Senate sources, Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news magazines. The same sources refused to say whether the CIA has ended all its associations with individuals who work for the two publications. Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience. For many years, Luce's personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time Inc., vice‑president who was publisher of Life magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964.While a Time executive, Jackson coauthored a CIA‑sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s. Jackson, whose Time‑Life service was interrupted by a one‑year White House tour as an assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower, approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time‑Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce's wife, Clare Boothe. Other arrangements for Time cover, according to CIA officials including those who dealt with Luce), were made with the knowledge of Hedley Donovan, now editor‑in‑chief of Time Inc. Donovan, who took over editorial direction of all Time Inc. publications in 1959, denied in a telephone interview that he knew of any such arrangements. "I was never approached and I'd be amazed if Luce approved such arrangements," Donovan said. "Luce had a very scrupulous regard for the difference between journalism and government." In the 1950s and early 1960s, Time magazine's foreign correspondents attended CIA "briefing" dinners similar to those the CIA held for CBS. And Luce, according to CIA officials, made it a regular practice to brief Dulles or other high Agency officials when he returned from his frequent trips abroad. Luce and the men who ran his magazines in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged their foreign correspondents to provide help to the CIA, particularly information that might be useful to the Agency for intelligence purposes or recruiting foreigners. At Newsweek, Agency sources reported, the CIA engaged the services of' several foreign correspondents and stringers under arrangements approved by senior editors at the magazine. Newsweek's stringer in Rome in the mid‑Fifties made little secret of the fact that he worked for the CIA. Malcolm Muir, Newsweek's editor from its founding in 1937 until its sale to the Washington Post Company in 1961, said in a recent interview that his dealings with the CIA were limited to private briefings he gave Allen Dulles after trips abroad and arrangements he approved for regular debriefing of Newsweek correspondents by the Agency.
He10said Page of 21that
he had never provided cover for CIA operatives, but that others high in the OctNewsweek 10, 2016 03:34:04AM MDT
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He said that he had never provided cover for CIA operatives, but that others high in the Newsweek organization might have done so without his knowledge. "I would have thought there might have been stringers who were agents, but I didn't know who they were," said Muir. "I do think in those days the CIA kept pretty close touch with all responsible reporters. Whenever I heard something that I thought might be of interest to Allen Dulles, I'd call him up.... At one point he appointed one of his CIA men to keep in regular contact with our reporters, a chap that I knew but whose name I can't remember. I had a number of friends in Alien Dulles' organization." Muir said that Harry Kern, Newsweek's foreign editor from 1945 until 1956, and Ernest K. Lindley, the magazine's Washington bureau chief during the same period "regularly checked in with various fellows in the CIA." "To the best of my knowledge." said Kern, "nobody at Newsweek worked for the CIA... The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department.... When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on. ... We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side." CIA officials say that Kern's dealings with the Agency were extensive. In 1956, he left Newsweek to run Foreign Reports, a Washington‑based newsletter whose subscribers Kern refuses to identify. Ernest Lindley, who remained at Newsweek until 1961, said in a recent interview that he regularly consulted with Dulles and other high CIA officials before going abroad and briefed them upon his return. "Allen was very helpful to me and I tried to reciprocate when I could," he said. "I'd give him my impressions of people I'd met overseas. Once or twice he asked me to brief a large group of intelligence people; when I came back from the Asian‑African conference in 1955, for example; they mainly wanted to know about various people." As Washington bureau chief, Lindley said he learned from Malcolm Muir that the magazine's stringer in southeastern Europe was a CIA contract employee—given credentials under arrangements worked out with the management. "I remember it came up—whether it was a good idea to keep this person from the Agency; eventually it was decided to discontinue the association," Lindley said. When Newsweek waspurchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from," said a former deputy director of the Agency. "Frank Wisner dealt with him." Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was the Agency's premier orchestrator of "black" operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his "mighty Wurlitzer," a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press.) Phil Graham was probably Wisner's closest friend. But Graharn, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said. In 1965‑66, an accredited Newsweek stringer in the Far East was in fact a CIA contract employee earning an annual salary of $10,000 from the Agency, according to Robert T. Wood, then a CIA officer in the Hong Kong station. Some, Newsweek correspondents and stringers continued to maintain covert ties with the Agency into the 1970s, CIA sources said. Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements. All editors‑in‑chief and managing editors of the Post since 1950 say they knew of no formal Agency relationship Page 11 of 21
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Post since 1950 say they knew of no formal Agency
relationship with either stringers or members of the Post staff. “If anything was done it was done by Phil without our knowledge,” said one. Agency officials, meanwhile, make no claim that Post staff members have had covert affiliations with the Agency while working for the paper.6 Katharine Graham, Philip Graham’s widow and the current publisher of the Post, says she has never been informed of any CIA relationships with either Post or Newsweek personnel. In November of 1973, Mrs. Graham called William Colby and asked if any Post stringers or staff members were associated with the CIA. Colby assured her that no staff members were employed by the Agency but refused to discuss the question of stringers. ■ The Louisville Courier‑Journal. From December 1964 until March 1965, a CIA undercover operative named Robert H. Campbell worked on the Courier‑Journal. According to high‑level CIA sources, Campbell was hired by the paper under arrangements the Agency made with Norman E. Isaacs, then executive editor of the Courier‑Journal. Barry Bingham Sr., then publisher of the paper, also had knowledge of the arrangements, the sources said. Both Isaacs and Bingham have denied knowing that Campbell was an intelligence agent when he was hired. The complex saga of Campbell’s hiring was first revealed in a Courier‑Journal story written by James R Herzog on March 27th, 1976, during the Senate committee’s investigation, Herzog’s account began: “When 28‑year‑old Robert H. Campbell was hired as a Courier‑Journal reporter in December 1964, he couldn’t type and knew little about news writing.” The account then quoted the paper’s former managing editor as saying that Isaacs told him that Campbell was hired as a result of a CIA request: “Norman said, when he was in Washington [in 1964], he had been called to lunch with some friend of his who was with the CIA [and that] he wanted to send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of newspapering.” All aspects of Campbell’s hiring were highly unusual. No effort had been made to check his credentials, and his employment records contained the following two notations: “Isaacs has files of correspondence and investigation of this man”; and, “Hired for temporary work—no reference checks completed or needed.” The level of Campbell’s journalistic abilities apparently remained consistent during his stint at the paper, “The stuff that Campbell turned in was almost unreadable,” said a former assistant city editor. One of Campbell’s major reportorial projects was a feature about wooden Indians. It was never published. During his tenure at the paper, Campbell frequented a bar a few steps from the office where, on occasion, he reportedly confided to fellow drinkers that he was a CIA employee. According to CIA sources, Campbell’s tour at the Courier‑Journal was arranged to provide him with a record of journalistic experience that would enhance the plausibility of future reportorial cover and teach him something about the newspaper business. The Courier‑Journal’s investigation also turned up the fact that before coming to Louisville he had worked briefly for the Hornell, New York, Evening Tribune, published by Freedom News, Inc. CIA sources said the Agency had made arrangements with that paper’s management to employ Campbell.7 At the Courier‑Journal, Campbell was hired under arrangements made with Isaacs and approved by Bingham, said CIA and Senate sources. “We paid the Courier‑Journal so they could pay his salary,” said an Agency official who was involved in the transaction. Responding by letter to these assertions, Isaacs, who left Louisville to become president and publisher of the Wilmington Delaware) News & Journal, said: “All I can do is repeat the simple truth—that never, under any circumstances, or at any time, have I ever knowingly hired a government agent. I’ve also tried to dredge my memory, but Campbell’s hiring meant so little to me that nothing emerges.... None of this is to say that I couldn’t have been ‘had.’”.Barry Bingham Sr., said last year in a telephone interview that he had no specific memory of Campbell’s hiring and denied that knew Page 12 he of 21
of any arrangements between the newspaper’s management and the CIA. CIA OctHowever, 10, 2016 03:34:04AM MDT
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that he knew of any arrangements between the newspaper’s management and the CIA. However, CIA officials said that the Courier‑Journal, through contacts with Bingham, provided other unspecified assistance to the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. The Courier‑Journal’s detailed, front‑page account of Campbell’s hiring was initiated by Barry Bingham Jr., who succeeded his father as editor and publisher of the paper in 1971. The article is the only major piece of self‑investigation by a newspaper that has appeared on this subject.8 ■ The American Broadcasting Company and the National Broadcasting Company. According to CIA officials, ABC continued to provide cover for some CIA operatives through the 1960s. One was Sam Jaffe who CIA officials said performed clandestine tasks for the Agency. Jaffe has acknowledged only providing the CIA with information. In addition, another well‑known network correspondent performed covert tasks for the Agency, said CIA sources. At the time of the Senate bearings, Agency officials serving at the highest levels refused to say whether the CIA was still maintaining active relationships with members of the ABC‑News organization. All cover arrangements were made with the knowledge off ABC executives, the sources said. These same sources professed to know few specifies about the Agency’s relationships with NBC, except that several foreign correspondents of the network undertook some assignments for the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. “It was a thing people did then,” said Richard Wald, president of NBC News since 1973. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people here—including some of the correspondents in those days—had connections with the Agency.” ■ The Copley Press, and its subsidiary, the Copley News Service. This relationship, first disclosed publicly by reporters Joe Trento and Dave Roman in Penthouse magazine, is said by CIA officials to have been among the Agency’s most productive in terms of getting “outside” cover for its employees. Copley owns nine newspapers in California and Illinois—among them the San Diego Union and Evening Tribune. The Trento‑Roman account, which was financed by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, asserted that at least twenty‑three Copley News Service employees performed work for the CIA. “The Agency’s involvement with the Copley organization is so extensive that it’s almost impossible to sort out,” said a CIA official who was asked about the relationship late in 1976. Other Agency officials said then that James S. Copley, the chain’s owner until his death in 1973, personally made most of the cover arrangements with the CIA. According to Trento and Roman, Copley personally volunteered his news service to then‑president Eisenhower to act as “the eyes and ears” against “the Communist threat in Latin and Central America” for “our intelligence services.” James Copley was also the guiding hand behind the Inter‑American Press Association, a CIA‑funded organization with heavy membership among right‑wing Latin American newspaper editors. ■ Other major news organizations. According to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news‑gathering organizations, among others: the New York Herald‑Tribune, the Saturday‑Evening Post, Scripps‑Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers Seymour K. Freidin, Hearst’s current London bureau chief and a former Herald‑Tribune editor and correspondent, has been identified as a CIA operative by Agency sources), Associated Press,9 United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. Cover arrangements with the Herald, according to CIA officials, were unusual in that they were made “on the ground by the CIA station in Miami, not from CIA headquarters. “And that’s just a small part of the list,” in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. Like many sources, this official said that the only way to end the uncertainties about aid furnished the Agency by journalists Page 13 of 21
is to disclose the contents of the CIA files—a course opposed by almost allOct of 10, the2016 thirty‑five 03:34:04AM MDT
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journalists is to disclose the contents of the CIA files—a course opposed by almost all of the thirty‑five present and former CIA officials interviewed over the course of a year. COLBY CUTS HIS LOSSES THE CIA’S USE OF JOURNALISTS CONTINUED VIRTUALLY unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency. He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his valuable intelligence in the journalistic community. He ordered his deputies to maintain Agency ties with its best journalist contacts while severing formal relationships with many regarded as inactive, relatively unproductive or only marginally important. In reviewing Agency files to comply with Colby’s directive, officials found that many journalists had not performed useful functions for the CIA in years. Such relationships, perhaps as many as a hundred, were terminated between 1973 and 1976. Meanwhile, important CIA operatives who had been placed on the staffs of some major newspaper and broadcast outlets were told to resign and become stringers or freelancers, thus enabling Colby to assure concerned editors that members of their staffs were not CIA employees. Colby also feared that some valuable stringer‑operatives might find their covers blown if scrutiny of the Agency’s ties with journalists continued. Some of these individuals were reassigned to jobs on so‑called proprietary publications—foreign periodicals and broadcast outlets secretly funded and staffed by the CIA. Other journalists who had signed formal contracts with the CIA—making them employees of the Agency—were released from their contracts, and asked to continue working under less formal arrangements. In November 1973, after many such shifts had been made, Colby told reporters and editors from the New York Times and the Washington Star that the Agency had “some three dozen” American newsmen “on the CIA payroll,” including five who worked for “general‑circulation news organizations.” Yet even while the Senate Intelligence Committee was holding its hearings in 1976, according to high‑level CIA sources, the CIA continued to maintain ties with seventy‑five to ninety journalists of every description—executives, reporters, stringers, photographers, columnists, bureau clerks and members of broadcast technical crews. More than half of these had been moved off CIA contracts and payrolls but they were still bound by other secret agreements with the Agency. According to an unpublished report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Representative Otis Pike, at least fifteen news organizations were still providing cover for CIA operatives as of 1976. Colby, who built a reputation as one of the most skilled undercover tacticians in the CIA’s history, had himself run journalists in clandestine operations before becoming director in 1973. But even he was said by his closest associates to have been disturbed at how extensively and, in his view, indiscriminately, the Agency continued to use journalists at the time he took over. “Too prominent,” the director frequently said of some of the individuals and news organizations then working with the CIA. Others in the Agency refer to their best‑known journalistic assets as “brand names.”) “Colby’s concern was that he might lose the resource altogether unless we became a little more careful about who we used and how we got them,” explained one of the former director’s deputies. The thrust of
Colby’s Page 14 of 21subsequent
actions was to move the Agency’s affiliations away from the so‑called and toMDT Oct 10,“majors” 2016 03:34:04AM
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Colby’s subsequent actions was to move the Agency’s affiliations away from the so‑called “majors” and to concentrate them instead in smaller newspaper chains, broadcasting groups and such specialized publications as trade journals and newsletters. After Colby left the Agency on January 28th, 1976, and was succeeded by George Bush, the CIA announced a new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual 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” At the time of the announcement, the Agency acknowledged that the policy would result in termination of less than half of the relationships with the 50 U.S. journalists it said were still affiliated with the Agency. The text of the announcement noted that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Thus, many relationships were permitted to remain intact. The Agency’s unwillingness to end its use of journalists and its continued relationships with some news executives is largely the product of two basic facts of the intelligence game: journalistic cover is ideal because of the inquisitive nature of a reporter’s job; and many other sources of institutional cover have been denied the CIA in recent years by businesses, foundations and educational institutions that once cooperated with the Agency. “It’s tough to run a secret agency in this country,” explained one high‑level CIA official. “We have a curious ambivalence about intelligence. In order to serve overseas we need cover. But we have been fighting a rear‑guard action to try and provide cover. The Peace Corps is off‑limits, so is USIA, the foundations and voluntary organizations have been off‑limits since ‘67, and there is a self‑imposed prohibition on Fulbrights [Fulbright Scholars]. If you take the American community and line up who could work for the CIA and who couldn’t there is a very narrow potential. Even the Foreign Service doesn’t want us. So where the hell do you go? Business is nice, but the press is a natural. One journalist is worth twenty agents. He has access, the ability to ask questions without arousing suspicion.” ROLE OF THE CHURCH COMMITTEE DESPITE THE EVIDENCE OF WIDESPREAD CIA USE OF journalists, the Senate Intelligence Committee and its staff decided against questioning any of the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast executives whose relationships with the Agency are detailed in CIA files. According to sources in the Senate and the Agency, the use of journalists was one of two areas of inquiry which the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to curtail. The other was the Agency’s continuing and extensive use of academics for recruitment and information gathering purposes. In both instances, the sources said, former directors Colby and Bush and CIA special counsel Mitchell Rogovin were able to convince key members of the committee that full inquiry or even limited public disclosure of the dimensions of the activities would do irreparable damage to the nation’s intelligence‑gathering apparatus, as well as to the reputations of hundreds of individuals. Colby was reported to have been especially persuasive in arguing that disclosure would bring on a latter‑day “witch hunt” in which the victims would be reporters, publishers and editors. Walter Elder, deputy to former CIA director McCone and the principal Agency liaison to the Church committee, argued that the committee lacked jurisdiction because there had been no misuse of journalists by the CIA; the relationships had been voluntary. Elder cited as an example the case of the Louisville
Courier‑Journal . Page 15 of 21
“Church and other people on the committee were on the chandelier about Oct 10,the 2016 03:34:04AM MDT
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Courier‑Journal. “Church and other people on the committee were on the chandelier about the Courier‑Journal,” one Agency official said, “until we pointed out that we had gone to the editor to arrange cover, and that the editor had said, ‘Fine.’” Some members of the Church committee and staff feared that Agency officials had gained control of the inquiry and that they were being hoodwinked. “The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its hands,” said one congressional source familiar with all aspects of the inquiry. “Church and some of the other members were much more interested in making headlines than in doing serious, tough investigating. The Agency pretended to be giving up a lot whenever it was asked about the flashy stuff—assassinations and secret weapons and James Bond operations. Then, when it came to things that they didn’t want to give away, that were much more important to the Agency, Colby in particular called in his chits. And the committee bought it.” The Senate committee’s investigation into the use of journalists was supervised by William B. Bader, a former CIA intelligence officer who returned briefly to the Agency this year as deputy to CIA director Stansfield Turner and is now a high‑level intelligence official at the Defense Department. Bader was assisted by David Aaron, who now serves as the deputy to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser. According to colleagues on the staff of the Senate inquiry, both Bader and Aaron were disturbed by the information contained in CIA files about journalists; they urged that further investigation he undertaken by the Senate’s new permanent CIA oversight committee. That committee, however, has spent its first year of existence writing a new charter for the CIA, and members say there has been little interest in delving further into the CIA’s use of the press. Bader’s investigation was conducted under unusually difficult conditions. His first request for specific information on the use of journalists was turned down by the CIA on grounds that there had been no abuse of authority and that current intelligence operations might he compromised. Senators Walter Huddleston, Howard Baker, Gary Hart, Walter Mondale and Charles Mathias—who had expressed interest in the subject of the press and the CIA—shared Bader’s distress at the CIA’s reaction. In a series of phone calls and meetings with CIA director George Bush and other Agency officials, the senators insisted that the committee staff be provided information about the scope of CIA‑press activities. Finally, Bush agreed to order a search of the files and have those records pulled which deals with operations where journalists had been used. But the raw files could not he made available to Bader or the committee, Bush insisted. Instead, the director decided, his deputies would condense the material into one‑paragraph summaries describing in the most general terms the activities of each individual journalist. Most important, Bush decreed, the names of journalists and of the news organizations with which they were affiliated would be omitted from the summaries. However, there might be some indication of the region where the journalist had served and a general description of the type of news organization for which he worked. Assembling the summaries was difficult, according to CIA officials who supervised the job. There were no “journalist files” per se and information had to be collected from divergent sources that reflect the highly compartmentalized character of the CIA. Case officers who had handled journalists supplied some names. Files were pulled on various undercover operations in which it seemed logical that journalists had been used. Significantly, all work by reporters for the Agency under the category of covert operations, not foreign intelligence.) Old station records were culled. “We really had to scramble,” said one official. After several weeks, Bader began receiving the summaries, which numbered over 400 by the time the Agency said it had completed searching its files.
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played an intriguing numbers game with the committee. Those who prepared material sayMDT Oct 10,the 2016 03:34:04AM
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The Agency played an intriguing numbers game with the committee. Those who prepared the material say it was physically impossible to produce all of the Agency’s files on the use of journalists. “We gave them a broad, representative picture,” said one agency official. “We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities over 25 years, or of the number of journalists who have done things for us.” A relatively small number of the summaries described the activities of foreign journalists—including those working as stringers for American publications. Those officials most knowledgeable about the subject say that a figure of 400 American journalists is on the low side of the actual number who maintained covert relationships and undertook clandestine tasks. Bader and others to whom he described the contents of the summaries immediately reached some general conclusions: the sheer number of covert relationships with journalists was far greater than the CIA had ever hinted; and the Agency’s use of reporters and news executives was an intelligence asset of the first magnitude. Reporters had been involved in almost every conceivable kind of operation. Of the 400‑plus individuals whose activities were summarized, between 200 and 250 were “working journalists” in the usual sense of the term—reporters, editors, correspondents, photographers; the rest were employed at least nominally) by book publishers, trade publications and newsletters. Still, the summaries were just that: compressed, vague, sketchy, incomplete. They could be subject to ambiguous interpretation. And they contained no suggestion that the CIA had abused its authority by manipulating the editorial content of American newspapers or broadcast reports. Bader’s unease with what he had found led him to seek advice from several experienced hands in the fields of foreign relations and intelligence. They suggested that he press for more information and give those members of the committee in whom he had the most confidence a general idea of what the summaries revealed. Bader again went to Senators Huddleston, Baker, Hart, Mondale and Mathias. Meanwhile, he told the CIA that he wanted to see more—the full files on perhaps a hundred or so of the individuals whose activities had been summarized. The request was turned down outright. The Agency would provide no more information on the subject. Period. The CIA’s intransigence led to an extraordinary dinner meeting at Agency headquarters in late March 1976. Those present included Senators Frank Church who had now been briefed by Bader), and John Tower, the vice‑chairman of the committee; Bader; William Miller, director of the committee staff; CIA director Bush; Agency counsel Rogovin; and Seymour Bolten, a high‑level CIA operative who for years had been a station chief in Germany and Willy Brandt’s case officer. Bolten had been deputized by Bush to deal with the committee’s requests for information on journalists and academics. At the dinner, the Agency held to its refusal to provide any full files. Nor would it give the committee the names of any individual journalists described in the 400 summaries or of the news organizations with whom they were affiliated. The discussion, according to participants, grew heated. The committee’s representatives said they could not honor their mandate—to determine if the CIA had abused its authority—without further information. The CIA maintained it could not protect its legitimate intelligence operations or its employees if further disclosures were made to the committee. Many of the journalists were contract employees of the Agency, Bush said at one point, and the CIA was no less obligated to them than to any other agents. Finally, a highly unusual agreement was hammered out: Bader and Miller would be permitted to examine “sanitized” versions of the full files of twenty‑five journalists selected from the summaries; but the names of the journalists and the news organizations which employed them would be blanked out, as would the identities of other CIA employees mentioned in the files. Church and Tower would be permitted to examine the unsanitizedversions of five of the twenty‑five files—to attest that the CIA was not hiding anything except the names. The whole deal was contingent on an agreement that neither Bader, Miner, Tower nor Church would reveal the contents of the files to other members of the committee or staff. Bader began Page 17 of 21
reviewing the 400‑some summaries again. His object was to select twenty‑five that, on the MDT Oct 10, 2016 03:34:04AM
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Bader began reviewing the 400‑some summaries again. His object was to select twenty‑five that, on the basis of the sketchy information they contained, seemed to represent a cross section. Dates of CIA activity, general descriptions of news organizations, types of journalists and undercover operations all figured in his calculations. From the twenty‑five files he got back, according to Senate sources and CIA officials, an unavoidable conclusion emerged: that to a degree never widely suspected, the CIA in the 1950s, ‘60s and even early ‘70s had concentrated its relationships with journalists in the most prominent sectors of the American press corps, including four or five of the largest newspapers in the country, the broadcast networks and the two major newsweekly magazines. Despite the omission of names and affiliations from the twenty‑five detailed files each was between three and eleven inches thick), the information was usually sufficient to tentatively identify either the newsman, his affiliation or both—particularly because so many of them were prominent in the profession. “There is quite an incredible spread of relationships,” Bader reported to the senators. “You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are Agency people at the management level.” Ironically, one major news organization that set limits on its dealings with the CIA, according to Agency officials, was the one with perhaps the greatest editorial affinity for the Agency’s long‑range goals and policies: U.S. News and World Report. The late David Lawrence, the columnist and founding editor of U.S. News, was a close friend of Allen Dulles. But he repeatedly refused requests by the CIA director to use the magazine for cover purposes, the sources said. At one point, according to a high CIA official, Lawrence issued orders to his sub‑editors in which he threatened to fire any U.S. News employee who was found to have entered into a formal relationship with the Agency. Former editorial executives at the magazine confirmed that such orders had been issued. CIA sources declined to say, however, if the magazine remained off‑limits to the Agency after Lawrence’s death in 1973 or if Lawrence’s orders had been followed.) Meanwhile, Bader attempted to get more information from the CIA, particularly about the Agency’s current relationships with journalists. He encountered a stone wall. “Bush has done nothing to date,” Bader told associates. “None of the important operations are affected in even a marginal way.” The CIA also refused the staffs requests for more information on the use of academics. Bush began to urge members of the committee to curtail its inquiries in both areas and conceal its findings in the final report. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t fuck these guys in the press and on the campuses,’ pleading that they were the only areas of public life with any credibility left,” reported a Senate source. Colby, Elder and Rogovin also implored individual members of the committee to keep secret what the staff had found. “There were a lot of representations that if this stuff got out some of the biggest names in journalism would get smeared,” said another source. Exposure of the CIA’s relationships with journalists and academics, the Agency feared, would close down two of the few avenues of agent recruitment still open. “The danger of exposure is not the other side,” explained one CIA expert in covert operations. “This is not stuff the other side doesn’t know about. The concern of the Agency is that another area of cover will be denied.” A senator who was the object of the Agency’s lobbying later said: “From the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive covert program of all.... It was a much larger part of the operational system than has been indicated.” He added, “I had a great compulsion to press the point but it was late .... If we had demanded, they would have gone the legal route to fight it.” Indeed, time was running out for the committee. In the view of many staff members, it had squandered its resources in the search for CIA assassination plots and poison pen letters. It had undertaken the inquiry into journalists almost as an afterthought. The dimensions of the program and the CIA’s sensitivity to providing Page 18 of 21
information on it had caught the staff and the committee by surprise. The CIA Octoversight 10, 2016 03:34:04AM MDT
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providing information on it had caught the staff and the committee by surprise. The CIA oversight committee that would succeed the Church panel would have the inclination and the time to inquire into the subject methodically; if, as seemed likely, the CIA refused to cooperate further, the mandate of the successor committee would put it in a more advantageous position to wage a protracted fight .... Or so the reasoning went as Church and the few other senators even vaguely familiar with Bader’s findings reached a decision not to pursue the matter further. No journalists would be interviewed about their dealings with the Agency—either by the staff or by the senators, in secret or in open session. The specter, first raised by CIA officials, of a witch hunt in the press corps haunted some members of the staff and the committee. “We weren’t about to bring up guys to the committee and then have everybody say they’ve been traitors to the ideals of their profession,” said a senator. Bader, according to associates, was satisfied with the decision and believed that the successor committee would pick up the inquiry where he had left it. He was opposed to making public the names of individual journalists. He had been concerned all along that he had entered a “gray area” in which there were no moral absolutes. Had the CIA “manipulated” the press in the classic sense of the term? Probably not, he concluded; the major news organizations and their executives had willingly lent their resources to the Agency; foreign correspondents had regarded work for the CIA as a national service and a way of getting better stories and climbing to the top of their profession. Had the CIA abused its authority? It had dealt with the press almost exactly as it had dealt with other institutions from which it sought cover — the diplomatic service, academia, corporations. There was nothing in the CIA’s charter which declared any of these institutions off‑limits to America’s intelligence service. And, in the case of the press, the Agency had exercised more care in its dealings than with many other institutions; it had gone to considerable lengths to restrict its role to information‑gathering and cover.10 Bader was also said to be concerned that his knowledge was so heavily based on information furnished by the CIA; he hadn’t gotten the other side of the story from those journalists who had associated with the Agency. He could be seeing only “the lantern show,” he told associates. Still, Bader was reasonably sure that he had seen pretty much the full panoply of what was in the files. If the CIA had wanted to deceive him it would have never given away so much, he reasoned. “It was smart of the Agency to cooperate to the extent of showing the material to Bader,” observed a committee source. “That way, if one fine day a file popped up, the Agency would be covered. They could say they had already informed the Congress.” The dependence on CIA files posed another problem. The CIA’s perception of a relationship with a journalist might be quite different than that of the journalist: a CIA official might think he had exercised control over a journalist; the journalist might think he had simply had a few drinks with a spook. It was possible that CIA case officers had written self‑serving memos for the files about their dealings with journalists, that the CIA was just as subject to common bureaucratic “cover‑your‑ass” paperwork as any other agency of government. A CIA official who attempted to persuade members of the Senate committee that the Agency’s use of journalists had been innocuous maintained that the files were indeed filled with “puffing” by case officers. “You can’t establish what is puff and what isn’t,” he claimed. Many reporters, he added, “were recruited for finite [specific] undertakings and would be appalled to find that they were listed [in Agency files] as CIA operatives.” This same official estimated that the files contained descriptions of about half a dozen reporters and correspondents who would be considered “famous”—that is, their names would be recognized by most Americans. “The files show that the CIA goes to the press for and just as often that the press comes to the CIA,” he observed. “...There is a tacit agreement in many of these cases that there is going to be a quid pro quo”—i.e., that the reporter is going to get good stories from the Agency and that the CIA will pick up some valuable services from the reporter.
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the interpretation, the findings of the Senate committees inquiry into the useOct of 10, journalists were MDT 2016 03:34:04AM
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Whatever the interpretation, the findings of the Senate committees inquiry into the use of journalists were deliberately buried—from the full membership of the committee, from the Senate and from the public. “There was a difference of opinion on how to treat the subject,” explained one source. “Some [senators] thought these were abuses which should be exorcized and there were those who said, ‘We don’t know if this is bad or not.’” Bader’s findings on the subject were never discussed with the full committee, even in executive session. That might have led to leaks—especially in view of the explosive nature of the facts. Since the beginning of the Church committee’s investigation, leaks had been the panel’s biggest collective fear, a real threat to its mission. At the slightest sign of a leak the CIA might cut off the flow of sensitive information as it did, several times in other areas), claiming that the committee could not be trusted with secrets. “It was as if we were on trial—not the CIA,” said a member of the committee staff. To describe in the committee’s final report the true dimensions of the Agency’s use of journalists would cause a furor in the press and on the Senate floor. And it would result in heavy pressure on the CIA to end its use of journalists altogether. “We just weren’t ready to take that step,” said a senator. A similar decision was made to conceal the results of the staff’s inquiry into the use of academics. Bader, who supervised both areas of inquiry, concurred in the decisions and drafted those sections of the committee’s final report. Pages 191 to 201 were entitled “Covert Relationships with the United States Media.” “It hardly reflects what we found,” stated Senator Gary Hart. “There was a prolonged and elaborate negotiation [with the CIA] over what would be said.” Obscuring the facts was relatively simple. No mention was made of the 400 summaries or what they showed. Instead the report noted blandly that some fifty recent contacts with journalists had been studied by the committee staff—thus conveying the impression that the Agency’s dealings with the press had been limited to those instances. The Agency files, the report noted, contained little evidence that the editorial content of American news reports had been affected by the CIA’s dealings with journalists. Colby’s misleading public statements about the use of journalists were repeated without serious contradiction or elaboration. The role of cooperating news executives was given short shrift. The fact that the Agency had concentrated its relationships in the most prominent sectors of the press went unmentioned. That the CIA continued to regard the press as up for grabs was not even suggested. Former ‘Washington Post’ reporter CARL BERNSTEIN is now working on a book about the witch hunts of the Cold War. Footnotes: 1 John McCone, director of the Agency from 1961 to 1965, said in a recent interview that he knew about "great deal of debriefing and exchanging help" but nothing about any arrangements for cover the CIA might have made with media organizations. "I wouldn't necessarily have known about it," he said. "Helms would have handled anything like that. It would be unusual for him to come to me and say, 'We're going to use journalists for cover.' He had a job to do. There was no policy during my period that would say, 'Don't go near that water,' nor was there one saying, 'Go to it!'" During the Church committee bearings, McCone testified that his subordinates failed to tell him about domestic surveillance activities or that they were working on plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. Richard Helms was deputy director of the Agency at the time; he became director in 1966. 2 A stringer is a reporter who works for one or several news organizations on a retainer or on a piecework basis. 3 From the CIA point of view, access to newsfilm outtakes and photo libraries is a matter of extreme importance. The Agency's photo archive is probably the greatest on earth; its graphic sources include satellites, photoreconnaissance, planes, miniature cameras ... and the American press. During the 1950s and the Agency obtained carte‑blanche borrowing privileges in the photo libraries of 2016 literally dozensMDT Page 20 1960s, of 21 Oct 10, 03:34:04AM
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cameras ... and the American press. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Agency obtained carte‑blanche borrowing privileges in the photo libraries of literally dozens of American newspapers, magazines and television, outlets. For obvious reasons, the CIA also assigned high priority to the recruitment of photojournalists, particularly foreign‑based members of network camera crews. 4 On April 3rd, 1961, Koop left the Washington bureau to become head of CBS, Inc.’s Government Relations Department — a position he held until his retirement on March 31st, 1972. Koop, who worked as a deputy in the Censorship Office in World War II, continued to deal with the CIA in his new position, according to CBS sources. 5 Hayes, who left the Washington Post Company in 1965 to become U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, is now chairman of the board of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty — both of which severed their ties with the CIA in 1971. Hayes said he cleared his participation in the China project with the late Frederick S. Beebe, then chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company. Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher, was unaware of the nature of the assignment, he said. Participants in the project signed secrecy agreements. 6 Philip Geyelin, editor of the Post editorial page, worked for the Agency before joining the Post. 7 Louis Buisch, presidentof the publishing company of the Hornell, New York, Evening Tribune, told the Courier‑Journal in 1976 that he remembered little about the hiring of Robert Campbell. "He wasn't there very long, and he didn't make much of an impression," said Buisch, who has since retired from active management of the newspaper. 8 Probably the most thoughtful article on the subject of the press and the CIA was written by Stuart H. Loory and appeared in the September‑October 1974 issue of Columbia Journalism Review. 9 Wes Gallagher, general manager of the Associated Press from 1962 to 1976, takes vigorous exception to the notion that the Associated Press might have aided the Agency. "We've always stayed clear on the CIA; I would have fired anybody who worked for them. We don't even let our people debrief." At the time of the first disclosures that reporters had worked for the CIA, Gallagher went to Colby. "We tried to find out names. All he would say was that no full‑time staff member of the Associated Press was employed by the Agency. We talked to Bush. He said the same thing." If any Agency personnel were placed in Associated Press bureaus, said Gallagher, it was done without consulting the management of the wire service. But Agency officials insist that they were able to make cover arrangements through someone in the upper management levelsof Associated Press, whom they refuse to identify. 10 Many journalists and some CIA officials dispute the Agency's claim that it has been scrupulous in respecting the editorial integrity of American publications and broadcast outlets.
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CIA Disinformation in Action: Operation Mockingbird and the Washington Post
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CIA Disinformation in Action: Operation Mockingbird and the Washington Post Mockingbird examples with introduction by H. Michael Sweeney, proparanoid.com Document by Julian Holmes No copyright - Public Domain Permissions not required The very lengthy (25 pages typwritten) document below is actually a letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes, in which he takes the Post to task for decades of disinformation - typically in the form of combating what the Post likes to describe as 'conspiracy theory' which, in the end, turns out to be conspiracy fact. This uncopyrighted document was borrowed with permission from Michael Rivero's excellent http://www.whatreallyhappened.com Web site. In an unusual format, Holmes carefully documents each accusation with footnotes, a valuable tool for the reader. This is no mere rant, no mere opinionated dissatisfaction, no angry response dashed off without thinking. No, it is an indictment. Nestled within the over 100 footnotes and the not quite as many individual examples of supression and distrotions of truth, and even fabrications of 'truth', is a root-most clue to the real problem - a problem which reader should take care not to miss grasping... That is the covert role played by the Washington Post in CIA's Operation Mockingbird, which is the infiltration and control of American media to insure that you and I never quite hear the truth as it really is. You will learn how the owner/publisher of the Post, Phillip Graham and graduate of the Army Intelligence School was literally the founding director of Operation Mockingbird on behalf of CIA. The significance is amplified when it is understood that Mockingbird was not simply the sell out of a newspaper. It was the organized infiltration and in some cases the actual take over of the top 25 newpapers in the United States, major television networks, high-profile magazines, the wire services (Reuters was an outright CIA owned and operated front until 'sold' to 'private' interests) and even motion picture studios. Since then, of course, it has expanded further. For more information, visit Rivero's site and read the excellent piece found there by author Alex Constantine, Tales From They Crypt. We might expect a fascist dictatorship to use the motto-policy of "Do what we tell you or else!" We would prefer to believe that our own democratic and free nation's motto-policy would be "Do what you think best." However, thanks to a secret government and CIA, it is actually "Do what we tell you to think best." That may have been what Eisenhower was warning us about when he coined the the phrase "military industrial complex" in his farewell address. In my own writing I have followed his lead and updated the phrase to that of simply: MIIM, the Military Industrial Intelligence Media complex. Subscribe to the Washington Post, dear sheep, and welcome to the New World Order. Or, listen to Holmes and decide for yourself. It is still your choice to make, despite what they would have you believe... April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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(*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [fo rWorld War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and dieselpowered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned AngloIranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50). Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to deescalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. * Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies? The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't". Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98). Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others. _ Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-GoRound, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988. 7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. 8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10016. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 12. See note 5a, p.180-1. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. 16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. 29. "BCCI NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. 32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 34. See note 33, p.136-7. 35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 36. See note 33, p.164-171. 37. See note 33, p.172-180. 38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 39. See note 33, p.217. 40. See note 33, p.235. http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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41. See note 33, p.277-288. 42. See note 33, p.323. 43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 44. William Blum, The CIA A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 46. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. 48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1. 50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. 54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. 60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. 62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 64. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. 65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247. 67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. 67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 69. See note 65b. 70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 72. See note 65c. 73. See note 65i. 74. See note 67e, p.438-450. 75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983. 79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 81. See note 79d, p.119-132. 82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's two- sentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 84. See note 79d, p.131. 85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 86. "conspire", ß4ßRandom House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 88. See note 65y. 89. See note 65n. 90. See note 65d. 91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. http://www.whale.to/b/mock.html
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93. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 99. See note 86. 100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977.
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CIA Propaganda and Disinformation
integratingdarkandlight.com Known Sources of Disinformation
CIA Operation Mockingbird - American Media Disinfo
Agent Smith Offers 2 Blue Pills
These are tricky, because they give a lot of information that is true and accurate, and the underground news sites even publish stories that line up with what you’re finding on other trusted underground news sites, and lead you to believe you’ve found a good source of information, but then the disinformation is inserted, and it takes some determined digging to figure out which parts are truth and which are red herrings. Wikipedia Replaces Paper Encyclopedias: A Generation Loses Access to Less-Filtered History
No Law Against TV News Lying to 15 Million People
NY Times - It Only Takes 20 Mins to Shift the Blame
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Wikipedia is a Cabal-controlled website peppered with censorship, Bernays - Propaganda - True Ruling Power of misinformation and Our Country disinformation. You can verify this for yourself by searching for information on any Cabal pet projects for which they try to discredit critics and actively publish disinformation. Here are a few examples: Their page on the hazards of Aspartame is labelled “ Aspartame Controversy” and minimizes the hazards, reports a sanitized version of the FDA approval process, court challenges and investigations, and arrives at the conclusion that Aspartame is safe. Aspartame is probably the most hazardous toxin allowed into our food supply. See here, here, and here for accurate information. Wikipedia refers to the life-saving benefits of the excellent drug Low-Dose Naltrexone as “ pseudo-scientific claims” and refuses all efforts by leading researchers to update that page with accurate information. Here is accurate information on Low-Dose Naltrexone. This particular drug replacesApr outrageously 27, 2015 12:52:06PM MDT
http://integratingdarkandlight.com/cia-propaganda-and-disinformation/
The CIA Owns Everyone of Any Significance in the Major Media
accurate information on Low-Dose Naltrexone. This particular drug replaces outrageously expensive and ineffective drugs for cancer, MS, and many other diseases, and would cost Big Pharma a lot of money and save a lot of lives if it were more widely publicized and mainstream medical doctors learned about it in medical school. Their List of Journalists Killed in the United States doesn’t include Gary Webb or others who were actively speaking and writing against the Cabal.
Quackbusters, Quackwatch, National Council Against Health Fraud, Campaign Against Health Fraud, CSICOP These are the AMA’s propaganda department. Whale on Medical and Pharma Shills. Gordon Duff and Veterans Today This is a disinformation news outlet associated with PressTV but controlled by U.S. Military Intelligence, so this is one of the sites you seriously have to take with a grain of salt. Gordon Duff and Veterans Today publishes a lot of good and accurate news not seen elsewhere, and then there is total bullshit mixed in, and it’s up to you to figure out which parts are which. There was one Gordon Duff story I posted on Facebbook, and several people challenged me, so I wrote to Gordon Duff asking him for some sort of validation or backup for the story, twice, and he never wrote back to me. Here is American Kabuki also confirming that Veteran’s Today is operated by U.S. Military Intelligence. Sorcha Faal on WhatDoesItMean.com and EUTimes.com Some comments about Sorcha Faal (possibly David Booth?) are here, here, and here. Attempts to Silence Dissent and Deter Whistleblowers The brutal police response to the Occupy Wall Street protests violated our rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to petition our government for a redress of grievances. In addition to the torture and abuse of arrested protesters, the FBI likely targeted leaders of the Occupy movement for assassination. Bradley Manning is not a traitor, he is a whistleblower who revealed US war crimes. Page 2 of 6
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http://integratingdarkandlight.com/cia-propaganda-and-disinformation/ US war crimes.
Julian Assange is a publisher of information many governments would rather keep hidden, so his website is actually online journalism covered under “freedom of the press.” NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake tried to report through proper channels, and was prosecuted for his efforts.
MSM Brainwashing Better Than the Nazis
CIA Whistleblower Susan Lindauer also tried to testify to congress through proper channels, and was arrested under the Patriot Act, incarcerated without trial, and even held in a mental hospital, at risk of forced medication. Lindauer is brilliant here in explaining the Nuremberg principles, morality, war crimes, and the criminalization of dissent and whistleblowing.
Assassination of Journalists There are many more who should be listed here…. Gary Webb Andrew Breitbart (story on murder of his coroner technician) Michael Hastings Bill Cooper predicted 9-11 Assassinatd 11-2001
Engineering of Public Opinion Through False Flag Events Your False Flags Don’t Work Any More ~ We Are Awake!
Michael Hastings - Journalist killed just before exposing CIA Director Our Government Wouldn't Do That To Us They Would Tell Us on TV
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Mind-Con Projects of the
Military-I Apr 27, 2015 12:52:06PM MDT
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Military-I Complex CIA Project MK Ultra
Top 5 Signs of a False Flag Terror Attack
Hoover - Human Mind Cannot Believe Conspiracies So Monstrous Exist
There were 140 sub-proje listed under
Project MK Ultra. Project Monarch is the most well-known. Colin A Ross, M.D., Mark Phillips and Cathy O’Brien on MK Ultra and other CIA Mind Control Projects Trance-Formation of America ~ official website Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips ~ TRANCE: Formation of America TRANCE Formation of America was originally written, in graphic detail, for the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight in 1995, seven years after Mark Phillips rescued my daughter Kelly and I from our White House/Pentagon level MK-Ultra mind control victimization. We had previously been stopped from presenting our compiled eyewitness testimonies, supporting medical documents and hard evidence to all local, state, and federal legal bodies for so-called “reasons of National Security”. Once it became clear that we would not be able to address the Congressional Committee, TRANCE was released en masse in the form of a self-published book. It is now in its 14th printing, and is rapidly spanning the globe. Ted Gundersom, Chip Tatum, Brice Taylor and Barbara Hartwell The Kay Griggs Interviews ~ Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 MK Ultra Project Monarch Monarch Slaves ~ Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson and Nicki Minaj Michael Jackson, Monarch Child ~ Part 2 ~ Part 3 Michael Jackson Speaks Out Against Illuminati, Media Manipulation, and Suppression of Black Contributions to Music and Dance Monarch Mind Control and the Music Industry ~ Britney Spears Tila Tequila Speaks Out Against Her Monarch Mind Controllers Dave Chappelle Breaks His Illuminati Spell ~ Part 1 ~ Part 2 Page 4 of 6
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The Montauk Project What is the Montauk Project? Al Bielek ~ The Montauk Project Al Bielek ~ Montauk Mind Control ~ Archive Footage Preston Nichols ~ The Montauk Project Mastermind Behind MK-Ultra Was Nazi Scientist
Preston Nichols and Duncan Cameron ~ The Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project
Al Bielek, Duncan Cameron and Preston Nichols ~ The Montauk Survivors, the Phoenix Project, and the Philadelphia Experiment Al Bielek ~ The Philadelphia Teleportation and Time Travel Experiments Al Bielek ~ The Alternative Future Time Lines and Time Travel Al Bielek/Ed Cameron ~ Complete Video Autobiography More Mind Control Projects A wide range of Mind Control Projects run by the CIA, NSA, Air Force, and other agencies, most as black ops projects. Colin A. Ross ~ The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists The C.I.A. Doctors, (Manitou Communications, 2006), uncovers the truth about violations of human rights by The More We Do To You - The Less You Seem To Believe American Psychiatrists in the twentieth century. We Are Doing It -- J Mengele Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and cross-referenced research published in leading medical journals expose the existence of mind altering experiments on unwitting human subjects, paid for by the U.S. government, the U.S. Military and the C.I.A. These experiments which inlcude LSD experiments, sensory deprivation, electroconvulsive treatment, brain electrode implants, radiation experiments and prostitution rings were perpetrated not by a few renegage doctors but by leading psychiatrists, psychologists, neurosurgeons, universities, medical schools and maximum security prisons on American soil. Dr. Ross takes you on a mind-blowing fact finding adventure into the secret world of espionage and Manchurian Candidates. Given our situations in
Guantanamo Page 5 of 6
and Abu Graib the only question left unanswered is what are the U.S. Government, Apr 27, 2015 12:52:06PM MDT
http://integratingdarkandlight.com/cia-propaganda-and-disinformation/
Guantanamo and Abu Graib the only question left unanswered is what are the U.S. Government, psychiatrists and medical schools doing today? The C.I.A. Doctors was originally published as BLUEBIRD: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists in 2000. Colin A. Ross ~ Military Mind Control: A Story of Trauma and Recovery Military Mind Control provides a single case history written by Dr. Ross. Terese, a woman treated in Dr. Ross’ private practice, is a survivor of childhood trauma that included paternal incest, ritual abuse and military mind control. The case history describes the therapeutic goals, tasks, strategies and principles that have contributed to her recovery, including the principle of therapeutic neutrality. It is a documented fact that victims of CIA and military mind control experimentation have been hypnotized, given hallucinogens, held in sensory deprivation chambers, given massive amounts of electroshock and subjected to unethical, inhumane treatment by psychiatrists. Therefore, although Terese’s participation in a military mind control program is unproven, it could very well be real. Resources for Survivors of Trauma and Mind Control Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips ~ Access Denied: For Reasons of National Security ACCESS DENIED provides pertinent facts on mind control in a comprehensive manner that inspires positive action through conscious awareness. This book was written for all people who have endured trauma; from childhood abuse to the horrors of war. It offers the detailed healing methods and coping skills Mark taught Cathy in order for her to heal from MK Ultra mind control and PTSD. This book is a monument to the power of love and truth, and inspires positive action through conscious I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. ~ Carl Jung awareness. ACCESS DENIED is a book of logical answers, solutions, and positive hope for all of u.s. and our allies around the world.
Healing Doesn't Mean the Damage Never Existed. It Means the Damage No Longer Controls Our Lives.
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The Central Intelligence Agency’s “Family Jewels”: Legal Then? Legal Now? DANIEL L. PINES∗ Congress and the media recently have claimed that various activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—from rendition operations, to the destruction of videotapes, to the maintenance of secret detention facilities overseas—are illegal. Critics levied similar charges against the CIA thirty-five years ago, with regard to activities contained in the “Family Jewels”—the 1973 compilation of the CIA’s darkest secrets. The recent release of the Family Jewels provides the opportunity to try to put today’s concerns in perspective. This Article evaluates the key activities conducted by the CIA as described in the Family Jewels—experimentation on unconsenting individuals, attempted targeted killings of foreign leaders, electronic surveillance of Americans, examination of U.S. mail, and collection of information on American dissident movements. Contrary to widely held beliefs both then and now, all but one of these activities (experimentation on unconsenting individuals) were legal when they were committed, suggesting that other allegedly “illegal” activities, engaged in by the CIA now, may similarly prove to be lawful. INTRODUCTION Congress and the media often accuse the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA or “the Agency”) of engaging in “illegal” activities. Current allegations have focused on the use of secret terrorist detention facilities overseas, the treatment of those detained in such facilities, and the destruction of videotapes of a few of those detainees.1 Yet rigorous and definitive analysis of the legality of such CIA activities is often precluded—or at least seriously undermined—by the politics and hype of the immediate period, and the secret and classified status of the operations at issue. The recent allegations are hardly the first time the Agency has been accused of engaging in illegal activities. The 1970s brought one of the first deluges of accusations levied against the CIA. This Article will evaluate the CIA’s activities during that era, now that such operations have been generally declassified and enough time has passed to be able to consider them in context. In concluding that those activities were generally legal then, the Article suggests that allegations of other “illegal” CIA
∗ Assistant General Counsel, Office of General Counsel, Central Intelligence Agency. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information. The author wishes to thank Robert M. Chesney for his assistance with this Article. 1. See, e.g., Editorial, Looking at America, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 31, 2007, at A16 (describing the “lawless behavior” of the CIA in “plott[ing] to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior”); Editorial, The Torture Mystery, L.A. TIMES, July 26, 2007, at A20 (noting that the Senate has raised questions about the legality of the techniques used in the CIA’s detention program).
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operations may also prove erroneous when the hype dissipates, the secrecy surrounding the activity lifts, and the benefit of perspective emerges. In May 1973, James R. Schlesinger, then director of the CIA, ordered all CIA employees to inform him personally of any current or past activities that could be construed as having violated the CIA’s Charter.2 The responses, totaling 702 pages and highly classified, were considered so sensitive that they were known as the CIA’s “Family Jewels.”3 In June 2007, almost thirty-five years later, the Agency declassified the Family Jewels with some redactions.4 The Family Jewels describe acts ranging from the attempted killings of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba to providing LSD to unconsenting Americans.5 The documents also reveal operations to electronically monitor U.S. reporters, gather intelligence on protest movements in the United States, and open U.S. mail going to and from communist countries.6 All of these activities were highly controversial in 1973, and remain so now.7 Indeed, when the Family Jewels were declassified in June 2007, the media described the documents as depicting the Agency’s “dirtiest secrets,”8 “rogue operations,”9 and “unsavory activities.”10 More importantly, however, these media outlets portrayed the Family Jewels as documenting the many “illegal activities” engaged in by the CIA in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.11 This Article seeks to challenge that last assertion. It will evaluate each of the main types of activities discussed in the 702 pages of the Family Jewels to determine if those activities were indeed illegal when the Family Jewels were compiled in 1973. Thus, what follows is an assessment of whether each given activity violated the United States Constitution, any U.S. statute, or any judicially created law as existed in 1973, and if so, whether such violation would have been actionable in a U.S. court. My conclusion is that the vast majority of the activities described in the Family Jewels were indeed
2. CIA, FAMILY JEWELS 00418 (1973), available at http://www.foia.cia.gov/ [hereinafter FAMILY JEWELS] (type “Family Jewels” in the Search Declassified Docs browser; then click on “Family Jewels” in the results). 3. Mark Mazzetti & Tim Weiner, Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons from Cold War, N.Y. TIMES, June 27, 2007, at A1. 4. Mary Louise Kelly, Some Fear CIA ‘Family Jewels’ Could Hurt Agency, NAT’L PUB. RADIO, June 27, 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=11417938. 5. See FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00418–18a, 00425. 6. Id. at 00021, 00182, 00331. 7. See Kelly, supra note 4. 8. Id. 9. Richard Willing, CIA Discloses Past Abuses, USA TODAY, June 27, 2007, at A1. 10. Karen DeYoung & Walter Pincus, CIA Releases Files on Past Misdeeds, WASH. POST, June 27, 2007, at A1. 11. DeYoung & Pincus, supra note 10 (noting the depiction of “illegal wiretaps” in the Family Jewels); Mazzetti & Weiner, supra note 3 (asserting the Family Jewels describe “illegal activities of the past” including “illegal spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s”); Willing, supra note 9 (describing the Family Jewels as CIA’s acknowledgement of its “past illegal activities” and how “the agency repeatedly violated its own charter”); CIA Releases 700 Pages PUB. RADIO, June 26, 2007, of ‘Family Jewels’, NAT’L http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11433256 (“The CIA on Tuesday released hundreds of pages of classified reports describing illegal activities by the agency in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.”).
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legal when undertaken. While some specific operations might not have complied with the letter of the law, every type of activity—with the exception of unconsenting human experimentation—was legally permissible. I will also evaluate the status of the law related to these activities as it currently exists. The CIA is precluding me from offering an assessment as to whether these activities would be legal today, as such an assessment could interfere with the authorized functions of the Agency. Therefore, I will provide a description of the current law in these areas, and permit the reader to draw his or her own conclusion as to the present-day legality of these activities. Part I of this Article will provide background on the Family Jewels. This Part will first provide a history of the CIA, in order to place the documents in context. It will then discuss the events that led to the compilation of the Family Jewels, as well as their recent declassification and release. Parts II through VI will describe and analyze the five main activities depicted in the Family Jewels: unconsenting human experimentation, attempted targeted killings of foreign leaders, electronic surveillance of Americans, examination of U.S. mail, and the collection of information on American dissident movements. These Parts will evaluate the legality of each of those activities in 1973—when the Family Jewels were compiled—and describe the law governing such activities today. I will conclude that while many critics and commentators might automatically assume that the activities in the Family Jewels were illegal when committed, such a presumption is in fact erroneous. I. BACKGROUND ON THE CIA AND ITS FAMILY JEWELS Until 1945, intelligence collection in this country had been an uncoordinated, disparate affair.12 Numerous, mostly military, units acquired information for their own purposes, without coordinating and collaborating amongst themselves.13 The advent of World War II required a change to that formula; the attack on Pearl Harbor exposed the need for a better intelligence-gathering mechanism, while the rising power of the Soviet Union demanded a coordinated intelligence effort to counter the growing threat of communism.14 What emerged was the Central Intelligence Agency, created by the National Security Act of 1947 (“National Security Act” or “Act”).15 The Act, which is considered the CIA’s Charter, originally allocated five main functions to the CIA: (1) provide advice on matters concerning intelligence activities related to national security; (2) make recommendations for coordinating such intelligence activities amongst U.S. government agencies; (3) correlate, evaluate, and disseminate that intelligence, as well as protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized
12. SENATE SELECT COMM. TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES, FOREIGN AND MILITARY INTELLIGENCE: BOOK I: FINAL REPORT, S. REP. NO. 94-755, at 20 (1976), available at http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports_book1.htm [hereinafter CHURCH REPORT: BOOK I]. 13. See id. 14. See id. 15. Id. at 21.
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disclosure; (4) perform services of common concern to the intelligence community; and (5) maintain the broad authority to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security” as the President may direct (known as the “Fifth Function”).16 While the list of functions did not explicitly include the “collection” of intelligence, Congress fully expected that the Agency would engage in such activities.17 Though amended several times, the core functions of the CIA— collection, evaluation, and dissemination of intelligence, as well as the “Fifth Function”—remain in effect today.18 The Act has always precluded the CIA from maintaining any “police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions.”19 Congress did not wish to have the Agency interfere with the authorities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), nor become a secret police unit akin to the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.20 The Act also limits the expanse of CIA activities to foreign intelligence and counterintelligence, as opposed to domestic intelligence.21 However, neither these provisions, nor any other portion of the Act, restrict the Agency’s intelligence collection activities solely to overseas endeavors. Indeed, the Act’s legislative history indicates that Congress expected the CIA to collect intelligence inside the United States.22
16. National Security Act of 1947, Pub. L. No. 80-253, § 102(d), 61 Stat. 495, 498 (codified as amended at 50 U.S.C. § 403-4a(d) (Supp. V 2005)). The Act explicitly gave the National Security Council (NSC) the authority to direct the Agency under this Fifth Function; however, it is clear that this authority really vested in the President, given that the NSC performs such functions “as the President may direct.” Id. at 496–97. 17. REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT BY THE COMMISSION ON CIA ACTIVITIES WITHIN THE UNITED STATES 48 (1975) [hereinafter ROCKEFELLER REPORT] (noting that, in enacting the National Security Act of 1947, “Congress contemplated that the CIA would be involved in all aspects of foreign intelligence, including collection”); id. at 51 (discussing the CIA’s authority to collect intelligence since its inception). 18. See 50 U.S.C. § 403-4a(d) (Supp. V 2005). The current version of the Act retained these key roles with some modifications. Specifically, it now explicitly authorizes the CIA to “collect intelligence” (amending the first function); eliminates the CIA’s role to protect sources and methods (part of the second function); no longer includes the CIA’s authority to perform services of common concern to the intelligence community (the fourth function); and changes the Fifth Function to authorize the CIA to engage in such other functions and duties as directed by the President and the Director of National Intelligence (as opposed to the NSC). See id. 19. Id. § 403-4a(d)(1). 20. See Weissman v. Cent. Intelligence Agency, 565 F.2d 692, 695 (D.C. Cir. 1977) (discussing the creation of the National Security Act and noting “[w]hile the 80th Congress obviously, and for good reason, wished to protect America’s security, it had no intention of making the mistake of creating an American ‘Gestapo’”); ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 54. 21. 50 U.S.C. §§ 401a(1), 403-4a(d). The original Act merely limited the CIA to activities involving “intelligence,” without defining the term. See 61 Stat. 495, 495–99 (1947). However, it was always understood that this meant foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. See ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 51–53. The congressional amendment of the Act in 1992 made this meaning explicit. Intelligence Organization Act of 1992, Pub. L. No. 102-496, 106 Stat. 3188, 3188 (1992). 22. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 52–53; see also infra text accompanying notes 430–42.
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During the first twenty-five years of its existence, the CIA maintained great autonomy as Congress generally sought and received few details of the Agency’s activities.23 As one Senator stated in an attitude considered typical: It is not a question of reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a Member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have.24
Such deference evaporated in the 1970s. The notable lack of success in the Vietnam War raised questions about the CIA’s operations and its intelligence gathering capabilities.25 The Watergate scandal, meanwhile, reduced trust in the executive branch, and increased the need and desire for aggressive investigative reporting about U.S. government activities.26 All of this led to greater scrutiny of the CIA and its activities, which increased exponentially with public revelations of some of the aggressive activities the CIA had engaged in during the decades since its creation.27 The CIA’s Family Jewels emerged from this period of change. In 1973, then-CIA Director28 James R. Schlesinger became appalled by press reports of Agency involvement in Watergate.29 Though it turned out that the Agency had virtually no role in the scandal,30 Schlesinger sought to ensure that all Agency activities going forward fell “within a strict interpretation” of the Agency’s “legislative charter,” or the National Security Act.31 Therefore, on May 9, 1973, Schlesinger issued a memorandum to the entire Agency populace, ordering every Agency employee (and inviting any former
23. See United States v. Lopez-Lima, 738 F. Supp. 1404, 1410 (S.D. Fla. 1990) (noting that prior to 1974 “[c]ongressional oversight of intelligence activities . . . was extremely limited”); William C. Banks & Peter Raven-Hansen, Targeted Killing and Assassination: The U.S. Legal Framework, 37 U. RICH. L. REV. 667, 709 (2003). 24. JOHN PRADOS, PRESIDENTS’ SECRET WARS: CIA AND PENTAGON COVERT OPERATIONS FROM WORLD WAR II THROUGH IRANSCAM 329 (1986) (quoting Senator Leverett Saltonstall); see also Ray S. Cline, Covert Action as Presidential Prerogative, 12 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL’Y 357, 366 (1989) (“Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a small number of senior congressional leaders monitored intelligence activities in minimal fashion.”). 25. See CHURCH REPORT: BOOK I, supra note 12, at 27. 26. Lori Fisler Damrosch, Covert Operations, 83 AM. J. INT’L L. 795, 795 (1989) (“The era of congressional noninvolvement [in CIA covert operations] came to an end with the Watergate disclosures of intelligence activities that many Americans found reprehensible [and] the ensuing investigations into assassination attempts and other controversial covert actions . . . .”). 27. See id. 28. The Act originally referred to the head of the CIA as the “Director of Central Intelligence” (DCI). National Security Act of 1947, Pub. L. No. 80-253, § 102(a), 61 Stat. 495, 497 (codified as amended at 50 U.S.C. § 403(a) (2000)). Currently, the head of the CIA is known as the “Director of the Central Intelligence Agency” (DCIA). 50 U.S.C. § 403(a) (2000). Throughout this Article, I will be using the term “CIA Director” to refer to the head of the CIA whether technically a DCI or a DCIA. 29. Mazzetti & Weiner, supra note 3. 30. See ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 32–33 (noting that the CIA’s role was nominal and that there was “no evidence that the CIA participated in the Watergate break-in or in the Post-Watergate cover-up by the White House”). 31. FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00418–18a.
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employee) to report to him directly “on any activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency.”32 He further demanded to be informed if any employee received an instruction or order that appeared “in any way inconsistent with the CIA legislative charter . . . .”33 The compendium of documents responsive to Schlesinger’s edict were originally called the “skeletons,”34 but quickly became referred to as the “Family Jewels.”35 The CIA kept the Family Jewels classified because it feared that exposing the various acts contained therein would cause extraordinary damage to the Agency’s reputation, and possibly lead to its demise.36 As later CIA Director Colby stated: “The shock effect of an exposure of the ‘family jewels,’ I urged, could, in the climate of 1973, inflict mortal wounds on the C.I.A. and deprive the nation of all the good the agency could do in the future.”37 Congress and the White House, concerned about the Agency’s activities, established three separate commissions to investigate.38 Vice President Nelson Rockefeller headed the White House commission (“Rockefeller Commission”), while Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike led the Senate and House of Representatives inquiries, respectively (“Church Commission” and “Pike Commission”).39 The CIA eventually provided copies of the Family Jewels to each commission.40 Based on those documents, as well as information gained through hearings and other mechanisms, each commission assessed the CIA’s activities and released reports (“Rockefeller Report,” “Church Report,” and “Pike Report”).41 The Church Commission also issued a separate
32. Id. at 00418. 33. Id. at 00418a; see JOHN PRADOS, LOST CRUSADER: THE SECRET WARS OF CIA DIRECTOR WILLIAM COLBY 260 (2003) (noting that, after hearing about CIA connections to Watergate, CIA Director Schlesinger “wanted information on any action in the CIA’s past, especially domestic activities, that might have flap potential” (emphasis in original)). 34. See Memorandum from James A. Wilderotter on CIA Matters to the File 1 (Jan. 3, 1975), available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/family_jewels_wilderotter.pdf. 35. See Mazzetti & Weiner, supra note 3. 36. Id. 37. Id. 38. See PRADOS, supra note 33, at 300. 39. Id. at 300, 308, 315. 40. See PRADOS, supra note 33, at 300, 308, 315; DeYoung & Pincus, supra note 10 (noting that CIA Director Colby “later turned the entire ‘family jewels’ file over to Congress, an act some agency veterans still consider a betrayal”); Press Release, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA Releases Two Collections of Historical Documents (June 26, 2007), available at https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/press-release-archive-2007/ciareleases-two-collections-of-historical-documents.html [hereinafter CIA Press Release]. 41. See SENATE SELECT COMM. TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES, FINAL REPORT, S. REP. NO. 94-755 (1976), available at http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports.htm [hereinafter CHURCH REPORT]; ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17. As noted below, all facets of the Pike Report remain classified. See infra note 45. None of these reports, of course, themselves created law, and their “views would not be controlling on a court . . . .” Marks v. Cent. Intelligence Agency, 590 F.2d 997, 1002 (D.C. Cir. 1978) (referring explicitly to the Church Report).
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report regarding CIA’s assassination plots of foreign leaders (“Assassinations Report”).42 Of the reports, the Rockefeller Report, conducted by the executive branch, understandably was the least scathing.43 The Rockefeller, Church, and Assassinations Reports were all released to the public.44 The Pike Report was not officially released, but was reportedly leaked to the press and published in its entirety just days after its completion.45 Almost thirty-five years later, current CIA Director Michael Hayden ordered the release of the Family Jewels, though with some redactions.46 As Director Hayden stated: The CIA fully understands that it has an obligation to protect the nation’s secrets, but it also has a responsibility to be as open as possible. I’ve often spoke about our social contract with the American people, and the declassification of historical documents is an important part of that effort.47
The 702 pages of the Family Jewels depict numerous activities conducted by the Agency in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. All of these activities could not possibly be addressed within the space limitations of this Article. I have therefore declined to assess the considerable number of activities in the Family Jewels that appear clearly legal on their face, including the CIA’s counterintelligence activities in the United States,48 as well as its use of physical surveillance, undercover agents, alias documents, and overhead imagery.49 I have also declined to evaluate operations that the Family Jewels mention only in passing, without sufficient detail to permit proper consideration of their legality.50 Instead, I have focused on the five types of activities that were of significant concern to the Rockefeller and Church Commissions,51 and more
42. SENATE SELECT COMM. TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS, INTERIM REPORT: ALLEGED ASSASSINATION PLOTS INVOLVING FOREIGN LEADERS, S. REP. NO. 94-465 (1975) [hereinafter ASSASSINATIONS REPORT]. 43. See PRADOS, supra note 33, at 303–04. 44. See ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42; CHURCH REPORT, supra note 41; ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17; see also PRADOS, supra note 33, at 303–04, 327. 45. See PRADOS, supra note 33, at 329. Because the Pike Report was never officially released and remains classified, even though allegedly published in the media, I am precluded from referring to its contents in this Article. 46. CIA Press Release, supra note 40. 47. Id. 48. Such activities, such as surveillance in the United States of a former CIA employee who had become “professionally and emotionally involved” with a Cuban national, FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00026, 00059–61, are permitted by statute. See 50 U.S.C. § 403-4a(d) (Supp. V 2005) (authorizing the Agency to engage in counterintelligence activities). 49. See ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 63–64, 229–31 (discussing the legality of such activities). 50. Examples include the testing of various equipment in the United States, see FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00238–40, 00331, 00544, and the confinement of a defector in a safehouse in Maryland. See id. at 00023–24, 00522. Both of these are mentioned in the Family Jewels, but not in extensive detail. 51. See CHURCH REPORT, supra note 41; ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17. The Church Report focused extensively on covert action, an area I will not address because it is only
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importantly, which appear to be the most controversial and the most critical both in 1973 and in today’s world.52 II. UNCONSENTING HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION Beginning in the early 1950s, the CIA operated a program known as MKULTRA, which mostly involved the administering of LSD and other drugs to unconsenting adults, including Americans.53 The program stemmed from an Agency fear that the Soviet Union and other communist countries were developing chemical and biological agents for the purposes of interrogating, brainwashing, and possibly even attacking Westerners.54 As the Church Report described: The CIA had received reports that the Soviet Union was engaged in intensive efforts to produce LSD; and that the Soviet Union had attempted to purchase the world’s supply of the chemical. As one CIA officer who was deeply involved in the work with this drug described the climate of the times: “[It] is awfully hard in this day and age to reproduce how frightening all of this was to us at the time, particularly after the drug scene has become as widespread and as knowledgeable in this country as it did. But we were literally terrified, because this was the one material that we had ever been able to locate that really had potential fantastic possibilities if used wrongly.”55
The MKULTRA program sought to administer LSD and other drugs to individuals in order to determine the threat of such drugs, and to design means to thwart that threat.56 In most cases, the subjects were unwitting nonvolunteers, who were slipped the drugs in their drinks at parties or at bars.57 The MKULTRA program eventually became quite extensive such that, by the time the CIA terminated the project in 1963, it contained 149 subprojects that the CIA contracted out to more than eighty universities,
nominally mentioned in the Family Jewels. 52. In the end, I am confined by space to focus on what appear to me to be the most significant activities contained in the Family Jewels. As with any top ten (or in this case top five) list, there will undoubtedly be other facets of the Family Jewels that the reader might have preferred had been given consideration. 53. See FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00402–04, 00433; CHURCH REPORT: BOOK I, supra note 12, at 389–92. Throughout this Part, I will use the term “unconsenting human experimentation,” rather than the often-used phrase “unwitting human experimentation,” because the key query, as discussed below, is whether the alleged subject consented to the experimentation, not whether the subject knew that some form of experimentation was occurring. It is not a crime if the individual consents to experimentation, but is not told whether such experimentation actually occurred, such as when individuals who consent to being part of a drug experiment are provided a placebo rather than the experimental drug. Illegal activity occurs only when the subject has not consented to being part of the experiment in the first place. See infra notes 62–68 and accompanying text. 54. CHURCH REPORT: BOOK I, supra note 12, at 392. 55. Id. at 392–93 (alteration in original). 56. See id. at 389–93. The CIA also tested drugs on monkeys and mice as part of a separate program. FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00413. 57. Kronisch v. United States, 150 F.3d 112, 118 (2d Cir. 1998); CHURCH REPORT: BOOK I, supra note 12, at 391–92.
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hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and other institutions.58 However, the full range and extent of the program, as well the number of individuals affected by it, is impossible to determine because the chief of the program ordered all MKULTRA records destroyed in January 1973.59 There is no doubt that the MKULTRA project was illegal from its inception. This may be why the CIA’s Office of General Counsel was not informed of the project until years after it had been terminated.60 Upon learning of the project, the CIA’s General Counsel immediately condemned it,61 and with good reason. Government experimentation on unconsenting individuals, such as occurred in the MKULTRA program, was a clear violation of the Constitution. The courts have long held that the Fifth Amendment’s protection of liberty interests includes protection from nonconsensual experiments on a person’s body. Usually described as the right to bodily integrity, this is “a right which has been recognized throughout this nation’s history.”62 Unconsenting human experimentation also constituted a tort for which the United States could be held liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA).63 Indeed, courts have upheld FTCA claims specifically made by alleged victims of MKULTRA.64 A federal statute also prohibits unconsenting human experimentation,65 as does a policy regulation issued by the Department of Health and Human Services,
58. CHURCH REPORT: BOOK I, supra note 12, at 389–91, 403–04. 59. Id. at 389, 391, 404. 60. See id. at 408. 61. Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. & James C. Turner, Anatomy of a Public Interest Case Against the CIA, 11 HAMLINE J. PUB. L. & POL’Y 307, 314–15 (1990). 62. Stadt v. Univ. of Rochester, 921 F. Supp. 1023, 1027 (W.D.N.Y. 1996); see also Ammend v. Bioport, Inc., 322 F. Supp. 2d 848, 870 (W.D. Mich. 2004) (“The right to bodily integrity is a fundamental right protected by the Constitution.”); Heinrich v. Sweet, 62 F. Supp. 2d 282, 290, 312–15 (D. Mass. 1999) (recognizing that unconsenting experimentation constitutes a “violation of the constitutionally protected liberty interest in bodily integrity”), aff’d, 308 F.3d 48 (1st Cir. 2002); Stadt, 921 F. Supp. at 1027−28 (“The Constitution, and more specifically, the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment clearly established a right to be free from non-consensual, governmental experimentation on one’s body—a right which had been in existence well before 1946.”). 63. See 28 U.S.C. § 1346(b) (2000); see also Stadt, 921 F. Supp. at 1023 (refusing to dismiss an FTCA claim by a woman claiming that the federal government had injected her with plutonium without her knowledge or consent). 64. See, e.g., Ritchie v. United States, 210 F. Supp. 2d 1120 (N.D. Cal. 2002) (same); Orlikow v. United States, 682 F. Supp. 77 (D.D.C. 1988) (upholding the ability of plaintiff to bring an FTCA claim based on alleged MKULTRA activities). The court eventually dismissed the Ritchie case for lack of evidence. Ritchie v. United States, 451 F.3d 1019 (9th Cir. 2006) (upholding dismissal of plaintiff’s claim that the CIA administered him LSD at a Christmas party, which plaintiff believed led him to commit a bank robbery). Failure to comply with the applicable statute of limitations has also led to the dismissal of FTCA claims based upon the MKULTRA program. See, e.g., Kronisch v. United States, 150 F.3d 112, 123−31 (2d Cir. 1998) (dismissing all of plaintiff’s FTCA claims as untimely). 65. See 42 U.S.C. § 3515b (2000) (prohibiting funds appropriated to the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, or related agencies from being used on research programs involving unconsenting human experimentation).
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applicable to all U.S. government agencies.66 Finally, a presidential directive specifically prohibits the practice by U.S. intelligence agencies.67 It is therefore unequivocal that unconsenting human experimentation, such as that conducted by the CIA in its MKULTRA program, was illegal in the 1950s and 1960s.68 The law has not changed in any significant manner since that time. As will be seen below, however, this is the only type of activity contained in the Family Jewels that was actually illegal. III. TARGETED KILLINGS OF FOREIGN LEADERS Media reports consistently portray the Family Jewels as containing multiple illegal attempts by the CIA to kill several foreign leaders.69 Yet, despite the general belief that the Agency was rampantly trying to terminate numerous heads of state, the Church Commission in its Assassinations Report concluded that the CIA, since its inception forty years earlier, had only initiated plans to kill two foreign leaders: Fidel Castro of Cuba in 1960−65 and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1960−61.70 Further, the CIA
66. See 45 C.F.R. §§ 46.101−.119 (2007) (requiring informed consent before conducting experiments on human subjects except in very limited circumstances not applicable here). Some commentators assert that unconsenting human experimentation also violates the Nuremberg Code, which is an international code of ethical standards for medical experiments that requires, among other things, informed consent. See Rauh & Turner, supra note 61, at 312. See generally Samuel B. Casey & Nathan A. Adams, IV, Specially Respecting the Living Human Embryo by Adhering to Standard Human Subject Experimentation Rules, 2 YALE J. HEALTH POL’Y L. & ETHICS 111, 114 (2001) (describing the genesis of the Nuremberg Code). However, the United States has never recognized the Nuremburg Code as binding U.S. law. See Ammend, 322 F. Supp. at 872. 67. Exec. Order No. 12,333 § 2.10, 3 C.F.R. 200, 213 (1982) (requiring written informed consent for any human experimentation by an agency within the Intelligence Community). Similar prohibitions have existed since the mid-1970s. See Exec. Order No. 12,036 § 2-302, 3 C.F.R. 112, 129 (1979); Exec. Order No. 11,905 § 5(d), 3 C.F.R. 90, 101 (1977). Executive Orders are discussed in more detail infra text accompanying notes 131−55. 68. Both the Church Commission Report and the Rockefeller Report found that the project violated U.S. law. See CHURCH REPORT: BOOK I, supra note 12, at 403; ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 37. 69. See Kelly, supra note 4 (describing illegal “assassination plots” in the Family Jewels); Mazzetti & Weiner, supra note 3 (discussing illegal “failed assassination plots” in the Family Jewels); Willing, supra note 9 (listing three assassination attempts as part of the illegal activities depicted in the Family Jewels). 70. ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 4–5; see also FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00012−16, 00038−50, 00425 (describing attempts against Castro); id. at 00425 (describing attempts against Lumumba); Robert F. Turner, It’s Not Really “Assassination”: Legal and Moral Implications of Intentionally Targeting Terrorists and Aggressor-State Regime Elites, 37 U. RICH. L. REV. 787, 791 (2003) (noting that the Assassinations Report connected the CIA to attempts to kill only two foreign leaders). The CIA sought to kill Castro through numerous devices that “ran the gamut from high-powered rifles or poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.” ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 71. The CIA’s plot to kill Lumumba involved attempting to induce a member of his inner circle to place poison in Lumumba’s food or toothpaste. Id. at 28. The Church Commission also investigated the role of the CIA in the deaths of three other foreign leaders—
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plots against both Castro and Lumumba proved unsuccessful. Castro evaded the CIA’s attempts, while Lumumba ended up being killed in 1961 by individuals not supported by or affiliated with the United States, before the CIA could carry out its plan.71 Finally, and most critically, as intimated by the Assassinations Report,72 the attempted targeted killing of such foreign leaders was entirely legal in 1973. Attempted killings of foreign leaders are not new. Nations have attempted targeted killings of political leaders for millennia. The Greeks and the Romans engaged in such activities, and “it was common practice during the Middle Ages.”73 The practice is even described in the Bible.74 Such killings, however, are usually referred to as “assassinations,” which creates much of the difficulty in assessing their legality. The main problem with the term “assassination” is that it has no consensus definition.75 No statute, presidential edict, or international document defines the term.76 Some scholars consider “assassinations” to be a form of murder and therefore illegal by definition.77 Others take a more neutral stance.78 Some focus on the victim’s status, others on whether the act has a political purpose, and still others on whether the act is “treacherous.”79 This lack of consensus makes evaluating the legality of “assassinations” virtually impossible. Therefore, rather than get immersed in a semantic debate, I will instead focus on the act itself, that is, the attempted targeted
Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam), and General Rene Schneider (Chile)—but determined that there was no valid evidence that the CIA planned, supported, or effectuated their deaths. Id. at 5. 71. ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 4, 256. 72. Id. at 281. 73. Michael N. Schmitt, State-Sponsored Assassination in International and Domestic Law, 17 YALE J. INT’L L. 609, 613 (1992). 74. See, e.g., Esther 2:21 (mentioning a conspiracy by royal officers to kill King Xerxes); Jeremiah 41:3–5 (discussing the “assassination” of Gedaliah); 1 Kings 16:16 (describing Zimri’s murder of the king); 2 Kings 15:10–14 (depicting the targeted killing of Zechariah, king of Israel, by Shallum, who in turn was killed a month later). 75. Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 669; see also W. Hays Parks, Memorandum of Law: Executive Order 12333 and Assassination, ARMY LAW., Dec. 1989, at 4, 8 (providing ten different definitions of the term “assassination,” none of which is “entirely satisfactory”); Schmitt, supra note 73, at 611 (“[S]cholars and practitioners have struggled to craft a working definition to serve as a guide to states . . . .”). 76. Schmitt, supra note 73, at 611. 77. See, e.g., Jeffrey F. Addicott, Proposal for a New Executive Order on Assassination, 37 U. RICH. L. REV. 751, 762 (2003) (“Assassination, then, is clearly identified and properly classified as a type of killing that is unlawful, i.e. a form of murder . . . .”); Major Tyler J. Harder, Time to Repeal the Assassination Ban of Executive Order 12,333: A Small Step in Clarifying Current Law, 172 MIL. L. REV. 1, 5 (2002) (defining “assassination” during peacetime as “(1) a murder, (2) of a specifically targeted figure, (3) for a political purpose”); Elizabeth R. Parker & Timothy E. Naccarato, Targeting Saddam and Sons: U.S. Policy Against Assassination, 1 IDF L. REV. 39, 53 (2003) (“Thus, it is clear that murder is a key element of assassination . . . .”); Parks, supra note 75, at 8 (“Assassination constitutes an act of murder that is prohibited . . . .”); Turner, supra note 70, at 790 (“By definition, assassination is a form of murder.”); id. at 807 (“True assassination is murder, and murder is wrong.”). 78. See Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 670 (discussing scholars who believe “assassination” is not necessarily murder). 79. Schmitt, supra note 73, at 611–12.
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killing of foreign leaders.80 This use of a more “neutral” term in no way makes the subject matter less serious, but at least allows us to consider the legality of these attempted targeted killings without the red herring of definitional uncertainty. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no statute prohibiting the CIA, or any other U.S. government agency for that matter, from conducting targeted killings of foreign leaders, at least within that leader’s own country.81 The only legislative restriction of any sort on the killing of foreign leaders is contained in 18 U.S.C. § 1116, which Congress enacted in 1972.82 Section 1116 imposes criminal sanctions on anyone who “kills or attempts to kill a foreign official, official guest, or internationally protected person.”83 However, the statute defines “foreign official” as a current or former Chief of State or other enumerated senior government official or their family “while in the United States.”84 An “official guest” refers to anyone “present in the United States” as an official guest of the U.S. government.85 An “internationally protected person” is defined as a Chief of State or Foreign Minister and his or her family “whenever such person is in a country other than his own.”86 Therefore, the statute precludes the targeted killing of a foreign leader who is in the United States or outside the leader’s own country. It does not preclude the targeted killing of a leader inside his or her own country.87 The CIA sought to kill both Castro and Lumumba in their home countries.88
80. See Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 671; Daniel B. Pickard, Legalizing Assassination?: Terrorism, the Central Intelligence Agency, and International Law, 30 GA. J. INT’L & COMP. L. 1, 9 (2001) (defining “assassination” as the “targeted killing of an individual, by an official agent of a nation, regardless of whether a state of war exists” (footnotes omitted)). 81. Addicott, supra note 77, at 757 (“Congress never enacted legislation to legally ban the use of assassination as an instrument of foreign policy . . . .”); Parker & Naccarato, supra note 77, at 48 (“[A]s of the present time, Congress has not enacted any legislation [prohibiting assassinations].”). 82. See 18 U.S.C. (2006). The federal murder statute does not apply extraterritorially except in limited circumstances not applicable here. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 7, 1111; United States v. Bin Laden, 92 F. Supp. 2d 189, 204 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) (noting that Congress limited “the reach of Section 1111 to murders committed ‘[w]ithin the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States’” (alteration in original)). 83. 18 U.S.C. § 1116. 84. Id. § 1116(b)(3) (emphasis added). 85. Id. § 1116(b)(6) (emphasis added). 86. Id. § 1116(b)(4)(A) (emphasis added). This subsection also defines an “internationally protected person” as an official “of the United States Government, a foreign government, or international organization who at the time and place concerned is entitled pursuant to international law to special protection against attack.” Id. § 1116(b)(4)(B). This provision protects “‘resident diplomats, consular and other foreign government personnel and their families.’” United States v. Marcano Garcia, 456 F. Supp. 1358, 1360 (D.P.R. 1978) (quoting S. REP. NO. 92-1105 (1972)). It therefore does not apply to foreign leaders, who are described in the first part of the definition of “internationally protected person” (discussed in the text accompanying this note), and in any case would only protect such persons “resident” in the United States. 87. Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 730–31; Patrick Cole, The Relevance of Human Rights Provisions to American Intelligence Activities, 6 LOY. L.A. INT’L & COMP. L.J. 37, 57 (1983) (noting that while § 1116 prohibits killing a foreign official in the United States, “there was no law making it a crime to assassinate or conspire to assassinate a foreign official while the individual was outside the United States”). One set of commentators argues that even
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Thus, even had § 1116 existed at the time of such attempts, it would not have prohibited them. Congress has attempted to prohibit targeted killings of foreign leaders in their home countries on several occasions, but each attempt has failed.89 Some scholars have interpreted this lack of success as implicit acknowledgement that Congress wishes to have the United States retain such activities as a policy option, at least under certain restricted circumstances.90 The so-called Fifth Function of the National Security Act of 1947 bolsters this argument. As noted above, the Fifth Function authorizes the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security” as the President may direct.91 Such unfettered language would appear to constitute implicit congressional approval for the Agency to engage in any presidentially authorized activity not explicitly prohibited by law, including targeted killings.92 Indeed, one court has gone so far as to assert that the Fifth Function granted the Agency such wide authority that, pursuant to it, the CIA could engage in any presidentially authorized activity it wished, even if the activity did violate U.S. law!93 No other court, however, has championed this position. Moving beyond statutory authority, the United States Constitution also does not forbid targeted killings of foreign leaders.94 The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution protects persons in the United States and Americans abroad, but does not protect non-Americans overseas.95 The only exception to this rule that has been carved out by the Court relates to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,96 due to the these restrictions of § 1116 have been superseded at least to some degree by subsequent acts of Congress that appear to permit targeted killings of terrorists and Saddam Hussein. Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 731–37. 88. Schmitt, supra note 73, at 619 n.45; see also ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 255. 89. Parker & Naccarato, supra note 77, at 48; Schmitt, supra note 73, at 662 (describing the various unsuccessful legislative attempts to ban targeted killings); see also Pickard, supra note 80, at 23. 90. Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 723; Pickard, supra note 80, at 26. 91. National Security Act of 1947, Pub. L.No. 80-253, § 102(a), 61 Stat. 495, 497 (codified as amended at 50 U.S.C. §403-4a(d) (Supp. V 2005)). 92. See Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 698, 729. 93. United States v. Lopez-Lima, 738 F. Supp. 1404, 1409 (S.D. Fla. 1990) (stating that, pursuant to the Fifth Function, “the CIA was under no limitation that its activities could not violate U.S. law”). Though the Lopez-Lima decision involved the Agency’s theoretical ability to authorize the hijacking of a plane, the argument would also apply to targeted killings. Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 714. 94. See Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 675–79. 95. United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 269 (1990) (noting that the Supreme Court has consistently “rejected the claim that aliens are entitled to Fifth Amendment rights outside the sovereign territory of the United States”); id. at 271 (stating that the Fourth Amendment does not protect aliens outside the United States who lack “substantial connections with this country”); see also Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 675–77 (discussing the inapplicability of the Constitution to aliens overseas). 96. Boumediene v. Bush, 128 S. Ct. 2229, 2270 (2008) (granting habeas rights under Article 1 of the Constitution to detainees held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, given the “complete and total control” the U.S. government exercises over that facility); Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466, 478 (2004) (suggesting constitutional habeas protections could possibly extend to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba). However, the Supreme Court in
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“complete and total control” the U.S. government exercises over that facility. As the United States does not maintain such “complete and total control” over foreign countries, our constitutional protections—to include the Fifth Amendment prohibition against deprivation of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”97—would not extend to foreign leaders outside the United States, such as Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, and thus would not protect foreign leaders from targeted killings. Some scholars have argued that targeted killings of foreign leaders are illegal under international law.98 Only two international treaties specifically address the topic of targeted killings/assassinations.99 The Charter of the Organization of African Unity urges its members to adhere to “unreserved condemnation, in all its forms, of political assassination.”100 While forceful, such a statement is hardly international law. It applies only to a limited region of the world, and there is no indication that it is followed or enforced even in that region.101 The second treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons, Including Diplomatic Agents (“New York Convention”), only prohibits targeted killings when the targets are outside of their home country (akin to 18 U.S.C. § 1116).102 With a lack of explicit international law prohibiting targeted killings of foreign leaders, some scholars have pointed to international treaties that have broader scopes in an attempt to argue the illegality of such killings.103 One scholar has pointed to statements in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the Charter of the Organization of American States that a country’s leaders are to be made by the will of the people.104 The scholar asserts that the targeted killing of a nation’s leader undercuts the will of that nation’s people and, therefore, violates those treaties.105 Yet such an argument contains numerous flaws. If adopted, it would preclude nations from removing leaders through legitimate war, such as what happened to Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein, since that would be perceived as violating the will of the people of those nations. Furthermore, many leaders came to power through nondemocratic means and therefore have not been chosen by the people. Would they, but only they, then be legitimate targets under this theory?
Boumediene acknowledged that “[i]t is true before today the Court has never held that noncitizens detained by our Government in territory over which another country maintains de jure sovereignty have any rights under our Constitution.” Boumediene, 128 S. Ct. at 2270. 97. U.S. CONST. amend. V. 98. See Addicott, supra note 77, at 769–70; Cole, supra note 87, at 49, 53; Harder, supra note 77, at 6−11. Please note that the discussion below focuses solely on the ability of the CIA to engage in targeted killings during peacetime, since that was the scenario for the targets in the Family Jewels. There are different rules and limitations for targeted killings of foreign leaders during armed conflict. See Parks, supra note 75; Schmitt, supra note 73, at 628−45. 99. Pickard, supra note 80, at 19 n.56; Schmitt, supra note 73, at 618. 100. Charter of the Organization of African Unity art. III, May 25, 1963, 2 I.L.M. 766. 101. Schmitt, supra note 73, at 618. 102. Id. at 619. 103. For an extensive discussion of purported international restrictions on targeted killings of foreign leaders, and why such international conventions do not actually prohibit such killings, see id. at 618−28. 104. See Cole, supra note 87, at 49, 53. 105. Id. at 49.
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A vastly more persuasive argument is made by scholars who point to Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter.106 That article states: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other matter inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”107 The first “Purpose” listed in the U.N. Charter is “[t]o maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.”108 A clear argument can be made that killing or attempting to kill a foreign leader is a threat or use of force, as well as a breach of the peace.109 However, Article 51 of the United Nations Charter provides an exception to this general prohibition.110 That article states: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”111 This reflects the long-standing, customary international law principle of the right to self-defense.112 Scholars are divided as to whether an armed attack must actually have occurred before a nation can deploy this right to self-defense.113 Those arguing that an armed attack must have actually occurred generally point to the above-mentioned specific language of article 51 of the Charter that allows self-defense “if an armed attack occurs.” They note that this accords with the overall purpose of the United Nations Charter—to create mechanisms for keeping the peace and reducing the overall use of force. Allowing a broad interpretation of self-defense, especially one that permitted anticipatory action, would undermine this base premise of the Charter.114 However, the more widely accepted, and I believe better, view is that an attack need not have occurred before a state may use force (to include a targeted killing of a foreign leader) in self-defense.115 Known as anticipatory or preemptive self-defense, this view is justified on a number of premises. First, the United Nations Charter “does not preclude unilateral action against an immediate [perceived] threat,” and therefore such action is considered permitted.116 Second, anticipatory self-defense often serves to prevent and reduce more extensive acts of violence.117 Killing a foreign leader before he or she can launch an attack may prevent that attack from ever occurring, and even
106. Harder, supra note 77, at 10; Pickard, supra note 80, at 11–13; Schmitt, supra note 73, at 619−20. 107. U.N. Charter art. 2, para. 4. 108. Id. art. 1, para. 1. 109. See Harder, supra note 77, at 10; Pickard, supra note 80, at 11–13; Schmitt, supra note 73, at 619–621. 110. Schmitt, supra note 73, at 620. 111. U.N. Charter art. 51. 112. Pickard, supra note 80, at 18. 113. See Harder, supra note 77, at 20; Schmitt, supra note 73, at 646. 114. See Schmitt, supra note 73, at 646 (describing the argument for restricting the interpretation of self-defense in Article 51 of the U.N. Charter). 115. See Addicott, supra note 77, at 773−79; Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 746; Schmitt, supra note 73, at 646; Turner, supra note 70, at 799−804. 116. Parks, supra note 75, at 7. 117. See Pickard, supra note 80, at 20−21.
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preclude all-out war, thus saving a considerable number of lives that would have been lost through a conventional war and upholding the core principle of the U.N. Charter— the preservation of peace among nations.118 Third, anticipatory self-defense deters leaders from even threatening aggressive action.119 Finally, there is the concept of selfpreservation. As one scholar has described it, “international law cannot compel a state to wait until it absorbs a devastating, or even lethal, first strike before it acts to protect itself.”120 The United States has long recognized this principle of anticipatory self-defense.121 Pursuant to it, the United States is permitted, under international law, to attempt the targeted killing of foreign leaders if those leaders constitute “legitimate threats to the national security of the United States or individual U.S. citizens.”122 As with all applications of self-defense, the nation’s action would need to be necessary (i.e., alternative means to resolve the threat are ineffective) and proportional (i.e., the level of coercion is the minimum necessary to end the aggression).123 This last requirement, proportionality, actually bolsters the argument for targeted killings over other military options since targeted killings seek to resolve a legitimate threat through the death of a single individual.124 It is also worth noting that even if international law could be construed as precluding targeted killings, such policies are likely unenforceable in a U.S. court of law. In Schneider v. Kissinger, the sons of killed Chilean army commander René Schneider alleged that the CIA was culpable for Schneider’s death as part of a botched kidnapping attempt.125 The Schneider incident had been one of the five main cases examined by the Church Commission in the Assassinations Report.126 The Commission found the CIA had no plans to have Schneider killed and played no role in the kidnapping attempt.127 Schneider’s sons, clearly not accepting that conclusion, brought suit in U.S. federal court in the District of Columbia, alleging the United States violated the “law of nations,” as well as numerous U.S. laws and treaties, including the United Nations Charter, with regard to their father’s death.128 The district court dismissed the case for several reasons, the primary one being the political question
118. See Turner, supra note 70, at 800. 119. See Schmitt, supra note 73, at 646. 120. Louis Rene Beres, On Assassination as Anticipatory Self-Defense: The Case of Israel, 20 HOFSTRA L. REV. 321, 336 (1991). 121. See Parks, supra note 75, at 7 (listing American uses of anticipatory self-defense in the attempted killing of foreign leaders dating back to 1804). 122. Id. at 8; see also Schmitt, supra note 73, at 646−50 (arguing that preemptive selfdefense is permitted if a threat to a country is imminent or likely). 123. See Turner, supra note 70, at 800 (stating that necessity and proportionality are prerequisites to any form of self-defense); see also Robert J. Beck & Anthony C. Arend, “Don’t Tread on US”: International Law and Forcible State Responses to Terrorism, 12 WIS. INT’L L.J. 153, 213 (1994) (summarizing scholarly opinion on use of self-defense as requiring proportionality, timeliness, and discrimination). 124. See Turner, supra note 70, at 800. 125. Schneider v. Kissinger, 310 F. Supp. 2d 251, 253−56 (D.D.C. 2004), aff’d, 412 F.3d 190 (D.C. Cir. 2005). 126. See ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 4−5. 127. Id. at 5. 128. Schneider, 310 F. Supp. 2d at 257.
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doctrine; that is, that the case was non-justiciable because executive branch decisions on whether to attempt to change the leadership of foreign governments “implicate policy decisions in the murky realm of foreign affairs and national security best left to the political branches.”129 The D.C. Circuit agreed.130 It is reasonable to believe that other courts would come to the same conclusion with regard to other claims of attempted targeted killings of foreign leaders. Overall then, there is no statutory, constitutional, or international law prohibiting the CIA from attempting the targeted killing of foreign leaders, at least under certain circumstances. There is, however, an explicit presidential directive that prohibits such actions. Section 2.11 of Executive Order 12,333 (“EO 12,333”), issued by President Reagan in 1981 and in effect today,131 states: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in or conspire to engage in assassination.”132 This section reflects a prohibition on “assassinations” first promulgated by President Ford in 1976133 and later adopted by President Carter in 1978.134 The term “assassination,” though, is not defined in the executive order,135 rendering the prohibition “replete with uncertainty.”136 In addition, executive orders are not law. Rather, they are published presidential directives to personnel of the executive branch, intended to effect action by those personnel.137 “The executive branch . . . simply has no power to make the law; that
129. Id. at 258. 130. Schneider v. Kissinger, 412 F.3d 190, 198 (D.C. Cir. 2005) (“[T]his case raises political questions committed to the political branches and therefore is beyond the jurisdiction of the courts.”). 131. Parker & Naccarato, supra note 77, at 42; Schmitt, supra note 73, at 652. 132. Exec. Order No. 12,333 § 2.11, 3 C.F.R. 200, 213 (1982). EO 12,333 also precludes the Agency from hiring someone else to engage in a targeted killing, even if that person is unaware of the Agency’s involvement. See id. § 2.12 (“No element of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”). 133. Exec. Order 11,905 § 5(g), 3 C.F.R. 90, 101 (1977) (“No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”). President Ford issued such a prohibition in reaction to the Church Report’s statement that assassinations conflicted with American morals and principles. Addicott, supra note 77, at 756. It is the first time that a President had ever enacted such a prohibition. Id.; Parks, supra note 75, at 4. However, CIA directors had issued memoranda to Agency personnel in 1972 and 1973 stating that Agency personnel were not to engage in assassinations. Schmitt, supra note 73, at 661. 134. Exec. Order 12,036 § 2-305, 3 C.F.R. 112, 129 (1979) (“No person employed by or acting on behalf of the Untied [sic] States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”). 135. See Exec. Order No. 12,333, 3 C.F.R. 200 (1982); Harder, supra note 77, at 38 (noting that EO 12,333 fails to define the term “assassination”); Parks, supra note 75, at 4 (“Neither Executive Order 12333 nor its predecessors defines the term ‘assassination.’”). 136. Schmitt, supra note 73, at 652; see also Harder, supra note 77, at 38 (noting that the failure of EO 12,333 to define the term assassination “prevented the United States from following legal policy [of killing Saddam Hussein] that could have saved American lives” during the Gulf War); Schmitt, supra note 73, at 679 (describing EO 12,333 and stating that “[s]etting forth a prohibition without clearly delineating what it means is arguably more damaging than having no order at all” since it opens up the possibility of abuse or “has the potential to inhibit valid operations out of fear that the ban might be violated”). 137. KENNETH R. MAYER, WITH THE STROKE OF A PEN: EXECUTIVE ORDERS AND
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power rests exclusively with Congress.”138 Based on this, courts generally find executive orders to be unenforceable.139 Courts will enforce executive orders only if two criteria are met. First, the executive order must have been issued “pursuant to a statutory mandate or delegation of authority from Congress.”140 Second, the order must indicate a clear intention by the President to create a private right of action.141 Based on these requirements, section 2.11 of EO 12,333, which prohibits “assassinations,” is clearly unenforceable in a court of law. Section 2.11’s prohibition on “assassinations” does not stem from a congressional mandate or delegation of authority since Congress has never passed a law precluding such targeted killings.142 Rather, section 2.11 reflects a congressional abdication on the subject, which Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan took upon themselves to address pursuant to their own presidential authority.143 Further, EO 12,333 does not contemplate a private right of action. Indeed, the executive order expressly states that it “is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity, by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.”144 EO 12,333 therefore clearly did PRESIDENTIAL POWER 4, 34 (2001); see also Exec. Order No. 13,470 § 3.7(c), 73 Fed. Reg. 45,325, 45,341 (stating that “[t]his order is intended only to improve the internal management of the executive branch”). Executive orders have been issued by every President since the founding of this country. MAYER, supra, at 4, 34; Parker & Naccarato, supra note 77, at 55. By statute, all executive orders are published in the Federal Register “except those not having general applicability and legal effect or effective only against Federal agencies or persons in their capacity as officers, agents, or employees thereof.” 44 U.S.C. § 1505(a)(1) (2000). 138. U.S. Dep’t of Health & Human Servs. v. Fed. Labor Relations Auth., 844 F.2d 1087, 1095 (4th Cir. 1988); see also Addicott, supra note 77, at 757 (noting that “executive orders are policy and not law”). 139. Facchiano Constr. Co. v. U.S. Dep’t of Labor, 987 F.2d 206, 210 (3d Cir. 1993) (“Generally, there is no private right of action to enforce obligations imposed on executive branch officials by executive orders.”). 140. Indep. Meat Packers Ass’n v. Butz, 526 F.2d 228, 234 (8th Cir. 1975); see also U.S. Dep’t of Health & Human Servs., 844 F.2d at 1096 (stating that an executive order has the effect of a statute when the order is issued “pursuant to statutory mandate or a delegation from Congress of lawmaking authority”); In re Surface Mining Regulation Litig., 627 F.2d 1346, 1357 (D.C. Cir. 1980) (noting that executive orders are enforceable only when they have a “specific foundation in Congressional action”). 141. MAYER, supra note 137, at 59; Chen Zhou Chai v. Carroll, 48 F.3d 1331, 1339 (4th Cir. 1995) (“An executive order issued as part of a statutory delegation of power, or as part of the process of carrying out a statute, may create enforceable private rights, but only if the statute or the order clearly intended to create such a right.”), superseded by statute as recognized in Yong Hao Chen v. INS, 195 F.3d 198 (4th Cir. 1999); Acevedo v. Nassau County, 500 F.2d 1078, 1084 n.7 (2d Cir. 1974) (declining to find a private right of action to enforce an executive order when such a right is not explicit in the order). 142. See supra note 88 and accompanying text. 143. See supra notes 131−34 and accompanying text. 144. Exec. Order No. 13,470 § 3.7(c), 73 Fed. Reg. 45,325, 45,341. This reflects amended language issued by President Bush in 2008. Id. However, the original language of EO 12,333 contained similar limitations. See Exec. Order No. 12,333 § 3.5, 3 C.F.R. 200, 216 (1982) (providing that nothing contained in the Order “or in any procedures promulgated hereunder is intended to confer any substantive or procedural right or privilege on any person or organization”).
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not intend to create a private right of action.145 Having failed both requirements for enforceability in a court of law, EO 12,333 is not judicially enforceable.146 Most importantly, however, to paraphrase the Bible: what the President giveth, the President can taketh away; or more accurately, what the President taketh away, the President can giveth back. It is a presidential directive (EO 12,333) which precludes the CIA from engaging in targeted killings. Therefore, a subsequent presidential directive can amend that restriction and authorize targeted killings, either entirely or in limited circumstances.147 This would not only permit such actions, but as a practical matter would immunize the killer from criminal or civil liability (assuming the targeted killing did not violate any other U.S. law, such as section 1116).148 Further, even though EO 12,333’s prohibition on targeted killings was publicly announced, any change or rescission of that prohibition could be done in secret.149 It is likely, though,
145. See Michigan v. Thomas, 805 F.2d 176, 187 (6th Cir. 1986) (holding that no private right of action exists for an executive order that expressly states that the order “is not intended to create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law by a party against the United States, its agencies, its officers or any person”). 146. See Zhang v. Slattery, 55 F.3d 732, 748 (2d Cir. 1995) (holding that Executive Order 12,711 did not create a private right of action as it stemmed from no specific Congressional authority and contained no indication of an intention to create a private right of action), superseded by statute as recognized in Yong Hao Chen, 195 F.3d at 201; Haitian Refugee Ctr., Inc. v. Baker, 953 F.2d 1498, 1510–11 (11th Cir. 1992) (finding no private right of action for Executive Order 12,324, when the language of that order indicated that no private civil action was contemplated); Farkas v. Texas Instruments Inc., 375 F.2d 629, 632−33 (5th Cir. 1967) (finding no private right of action where the history and language of the executive order indicated that private civil action was not contemplated). The D.C. Circuit case of United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. v. Reagan, 738 F.2d 1375 (D.C. Cir. 1984) is inapposite. Though the D.C. Circuit did consider whether plaintiffs there had sufficient injury in fact to raise a claim based on EO 12,333, deciding in the end that they did not, the court never considered the question of whether EO 12,333 permits a private right of action. See id. 147. Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 719−20 (“[An executive order] can be changed or revoked by the President, unlike a statute. Thus, if the President could prohibit political assassination, he could also allow it—by lifting that ban—unless other legal authorities or political considerations forbid him from doing so.” (footnotes omitted)); Pickard, supra note 80, at 27 (noting that EO 12,333 “is not law and can be unilaterally revoked by the President”); see also Addicott, supra note 77, at 784 (“Those who think that the United States is somehow restricted by Executive Order 12,333 from targeting terrorists or rogue nations that threaten to conduct terrorist acts are mistaken.”); Turner, supra note 70, at 809. This concept is further enforced by the Fifth Function of the National Security Act, which permits the CIA to engage in any activity authorized by the President so long as it does not violate the Constitution or any statute. See discussion supra note 16. 148. Turner, supra note 70, at 809. An executive order cannot authorize an action that violates a statute or the Constitution. Marks v. Cent. Intelligence Agency, 590 F.2d 997, 1003 (D.C. Cir. 1978) (“Of course, an executive order cannot supersede a statute.”); MAYER, supra note 137, at 35−36. 149. Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 720 n.377, 725−26. Given the sensitivity of the topic, it is unlikely that any President would publicly announce a revocation of, or exception to, the ban. This is especially true if the exception to the ban was limited to particular individuals or categories of people, since any public announcement would alert those potential targets, and would preclude the United States from any future plausible deniability.
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that the President would notify the congressional intelligence oversight committees of such activities, at least in a classified setting.150 Indeed, any attempted targeted killing by the CIA would almost certainly be considered a “covert action,” and therefore trigger congressional notification as a matter of law.151 Applying all of the above analysis to the CIA’s attempted targeted killings of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba in the early 1960s, a compelling argument can be made that the plots against both leaders were entirely legal. Constitutional protections did not and do not extend to such foreigners overseas.152 Section 1116 did not exist in the early 1960s, but would have been inapplicable anyway, as the targeted killings were to take place within each leader’s home country.153 EO 12,333 and its predecessor executive orders also did not exist in the 1960s,154 and, in any case, could have been revoked by presidential directive and congressional notice.155 The only legal limit, then, to the attempted killings of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba could possibly stem from the international law concepts of the use of force and anticipatory self-defense, which were well in place in the 1960s.156 As the Schneider case indicates, courts would probably preclude such claims under the political question doctrine.157 However, if a court chose to consider such a claim, the CIA’s plots would pass this international law hurdle if, as noted above, a showing could be made that each leader posed a legitimate threat to U.S. national security or U.S. citizens, and if the targeted killing of the leader was necessary and proportional.158 Fidel Castro fulfilled these requirements in the early 1960s. Soon after seizing power in Cuba in January 1959,159 Castro began advocating armed struggle in Latin America, seeking to export revolution throughout the continent and the Caribbean.160 The United States believed that Cuba was encouraging and assisting violent revolution in virtually every country in Latin America, including assisting revolutionaries in Argentina, smuggling guerillas into Bolivia, plotting targeted killings in Colombia, shipping weapons to Venezuela, and initiating student riots in Puerto Rico.161 Castro’s
150. See Banks & Raven-Hansen, supra note 23, at 726−29; Pickard, supra note 80, at 34. 151. See 50 U.S.C. § 413b (Supp. V 2005). A “covert action” is defined as “an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly. . . .” Id. § 413b(e). A targeted killing would almost certainly fall in this category. The executive branch is required to keep the Congressional intelligence oversight committees “fully and currently informed” of covert action operations. Id. § 413b(b). 152. See supra notes 94−96 and accompanying text. Again, the only exception is with regard to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States maintains “complete and total control.” See supra note 96. 153. See supra notes 81−88 and accompanying text. 154. See supra note 132. 155. See supra note 147 and accompanying text. As an aside, the Assassinations Report did not find that any President authorized any of the attempted killings. ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 7. 156. See supra notes 105−11 and accompanying text. 157. See supra notes 125−30 and accompanying text. 158. See supra notes 122−23 and accompanying text. 159. Turner, supra note 70, at 796 n.55. 160. See CARLA ANNE ROBBINS, THE CUBAN THREAT 27, 57, 90, 131 (1983). 161. Id. at 3, 57.
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Cuba was also viewed as a launching point for Soviet intervention in the Western Hemisphere.162 By the early 1960s, thousands of Soviet specialists and advisors had entered Cuba, Soviet ships carrying military weapons were arriving almost daily at Cuban ports, and Cuban military sites were undergoing extensive construction.163 As President John F. Kennedy stated: “The American people are not complacent about Iron Curtain tanks and planes less than ninety miles from their shore.”164 Castro’s willingness to allow the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles on the Cuban island represented the apex of this threat to the United States.165 Castro was seen as such a threat that the United States sent 23,000 troops to the Dominican Republic to stop that country from being taken over by what the United States government called “Castro Communists;”166 trained, supported, and equipped an invasion of Cuba in April 1961 via the Bay of Pigs;167 and risked nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis.168 The Assassinations Report stated that Castro only posed physical danger to the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis.169 However, it seems abundantly clear that he constituted a considerable threat to the national security of the United States throughout the early 1960s, and that his death was viewed as necessary and proportional to the threat. Thus, Castro’s activities warranted acts of self-defense by the United States, including an attempted targeted killing.170 The CIA’s attempt to end the life of Patrice Lumumba is admittedly more difficult to justify legally. Nonetheless, an argument can still be made that he too posed a legitimate threat to the national security of the United States, even though the Assassinations Report found that he never posed any physical danger to the United States.171 Lumumba rose to power in the summer of 1960, when Congo was declaring its independence from Belgium.172 He briefly served as Premier of the new country before being ousted and joining the opposition party, where he continuously posed a threat to return to power.173 He was killed in early 1961 by forces not affiliated with the United States.174
162. See id. at 103−04; Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Speech to the United Nations Security Council (Oct. 23, 1962), in 8 THE PAPERS OF ADLAI E. STEVENSON 309, 319 (Walter Johnson ed., 1979) [hereinafter Stevenson Speech] (“The crucial fact is that Cuba has given the Soviet Union a bridgehead and staging area in this hemisphere—that it has invited an extra-continental, anti-democratic and expansionist power into the bosom of the American family—that it has made itself an accomplice in the communist enterprise of world domination.”). 163. ROBBINS, supra note 160, at 105. 164. Id. at 103. 165. Stevenson Speech, supra note 162, at 309 (noting that the placing of nuclear missiles on Cuba “constitutes a threat to the peace of this hemisphere” and “to the peace of the world”). 166. ROBBINS, supra note 160, at 1. 167. Id. at 101−02. 168. Id. at 105−10; Stevenson Speech, supra note 162 (urging the United Nations Security Council to take action against Cuba during the Cuban Missile crisis). 169. ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 258. 170. See Turner, supra note 70, at 797. 171. ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 258. 172. Id. at 13. 173. Id. at 13−14, 16, 18. 174. Id. at 4.
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The CIA initiated plans to kill Lumumba soon after he became Premier.175 The concern arose from Lumumba’s perceived strong affiliation with the Soviet Union, which provided him advisors as well as considerable military aid and equipment.176 At the time, “American officials believed the basic premise of Cold War ideology: the threat of aggressive, monolithic international communism . . . . They knew the Congo would be a valuable prize for the communists due to its size, central location in Africa, and vast mineral wealth.”177 There was fear that “a Communist victory in this large, centrally located state could create a base for the subversion of Central Africa.”178 Based on this, Acting Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon considered Lumumba “dangerous to the peace and safety of the world,”179 while CIA Director Allen Dulles regarded Lumumba as “a grave danger.”180 Numerous members of Congress agreed.181 So concerned was the United States about Lumumba that it positioned an attack carrier off the coast of Congo, and drew up contingency plans for a limited war.182 While the United States’ perception of Lumumba may have been excessive and even misguided,183 the fact remained that he threatened to lead the largest country in Africa into the Soviet fold. Such fears might seem overly alarmist now with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and may have seemed exaggerated to the Church Committee examining the CIA’s attempted killing of Lumumba more than a decade after the fact. The truth, however, is that the communist threat in Africa in the early 1960s was both real and considerable. The United States fervently believed that its way of life was under attack and that the only way to prevent a communist takeover of the world was to control Soviet influence anywhere it appeared. The Congo was not any African country–due to its size and location, it represented a critical area to prevent the communist infiltration of Africa that could spread beyond that continent and threaten
175. See id. at 4, 13−14. 176. See id. at 14, 62; CENT. INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, CURRENT INTELLIGENCE STAFF STUDY: SOVIET POLICY TOWARD THE UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES 102 (1961), available at http://www.foia.cia.gov (type “Soviet Policy Toward the Undeveloped Countries” in the Search Declassified Docs browser; then click on “SOVIET POLICY TOWARD THE UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES (XIII–61*) in the results) (noting that the Soviet Union provided Lumumba with “relief supplies, technicians, and advisers” and promised “almost unlimited economic aid”); STEPHEN R. WEISSMAN, AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE CONGO 1960–1964, at 81, 262 (1974). 177. WEISSMAN, supra note 176, at 52; see also ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 256 (discussing how the CIA’s assassination plots were planned in the depths of the Cold War, when “our country faced a monolithic enemy in Communism”). 178. WEISSMAN, supra note 176, at 53; see also ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 18 n.4 (noting the fear expressed by the Chief of CIA’s Africa division that Soviet control of the Congo would create a domino effect in Africa). 179. ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 58. 180. Id. at 62. Even after being ousted from power, Lumumba was considered extremely dangerous due to his ability to influence the Congolese people. As Secretary Dillon noted, were Lumumba given the chance to talk to the Congolese Army, “he probably would have had them in the palm of his hand in five minutes.” Id. at 63. 181. WEISSMAN, supra note 176, at 140. 182. Id. at 279. 183. See generally id. at 257−90 (discussing how the United States misunderstood Lumumba and his politics).
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the national security of the United States. And Lumumba was not any African leader— his affiliation with the Soviet Union, as well as his magnetic personality,184 led the United States to believe that his leadership of the Congo threatened the United States’ security concerns for the entire African continent. Just as many scholars have argued that a targeted killing of Saddam Hussein before the invasion of Iraq was justified due to his threat to the Middle East,185 so too could the United States have deemed an attempted killing of Lumumba as necessary and proportional in order to prevent a perceived Soviet take-over of Africa. Thus, in 1973, the CIA could engage in targeted killings of foreign leaders so long as the target posed a threat to U.S. citizens or U.S. national security, the action was proportional and necessary (per international law), and the attempt took place within the leader’s own country (section 1116). The only change since 1973 has been the proscription contained in EO 12,333, which could be amended or reversed if the President issued a specific directive and provided notice to the congressional intelligence oversight committees.186 IV. ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE OF AMERICANS The Family Jewels describe two CIA operations involving the electronic surveillance of Americans in the United States. In neither operation did the CIA seek or acquire a warrant. In one operation, the CIA listened to radio telephone calls between alleged drug traffickers in the United States and South America.187 The surveillance ended after four months, when the CIA’s General Counsel rendered an opinion that the activity was illegal.188 A more notorious CIA electronic surveillance operation was Project Mockingbird, which involved tapping the Washington, D.C. telephones of two U.S. newspaper reporters in 1963.189 The operation was done with the support of the telephone company,190 and with the apparent knowledge and consent of the Attorney General.191 The reporters had published extensive news articles that contained highly classified CIA information.192 The CIA tapped the reporters’ phones to identify the sources of that classified information, in order to prevent such leaks from continuing.193 The operation culminated in the identification of dozens and dozens of the reporters’ sources, including a White House staffer, an Assistant
184. ASSASSINATIONS REPORT, supra note 42, at 63. 185. See, e.g., Turner, supra note 70, at 789 n.12, 807 (noting Professor Turner’s own views as well as that of “Pentagon ‘super-lawyer’” W. Hays Parks that killing Saddam Hussein would have been justified). 186. For additional discussion on the legality of targeted killings today, see Banks & RavenHansen, supra note 23, at 749; Parks, supra note 75; Pickard, supra note 80, at 34–35; Schmitt, supra note 73, at 675; Turner, supra note 70, at 807–08. 187. See FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00537. 188. See id. at 00331, 00534–35, 00537–39. 189. See id. at 00021, 00457. 190. See id. at 00021. 191. See id. at 00021; ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 164. 192. FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00021. 193. See id.
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Attorney General, twenty-one congressional staffers, six Members of Congress, and twelve Senators.194 The question of whether the United States government is permitted to conduct this type of warrantless electronic surveillance of Americans has been an on-going debate for forty years, and remains unresolved.195 The tension stems from two competing facets of the United States Constitution. The Fourth Amendment prohibits the United States government from searching the property of an American absent a warrant.196 In juxtaposition is what is referred to as the inherent constitutional authority of the President to engage in foreign affairs.197 This tension is aided by the fact that the Framers of the Constitution did not, and could not, foresee the concept of electronic surveillance (as there were no telephones in 1776, much less a means to tap them), and therefore could not even contemplate the problems such surveillance would place on the Fourth Amendment in the area of national security.198 The Supreme Court first addressed the constitutionality of electronic surveillance in 1967 when it held that warrantless searches in a domestic criminal context generally were “per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment . . . .”199 However, the Court explicitly demurred as to whether a warrant would be required for electronic surveillance “in a situation involving the national security. . . .”200 The Court addressed that latter issue in 1972, in analyzing a warrantless wiretap of three individuals accused of conspiring to destroy a CIA office in Michigan.201 Though the Court found that the actions of the government there violated the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant, it was cautious to indicate that its opinion “involves only the domestic aspects of national security. We have not addressed, and express no opinion as to, the issues which may be involved with respect to activities of foreign powers or their agents.”202
194. Id. 195. See Warrantless Surveillance and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance: The Role of Checks and Balances in Protecting Americans’ Privacy Rights (Part I): Hearing Before the H. Comm. of the Judiciary, 110th Cong. 25 (2007) [hereinafter Warrantless Surveillance] (prepared statement of Robert F. Turner) (describing the decades-long debate over warrantless electronic surveillance). 196. U.S. CONST. amend. IV. 197. See Constitutional Limitations on Domestic Surveillance: Hearing on Warrantless Surveillance and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Before the H. Comm. of the Judiciary, 110th Cong. 76 (2007) [hereinafter Constitutional Limitations] (prepared statement of Louis Fisher) (explaining the “inherent authority” concept); Warrantless Surveillance, supra note 195, at 37–43 (noting that this inherent authority stems from the powers provided the president by Article II of the Constitution). 198. William C. Banks, The Death of FISA, 91 MINN. L. REV. 1209, 1221 (2007). 199. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 357 (1967) (footnotes omitted); see also Warrantless Surveillance, supra note 195, at 40 (noting that Katz was the first Supreme Court case to consider the issue of electronic surveillance). 200. Katz, 389 U.S. at 358 n.23. 201. See United States v. U.S. Dist. Court for the E. Dist. of Mich. (Keith), 407 U.S. 297 (1972). 202. Id. at 321–22 (footnote omitted); see also id. at 308–09 (emphasizing that the opinion applied only to domestic matters and “requires no judgment on the scope of the President’s surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country”).
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The Supreme Court has yet to address this last issue regarding foreign national security concerns. The Fourth Circuit, however, considered this issue in the wellknown case of United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, an espionage case in which Truong and others stood accused of transmitting classified information to representatives of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.203 In investigating the case, and seeking to discover the scope and sources of the espionage, the United States government placed a tap on Truong’s phone, and bugged his apartment, with Attorney General approval but without seeking a warrant from a court.204 The Fourth Circuit upheld the warrantless tap and bug under the Fourth Amendment, noting that thwarting overseas threats requires speed and secrecy; requiring a warrant “would add a procedural hurdle” that would reduce the President’s ability to act quickly and would risk exposure.205 The court also recognized that the executive branch possesses “unparalleled expertise” in the arena of foreign affairs, which the courts do not have and should not second-guess.206 Finally, and most importantly, the court recognized that the executive branch is “constitutionally designated as the pre-eminent authority in foreign affairs” and therefore separation of powers requires the courts “to acknowledge the principal responsibility of the President for foreign affairs and concomitantly for foreign intelligence surveillance.”207 The Truong court, however, placed some limits on warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance. The target of the surveillance must be a foreign power, or an agent or collaborator of a foreign power; the surveillance must be primarily for foreign intelligence purposes; and the surveillance must be reasonable.208 Every other lower court that considered the matter has come to the same conclusion and has upheld the executive branch’s ability to conduct warrantless electronic searches in the United States so long as there is Attorney General approval and the purpose of the surveillance is to acquire foreign intelligence information.209 The
203. 629 F.2d 908 (4th Cir. 1980). 204. Id. at 912. 205. Id. at 913. 206. Id. at 913–14. 207. Id. at 914. 208. Id. at 915–16. 209. See United States v. Buck, 548 F.2d 871, 875 (9th Cir. 1977) (“Foreign security wiretaps are a recognized exception to the general warrant requirement . . . .”); United States v. Butenko, 494 F.2d 593, 605 (3d Cir. 1974) (upholding a warrantless tap as reasonable under the Fourth Amendment since the tap was “‘solely for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence information’”); United States v. Brown, 484 F.2d 418, 426 (5th Cir. 1973) (permitting the use of evidence obtained from a warrantless wiretap, where the wiretap was for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence, due to “the President’s constitutional duty to act for the United States in the field of foreign relations, and his inherent power to protect national security in the context of foreign affairs”); United States v. Clay, 430 F.2d 165, 171–72 (5th Cir. 1970) , rev’d on other grounds, 403 U.S. 698 (1971) (allowing information from a warrantless tap of a former boxing champion since the purpose of the tap was for “foreign intelligence surveillance”); see also In re Sealed Case, 310 F.3d 717, 742 (FISA Ct. Rev. 2002) (“The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.”); Warrantless Surveillance, supra note 195, at 24 (“Since Keith, every single Federal court of appeals to decide the issue has agreed the President has independent constitutional power to [collect
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conduct of such warrantless electronic surveillance for this purpose not only precludes any allegation of constitutional violation, but, being based on the constitutional power of the President, also would appear to vitiate any claim that such activities violate federal statutes that prohibit warrantless electronic surveillance.210 The law in this area changed in 1978 with passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),211 which was meant to place the constitutional debate on hold.212 FISA represented a contentious and difficult compromise regarding the collection of foreign intelligence.213 The Supreme Court had left the door open regarding warrantless wiretaps for foreign intelligence purposes, and the lower courts had uniformly permitted the government to go through that door. However, the executive branch worried that the Supreme Court might decide to take up the matter and issue a less favorable ruling.214 Furthermore, numerous lawsuits had been filed challenging warrantless electronic surveillance, and most telephone companies and government agencies were becoming reluctant to engage in such surveillance without a court order.215 FISA thus sought to balance the public’s concern about an unfettered government with the executive branch’s need to collect foreign intelligence quickly and in secret.216 One of FISA’s main tenets was the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which is a special tribunal comprised of eleven district court judges.217 FISA authorizes judges on the FISC to issue foreign intelligence warrants if certain foreign intelligence information without a warrant].”). 210. See Butenko, 494 F.2d at 598–602 (stating that the President’s authority to gather foreign intelligence trumps section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934, which prohibits the warrantless interception of communications); Clay, 430 F.2d at 171–72 (same). The basis for this stems from the President’s constitutional power, not any “exemption” language in section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934. Admittedly, in the 1970s, section 605 did contain a provision that nothing contained in that act “shall limit the constitutional power of the President to take such measures as he deems necessary . . . to obtain foreign intelligence information deemed essential to the security of the United States.” 18 U.S.C. § 2511(3) (1974). However, the Supreme Court expressly refused to interpret this language as exempting any presidential action, but rather considered it a “clear[] expression of congressional neutrality. . . . [N]othing in § 2511(3) was intended to expand or to contract or to define whatever presidential surveillance powers existed in matters affecting the national security.” United States v. U.S. Dist. Court for the E. Dist. of Mich. (Keith), 407 U.S. 297, 308 (1972) (emphasis in original). As the Court held, “the statute is not the measure of the executive authority asserted in this case. Rather, we must look to the constitutional powers of the President.” Id. As noted in the text, the President’s constitutional powers permit warrantless electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes. 211. 50 U.S.C. §§ 1801–62 (2000). 212. Ellsberg v. Mitchell, 709 F.2d 51, 66 n.66 (D.C. Cir. 1983) (noting that the enactment of FISA “seems likely to result in indefinite postponement of definitive resolution of the constitutional minima” in the area of foreign intelligence surveillance). 213. Banks, supra note 198, at 1225; Diane Carraway Piette & Jesselyn Radack, Piercing the “Historical Mists”: The People and Events Behind the Passage of FISA and the Creation of the “Wall”, 17 STAN. L. & POL’Y REV. 437, 441 (2006). 214. Piette & Radack, supra note 213, at 442–43. 215. See id. at 441–42, 448; Banks, supra note 198, at 1225. 216. ACLU v. Barr, 952 F.2d 457, 461 (D.C. Cir. 1991); Banks, supra note 198, at 1228; Piette & Radack, supra note 213, at 486. 217. See 50 U.S.C. § 1803(a) (2000).
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criteria are met.218 Requests to the FISC must be in writing and under oath, and must be approved by the Attorney General after personal review.219 For a warrant to issue, the FISC judge must find probable cause to believe that the target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, and that foreign intelligence information is being sought.220 FISC judges hold hearings in secret and ex parte, and their decisions are usually not published.221 The Attorney General may still authorize warrantless electronic surveillance, but only in very limited circumstances.222 Criminal and civil liabilities attach to violations of FISA, and a private right of action exists.223 Per its terms, FISA is considered the “exclusive means” of engaging in electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes.224 Nonetheless, a recent argument has been made that the restrictions of FISA can be superseded in certain circumstances. Supporters of this position note that portions of FISA contain the provision “unless authorized by statute.”225 Therefore, it has been argued that a statute authorizing the President to engage in wide-ranging activities designed to protect the nation in time of emergency, such as the Authorization for Use of Military Force Resolution (AUMF) enacted in the wake of 9/11,226 can serve to overcome the restrictions of FISA, including the preclusion of electronic surveillance absent a FISC-ordered warrant.227 Indeed, this was the legal argument employed by the Bush Administration to validate the National Security Agency’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”228 Critics of this
218. See id. § 1804. 219. Id. § 1804(a), (e). 220. Id. §§ 1804(a)(4), 1805. 221. Banks, supra note 198, at 1231; see § 1803(c). 222. This includes when there is an emergency during the fifteen days following a congressional declaration of war, or if the surveillance is directed solely at communications between or amongst foreign powers and “there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communications to which a United States person is a party.” §§ 1802(a)(1), 1805(f), 1811. Recent amendments to FISA also authorize the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance of persons “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” under certain criteria. Foreign Intelligence Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-261, § 101, 122 Stat. 2436(to be codified at 50 U.S.C. § 1881). 223. §§ 1809–10. 224. 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(f) (2006); Constitutional Limitations, supra note 197, at 74; Banks, supra note 198, at 1232 (quoting § 2511(2)(f)). 225. See, e.g., 50 U.S.C. § 1809 (providing for criminal sanctions for engaging “in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute”). 226. S.J. Res. 23, 115 Stat. 224 (2001). 227. See An Examination of the Call to Censure the President: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 122 (2006) (statement of Robert Turner) (noting that the AUMF trumps FISA and “clearly empowers [the President] to exercise the intelligence-gathering component of his Commander in Chief power”). 228. See Constitutional Limitations, supra note 197, at 74–75; see also Press Briefing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (Dec. 19, 2005). The program authorized the NSA to monitor—without prior FISC or other court approval—phone calls and other communications where the NSA believed one party to the communication was affiliated with Al Qaeda and outside the United States, even if it was possible that the other party resided in the United States. Id.
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argument, who are numerous, assert that the specific restrictions contained in FISA cannot be overcome by a much broader and less specific statute such as the AUMF.229 An additional, and more fundamental, argument in favor of Presidential primacy in this area asserts that FISA cannot usurp the aforementioned inherent presidential authority over foreign affairs. As Professor Robert Turner, one of the most forceful advocates of this position describes: At the core of exclusive presidential constitutional powers are the conduct of diplomacy, the collection of foreign intelligence, and the supreme command of military forces and conduct of military operations. Into these areas, Congress was not intended by the Founding Fathers to interfere. This was the consistent view of the Federalist Papers and the courts have repeatedly affirmed these principles.230
Per Professor Turner and others, including the Bush Administration, this authority provides the President with power to engage in warrantless searches, a power that cannot be taken away by Congress through FISA or any other mechanism, as a matter of constitutional law.231 The FISC Court of Review, in the only opinion it has ever issued, appears to confirm this position. The court, in discussing whether the President has the inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information, stated: “We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.”232 However, this assertion is hotly contested. Critics have asserted that the Constitution is not as clear cut as Professor Turner suggests; that the executive branch has acceded to the exclusivity of FISA when President Carter signed FISA into law in 1978; that such accession is further evidenced by the executive branch’s continued use of the FISC; and that the proper mechanism for concerns about FISA is to seek a legislative amendment.233 Congress apparently sought to resolve this issue when it amended FISA in 2008 to, inter alia, expressly provide that FISA “shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance and the interception of domestic wire, oral, or electronic communications may be conducted.”234 However, such legislation does not resolve the underlying constitutional argument.
229. See, e.g., Constitutional Limitations, supra note 197, at 75 (statement of Louis Fisher) (asserting that the broad language in the AUMF does not allow the President to have unfettered power: “If Congress after 9/11 wanted to modify [the FISA] procedures and permit the President to engage in national security surveillance without a judicial check, it knows how to amend a statute”); Piette & Radack, supra note 213, at 443 n.26 (citing numerous critics of the Administration’s argument). 230. Warrantless Surveillance, supra note 195, at 29. 231. Id. at 36 (“[T]he foundation of FISA from the start was not a lawful and binding Act of Congress at all but rather a usurpation of presidential constitutional power that as a matter of U.S. constitutional law was void . . . .”); Press Briefing, supra note 228. 232. In re Sealed Case, 310 F.2d 717, 742 (FISA Ct. Rev. 2002). 233. Constitutional Limitations, supra note 197, at 76–79; see also Warrantless Surveillance, supra note 195, at 58–59 (summarizing the critics’ argument); Piette & Radack, supra note 213, at 443 n.26 (citing numerous critics of the program). 234. Foreign Intelligence Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-261, § 102(a), 122 Stat. 2436(to be codified at 50 U.S.C. § 1812 (2000)).
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Finally, it should be noted that EO 12,333 also precludes the CIA from “engag[ing] in electronic surveillance within the United States except for the purpose of training, testing, or conducting countermeasures to hostile electronic surveillance.”235 However, as noted previously, the limitations of EO 12,333 can be countermanded by presidential directive.236 Overall then, it seems clear that at the time of the Family Jewels in 1973 the CIA could engage in electronic surveillance in the United States without a warrant but with Attorney General approval, so long as the purpose was to collect foreign intelligence.237 It is also possible that the target of the surveillance needed to be a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, as mandated by some courts.238 These requirements continue today, with the additional requirement that the Agency likely would need to acquire a warrant from the FISC or at least a presidential directive.239 Applying the above requirements to the circumstances described in the Family Jewels is not simple, especially given the lack of factual information surrounding those electronic surveillance activities and the current legal uncertainty in this area. However, Project Mockingbird—the CIA’s warrantless telephone tap of the phones of U.S. reporters to determine their sources of information—does not appear to have been legal in 1973. Though the Agency had Attorney General approval to conduct the taps,240 the surveillance does not appear to have been done to collect foreign intelligence, but rather to assess the source of leaks,241 and therefore would not comply with the basic requirements of the foreign intelligence exception. It is possible that the project could have complied with that exception, and been legal, if the CIA originally believed that the leaks were being made by or to agents of a foreign power, or that the reporters were acting as agents of a foreign power. However, there is no indication that the CIA ever held such a belief or acted for such a purpose, and therefore the project would appear to have been illegal.242 The CIA’s practice of tapping telephone conversations between alleged narcotics traffickers in the United States and in South America would seem on its face to be a more legal endeavor because such information has clear foreign intelligence value.243 The CIA’s General Counsel, however, determined the telephone taps were not done for foreign intelligence purposes. Instead, the General Counsel determined that since the “ultimate destination” of the information from the taps was to the then predecessor of
235. Exec. Order No. 12,333 § 2.4, 3 C.F.R. 200, 212 (1982). 236. See supra note 147 and accompanying text. 237. See supra note 209 and accompanying text. 238. See supra text accompanying note 208. 239. See supra text accompanying notes 211–35. 240. See supra text accompanying note 191. 241. See supra text accompanying note 193. 242. The Rockefeller Commission agreed, noting that the Agency has authority to conduct investigations of present or former employees, but “has no authority to investigate newsmen simply because they have published leaked classified information.” ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 165–66. 243. See, e.g., 21 U.S.C. § 801 (2006) (reciting Congressional concerns regarding international narcotics trafficking, including a finding that the “illegal importation . . . of controlled substances [has] a substantial and detrimental effect on the health and general welfare of the American people”).
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the Drug Enforcement Administration, “it appears to be collection for law-enforcement purposes, which . . . is barred to this Agency by statute.”244 It should be noted, however, that the mere fact that the information was provided to a law enforcement agency does not in itself preclude collection from being done for foreign intelligence purposes. Indeed, Truong involved a joint collection operation by the FBI and the CIA, where information acquired from warrantless electronic surveillance was eventually used in a criminal prosecution.245 Nonetheless, there are insufficient facts in the Family Jewels to assess the true purpose of the telephone taps of the narcotics traffickers. It is also unclear whether the CIA acquired Attorney General approval to engage in this electronic surveillance, and whether the traffickers were acting as agents of a foreign power. The CIA did end the operation because of the General Counsel’s opinion.246 V. EXAMINATION OF U.S. MAIL From the early 1950s until 1973, the CIA, with the general knowledge and consent of the United States Postal Service, engaged in a systematic operation to examine extensive amounts of mail sent between Americans and individuals in communist countries, most particularly the Soviet Union.247 The purpose of the operation was to “give United States intelligence agencies insight into Soviet intelligence activities and interests.”248 The operation took place mostly in the main post office in New York, though short-lived mail examination programs also occurred in post offices in San Francisco, Hawaii, and New Orleans.249 The mail program, known by the cryptonym SRPOINTER-HTLINGUAL,250 began with CIA engaging purely in a “mail cover” operation, in which CIA officers examined just the outside or “cover” of mail mostly received from, but also sent to, communist countries.251 The program soon progressed to opening certain select envelopes and reviewing their contents.252 If the contents were of interest, the cover of the envelope and its contents were photographed, with the copies sent to CIA headquarters and often to the FBI for review.253 The original letters would then be resealed and reinserted into the mail system for delivery.254 Generally, the evaluation of the covers and letters, to include the opening and resealing of envelopes, took place at the actual postal facilities located at the intercept points, for example New York and San Francisco, with the
244. FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00539. 245. See United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, 629 F.2d 908, 912 (4th Cir. 1980). 246. See supra text accompanying note 188. 247. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 101; see also FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00331 (discussing the CIA’s reading of Russian and other mail). 248. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 101 (quoting a report from the CIA Chief of Counterintelligence to DCIA Schlesinger). 249. Id. (noting that the San Francisco program operated during four separate periods of time of a month or less between 1969 and 1971; the Hawaii program ran from late 1954 to early 1955; the New Orleans program existed only during a three-week stretch in 1957). 250. See FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00644. 251. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 103. 252. Id. 253. Id. at 105. 254. See id.
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analysis occurring at CIA headquarters, in Langley, Virginia.255 Much of the determination as to which envelopes were to be opened stemmed from watch lists, created by the CIA or FBI, of individuals or organizations of particular interest.256 During its inception in the early 1950s, the operation involved examination of only a few letters.257 By 1959, the number had grown to 13,000 letters per year.258 The project ballooned from there. In 1972, the last full year of operation, the New York intercept facility, which was the only program in operation at the time, examined the covers of over 2.3 million items of mail coming into and going out of the United States, photographed the exterior of approximately 33,000 items, opened and analyzed 8700 items of mail, and sent 1400 items of information from the mail intercept program to the FBI.259 The CIA notified, and acquired permission from, the Chief Postal Inspector of the Postal Service, as well as other Postal Inspectors, regarding the “mail cover” portion of the project (though not the “mail opening” portion) both in writing and verbally before the operation commenced.260 Moreover, the Chief Postal Inspector who served from 1969 through the end of the Agency’s program in 1973, having been a former Agency officer, was aware of both the mail cover and mail opening portions of the Agency’s program.261 The CIA also briefed, and received approval from, many of the other Postmasters General, and at least one other Chief Postal Inspector, throughout the duration of the program, though it is unclear whether such briefings included discussion of the mail opening portion of the program.262 The CIA also briefed Attorney General John Mitchell on the program in 1971; Attorney General Mitchell fully concurred with continuing the operation.263 There is no indication that the CIA ever briefed any other high-level official in the executive branch (to include any President) on the program during its operation.264 Nor is there any indication that Congress or the courts were aware of the program, much less had a chance to evaluate
255. FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00644; ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 105, 112–15. The Church Report indicates that at least some of the mail opening operations took place at a CIA “laboratory” located at Kennedy Airport. SENATE SELECT COMM. TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES, SUPPLEMENTARY DETAILED STAFF REPORTS ON INTELLIGENCE AND THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS: BOOK III: FINAL REPORT, S. REP. NO. 94-755, at 572 (1976), available at, http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports_book3.htm [hereinafter CHURCH REPORT: BOOK III]. It is unclear whether that laboratory was affixed to, or part of, the U.S. Postal facility at that airport. 256. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 105; see also FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00644–45 (discussing the CIA’s maintenance of the watch list). 257. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 105. 258. Id. 259. Id. at 111–12. 260. Id. at 103. 261. Id. at 108–09. 262. See id. at 104–10 (discussing several Postmasters General who were briefed during the program). But see CHURCH REPORT: BOOK III, supra note 255, at 585 (stating that the CIA provided no information on the program to several of the Postmasters General who served while the program was in place). 263. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 110. 264. Id. at 111.
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its legality, until after the program had been terminated.265 The CIA never acquired a warrant for the program.266 The CIA ended the program in 1973 when the postal service refused to allow the program to continue without high-level approval, presumably from the President.267 By then, much of the take from the operation involved matters of greater interest to the FBI than to the CIA.268 With the risk of exposure high, the CIA determined the operation should be completely turned over to the FBI.269 Nonetheless, both the CIA and FBI believed that the project had provided valuable strategic and technical intelligence, as well as numerous counterintelligence leads.270 The Rockefeller Commission, without much analysis, concluded that the Agency’s mail intercept program was “unlawful,” as it had violated unspecified “United States statutes” and the National Security Act of 1947, and “raise[d] Constitutional questions.”271 A more extensive analysis of the program, however, indicates that the mail cover portion of the program was legal throughout its duration, while the mail opening portion was legal during its peak years, and may have been since its inception. A. Mail Cover Portion Three statutes impose criminal sanctions for interference with U.S. mail—18 U.S.C. §§ 1701, 1702, and 1703. Section 1701, in relevant part, imposes criminal penalties on anyone who “knowingly and willfully obstructs or retards the passage of the mail.”272 Section 1702 prohibits the opening of mail, or the taking of letters out of a post facility or out of the custody of a mail carrier “with design to obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another.”273 Section 1703 prohibits postal employees from “unlawfully” opening or delaying any correspondence, and prohibits anyone (postal employees or otherwise) from opening or destroying any mail “without authority.”274 These statutes apply to all mail in the United States, even if originating overseas.275 All of these statutory provisions have remained the same in relevant part since they were enacted in 1948.276
265. See Avery v. United States, 434 F. Supp. 937, 940 (D. Conn. 1977) (noting that the CIA never sought or obtained judicial approval for its mail operation). See generally ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 101–15 (discussing interaction of CIA officials with other government officials but notably never mentioning Congress or the courts). 266. Avery, 434 F. Supp. at 940. 267. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 20, 111. 268. FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00028 (noting that by the end of the operation it appeared that the “bulk of the take involved matters of internal security interest which was [sic] disseminated to the Federal Bureau of Investigation”). 269. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 111. 270. Id. at 112. 271. Id. at 115. 272. 18 U.S.C. § 1701 (2006). 273. Id. § 1702. 274. Id. § 1703. 275. Id. § 1692. 276. See 18 U.S.C.A. §§ 1701–1703 notes (West 2000) (indicating only nominal changes since each provision’s inception).
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Courts have consistently held that mail cover operations do not violate §§ 1701, 1702, or 1703 as long as there is a legitimate government purpose to the operation and there is “only an insubstantial delay of the mail as the result of an authorized ‘mail cover’ or ‘mail watch.’”277 In United States v. Costello, postal authorities, at the request of law enforcement officers and without seeking a warrant from a judge, recorded the names and return addresses that appeared on mail addressed to the defendant, who was believed to be engaged in tax evasion.278 The Second Circuit held that this mail cover operation in Costello did not violate §§ 1701, 1702, or 1703, as any delay in delivery of the defendant’s mail was minimal (§ 1701), the defendant’s letters were never removed from the post office (§ 1702), and any delay had a lawful purpose (§ 1703).279 The same should be true for the CIA’s mail cover program. There is no indication that the CIA’s review of the cover of mail coming in from, and going out to, the Soviet Union and other communist countries resulted in anything more than minimal delay of that mail.280 When only the covers of letters were analyzed, the letters never left the post office, as the CIA ran this operation in the postal facilities.281 It is also clear that there was a lawful government purpose to the review of the mail covers. The National Security Act authorizes the CIA to collect foreign intelligence information,282 which would clearly include information on suspected communist intelligence operations.283 Thus, there is no basis to find any criminal violation from the CIA’s mail cover program.284 There is also no basis for civil liability. There is no civil statute precluding mail cover operations, and courts are uniform in holding that §§ 1701–1703 do not contain a private right of action, and therefore are unenforceable in a civil context.285 Courts
277. United States v. Upshaw, 895 F.2d 109, 110–111 (3d Cir. 1990) (summarizing the case law of mail cover). 278. 255 F.2d 876, 881 (2d Cir. 1958). 279. Id. at 881–82. 280. See ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 101–15 (discussing the mail cover program without suggesting that anything more than a minimal delay was caused). The Church Commission noted that even the mail opening portion of the operation resulted in an average delay of only one day. CHURCH REPORT: BOOK III, supra note 255, at 572. 281. See ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 105. 282. See supra note 21. 283. See infra text accompanying notes 329–30 for additional discussion of the lawful government purpose of the Agency’s mail operation. 284. See Lustiger v. United States, 386 F.2d 132, 139 (9th Cir. 1968) (stating that the government does not violate § 1703 when it places a “mail watch” on incoming mail to an individual believed to be involved in an illegal scheme to sell land in Arizona through misleading brochures sent through the mail); Cohen v. United States, 378 F.2d 751, 759 (9th Cir. 1967) (finding no violation of §§ 1701–1703 where the government placed a mail cover on the incoming mail of an individual suspected of conducting an illegal gambling business); United States v. Costello, 255 F.2d 876, 881 (2d Cir. 1958) (finding no violation of §§ 1701– 1703 for a mail cover operation). 285. See Woods v. McGuire, 954 F.2d 388, 391 (6th Cir. 1992) (“[F]ederal courts uniformly have held that there is no private right of action under [§ 1703].”); Contemporary Mission, Inc. v. U.S. Postal Serv., 648 F.2d 97, 103 n.7 (2d Cir. 1981) (holding that there is no private cause of action for §§ 1701–1703); United States ex rel. Pope v. Bruckno, 330 F. Supp. 793, 795
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have also consistently found that mail cover operations do not violate the Constitution.286 Anyone who uses the United States postal service is clearly aware that the outside of their mail will be seen by others, and in particular by government officials. At the very least, “persons who sent or received mail knew or ought to have known that postal employees must examine the outside of the mail in order to deliver it.”287 Furthermore, there is knowledge that at least incoming international mail is subject to inspection by United States law enforcement. As Justice Friendly has stated: “it is difficult to see how there can be any [reasonable expectation of privacy] with respect to the outsides of incoming international mails which are subject to inspection and even in some cases to opening in aid of the enforcement of the customs laws.”288 Indeed, the courts have analogized the issue to telephone calls: Just as courts have held that a person’s expectations of privacy concerning telephone communication attach only to the Contents of the conversation and not to the fact the communication was made, so also the courts have held that a person may reasonably expect privacy only with respect to the contents of an envelope and Not with respect to information knowingly exposed to third parties on the envelope’s exterior.289
Nonetheless, the Rockefeller Commission found the CIA’s cover operation to be illegal, stating that mail cover operations “are legal when carried out in compliance with postal regulations on a limited and selective basis involving matters of national security. The [CIA’s mail cover program] did not meet these criteria.”290 However, there is no statutory requirement that mail cover operations be “limited and selective” or that they involve “national security.” Sections 1701, 1702, and 1703 do not contain such requirements, no court has placed such restrictions on mail cover operations, and courts have certainly upheld mail cover operations that do not contain such limitations (especially the requirement of a national security facet).291
(E.D. Pa. 1971) (finding no private right of action under § 1702). 286. See United States v. Mayer, 490 F.3d 1129, 1137 (9th Cir. 2007) (finding “no constitutional violation” in a mail cover operation “[b]ecause a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in the outside of his mail . . .”); United States v. Huie, 593 F.2d 14, 14– 15 (5th Cir. 1979) (“[T]he courts uniformly have upheld the constitutionality of mail covers.”); United States v. Choate, 576 F.2d 165, 173–83 (9th Cir. 1978) (determining that a mail operation undertaken for legitimate government purposes does not violate the First, Fourth, or Ninth Amendments to the Constitution); United States v. Bianco, 534 F.2d 501, 508 (2d Cir. 1976) (“[T]he reading of the outside of an envelope does not violate any constitutional principles.”). 287. Vreeken v. Davis, 718 F.2d 343, 348 (10th Cir. 1983), overruled on other grounds by Grantham v. Ohio Cas. Co., 97 F.3d 434, 435 (10th Cir. 1996). 288. United States v. Leonard, 524 F.2d 1076, 1087 (2d Cir. 1975). 289. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press v. Am. Tel. & Tel. Co., 593 F.2d 1030, 1056–57 (D.C. Cir. 1978) (capitalization in original). 290. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 115; see also id. at 64 (stating that courts had held that examination of envelopes is legal if conducted within the regulations of the postal office and the mail is not unreasonably delayed). 291. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1701–1703 (2006); supra notes 284–87 (citing cases containing no such restrictions).
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The Rockefeller Report did not provide any specifics regarding how the Agency’s mail cover operation purportedly violated postal regulations. However, other than perhaps a minor technical violation, the operation appears to have complied with the regulations then in place. In 1973, a Chief Postal Inspector could order a mail cover if he or she received a written request from a “law enforcement agency” articulating reasonable grounds as to why a mail cover “is necessary to . . . protect the national security . . . .”292 The regulations define a “law enforcement agency” as a federal, state, or local government authority “one of whose functions is to investigate the commission or attempted commission of acts constituting a crime.”293 The Chief Postal Inspector must approve any mail cover in effect for more than 120 days,294 but there is no restriction on the breadth of the operation.295 There is also no requirement that the mail cover be conducted by postal employees.296 The CIA’s mail cover operation generally complied with all of these postal regulations. As noted above, the CIA sent a written request to the Chief Postal Inspector for the mail cover operation before its initiation.297 Though that request does not appear available for public view, given the concerns about the Soviet and communist threat at the time, it is easy to believe that the CIA request demonstrated reasonable grounds to believe that the mail cover operation was needed to protect national security. The CIA request was approved.298 The CIA then continued to brief subsequent Chief Postal Inspectors, as well as Postmasters General, who outrank Chief Postal Inspectors, on at least the mail cover operation throughout the duration of the program.299 All of these individuals consistently approved the program.300 The main problem, of course, is that the CIA is not now, and was not then, a “law enforcement agency” as that term was defined by the postal regulations; that is, an entity “one of whose functions is to investigate the commission or attempted commission of acts constituting a crime.”301 Indeed, as discussed above, the CIA’s
292. 39 C.F.R. § 233.2(d)(2)(ii) (1975). On March 11, 1975, the Postal Service outlined new regulations for mail covers. See Inspection Service Authority, 39 Fed. Reg. 11,579 (Mar. 11, 1975). These new regulations effectively combined portions of the Postal Service Manual and the Postal Manual that had dealt with mail covers. Id. at 11,579. However, the new regulations made “no substantial changes” to the prior regulations, which had been in place since 1965. Id.; see also United States v. Choate, 422 F. Supp. 261, 263 (C.D. Cal. 1976), rev’d on other grounds, 576 F.2d 165 (9th Cir. 1978) (en banc) (noting that the postal regulations outlining mail covers “were first promulgated on June 17, 1965; they were republished without substantial change in March 1975” as 39 C.F.R. § 233.2 (footnote omitted)). The regulations note that they constitute the “sole authority and procedure for initiating, processing, placing and using mail covers.” 39 C.F.R. § 233.2(b). 293. 39 C.F.R. § 233.2(c)(4). 294. Id. § 233.2(f)(5). 295. See generally 39 C.F.R. § 233.2 (outlining restrictions and requirements for mail cover operations, but providing no limit on the number of individuals who could fall within a mail cover). 296. See generally id. 297. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 103. 298. See id. 299. See supra text accompanying notes 257–62. 300. See supra text accompanying notes 257–62. 301. 39 C.F.R. § 233.2(c)(4) (1975).
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charter expressly precludes it from operating as a law enforcement entity.302 Nonetheless, it is possible that the Postmasters General and the Chief Postal Inspectors deemed the CIA to fall within the definition of the term. The regulations expressly state that “[t]he Chief Postal Inspector’s determination in all matters concerning mail covers shall be final and conclusive . . . .”303 Further, the Postal Service’s interpretation of its own regulations “becomes of controlling weight unless it is plainly erroneous or inconsistent . . . .”304 Given the initial and then continuous approval of the CIA’s cover program by Chief Postal Inspectors and Postmasters General,305 it would appear that they made a “final and conclusive” determination that the CIA’s cover program filled the requirements of the postal regulations. In addition, the Postmaster General appears to have the authority to waive any substantive provision of the postal regulations.306 Thus, to the extent that the CIA’s mail cover program could be interpreted as marginally inconsistent with the postal service’s regulations, the Postmasters General waived such regulations by consistently and continuously approving the Agency’s program.307 Current postal regulations have resolved any uncertainty in this area by explicitly expanding the definition of “law enforcement agency” to include any federal, state or local government authority, “one of whose functions is to . . . [p]rotect the national security.”308 The phrase “protection of the national security” is then defined as protecting the United States from “actual or potential threats to its security by a foreign power or its agents” via an attack, sabotage, international terrorism, or clandestine intelligence activities.309 It seems clear that the CIA would fall within this definition.
302. See supra text accompanying notes 19–20. 303. 39 C.F.R. § 233.2(h)(2). 304. Bowles v. Seminole Rock Co., 325 U.S. 410, 413–14 (1945); see also 1 RICHARD J. PIERCE, JR., ADMINISTRATIVE LAW TREATISE § 6.11 (4th ed. 2002) (noting that, in non-penalty situations such as the instant case, courts give “substantial deference” to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulations). 305. See supra text accompanying notes 257–62. 306. 39 U.S.C. § 402 (2000); 39 C.F.R. §§ 1.2, 2.6, 3.3 (2007). While these regulations do not explicitly authorize the Postmaster General to waive substantive provisions of postal regulations, such power is implied from the broad powers provided to the Postmaster General to “issue regulations.” See Pent-R-Books, Inc. v. U.S. Postal Serv., 328 F. Supp. 297, 312–13 (E.D.N.Y. 1971) (describing the extensive powers given to the Postmaster General); Ex Parte Willman, 277 F. 819, 821 (S.D. Ohio 1921) (“[The Postmaster General] has power to promulgate regulations generally as to the conduct of the department, and such regulations are controlling, have the force of law, and are judicially noticed.”). Since the Postmaster General has the ability to issue regulations, logic would dictate that the Postmaster General also has the power to waive substantive regulations, which is effectively “issuing” an exception regulation. Of course, the Postmaster General does not have the ability to waive Postal Service regulations applying to procedural rights, especially when such rights are required by statute or the Constitution. See Myers & Myers, Inc. v. U.S. Postal Serv., 527 F.2d 1252, 1259–62 (2d Cir. 1975) (noting that the Postmaster General may not ignore procedural requirements for a hearing). 307. See supra text accompanying notes 257–62. 308. 39 C.F.R. § 233.3(c)(8)(ii) (2007). 309. Id. § 233.3(c)(9).
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Finally, it should be noted that the Agency’s mail cover program complied with the National Security Act. As noted above, the purpose of the program was to gather information about Soviet intelligence interests and activities. It therefore clearly falls within the Agency’s function of collecting and coordinating foreign intelligence.310 The Rockefeller Report, however, assessed that the “nature and assistance given by the CIA to the FBI in the New York mail project indicate that the primary purpose eventually became participation with the FBI in internal security functions,”311 which is expressly precluded by the National Security Act.312 It is difficult to understand how the Rockefeller Commission came to that determination, however. The vast majority of the mail that the CIA reviewed (approximately seventy percent) was mail coming into the United States from communist countries.313 This suggests a focus on foreign intelligence as opposed to internal domestic interests. Further, while the CIA did send copies of some of the opened letters to the FBI, the vast majority went to CIA headquarters for evaluation,314 again indicating the program focused on foreign affairs of interest to the CIA as opposed to issues of interest to the FBI. Thus, it would appear that the CIA’s mail cover program was legal during its operation. It did not violate any criminal or civil statute, constitutional provision, or the National Security Act. In addition, contrary to the unspecified claims made by the Rockefeller Commission, the CIA’s mail cover operation did not violate postal service regulations. The law regarding mail cover operations has not changed since 1973, except for the increased breadth of the Postal Regulations in this area. Indeed, EO 12,333 expressly permits the CIA to engage in “mail surveillance” operations so long as they comply with procedures established by the CIA Director and approved by the Attorney General.315 B. Mail Opening Portion From the beginning, the CIA had suspicions that the mail opening portion of the operation was illegal.316 The Rockefeller Report was more definitive: “While in operation, the CIA’s domestic mail opening programs were unlawful. United States statutes specifically forbid opening the mail.” 317 This was undoubtedly a reference to
310. See supra notes 16–17 and accompanying text. 311. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 115. 312. See supra note 19. 313. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 112. 314. See id. (stating that, in the last year of operation, 3800 disseminations of intelligence from the mail program were sent to CIA headquarters and 1400 were sent to the FBI). 315. Exec. Order No. 12,333 § 2.4, 3 C.F.R. 200, 212 (1982). 316. CHURCH REPORT: BOOK III, supra note 255, at 566; ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 107–08, 114. It should be noted that nobody ever requested an opinion on the legality of the mail opening operation from the CIA’s General Counsel. CHURCH REPORT III, supra note 255, at 607. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the CIA’s General Counsel was never even made aware of the operation until after its conclusion. Id. 317. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 115. The Department of Justice eventually decided not to prosecute any individuals for their roles in the CIA’s mail program. Avery v. United States, 434 F. Supp. 937, 940 n.4 (D. Conn. 1977).
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the express language of §§ 1702 and 1703.318 The relevant parts of those provisions prohibit the opening of mail “to pry into the business or secrets of another”319 and the opening of mail “without authority,”320 respectively. The Rockefeller Commission concluded that the Agency had violated such provisions as “[t]he statutes set forth no exception for national security matters.”321 The Rockefeller Commission’s overarching conclusion, however, was incorrect. It is true that neither § 1702 nor §1703 contains an express provision exempting CIA activities from their reach. However, neither section expressly exempts customs and prison officials from opening mail pursuant to their authorities, or U.S. law enforcement officials from doing so pursuant to a valid warrant. Yet these are clearly legal activities that do not violate §§ 1702 or 1703.322 The same applies for the CIA’s opening of mail for national security matters, or more specifically, for foreign intelligence purposes. As noted in Part IV above, prior to the enactment of FISA, the courts recognized a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement for electronic surveillance.323 The courts have recognized a similar exception for physical searches, including the opening of mail, based upon the constitutional power of the President.324 Just as the federal government did not violate
318. Section 1701 would not bar the CIA’s mail opening operation. Section 1701 prohibits the obstruction or retardation of United States mail. 18 U.S.C. § 1701 (2006). Courts have acknowledged that minimal delay, with “proper considerations,” does not violate § 1701. United States v. Austin, 492 F. Supp. 502, 504 (N.D. Ill. 1980); see also United States v. Wooden, 61 F.3d 3, 5 (2d Cir. 1995) (finding no violation of § 1701 unless the defendant has an “illegitimate or improper intent”). The minimal delay incurred as part of the CIA’s mail opening operation would likely be deemed a “proper consideration” as it was for governmental purposes. See United States v. Beckley, 335 F.2d 86, 89–90 (6th Cir. 1964) (providing that delay from customs officials opening a package pursuant to their government authority does not violate § 1701); United States v. Costello, 255 F.2d 876, 881 (2d Cir. 1958) (stating that minimal delay from valid mail cover operation does not violate § 1701). 319. 18 U.S.C. § 1702. 320. Id. § 1703. 321. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 64. The Church Commission came to a similar conclusion. CHURCH REPORT: BOOK III, supra note 255, at 564 (citing to §§ 1701–1703 and concluding “[t]he only persons who can lawfully open first class mail without a warrant, in short, are employees of the Postal Service for a very limited purpose [e.g., to determine the address for delivery]—not agents of the CIA or FBI”). 322. See United States v. Beckley, 335 F.2d 86, 88–90 (6th Cir. 1964) (holding that customs agents who open packages coming into the United States “violated no statute or regulation,” including §§ 1701–1703, nor the Fourth Amendment); Adams v. Ellis, 197 F.2d 483, 485 (5th Cir. 1952) (holding that prison officials who open prisoner mail do not violate § 1702 or any other criminal statute). 323. See supra notes 203–10 and accompanying text. 324. See United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, 629 F.2d 908, 917 & n.8 (4th Cir. 1980) (holding that, without a warrant but with executive authorization, searches of a letter and a package sent via U.S. mail did not violate the Fourth Amendment); United States v. Marzook, 435 F. Supp. 2d 778, 793 (N.D. Ill. 2006) (“[B]efore Congress expanded FISA to include physical searches the Executive Branch maintained the authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence investigation, which would include physical searches.” (footnote omitted)); see also United States v. Bin Laden, 126 F. Supp. 2d 264, 285 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) (“[T]he Court finds that the foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement applies with equal force to
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federal criminal statutes when it conducted warrantless electronic surveillance pursuant to the foreign intelligence exception,325 the CIA did not violate §§ 1702–1703 when it conducted warrantless mail opening operations pursuant to the same exception.326 The requirements of the foreign intelligence exception for warrantless physical searches are similar to those for electronic surveillance. Courts have allowed such searches if the activity was conducted primarily for foreign intelligence reasons, the target was a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, and the Attorney General approved such activity.327 The Agency’s mail opening program appears to have fulfilled the first requirement, since, as noted above, the purpose of the program was to “give United States intelligence agencies insight into Soviet intelligence activities and interests.”328 As stated above, while the program may have collected information of interest to the FBI, the primary purpose of the program remained foreign intelligence collection until its termination.329 The program also appears to have fulfilled the second requirement, as the target of the operation was a foreign power (the Soviet Union and other communist countries) or its purported agents. Though we lack facts regarding every letter that the CIA opened, the CIA seemed to believe that the letters it was opening belonged to or were in transit to or from a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, given the purpose and focus of the program.330 The last requirement—approval by the Attorney General—proves the most problematic. The CIA did brief Attorney General Mitchell in June 1971 about the program, and that briefing appears to have included both the mail opening and mail cover portions of the program.331 The Attorney General approved the program and had no “hang ups” about it.332 However, his approval came near the end of the program (though at its high point). There is no indication that the CIA previously briefed the program to either Attorney General Mitchell or his predecessor Attorneys General. Courts have not accepted after-the-fact Attorney General approval for the foreign intelligence exception, at least for purposes of use of the information in criminal prosecutions.333 Thus, while it is unclear whether the initial portions of the program received Attorney General approval and thus are valid, at the very least any mail openings between June 1971 (when the Attorney General gave his approval) and residential searches.”). 325. See supra text accompanying notes 213–14. 326. One district court has posited the more radical assertion that, prior to the issuance of EO 12,333, “the CIA was under no limitation that its activities could not violate U.S. law” due to the Fifth Function. United States v. Lopez-Lima, 738 F. Supp. 1404, 1410 (S.D. Fla. 1990) (emphasis added). 327. Truong, 629 F.2d at 917 & n.8. 328. See supra text accompanying note 248. 329. See supra text accompanying notes 313–14. As noted above, the CIA terminated the program in 1973 due in part to the fact that the program began generating more internal security information than foreign intelligence. See supra text accompanying notes 268–69. 330. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 101–03. 331. Id. at 110 (noting that the mail cover portion of the operation was certainly briefed at the meeting, but expressing some uncertainty amongst the parties as to whether the mail opening portion was also discussed). 332. Id. 333. See United States v. Bin Laden, 126 F. Supp. 2d 264, 279 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) (holding that approval by Attorney General for warrantless surveillance pursuant to the foreign intelligence exception in April 1997 does not apply to surveillance conducted prior to that date).
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February 1973 (when the program was terminated) appear to have complied with the requirements of the foreign intelligence exception for physical searches. An argument, however, can be made that Attorney General approval was not in fact required for the CIA’s mail opening operation, because there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in mail going to or from communist countries. In Truong, discussed above,334 one portion of the opinion discussed the fact that the named defendant had sent a poorly wrapped package from the United States to Paris.335 The FBI and CIA searched the package without obtaining either Attorney General approval or a search warrant.336 The Fourth Circuit nonetheless upheld the warrantless search of the package: “[B]ecause the package was poorly wrapped and because it was destined for foreign delivery, Truong could not have harbored a reasonable expectation that the contents of the package would remain undisclosed; and consequently neither a search warrant nor executive authorization was necessary for this search.”337 While there is no suggestion that the letters opened as part of the CIA’s mail operation were poorly wrapped, such letters likely enjoyed an even lesser expectation of privacy than in Truong. While Truong’s package was sent to France, which may or may not routinely open such packages, the letters opened as part of the CIA’s program were all going to or coming from the Soviet Union or other communist countries.338 As the Rockefeller Report notes: “Presumably all mail to and from the USSR is censored by the Soviets.”339 Based on this statement, an argument could be raised that such letters enjoyed no expectation of privacy, were therefore not protected by the Fourth Amendment at all,340 and thus, as in Truong, could be searched without either a warrant or Attorney General approval. Beyond constitutional and criminal considerations, a civil provision existed in 1973 that also precluded the opening of U.S. mail. Specifically, 39 U.S.C. § 3623(d) precluded the opening of any mail of domestic origin, except in cases where either a search warrant had been authorized, the addressee authorized the letter opening, or a postal employee needed to open the letter to determine the address for delivery.341 However, the foreign intelligence exception that applied to §§ 1701–1703 would also apply to this civil provision. Indeed, when the postal service statutes were revised in 2006, and 39 U.S.C. § 3623(d) was reconstituted as 39 U.S.C. § 404(c) with the same general restrictions,342 President Bush explicitly stated that the executive branch would
334. See supra notes 203–08 and accompanying text. 335. United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, 629 F.2d 908, 917 (4th Cir. 1980). 336. Id. 337. Id. 338. See supra text accompanying notes 247–49. 339. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 101 n.2. 340. See Kimmelman v. Morrison, 477 U.S. 365, 374 (1986) (holding that to prevail on a Fourth Amendment claim, the complainant must not only prove that the search or seizure was illegal, but also “that it violated his reasonable expectation of privacy in the item or place at issue”); Couch v. United States, 409 U.S. 322, 336 n.19 (1973) (noting that there is a “necessary expectation of privacy to launch a valid Fourth Amendment claim”). 341. 39 U.S.C. § 3623(d) (1970), repealed by Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, Pub. L. No. 109-435, § 201(b), 120 Stat. 3198, 3205 (2006) (codified at 39 U.S.C.A. § 404(c) (West 2007)). 342. See 39 U.S.C.A. § 404(c) (West 2007).
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construe § 404(c) “in a manner consistent [with] . . . the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.”343 Subsequent to 1973, of course, Congress passed FISA to contend with foreign intelligence collection. FISA, when originally enacted in 1978, did not provide guidelines for physical searches to obtain foreign intelligence.344 Congress amended FISA in 1994 to include such guidelines.345 The amended provisions, which remain in effect today, mirror the main requirements for electronic surveillance.346 Thus, requests must be submitted to the FISC after personal approval by the Attorney General, who certifies that the target of the search is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, that the property to be searched contains foreign intelligence, and that the property to be searched is owned, used by or in transit to or from a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.347 As noted in the above section on electronic surveillance, the exclusivity of FISA remains an open question, and therefore these FISA procedures may not always be necessary to conduct physical searches for foreign intelligence.348 Finally, postal regulations in effect both in 1973 and now do prohibit postal employees from opening, or permitting the opening, of any first class mail without a search warrant, except in limited circumstances not relevant here.349 However, as noted above, the Postal Service Regulations in effect both then and now appear to grant the Postmaster General the authority to waive any substantive provision of the regulations, such as the preclusion of a mail opening operation absent a search warrant.350 As discussed, the CIA briefed Postmasters General on the CIA’s program.351 To the extent that such briefings included the mail opening portion of the operation, which is
343. Statement by President George W. Bush upon Signing H.R. 6407 (Dec. 20, 2006), reprinted in 2006 U.S.C.C.A.N. S76, S77. 344. United States v. Marzook, 435 F. Supp. 2d 778, 785 (N.D. Ill. 2006); see also Global Relief Found., Inc. v. O’Neill, 207 F. Supp. 2d 779, 789 (N.D. Ill. 2002) (explaining that FISA was amended in 1994 to address physical searches), aff’d, 315 F.3d 748 (7th Cir. 2002). 345. Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1995, Pub. L. No. 103-359, § 807, 108 Stat. 3243, 3443–53 (codified as amended at 50 U.S.C. §§ 1820–1829 (2000 & Supp. V 2005) (amending Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, §§ 301–309); Global Relief Found., Inc., 207 F. Supp. 2d at 789 (explaining that FISA was amended in 1994 to address physical searches), aff’d 315 F.3d 748 (7th Cir. 2002). As with electronic surveillance, there are limited exceptions not relevant to the instant discussion. See, e.g., 50 U.S.C. § 1824(e) (allowing the Attorney General to authorize a warrantless physical search in an emergency). 346. Marzook, 435 F. Supp. 2d at 785. Compare 50 U.S.C. §§ 1801–1811 (outlining procedures regarding electronic surveillance), with id. §§ 1821–1829 (outlining procedures regarding physical searches). 347. 50 U.S.C. § 1823(a). 348. See supra text accompanying notes 224–36. 349. The exceptions are for situations where postal employees need to open mail to determine payment of proper postage or to assess mailability. See 39 C.F.R. § 233.3(g)(1)–(2) (2007); 39 C.F.R. § 233.2(f)(1) (1975). As noted in note 292, supra, the postal regulations regarding postal covers and openings, implemented in 1975, merely reflected a formal culmination of standard postal practice in effect since the mid 1960s without any “substantive changes.” 40 Fed. Reg. 11,579 (Mar. 12, 1975) (noting that implementation of the 1975 regulations was merely a “republication” of existing rules). 350. See supra text accompanying notes 301–07. 351. See supra text accompanying notes 260–65.
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uncertain, the continuous approval of the program by those senior postal officers would constitute a waiver of the postal regulations requiring a warrant to conduct a mail opening.352 Even if the Postmasters General did not waive these postal regulations, the Supreme Court, in analyzing the authority of customs agents, has held that postal regulations, which preclude the opening of mail absent a search warrant, are trumped if the Constitution or a statute authorizes a warrantless search.353 As noted above, that is precisely the situation here.354 The above analysis should preclude most lawsuits based on the CIA’s mail opening program in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court case of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Federal Narcotics Agents authorizes claims against federal employees for constitutional and statutory violations. 355 However, federal employees are immune from such Bivens claims if “their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”356 This so-called “qualified immunity” should attach here. Certainly by June 1971, having believed they had secured Attorney General approval for the mail opening portion of the operation,357 CIA employees would have had reasonable basis to believe that they were in full compliance with the foreign intelligence exception and thus not in violation of the Constitution or any civil statute.358 For the period prior to June 1971, a reasonable person could believe that, pursuant to Truong, individuals sending mail to the Soviet Union had no reasonable expectation of privacy and thus no Fourth Amendment protection.359 In today’s world, the enactment of FISA obviously changes the situation, especially as FISA authorizes a civil penalty for violations and contains a private right of action.360 However, as noted above, it is unclear whether the President’s constitutional powers trump the FISA statute. A successful Bivens claim would need to show that, in such a legal climate, the employee’s conduct violated a clearly established statutory or constitutional right of which a reasonable person should have known. Though no plaintiff has brought a Bivens claim based on the CIA’s mail opening program, at least one plaintiff has filed a claim pursuant to the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and the Tucker Act.361 The claim proved unsuccessful on both
352. See supra text accompanying notes 260–66. Indeed, the Church Commission noted that two of the Postmasters General briefed on the program appeared to believe that the mail opening program was legal, or at least that the program’s illegality was less than clear. CHURCH REPORT: BOOK III, supra note 12, at 606. As one of those Postmasters General stated: “If the CIA lawyers concluded that the CIA could not open mail to and from Communist countries in the early 1960’s without violating the law, I think the CIA needs better lawyers.” Id. at 606 n.208 353. United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 623–25 (1977) (upholding warrantless searches by customs agents despite the explicit postal regulation precluding the opening of mail absent a search warrant). 354. See supra notes 323–27 and accompanying text. 355. 403 U.S. 388 (1971). 356. Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1981). 357. See supra note 263 and accompanying text. 358. See Harlow, 457 U.S. at 818. 359. See supra notes 332–37 and accompanying text. 360. 50 U.S.C.A. § 1828 (West 2003). 361. Kipperman v. McCone, 422 F. Supp. 860 (N.D. Cal. 1976) (dismissing plaintiff’s claims that the CIA’s mail opening program violated the Tucker Act and the APA).
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counts.362 The APA permits “relief other than money damages” when an agency action is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law,” or violates a statute or the United States Constitution.363 As noted above, certainly by June 1971, and possibly throughout its operation, the CIA’s mail opening program complied with statutory and constitutional law.364 This may well bar any APA claim for the same reasons as with a Bivens claim. Further, the bases for relief under the APA (and Bivens) are discretionary.365 Courts have declined to employ that discretion for matters concerning sensitive areas within the executive branch’s particular expertise, such as foreign affairs.366 Such discretion might well be used with regard to a foreign intelligence matter such as the CIA’s mail opening operation.367 The relevant portion of the Tucker Act grants district courts jurisdiction over claims against the United States, not in excess of $10,000, which are based upon the Constitution, an act of Congress, or any regulation of an executive department.368 However, the Tucker Act is “merely jurisdictional.”369 It does not create a “substantive right enforceable against the Government.”370 Rather, it permits suit based on violation of an underlying constitutional provision, statute, or regulation and only if that provision “‘can fairly be interpreted as mandating compensation by the Federal Government for the damage sustained.’”371 Thus, for a provision to create a right of action under the Tucker Act, it must be “reasonably amenable to the reading that it mandates a right of recovery in damages.”372 The one court to consider a Tucker Act claim in the context of the CIA’s mail opening program properly found no such provision existed at the time of the CIA’s mail opening operation.373 Today, of course, such a penalty does exist under FISA.374 The only basis under which plaintiffs have successfully challenged the Agency’s mail opening operation has come pursuant to the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA).375 The FTCA authorizes a civil claim against the federal government for the negligent or wrongful activities by a government employee acting within the scope of his or her
362. Id. at 867. 363. 5 U.S.C.A. §§ 702, 706(2)(A)–(C) (West 2007). 364. See supra notes 357–59 and accompanying text. 365. See Sanchez-Espinoza v. Reagan, 770 F.2d 202, 207–08 (D.C. Cir. 1985). 366. Id. at 208 (dismissing a claim where the plaintiffs sought injunctive relief to preclude the United States from supporting the Contras in Nicaragua). The D.C. Circuit applied this same discretion in refusing to grant relief under Bivens. Id. at 208–09. 367. See, e.g., Webster v. Doe, 486 U.S. 592, 600–01 (1988) (determining that the CIA Director’s discretion to discharge individual Agency employees precluded an APA claim). 368. 28 U.S.C. § 1346(a) (2000). The relevant portions of the Tucker Act were the same in 1973 as they are now. Compare Kipperman v. McCone, 422 F. Supp. 860, 868 (N.D. Cal. 1976) (quoting relevant portions of the Tucker Act as existed in 1973), with 28 U.S.C. § 1346(a). 369. United States v. Testan, 424 U.S. 392, 400 (1976). 370. United States v. White Mountain Apache Tribe, 537 U.S. 465, 472 (2003). 371. Id. (quoting Testan, 424 U.S. at 400). 372. Id. at 473. 373. Kipperman, 422 F. Supp. at 868. 374. See supra note 360 and accompanying text. 375. See generally Avery v. United States, 434 F. Supp. 937, 940 n.5 (D. Conn. 1977) (noting that at least eight cases challenging the CIA’s mail opening operation have been made pursuant to the FTCA).
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employment if a private person would have been held liable for such activities under the law of the state where the activity took place.376 The CIA has raised numerous defenses to these claims, which have been uniformly rejected by the courts.377 However, these courts appear to have wrongly determined that one of those defenses—the discretionary function exception to the FTCA—fails to shield the CIA’s operation. The discretionary function exception provides that the government is not liable for actions or omissions “in the execution of a statute or regulation . . . or based upon the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty . . . whether or not the discretion involved be abused.”378 As the Supreme Court has consistently stated, the act must “involv[e] an element of judgment or choice, and it is the nature of the conduct, rather than the status of the actor, that governs whether the exception applies.”379 Based on this, the Supreme Court has held: “Where Congress has delegated the authority to an independent agency or to the Executive Branch to implement the general provisions of a regulatory statute and to issue regulations to that end, there is no doubt that planning-level decisions establishing programs are protected by the discretionary function exception . . . .”380 The CIA’s mail opening operation falls squarely within this description. Congress, in enacting the National Security Act of 1947, clearly delegated foreign intelligence collection to the executive branch, and specifically the CIA. The very functions of the CIA, as set out in the Act and later amended, definitively authorize the CIA to acquire, protect, and disseminate such intelligence.381 The only limit on such functions is that the CIA must comply with the law and the United States Constitution, as well as not engage in police, subpoena, law enforcement, or internal security matters.382 This area already falls within the President’s inherent authority, as discussed above.383 The Supreme Court has long recognized the executive branch’s primacy in such matters.384 Applied here, the Agency’s mail opening operation fell completely within the CIA’s foreign intelligence function, and represented a “planning-level decision[] establishing programs” to fulfill that function.385 Indeed, the CIA’s program is akin to other programs established by other federal agencies which the Supreme Court has found fall within the discretionary function exception, such as the regulation and oversight of
376. 28 U.S.C. § 1346(b)(1) (2000). 377. See, e.g., Avery, 434 F. Supp. at 941–45 (declining to dismiss the case pursuant to the scope of employment, discretionary function, postal matter, or intentional tort exceptions to the FTCA); Cruikshank v. United States, 431 F. Supp. 1355, 1356–60 (D. Haw. 1977) (same). 378. 28 U.S.C. § 2680(a). 379. United States v. Gaubert, 499 U.S. 315, 322 (1991) (internal citations and quotations omitted). 380. Id. at 323. 381. National Security Act of 1947, Pub. L. No. 80-253, § 103(d), 61 Stat. 495, 499 (codified as amended at 50 U.S.C. § 403–4a(d) (Supp. V 2005)). 382. 50 U.S.C. § 403–4a(d). 383. See supra note 197. 384. See Regan v. Wald, 468 U.S. 222, 242 (1984) (“Matters relating ‘to the conduct of foreign relations . . . are so exclusively entrusted to the political branches of government as to be largely immune from judicial inquiry or interference.’” (quoting Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, 342 U.S. 580, 589 (1952))). 385. Gaubert, 499 U.S. at 323.
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savings and loans by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board,386 the release of vaccine lots by the Food and Drug Administration,387 and the implementation of airline safety standards by the Federal Aviation Administration.388 Courts have found that there is no discretionary act, however, if a “federal statute, regulation, or policy specifically prescribes a course of action for an employee to follow [because] the employee has no rightful option but to adhere to the directive.”389 The two district courts that have reviewed the discretionary function exception with regard to the CIA’s mail opening operation have focused on this in holding the exception did not apply, asserting that the program “trespasses in violation of constitutional guarantees”390 or involves “illegal acts committed by government officials.”391 Yet, this interpretation would appear erroneous. As noted above, certainly by June 1971, and possibly from its inception, the CIA’s mail opening program did not violate the United States Constitution or statutory law.392 Thus, the discretionary function exception should apply to the CIA’s mail opening operation, and preclude any FTCA claim made pursuant to that operation. Yet, even if a plaintiff could overcome the discretionary function exception and pursue an FTCA claim, the claimant would need to show that the CIA’s mail opening program constituted an actual tort, that is, that “the United States, if a private person, would be liable to the claimant in accordance with the law of the place where the act or omission occurred.”393 This requires the plaintiff to establish that, under the law of the state where the alleged act took place, “a private actor could be found liable in tort for the unauthorized opening of another’s mail,” that is, an invasion of the right to privacy.394 However, not all states recognize an invasion of the right to privacy as a tort.395 Most critically for the CIA’s mail program, the state of New York, where most of the mail opening operations occurred, does not recognize such a tort.396 Indeed, in 1989, the Second Circuit dismissed an FTCA claim based upon the CIA’s mail opening program because the law of New York confers no cause of action “to right the wrongs complained of in this case.”397 The Commonwealth of Virginia also does not recognize such a tort.398 This is most critical because the Commonwealth of Virginia is the home to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, where opened mail was usually analyzed.399
386. Id. at 332–34. 387. Berkovitz v. United States, 486 U.S. 531, 545–48 (1988). 388. United States v. S.A. Empresa de Viacao Aerea Rio Grandense (Varig Airlines), 467 U.S. 797, 814–20 (1984); see also Stables v. United States, 366 F. Supp. 2d 559, 567 (S.D. Ohio 2004) (summarizing the three decisions discussed in the text). 389. Berkovitz, 486 U.S. at 536. 390. Avery v. United States, 434 F. Supp. 937, 944 (D. Conn. 1977). 391. Cruikshank v. United States, 431 F. Supp. 1355, 1359 (D. Haw. 1977). 392. See supra notes 357–59 and accompanying text. 393. 28 U.S.C. § 1346(b)(1) (2000). 394. Hurwitz v. United States, 884 F.2d 684, 686 (2d Cir. 1989). 395. See DAVID A. ELDER, PRIVACY TORTS, § 2:19, at 2-205 n.10 (2002). 396. Hurwitz, 884 F.2d at 685. 397. Id. at 686. 398. ELDER, supra note 395, § 2:3, at 2-36–2-39 & 2-39 n.37. Other states that do not recognize this tort are Illinois and North Dakota. Id. at 2-36–2-39. 399. See supra note 255.
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Whether this precludes all FTCA claims against the CIA for its mail opening program depends on determining where the alleged act took place, that is, the venue. The Supreme Court has ruled, in a case involving the CIA’s mail program, that in actions for money damages, such as FTCA claims, the only proper venue would be in the district where all federal employee defendants reside; where a substantial part of the event or omissions giving rise to the claim occurred; or where any defendant may be found, but only if the action cannot be brought in any other district.400 The Supreme Court then noted in dicta that, for cases seeking money damages stemming from the CIA’s New York mail operation, venue “would have been the Eastern District of New York where the alleged claim rose, or perhaps the Eastern District of Virginia, where some acts may have occurred at the headquarters of the CIA.”401 If all the defendants “resided” in the same state, that too could be a possible venue;402 however, that venue would likely be either New York or Virginia where the employees’ official duties took place—“[i]n determining the residence of a public official sued in his official capacity, the test of residence is where official duties are performed.”403 As noted above, given the lack of a right to privacy cause of action in New York and Virginia, it would appear likely that plaintiffs would be unable to bring FTCA claims against the CIA for its mail operations.404 Finally, EO 12,333 also prohibits the CIA from engaging in mail opening operations.405 However, as noted previously, the President has the authority to amend or retract this restriction with a presidential directive.406 Thus, in the end, it would appear that the CIA’s mail cover program was legal throughout its operation. The CIA’s mail opening operation certainly appears to have been legal after June 1971 and may have been before then. Further, plaintiffs face considerable barriers to bringing a claim based upon the mail opening operation. Since 1973, Congress has enacted FISA, which may or may not be the exclusive method for engaging in physical searches, and the president has issued EO 12,333, which can be revoked through presidential directive.
400. Stafford v. Briggs, 444 U.S. 527, 544 (1980); see also 28 U.S.C. § 1391(b) (2000). 401. Stafford, 444 U.S. at 544 n.11; see also Kipperman v. McCone, 422 F. Supp. 860, 879 (N.D. Cal. 1976) (concluding, though published prior to Stafford, that the Northern District of California was the improper venue for a claim based on the CIA’s mail opening operation, and that the court “believes venue would lie in the Southern District of New York where the East Coast Mail Intercept operated during its twenty-year life”). 402. 28 U.S.C. § 1391(b). 403. Doe v. Casey, 601 F. Supp. 581, 585 (D.D.C. 1985), remanded on other grounds, 796 F.2d 1508 (D.C. Cir. 1986). The Doe court noted, however, that proper venue for at least the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency could be either Virginia or the District of Columbia. Id. 404. However, this might not preclude claims based on the small portion of the CIA’s mail opening operations that took place in San Francisco, Hawaii, and New Orleans. See supra note 249 and accompanying text. 405. Exec. Order No. 12,333 § 2.4(b), 3 C.F.R. 200, 212 (1982) (stating that only the FBI can engage in “unconsented physical searches in the United States” except under circumstances not relevant here). 406. See supra note 147 and accompanying text.
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VI. COLLECTING ON AMERICAN DISSIDENT MOVEMENTS From 1967 to 1974, the Agency operated a program known as Operation CHAOS to collect information and produce studies regarding various dissident movements in the United States.407 Initiated pursuant to a presidential request, the purpose of the program was to assess whether these groups had been penetrated by, or were being used by, foreign intelligence services.408 At first, the Agency merely culled through information already in its possession.409 The operation quickly evolved to where the CIA maintained agents in the field for the sole purpose of gathering information on various dissident groups.410 These agents generally were not directed to collect information about United States domestic affairs.411 However, the Rockefeller Report found that several of these agents ended up acquiring such information while they were in the United States bolstering their dissident credentials, and on three occasions agents were specifically directed to collect information on domestic U.S. matters.412 The operation also resulted in the accumulation of large amounts of information on U.S. citizens.413 There is no indication, however, that anyone connected to Operation CHAOS utilized clandestine means, such as electronic surveillance, wiretaps, or break-ins, to acquire any of this information.414 The CIA terminated the program in 1974,415 after the New York Times published a front-page story about the operation.416 The Family Jewels describe the three foci of Operation CHAOS—student groups, the anti-Vietnam War protestors, and the “black power” movement. The CIA initiated collection on worldwide student dissidence in 1968 at the request of Walt Rostow, then Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.417 According to an Agency document, the purpose of the study was to assess whether the various international student dissident groups were interconnected, whether they bred from the same causes worldwide, and whether they were “financed and hence manipulated by forces or influences hostile to the interests of the US and its allies; or likely to come under inimical sway to the detriment of US interests.”418 The resulting paper was given the whimsical title “Restless Youth.”419 The CIA created two versions of the document—the highly sensitive version, which included a chapter on radical students in the United States, was distributed to only nine individuals, including the President
407. See FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00180–82; ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 130, 132, 148–49. 408. See FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00184, 00591–93; CHURCH REPORT: BOOK III, supra note 255, at 688; ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 130. 409. See ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 133–36. 410. See id. at 137–42. 411. See id. at 131. 412. Id. 413. Id. at 130. 414. Id. at 24. 415. Id. at 148 (“On March 15, 1974, the Agency terminated operation CHAOS.”). 416. See Seymour M. Hersh, Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 22, 1974, at A1. 417. FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00190. 418. Id. 419. Id. at 00171.
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and Mr. Rostow;420 the other version, which excluded that chapter, was provided to approximately twenty people outside the CIA.421 The CIA’s collection on the anti-Vietnam War movement emerged from a 1967 order from President Lyndon B. Johnson for the CIA to gather evidence supporting the President’s conviction that communist governments led and financed the movement.422 When then CIA Director Richard Helms informed President Johnson that the Agency could not spy on Americans, President Johnson stated: “I’m quite aware of that. What I want for you is to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs.”423 It appears that the Agency did just that—focusing not on the domestic facets of the movement, but rather on the connection of foreign entities to it.424 The result was several short memoranda prepared in 1967 and 1968 that analyzed foreign connections to the movement in the United States.425 In the end, the CIA assessed that while some informal connections existed, there was “no evidence of direction or formal coordination” by any foreign entity.426 The CIA also conducted limited analysis of the “black power” movement.427 Two papers on the topic were produced, one in 1969 and the other in 1970.428 In each paper, one paragraph considered the ties between the black power movement and various Caribbean movements, focusing mostly on contacts and visits between U.S. activists, including Stokely Carmichael, and the Caribbean activists.429 The CIA produced other memoranda regarding the connections between the two entities.430 CIA Director Helms stated that, through these programs, “we’re not trying to do espionage on American citizens in the United States.”431 However, many both inside and outside the Agency believed that the CIA was doing just that, and that such activities violated the Agency’s Charter, the National Security Act.432 Indeed, on the cover memo of the more restricted report on student dissident movements, Director Helms stated that the section on American students “is an area not within the charter of this Agency, so I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive this makes the paper.
420. Id. at 00171, 00191. 421. Id. at 00171. 422. See Mazzetti & Weiner, supra note 3. 423. Id. (quoting from President Johnson’s memoirs). 424. FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00193 (providing that the purpose of gathering information about the antiwar movement was to “determine whether any links existed between international Communist elements or foreign governments and the American peace movement”). 425. See id. at 00193–94. 426. Id. at 00193. 427. See id. at 00188. 428. Id. 429. Id. 430. See id. at 00188–89, 00330. 431. Id. at 00442. 432. See id. at 00173, 00443; see also ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 131, 134; DeYoung & Pincus, supra note 10 (noting that Agency officials became nervous about collecting on certain domestic dissidents because “[u]nder its charter, the CIA is not allowed to conduct domestic intelligence-gathering”); Mazzetti & Weiner, supra note 3 (discussing how the CIA “illegally spied on Americans decades ago”). This may be why many CIA officers disliked working on Operation CHAOS matters. FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00326.
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Should anyone learn of its existence it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned.”433 Whether the Agency violated the National Security Act in collecting information on these dissident groups hinges on whether the Act permitted the Agency to collect intelligence on Americans within the United States, and, if so, under what conditions.434 As of 1973, the Act vaguely permitted the Agency to collect “intelligence,” but did not define the term, and did not indicate the limits to such collection.435 The Church Commission, after evaluating the legislative history of the Act, concluded that “in establishing the CIA Congress contemplated an agency which not only would be limited to foreign intelligence operations but one which would conduct very few of its operations within the United States.”436 Those U.S. operations were restricted to training in the United States, protecting the Agency’s physical headquarters, and gathering information from willing Americans who had traveled abroad and had information of interest to the Agency.437 The Rockefeller Commission took a more expansive view. It noted that though the Act does not expressly limit the CIA’s intelligence activities to “foreign intelligence,” that was nonetheless the intention of Congress.438 The Commission then stated that the term “foreign intelligence” had no settled meaning, but that the legislative history of the National Security Act indicated that the CIA was expected to collect foreign intelligence from inside the United States,439 and that in 1948 the National Security Council, pursuant to the Fifth Function, had expressly given the CIA responsibility for collecting foreign intelligence in the United States by overt means.440 As the only restriction in the Act on the CIA’s collection capability precluded the use of police powers or internal security functions,441 the Commission concluded that the Agency could collect on Americans in the United States, so long as the purpose was to gather information on foreign countries, individuals, or organizations, and not on domestic matters.442 As the Report stated: “[T]he subject matter of the information and not the location of its source is the principal factor that determines whether it is within the purview of the CIA.”443 The Rockefeller Report has the better argument. If Congress wished to preclude the Agency from engaging in intelligence collection in the United States, Congress clearly
433. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 134; see also FAMILY JEWELS, supra note 2, at 00040 (noting the “risk and impact of revelation” should these domestic collection operations become public knowledge). 434. See ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 59. 435. See id. 436. CHURCH REPORT: BOOK I, supra note 12, at 136. 437. See id. at 136–38. 438. ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 59. 439. Id. at 52–53. 440. See id. at 55. 441. See id. at 59. 442. Id. 443. Id. The report, however, remained uncertain whether the Act permitted the CIA to acquire foreign intelligence in this country by covert means, id., though this does not appear to have been an issue in Operation CHAOS, which did not collect via covert methods, see supra text accompanying note 414.
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had the ability to so state in 1947, when it passed the Act, or in any of the decades subsequent. As Congress never took such action, the Agency had to follow the actual authorities and restrictions contained in the Act. That Act permitted the Agency to collect intelligence so long as the CIA did not engage in “police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions.”444 Collection of foreign intelligence information in the United States does not, in and of itself, fall within that latter restriction. Therefore, the collection of foreign intelligence information was permissible under the Agency’s charter, as it existed in 1973 when the Agency compiled the Family Jewels.445 Applying this to Operation CHAOS under the Act as it existed in 1973, most of the activities undertaken by the Agency were entirely legal. The stated purpose of the Agency’s activities in tracking dissident movements was to determine the foreign influences, if any, on those movements.446 Thus, the purpose was not to collect domestic information, nor to collect information for the purpose of prosecution (i.e., law enforcement), but rather for foreign intelligence purposes. The collection therefore fell within the confines of the Act and was entirely permissible. The Rockefeller Commission came to the same conclusion, though it did note that some of the collected information contained no foreign or counterintelligence and should be purged from the Agency’s files.447 The Commission also properly found that the sporadic use of Agency recruits to collect purely domestic information within the United States “was beyond the CIA’s authority” and that the dissemination of the portion of the Restless Youth report that concerned only domestic affairs was “improper.”448 It is worth noting, however, that there may be limited mechanisms for enforcing even these minimal violations of the Act. The Act does not provide for a criminal sanction.449 Courts have also concluded that the Act does not permit a private right of action and therefore is “singularly inappropriate for the implication of private damage actions.”450 A plaintiff may still be able to bring a claim under the APA, but could have difficulty showing standing, and courts still possess discretion to dismiss such claims when they concern sensitive areas within the executive branch’s particular expertise.451
444. National Security Act of 1947, Pub. L. No. 80-253, § 103(d)(1), 61 Stat. 495, 498 (current version at 50 U.S.C. § 403-4a(d)(1) (Supp. V 2005)). 445. Weissman v. Cent. Intelligence Agency, 565 F.2d 692 (D.C. Cir. 1977), is not to the contrary. The D.C. Circuit, based on the “sketchy” legislative history of the National Security Act, did make the overarching assertion that the CIA did not have the authority “to place United States citizens living at home under surveillance and scrutiny.” Id. at 695. However, the case concerned the collection of purely domestic information about an American for possible recruitment, not the instant situation of collection for foreign intelligence purposes. See id. at 693–94. 446. See supra note 418 and accompanying text. 447. See ROCKEFELLER REPORT, supra note 17, at 24–25, 42, 149. The Rockefeller Report acknowledged that the Agency probably needed to evaluate the information when it was first collected to determine if there was a foreign connection (since the FBI refused to do so), but once done, the purely domestic information needed to be purged. See id. at 25. 448. Id. at 25. 449. See generally National Security Act of 1947, Pub. L. No. 80-253, § 103(d)(1), 61 Stat. 495, 498 (current version at 50 U.S.C. §§ 401–422 (2000 & Supp. V 2005)). 450. Sanchez-Espinoza v. Reagan, 770 F.2d 202, 209 (D.C. Cir. 1985). 451. See supra notes 365–66 and accompanying text.
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Subsequent to 1973 and the compilation of the Family Jewels, Congress amended the Act to define “intelligence” as including “foreign intelligence,” which is then denoted as “information relating to the capabilities, intentions, or activities of foreign governments or elements thereof, foreign organizations, or foreign persons, or international terrorist activities.”452 This clearly does not restrict the Agency’s intelligence collection activities solely to overseas endeavors, though Congress certainly had the ability to impose such a restriction had it so desired. However, section 2.3 of EO 12,333, issued in 1981, does create such a limitation. That section explicitly authorizes the CIA to engage in the collection, retention, and dissemination of information concerning Americans, including foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information.453 However, the section provides that the FBI, not the CIA, is to engage in such collection in the United States.454 The CIA may engage in such collection in the United States only if it concerns “significant foreign intelligence” (not defined) that does not involve “the domestic activities of United States persons.”455 Further, collection techniques in the United States cannot include electronic surveillance, unconsenting physical searches, mail surveillance, physical surveillance, or monitoring devices absent a FISA warrant, or Attorney General approval.456 As stated previously, however, executive orders can be amended or negated by presidential directive.457 Thus, the Act permits the Agency to collect intelligence within the United States so long as it is for foreign intelligence purposes, and not for domestic purposes or law enforcement actions. EO 12,333 would allow the CIA to engage in this collection so long as it consists of “significant foreign intelligence,” though the CIA could engage in any foreign intelligence collection in the United States with a presidential directive. CONCLUSION The Family Jewels contain what are purportedly the “worst of the worst” of the first thirty-plus years of the CIA’s existence—a complete compilation of the Agency’s supposedly illegal activities. Admittedly, several of the operations mounted during that period failed to comply fully with the laws then in place. Yet, the vast majority of those operations did. Further, except for unconsenting human experimentation, each of the main types of activities depicted in the Family Jewels—targeted killings of foreign leaders, electronic surveillance of Americans, examination of U.S. mail, and collecting information on American dissident movements—was legal in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Beyond the issue of the legality of these activities, of course, lies the question of whether the CIA should have engaged in such activities as a practical matter. In
452. Intelligence Organization Act of 1992, Pub. L. No. 102-496, § 702, 106 Stat. 3188, 3188 (current version at 50 U.S.C. § 401a (2000)). 453. Exec. Order No. 12,333 § 2.3(b), 3 C.F.R. 200, 211 (1982). 454. Id. 455. Id. 456. Id. § 2.4. All of these require Attorney General approval. Id. All but physical surveillance may also require a FISA warrant. See supra notes 225–36, 340–48 and accompanying text. 457. See supra note 147 and accompanying text.
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hindsight, many of these activities appear to have had little utility. None of the Agency’s targeted killings actually materialized. The CIA’s mail cover and mail opening operations yielded only modest foreign intelligence information. The collection on American dissident groups failed to reveal the expected connection between such groups and the nation’s external enemies. Further, the eventual revelation of the activities in the Family Jewels led to critical review of the Agency’s actions by three separate commissions and diminished the CIA’s overall image. Yet hindsight is, as always, 20/20. At the time, the CIA was battling a perceived life-threatening enemy in the Soviet Union, akin to the current threat to the United States posed by terrorist organizations. The Agency’s actions—from engaging in electronic surveillance aimed at determining the sources of leaks of sensitive information to attempting to kill leaders connected to the Soviet threat—as flawed and misguided as some might believe, were directed solely towards combating that Soviet threat. Given the primary task of collecting, evaluating, and disseminating foreign intelligence, an argument can be made that the CIA needed a multiplicity of methods to locate, track, and defuse those threats, especially where a perception existed that Soviet spies were infiltrating the United States. Under this viewpoint, it would have been inimical to our country’s interests to have had the Agency’s attempts to acquire critical foreign intelligence information turn off at the precise moment that the potential enemy became the greatest threat, that it when that enemy actually crossed into, or resided in, the United States. A further argument could be made that the CIA needed to have the ability to take even drastic action to protect this country, including the targeted killing of threatening foreign leaders. As horrific as such an act might have been, it would have paled in comparison to the bloodshed that could have occurred to this country if, for example, Castro had launched a nuclear attack against the United States. In addition, had the attempted targeted killing of Castro been successful, the United States might have been less inclined to engage in more drastic measures with regard to Cuba, such as the illfated Bay of Pigs invasion. Merely having the option available, even if never utilized, might have served as a deterrent to the nation’s enemies, who become aware of the extent of our capabilities and uncertain as to their limits. Obviously, the benefit of the activities undertaken by the CIA in the Family Jewels is a matter of debate, and certainly additional oversight and approvals would have benefited the Agency’s operations. Nonetheless, those types of activities (with the exception of unconsenting human experimentation) were in fact legal when undertaken, despite widespread beliefs, both then and now, to the contrary. The actual legality of these supposedly “illegal” types of activities raises the question of the lawfulness of many of the purportedly ultra vires operations allegedly conducted by the CIA today. Only time, perspective, and eventually declassification will reveal whether today’s activities are indeed unlawful. However, it is dangerous to leap to the conclusion that these various activities violate U.S. law. It may some day come to be revealed that, like the vast majority of the activities in the Family Jewels, many of the suspected “illegal” activities engaged in by the CIA are, in the end, entirely lawful.
10/10/2016
The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD by Alex Constantine
[back] Mockingbird
The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD 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 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 former Village 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,
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10/10/2016
The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD by Alex Constantine
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 Blücher, 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 Düsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in 1982, von Blücher 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 http://whale.to/b/depraved_spies.html
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The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD by Alex Constantine
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 federallysponsored 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 http://whale.to/b/depraved_spies.html
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The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD by Alex Constantine
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.
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Friends of Liberty - Pipeline News disagrees w/ Fahey on Bob Novak/Operation MOCKINGBIRD
sianews.com
Pipeline News disagrees w/ Fahey on Bob Novak/Operation MOCKINGBIRD
William (ed/pub, PipelineNews.org), Buckley has not 'fessed up to being--past his OSS days at a very tender age--a longtime CIA conduit in Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The first time you heard of this might have been last night, when I told you that I had worked with his CIA station-partner Theodore L. Humes/Huminski (Buckley and Humes being both stationed in Japan, 1951-54). Ted had a loose tongue, was going senile (not a jab at the dear man: he died of Alzheimer's) when I knew him, and he told me quite a lot of things; was still 85% "there" when I knew him, but people could tell he was experiencing the symptoms of onset-Alzheimer's. He was very clear, though, about his and Buckley's days together, and spoke often of Buckley and MOCKINGBIRD. He and Buckley had remained friends throughout Ted's life, and I waited long past the man's passing to state this, out of respect. I ain't no fan of Karl Rove (I'm a Ron Paul--Republican, w/ fondness for Tom Tancredo on immigration issues). But if Novak burned Valerie Plame/Wilson, we're likely not going to know about it, as CIA covers up for its own. I'd like to see a few squirm, though. Such was my interest in raising the MOCKINGBIRD issue, as Novak is very likely a CIA agent himself. Regards, TBF ... [to Fahey] Well I was referring only to Buckley and the OSS, the mockingbird stuff is where the conspiracy buff skeptic kicks in. I admire Rove for his ability and I am very disappointed in the missteps that the Bush admin has made since November, Tancredo is one of the few members of the House who is worth his salary, Ron Paul and the libertarians have it wrong on many important issues including the war on terror imho. Regardless, Bill Buckley is the father of modern conservatism and I couldnt hold him in higher regard if he actually lived on Mt. Olympus. What Rich Lowrey, Jonah Goldberg and the rest have done to NR is a crime. W ... Page 1 of 3
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... http://"pipelinenews.org" wrote: [to Fahey] With all due respect Todd, the entire premise is tinfoil hat. Buckley was in the OSS 60 years ago...that is not a secret, its on the inside flap of half of his fiction books. :-) I really don't have inclination right now to engage in a debate over a conspiracy theory because I have found in the past that adherents to such implausible explanations seldom if ever see past that type of reasoning. I hope you understand that this is not a personal criticism, before you sent this I was unaware of your writing. btw as you might be aware spy vs spy was a former staple in MAD magazine, I thought from the title of your piece that it was a takeoff on that but as applicable to the Rove "affair." Again I suggest you familiarize yourself with the facts of the case, irrespective of the conspiracy angles so you can understand the viewpoint of many, that Rove is guilty of nothing even assuming that he did mention something regarding Liar Joe Wilson's idiot wifey. You may want to consult the most recent entry in the following which is something I penned for a new blog on my local newspaper. http://cctimeswatch.blogspot.com/ One last thingie, I always suggest Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum to conspiracy buffs, just to give them an inside out view of where that type of "secret society" type thing can lead, if you aren't familiar with it I suggest you pick up a copy, I guarantee you will love it. regards & good luck, W ... ----- Original Message ----From: Todd Fahey To: http://pipelinenews.org Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2005 5:56 PM Subject: Re: Spy versus Spy: Robert Novak, the CIA's MOCKINGBIRD program, and the Plame/Wilson Scandal William, What, of my article, in your opinion, begets the "tinfoil"-label? Do you know of Operation MOCKINGBIRD? &, if so--and knowing that Phil Graham, the of the Washington Post who committed suicide (?)--was, in fact, theOct lead agent MDT Page 2then-publisher of 3 10, media 2016 04:45:16AM
http://sianews.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2553 Do you know of Operation MOCKINGBIRD? &,
if so--and knowing that Phil Graham, the then-publisher of the Washington Post who committed suicide (?)--was, in fact, the lead media agent withing MOCKINGBIRD. ...Bob Woodward is also a CIA MOCKINGBIRD operative. This ain't tinfoil. Is it such a stretch to think that Robert Novak may have been recruited by CIA through the same project? That's what I'm positing. I know from William F. Buckley's CIA partner Ted Humes (my former boss in Arizona, 1986-87) during their stationing in Japan, that Buckley is CIA and was part of MOCKINGBIRD. Having worked with and around such types for 20 years, I can smell it. So, again, is it simply that my stating that I believe Bob Novak to be CIA/MOCKINGBIRD strikes you as "tinfoil"; or are you questioning other aspects of the piece to which you commented? I'm interested in your specific questions. All best wishes, TBF ... http://"pipelinenews.org" wrote: Mr Fahey The most plausible explanation is that Mr. Rove indeed told the truth to the grand jury, that he merely made reference to Liar Joe Wilson's wife getting him sent to Niger, and that Matt Cooper, whose wife afterall is Mandy Grunwald the Dems most powerful political consultant, shouldn't hang it out there too far with Liar Joe's lying report on Niger. Have you actually read the operative section of the 1982 law which sets the backdrop for this controversy? I suggest you do, to me your theory is pure tinfoil hat stuff. Assuming the worst about Rove, what he did doesn't even come close to violating the law, I don't think you know much about how this admin works, we on the right wish it played as tough as the left is claiming, but it ain't true. Thanks anyway for the input & regards, William E&P http://www.pipelinenews.org The article in question.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Friends of Liberty
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How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
[back] Operation Mockingbird [back] Conspiracy
How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes _________________________________________________________________ April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability -- the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [fo rWorld War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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Lumumba (*50). Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode -- depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) -- facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs -- a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies? The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column -- ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't". Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth -- revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98). Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel -- like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others. _________________________________________________________________ Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra -- The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988. 7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10016. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 12. See note 5a, p.180-1. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. -- Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard-- The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend -- Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus -- Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. 29. "BCCI -- NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. 32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 34. See note 33, p.136-7. 35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 36. See note 33, p.164-171. 37. See note 33, p.172-180. 38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 39. See note 33, p.217. 40. See note 33, p.235. 41. See note 33, p.277-288. 42. See note 33, p.323. 43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 44. William Blum, The CIA -- A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 46. See note 17, p.18. http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. 48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1. 50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. 54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. 60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. 62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America -- The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 64. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories -- When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned -- Warren Commission http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't -- In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire -- In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. 65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! -- Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts - Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories -- Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie -- America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken -- Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247. 67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy -- The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. 67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 69. See note 65b. 70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 72. See note 65c. 73. See note 65i. http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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74. See note 67e, p.438-450. 75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day - 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission - Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship -- Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983. 79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men -- A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 81. See note 79d, p.119-132. 82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media -- How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's two- sentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 84. See note 79d, p.131. 85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 86. "conspire", ß4ßRandom House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 88. See note 65y. 89. See note 65n. 90. See note 65d. 91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 93. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. http://whale.to/b/holmes.html
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94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court -- Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 99. See note 86. 100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977.
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MOCKINGBIRD The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA
theforbiddenknowledge.com
The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA http://www.whatreallyhappened.com "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. The Alex Constantine Article
Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD 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 Page 1 of 31
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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 f__ind 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 tha__t "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 Page 2 of 31
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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 Blücher, 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 Düsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical Page 3 of 31
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warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in 1982, von Blücher 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, Page 4 of 31
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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 Page 5 of 31
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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. How the Washington Post Censors the News [Note: Look for the paragraph indicated by asterisks] How the Washington Post Censors the News A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes _________________________________________________________________ April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit Page 6 of 31
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of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability -- the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published Page 7 of 31
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their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and Page 8 of 31
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conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [fo rWorld War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer Page 9 of 31
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software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of Page 10 of 31
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their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the Page 11 of 31
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British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50). Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Page 12 of 31
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Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode -- depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have Page 13 of 31
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each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) -- facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing Page 14 of 31
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co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. **************************************************************************** Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a ^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^ former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas Page 15 of 31
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announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). *************************************************************************** Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs -- a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies? The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Page 16 of 31
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Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column -- ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't". Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million Page 17 of 31
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judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth -- revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98). Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from Page 18 of 31
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that of any other cartel -- like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others. _________________________________________________________________ Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Page 19 of 31
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Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra -- The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988. 7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. 8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. Page 20 of 31
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8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10016. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 12. See note 5a, p.180-1. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. -- Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Page 21 of 31
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Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. 16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard-- The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend -- Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. Page 22 of 31
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26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus -- Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. 29. "BCCI -- NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. 32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 34. See note 33, p.136-7. 35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 36. See note 33, p.164-171. 37. See note 33, p.172-180. 38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 39. See note 33, p.217. 40. See note 33, p.235. 41. See note 33, p.277-288. 42. See note 33, p.323. 43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Page 23 of 31
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Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 44. William Blum, The CIA -- A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 46. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. 48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1. 50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. 54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12. Page 24 of 31
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56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. 60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. 62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America -- The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. Page 25 of 31
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64. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories -- When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned -- Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't -- In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire -- In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. 65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! -- Why Did Oliver Page 26 of 31
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Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts -Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories -- Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie -- America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken -- Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247. 67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy -- The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New Page 27 of 31
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printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. 67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 69. See note 65b. 70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 72. See note 65c. 73. See note 65i. 74. See note 67e, p.438-450. 75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day -'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission -Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. Page 28 of 31
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79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship -- Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983. 79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men -- A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 81. See note 79d, p.119-132. 82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media -- How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's two- sentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 84. See note 79d, p.131. 85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. Page 29 of 31
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86. "conspire", ß4ßRandom House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 88. See note 65y. 89. See note 65n. 90. See note 65d. 91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 93. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court -- Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, Page 30 of 31
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August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 99. See note 86. 100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977.
NOTES A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham's attempt to suppress the Davis book,"Katherine The Great,", which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal's, "Power and Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story." For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is "All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story," by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye. An additional good short reference is "The CIA's Greatest Hits" by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein's classic "The CIA and the Media" which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, 1977. Still another recent example of the CIA's control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton's & Roger Morris' story,"THE CRIMES OF MENA" by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA's involvement in drug trafficing, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed withouty explanation. A recent example of media lies can be found in this example of a faked newspaper photograph.
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MOCKINGBIRD: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA WhatReallyHappened.com "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." - CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." -- William Colby, former CIA Director, cited by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy "There is quite an incredible spread of relationships. You don't need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are [Central Intelligence] Agency people at the management level." -- William B. Bader, former CIA intelligence officer, briefing members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein "The Agency's relationship with [The New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy ... to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible." -- The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein "Senator William Proxmire has pegged the number of employees of the federal intelligence community at 148,000 ... though Proxmire's number is itself a conservative one. The "intelligence community" is officially defined as including only those organizations that are members of the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB); a dozen other agencies, charged with both foreign and domestic intelligence chores, are not encompassed by the term.... The number of intelligence workers employed by the federal government is not 148,000, but some undetermined multiple of that number." -- Jim Hougan, Spooks "For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.... I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations." --former President Harry Truman, 22 December 1963, one month after the JFK assassination, op-ed section of the Washington Post, early edition
As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie
about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself.
The Alex Constantine Article Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD 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 f__ind 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 tha__t "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.
How the Washington Post Censors the News [Note the highlighted paragraph]
How the Washington Post Censors the News
A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes _____________________________________________________ April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood,
Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability -- the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!!
It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS".
Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra.
Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers,
and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2).
But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5).
Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter.
Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself
which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11).
Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John
Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15).
Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies:
In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16).
The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17).
"Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [fo rWorld War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18).
U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19).
Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21).
"The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22).
The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23).
If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country.
Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24).
Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27).
Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28).
Or Watergate.
Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32).
Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33).
Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34).
Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and
covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35).
Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37).
Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38).
Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40).
Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41).
Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua
a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43).
Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46).
Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47).
Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49).
Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50).
Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51).
Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52).
Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53).
Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54).
Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55).
Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56).
Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57).
Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58).
Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59).
Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60).
Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61).
Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government.
Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode -depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security.
Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam.
The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the
1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65).
Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments.
An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of thebr> Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71).
Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction".
When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) -- facts that Lardner avoided.
The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest:
The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to"employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77).
In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA.
Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this
kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80).
And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work.
Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictment was announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83).
Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington
Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85).
Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs -- a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87).
So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies?
The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90).
And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a
safer bet.
Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column -- ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't".
Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93).
Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence?
And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen.
Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95).
When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim?
Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth -- revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98).
Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly?
On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively:
TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH
TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH
TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON
TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON
This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel -- like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101).
The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading:
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post"conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask.
What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news.
Sincerely,
Julian C. Holmes
Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others. Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992:
1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1
2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman
Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates.
2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a)..
2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a)..
3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint
for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986.
3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986.
3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990.
4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987.
5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181.
5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07.
5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3.
5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letterto-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7.
6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988.
6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22.
6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra -- The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24.
6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and
International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988.
7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1.
7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2.
8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989.
8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times
Books, Random House, 1991.
9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73.
9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991.
10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4.
10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison
Avenue, New York, NY, 10016.
11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11.
11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7.
11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3.
12. See note 5a, p.180-1.
13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1.
13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141.
14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989.
14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. -- Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990.
14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991.
15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989.
16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989.
17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard-- The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121.
18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93.
19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6.
20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend -Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites",
Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K.
21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15.
22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9.
22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992.
23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014.
23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285.
23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285.
24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The
Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4.
24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25.
25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1.
26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus -- Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8.
27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19.
28a. James Kilpatrick,
"Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991.
29. "BCCI -- NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI.
30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5.
31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9.
32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10.
33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227.
34. See note 33, p.136-7.
35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157.
36. See note 33, p.164-171.
37. See note 33, p.172-180.
38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii.
39. See note 33, p.217.
40. See note 33, p.235.
41. See note 33, p.277-288.
42. See note 33, p.323.
43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1.
44. William Blum, The CIA -- A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243.
45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978.
45b. See note 44, p.284-291.
46. See note 17, p.18.
47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et
al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163.
47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7.
48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521.
48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521.
49a. See note 44, p.67-76.
49b. See note 48a, p.530-1.
50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60.
51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35.
52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6.
53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35.
54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35.
55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24.
56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12.
56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903.
57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992.
58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18.
59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1.
59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3.
59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20.
59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1.
59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1.
59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1.
59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8.
60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions",
Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1.
61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1.
62a. See notes 48 and 49.
62b. See note 47b, p.63-76.
62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742.
62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post,
June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act.
63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America -- The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii.
64. See note 63, p.28.
65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3.
65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1.
65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3.
65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories -- When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19.
65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3.
65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned -- Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14.
65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy
Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21.
65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1.
65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't -- In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2.
65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55.
65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire -- In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy
Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1.
65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23.
65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991.
65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21.
65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7.
65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! -- Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2.
65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts -- Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1.
65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1.
65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post,
January 10,1992, p.A19.
65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1.
65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories -- Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1.
65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie -America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1.
65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post
Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5.
65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17.
65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken -- Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5.
65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5.
65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post,
March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12
66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i.
67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247.
67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy -- The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224.
67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for
Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416.
67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4.
67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992.
67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290.
68a. See note 65b.
68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3.
69. See note 65b.
70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318.
71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3.
72. See note 65c.
73. See note 65i.
74. See note 67e, p.438-450.
75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post,
Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8.
76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1.
76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day -- 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September
20, 1975, p.A1.
76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission -Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1.
77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37.
78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2.
79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship -- Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983.
79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been
"processed and converted into waste paper"".
79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men -- A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60.
79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p..
80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304.
81. See note 79d, p.119-132.
82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media -- How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63.
83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect.
83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988,
p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists."
83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's twosentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual
circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez."
84. See note 79d, p.131.
85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1.
86. "conspire", �4�Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987.
87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1.
88. See note 65y.
89. See note 65n.
90. See note 65d.
91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992.
Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6.
93. p. 29-32.
94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns,
letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline.
94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed.
94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize",
Boston Globe, February 25, 1992.
94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992.
95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7.
96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added]
96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston
Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990)..
96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court -- Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991.
96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991.
97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists
Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1.
98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day.
99. See note 86.
100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil
drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members".
101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977.
NOTES A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham's attempt to suppress the Davis book,"Katherine The Great,", which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal's, "Power and Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story." For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is "All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story," by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye. An additional good short reference is "The CIA's Greatest Hits" by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein's classic "The CIA and the Media" which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, 1977. Still another recent example of the CIA's control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton's & Roger Morris' story,"THE CRIMES OF MENA" by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA's involvement in drug trafficing, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed withouty explanation. An example of media lies can be found in this example of a faked newspaper photograph.
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MOCKINGBIRD: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) "The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." William Colby, former CIA Director, cited by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy "There is quite an incredible spread of relationships. You don't need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are [Central Intelligence] Agency people at the management level." William B. Bader, former CIA intelligence officer, briefing members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein "The Agency's relationship with [The New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy ... to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible." The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein "Senator William Proxmire has pegged the number of employees of the federal intelligence community at 148,000 ... though Proxmire's number is itself a conservative one. The "intelligence community" is officially defined as including only those organizations that are members of the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB); a dozen other agencies, charged with both foreign and domestic intelligence chores, are not encompassed by the term.... The number of intelligence workers employed by the federal government is not 148,000, but some undetermined multiple of that number." Jim Hougan, Spooks "For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policymaking arm of the government.... I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations." former President Harry Truman, 22 December 1963, one month after the JFK assassination, oped section of the Washington Post, early edition As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to
adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. The Alex Constantine Article Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD by Alex Constantine Who Controls the Media? Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning, doublebreasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. CocaCola. Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The AtlanticRichfield 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 politicallymotivated assassinations, CIAMafia 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 codenamed 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
f__ind 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," "worlddominating 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 antifascist media critic, drew down on Luce in 1947, explaining tha__t "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 gobetween 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 Blcher, 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 BerlinFilm 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 Dsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but antichemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Dsseldorf in 1982, von Blcher 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 worldmoving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the CIA/mobanchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like most American highrollers, 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 threeyear 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 quartercentury 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 conflictofinterest rule with the mobcontrolled 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, T10.' 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 horrorfilm simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other organizedcrime 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 federallysponsored 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 lowprice 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 fulltime 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. How the Washington Post Censors the News [Note the highlighted paragraph] How the Washington Post Censors the News A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes _____________________________________________________ April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Though the Washington Post does not overextend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herdjournalism, corporate profits, and government stability the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY
THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about IranContra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIAassociated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the IranContra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. armsfordrugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIAContra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drugsmuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (DNY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the everaccommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a preelection release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged ReaganBush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the
election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gunshy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (DIN). who had chaired the House of Representatives IranContra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. armsfordrugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [fo rWorld WarII] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19).
Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its preGulfWar support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, lawenforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric
transportation with gas and dieselpowered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (DCT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the nowbanned, cancerproducing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up
the nature of our decadesold war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the Britishowned AngloIranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIAplanned assassination of Congo headofstate Patrice Lumumba (*50). Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the IranContra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in
Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strongman and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilianmilitary cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safetocite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam.
The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's nonconspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a highlevel assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of thebr> Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again
ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to deescalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing coconspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to"employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing coldwar/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80).
And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictment was announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our highlevel public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drugsmuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of likeminded entrepreneurs a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies?
The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his offthecuff comment into an entire column ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't". Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our newsmedia "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to
that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wireservice control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a sevenpart series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98). Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would
enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, frontpage headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post"conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few microseconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely,
Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Publicspirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And maybe a few others. Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "IranContra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington MerryGoRound, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to
Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 861146CIVKING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine
Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter totheEditor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E32967. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to ContraDrug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The ContraDrug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace
an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "IranContra The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. Read more: whatreallyhappened.com http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.php#ixzz3f5V mnPrZ
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
[back] Mockingbird CHAOS COINTELPRO
Testimony of Mr. William Schaap, attorney, military and intelligence specialization, co-publisher Covert Action Quarterly, on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King MLK Conspiracy Trial Transcript - Volume 9 November 30, 1999 THE CIRCUIT COURT OF SHELBY COUNTY, TENNESSEE THIRTIETH JUDICIAL DISTRICT AT MEMPHIS _______________________________________________ CORETTA SCOTT KING, MARTIN LUTHER KING, III, BERNICE KING, DEXTER SCOTT KING and YOLANDA KING, Plaintiffs, Vs. Case No. 97242-4 T.D. LOYD JOWERS and OTHER UNKNOWN CO-CONSPIRATORS, Defendants. _______________________________________________ PROCEEDINGS November 30th, 1999 VOLUME IX _______________________________________________ Before the Honorable James E. Swearengen, Division 4, Judge presiding. _______________________________________________ DANIEL, DILLINGER, DOMINSKI, RICHBERGER, WEATHERFORD COURT REPORTERS Suite 2200, One Commerce Square Memphis, Tennessee 38103 (901) 529-1999 DANIEL, DILLINGER, DOMINSKI, RICHBERGER, WEATHERFORD (901) 529-1999 1185 - APPEARANCES For the Plaintiffs: MR. WILLIAM PEPPER Attorney at Law 575 Madison Avenue, Suite 1006 New York, New York 10022 (212) 605-0515 For the Defendant: MR. LEWIS K. GARRISON, Sr. Attorney at Law 100 North Main Street, Suite 1025 Memphis, Tennessee 38103 (901) 527-6445 Reported by: MS. MARGIE J. ROUTHEAUX Registered Professional Reporter Daniel, Dillinger, Dominski, Richberger & Weatherford 2200 One Commerce Square http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
Memphis, Tennessee 38103 DANIEL, DILLINGER, DOMINSKI, RICHBERGER, WEATHERFORD (901) 529-1999 1186 - INDEX WITNESS: PAGE NUMBER ... WILLIAM SCHAAP Direct Examination By Mr. Pepper --------------- 1299 TRIAL EXHIBITS 24 --------------- 1265 (Collective) 25 --------------- 1271 26 --------------- 1275 27 --------------- 1286 28 --------------- 1304 MR. PEPPER: Plaintiffs call Mr. William Schaap to the stand. WILLIAM SCHAAP, Having been first duly sworn, was examined and testified as follows:
DIRECT EXAMINATION BY MR. PEPPER: Q. Good afternoon, Mr. Schaap. A. Good afternoon. Q. Would you state your full name and address for the record, please. A. My name is William Schaap. My address is 143 West Fourth Street, New York, New York. Q. Could you give us a summary of your professional background, please. THE COURT: Before you do that, spell your last name. THE WITNESS: I'm sorry. S C H A A P. THE COURT: Thank you. A. I'm an attorney. I graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1964. I've been a practicing lawyer since then. And I'm a member of the bar of the State of New York and of the District of Columbia. I specialized in the 1970's in military law. I practiced military law in Asia and Europe. I later became the editor in chief of the Military Law Reporter in Washington for a number of years. And in the 70's and 80's I was staff counsel of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. I also in the late 1980's was an adjunct professor at John J. College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York where I taught courses on propaganda and disinformation. Q. (BY MR. PEPPER) Have you also been involved in journalism and publishing? A. Yes, I have. Since 1977 or '78, in addition to being a practicing lawyer, I've also been a journalist and a publisher and a writer specializing in intelligence-related matters and particularly their relationship to the media. http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
For more than 20 years I've been the co-publisher of a magazine called the Covert Action Quarterly which particularly deals with reporting on intelligence agencies, primarily U.S. agencies but also foreign. I published a magazine for a number of years called Lies Of Our Times which specifically was a magazine about propaganda and disinformation. And I've been the managing director of the Institute for Media Analysis for a number of years. I also, for about 20 years now, I think, was one of the principals in a publishing company called Sheraton Square Press that published books and pamphlets relating to intelligence and the media. Q. Do you also write? Have you authored articles and works? A. Yes, I do. I've written, oh, dozens of articles on -- particularly on media and intelligence. I've edited about seven or eight books on the subject. I've contributed sections to a number of other books and had -- I've -- many of my articles, of course, have appeared in my own -- our own publications, but I've also had articles appear around the world including New York Times, Washington Post and major media like -- like those. I've appeared a lot on radio and television as an expert on intelligence and the media. I'm slowing down a bit now because I'm getting older. But I used to do a lot of speaking at universities and colleges around the country and debating government officials and people connected to organizations that supported the CIA and the other -FBI and the other intelligence agencies. Q. Have you ever testified as an expert witness in the area of governmental use of media for disinformation and propaganda? A. Yes, I have. I've -- I've testified as an expert in that field in both state and federal courts in this country. I've testified in foreign courts. I testified once before the United Nations on that subject and once before the U.S. Congress. Q. Mr. Schaap, I'm going to show you a copy of a -- of your own CV. It's a summary of your professional qualifications. I want you to confirm its accuracy. A. Yes, that's -- that's my CV that I prepared. MR. PEPPER: Your Honor, we move admission of Mr. Schaap's CV and move that he be accepted as an expert witness in the matter at hand for the issues of government use of media or disinformation and propaganda purposes. THE COURT: Objections? MR. GARRISON: I have no objection. THE COURT: All right. (Whereupon said document was marked as Trial Exhibit Number 28.) Q. (BY MR. PEPPER) Mr. Schaap, in the course of your research, have you had occasion to study the use of the media by government agencies? A. Yes, I have. I've studied many government reports on the subject. Many, many books have been written about it and articles. In fact, I've written many of those articles. Q. Can you give the Court and the Jury a brief summary of the subject indicating the extent to which this type of activity by government still takes place? A. Yes, I can. I -- I won't go into ancient history, but it should be noted that -- that governments around the world have secretly used the media for their purposes for many hundreds of years, probably thousands. But certainly from the 16th and 17th century in England on there has been a great deal of research about the use by governments -- a secret use of the media. http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
For our purposes though, the -- particularly relating to the U.S., the most significant and the first major deliberate program in this country was during World War I when President Wilson set up an organization called the Committee For Public Information under a public relations executive -- a man named George Creole. The purpose of this committee was to propagandize the war effort against Germany. This was created immediately after the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. And in propagandizing the war effort and war news, it was the policy of this committee to have no compunctions about falsifying the news whenever it was felt that that was necessary to help the war effort. Q. Can you give us an example of the type of falsification of the news that you're talking about. A. Yes. They -- the Committee For Public Information purported very often to release documents, supposedly genuine documents, to the press in order to substantiate whatever particular position the -- the Wilson government might have been taking at the time. And one of the most famous that happened early in its creation in 1917 was a disinformation campaign to suggest that the Russian revolutionaries, Lenin in particular and Trotsky, were actually German agents being paid by the Kaiser. The Government and Creole's committee made up the story. They made up -- created phony documents. They passed it all to friends in the major newspapers. And almost immediately this was front page news around the United States and around the world. Q. I'm going to show you a New York Times headline of that era and see if that's the kind of falsification you're talking about. A. Yes, this is -- the rest of the text is from an article where that headline appeared. But that was on the front page of the New York Times in 1917. And later it transpired that the documents were -- were forgeries that had been created by Mr. Creole. And, of course, it was obvious by the current course of history, the Russian revolutionaries were hardly friends of the Kaiser. Q. Yes, indeed. A. Much less employees. Q. Can you continue with your summary, please. A. Yes. After World War I, the U.S. continued to be the -- or actually became the world's leader in the control of information. Britain had been more pre-eminent before World War I. But at the end of the war, the U.S. was really in control of all the world communication media. And disinformation was used by the government sporadically during the inter-war years. It was particularly used in the red scares of the 1920's and the creation of disinformation suggesting various opponents of the government were communists. But it wasn't a major aspect of government policy until the advent of World War II. And that was when deliberate disinformation or a structure for emitting deliberate disinformation became very, very important. Q. What happened at that point in history to bring about that resurgence? A. Well, at the very beginning of World War II there were really two schools of thought competing, both of which had government agencies. One that was set up was called the Office of War Information which was a civilian organization although it worked closely with the War Department, as it was then called. And it was headed by a man named Elmer Davis who was a very famous reporter -- journalist. His philosophy was that the agency should tell the American people exactly what was happening -- tell them the truth. If we lost a battle somewhere in Europe or the Pacific, we should tell the people we lost that battle. If we won a battle, we'd tell them we won it. But he believed that in the long run we would do best by reporting the truth.
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
But at the same time another key organization that developed during World War II was the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, which was headed by a military man, William Donovan, who was known as Wild Bill Donovan, who believed the saying that George Creole had -- his philosophy from World War I, which was that you should lie to the people whenever it's necessary, whenever you think lying will help maintain morale and win the war. This struggle was taking place, of course, in the context of World War II. And Donovan won both with President Roosevelt and afterward with President Truman. His philosophy that disinformation was a powerful -- a valuable weapon for a country to have, and that the disadvantages of lying to the American people were outweighed by the advantages of being able to manipulate the media. So when the war was over, the Office of War Information was dissolved. The OSS was transformed into the CIA. And the CIA was now existing in peace time, mind you. World War II is over, and now the CIA is set up with this information as a major part of its work and, in fact, as most of the reports later pointed out, the largest single part of the CIA's operations. The -- within the government at least, the acceptability of lying to the public became very widespread and acceptable even in time of peace. There had been people who felt, well, it's one thing when you're at war. But even in time of peace it became acceptable, and it spread from other agencies, including the -- the FBI which also began to engage in media manipulation in a very, very large way. Q. So in addition to being a war time strategy with respect to the security of the nation and the -- the promulgation of -- of falsehoods in times of war, this tactic started to be used in peace time. A. Exactly. That was the major difference. Certain things were -- were much more acceptable or expected over the course of history in time of war and were generally supposed to stop when the war was over. Now, there were people who argued in the late 40's that the Cold War was a war just like a hot war, and that was the war that was on, and that was why we had to do this. But what really happened is there were not battles being waged between soldiers. There was not a hot war going on anywhere, and yet the -- the infrastructure that had been set up to spread disinformation to be able to lie became institutionalized and became operating at a greater and greater level. Q. Mr. Schaap, how is it that some individuals like yourself have become more aware of these kinds of practices in our lifetimes while the mass of the population has not? A. Well, it's mostly because -- by coincidence there were a number of factors that came together, mostly in the 1970's, leading to major congressional investigations of these activities leading some newspapers to fund serious in-depth investigative reports. And in the middle and late 70's there were a series -- a huge series of congressional reports on intelligence activities, a whole section of which was devoted to media activities. And then there were major exposes in the New York Times and the Washington Post. It was sort of the Watergate mentality, I guess, that allowed this to happen. There was a window of a few years when exposing government misconduct, particularly past government misconduct -- and as far as the government was concerned, the older the better. But at least there was a window of opportunity where this was acceptable even within the mainstream, the establishment press. It was not frowned upon as much as it might have been at other times both before and since. Q. Before we go into some specific instances of this and details, can you explain to the Court and Jury really how does disinformation work? And why is it so -- why is it so successful? A. Well, you have to understand first the target of propaganda -- of disinformation. The consumer of the false news so to speak is -- in what we're talking about is the American public in general and sometimes the public overseas. Disinformation is almost always by -- by definition, about things that the average person has no separate personal knowledge of, otherwise it couldn't really work. I mean, you can't fool the people you're http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
talking about. You can fool the other people who don't know about it. You're not trying to fool the people you're talking about. The simplest example is during the Vietnam War when there was a massive bombing campaign and the U.S. was bombing Cambodia. President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger repeatedly made public statements that we were not dropping bombs in Cambodia. Well, you couldn't fool the Cambodians who looked up and saw the bombs falling in their back yard. They knew you were bombing Cambodia. But the American people by and large accepted these statements as truth, and in fact that was a disinformation campaign that was later admitted. You're -- really we're talking about things that the public has no separate knowledge of. And it's also reinforced by the fact that Americans generally tend to believe what their government tells them, to believe that government officials on all levels generally tell the truth. And that -- if you have that, that absence of skepticism, it's a major plus for the disinformationists. And, also, it's very, very unusual around the world other than in the United States. In most other countries, particularly in Europe, it's much more the opposite. People tend on average to be very skeptical of their government. If the Italian government issues a statement, the average Italian on the street will say it's probably a lie until you can prove to me otherwise that it's not a lie. Because governments lie. That's what they -- you know, they sort of expect them to do that whereas Americans don't expect that. The average American would hear something from the government or hear the news on television and assumes that what they're hearing is the truth unless they're shown otherwise. They assume that almost nothing is ever a conspiracy. In Europe it's very much the opposite. Anything happens. They tend to think it's a conspiracy unless you show them that it wasn't a conspiracy. I mean, after all, "conspiracy" just means, you know, more than one person being involved in something. And if you stop and think about it, almost everything significant that happens anywhere involves more than one person. Yet here there is a -- not a myth really, but there's just an underlying assumption that most things are not conspiracies. And when you have that, it enables a government which has a propaganda program, has a disinformation program, to be relatively successful in -- in having its disinformation accepted. The other reason why it -- why it works even though as we -- as we know, somewhere there are people who know it's not true. Somewhere they know you're lying about something. But another reason it works is that disinformation is very, very effective over time. The longer that you, whoever you are, can control the spin on a story, the more that spin becomes accepted as the absolute truth. And in this country the government has a great deal of power and influence over that spin. Q. Why is it so effective over time? A. Well, this is an area where I had to consult with other experts because it turns out really to be a neurological function. And that was first explained to me by a -- a professor at Harvard Medical School. And it has to do with the way the human brain remembers things, the way we learn things, the way we create patterns and associations and reinforce -- well, I don't know how you -- it sort of like channels in the brain when certain things trigger certain collateral thoughts. And when you associate one thing with another over time, just the mention of the one brings the association of the other. What this will sometimes mean is that even when something is later exposed as a lie, if it was accepted as a truth for a long time, the exposure of it as a lie is not believed. It's in one ear and out the other. The best example that we know in my field is one that John Stockwell reported on. He was a CIA officer in Angola -- for Angola. But they were based -- the CIA station was based in the Congo. And when the Cuban troops were sent in to help the Angolans fight the South Africans during the early and mid 70's, the CIA's task was to try to discredit the Cubans and do whatever it could to make people around the world think it was a terrible thing that the Cubans were helping the Angolans. http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
So Stockwell's group in Congo sat down, and one guy says to the other guy, let's think of something terrible to say that the Cubans did. And another guy says, hey, why don't we say they're raping Angolan women. That would be a great thing to say. The other guy says, terrific. And they call in their media experts, and they start sitting there at their desk at the CIA office and they start typing out these news stories about how a group of Cuban soldiers raped a bunch of Angolan women in some operation. And then they write Story Number 2 which is that the villagers got incensed and decided they didn't want the Cubans anymore, and they were going to find the fellows who did it and arrest them. And in Story Number 3 the villagers captured the Cubans. In Story Number 4 they were tried by a jury of the women victims and they were later executed with their own weapons. And they made a series of about 12 newspaper stories in a row. And with one phone call and one visit, it went over the wire services, it went into Europe, it went into the United States, it went around the world. And for about a six-month period there were all these stories about the horrible Cuban rapes in Angola. And what that does is when you hear -- the average person hears Angola or Cuban, they'll think rape of the women. And if they hear rape of the women, they will think Angola or Cubans. And if you get Angola, they'll think Cubans and rape of the women. And these patterns build up so that that becomes the truth embedded in your mind. Four years later John Stockwell quit the CIA and wrote a book exposing it. Wrote a big piece for the New York Times about how the entire Cuban/Angola story was a fabrication. And he sat there at the desk typing it. And the day after that story appeared, there was still 900 million people around the world who thought the phony story was true. Because when year, after year, after year you hear that something was the case, one story -- one day saying, hey, the whole thing was a lie, and it doesn't register on their brain. It can't beat those -- those patterns that have been built up. Q. Let's go back now taking an example -- let's go back now to the general area of intelligence because all of this activity is useless unless there's a structure into which it fits and into which it can be put out. Can you deal with the kind of structure of media operations that puts out this kind of disinformation. How extensive is it? A. Yes. We can be -- we have a lot of information about the CIA. We have a certain amount of information about the FBI, a certain amount about military intelligence. And the reason for this is because there were those congressional investigations that I mentioned before. There have been reports published, particularly from the Church Committee in the late 70's, where they published volume after volume describing the extent of media operations by the CIA and -- and other agencies. They -- the exact amounts of money that were being spent were -- were not divulged by those initial reports because that was considered to be classified. The intelligence budgets are always classified except at the same time every few weeks you'll read something in the newspaper where they say, the classified budget, which is approximately 25 billion dollars, and so on and so on and so forth. So what we -- what we have learned from these reports is that -- the first thing was that about a third of the whole CIA budget went to media propaganda operations. Q. Well, if a third of the CIA's budget went to media propaganda operations, how much would that be approximately? A. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year just for that. I mean, the intelligence budget -- now everything together is according to these -- all these reports that say it's secret, but it's about 25 to 30 billion dollars a year. Now, a lot of that is high-tech stuff. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about -- satellites and so on. But the stuff that goes to the CIA is several billion. And when you factor out overhead and things like that, you have got your operational amount. Most of the estimates suggest that -- that hundreds of billion -- hundreds of http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
millions of dollars -- close to a billion dollars are being spent every year by the United States on secret propaganda. Again, we have fairly good figures for the CIA because it at least has been admitted in the past that they did do this stuff. They admit they do it now except they say they don't do it within the United States. But they admit that that's part of what they do. The FBI is much harder to -- to get figures for because they don't generally admit to conducting media operations. And unless and until something gets exposed and they have to admit that particular operation, they -they deny to an extent where it's really hard to try and estimate how much money is being used by the FBI and by the military intelligence agencies. But it's sort of clear that hundreds of millions of dollars a year are being spent by various aspects of the government on deliberately creating and spreading lies. Q. Before we get into the specifics of media operations related to the Martin Luther King case and James Earl Ray, can you give us -- just to finish the background, can you give us some idea of the influence that the CIA and the FBI have had over the media. A. Yes. Again, this was something that very specific figures came out in the 70's and 80's, and we don't know the precise figures. Today we have no reason to think that they are significantly less than when they came out. But when the Church Committee reported on the CIA media operations, for example, beyond friends in the press, beyond having people who were just generally -- thought along similar lines, it turned out that they had thousands of journalists in their employ. Not merely friendly, not merely agents, not merely someone you could pass a story to, but people who might have appeared to the outside world to be a reporter for CBS was in fact a CIA employee getting a salary from the CIA. And that was repeated thousands of times all around the world. They also owned outright, the CIA -- about that time 250 or more media organizations. That's wire services, newspapers, magazines, radio, TV stations -- all around the world that they owned outright. The actual shareholder of the company turned out to be some CIA front. The Church Committee, unfortunately, did not name very many of these organizations because those that got named, of course, had to close down immediately. But it was learned that -- even things like the Rome Daily American, which was a major English language newspaper in Rome, for 20 or 30 years had been owned by the CIA. This was published and, of course, the paper closed the next day. But most people didn't realize the extent of the intelligence media organization. It's fairly incredible. They sort of brag about it. When you read the books about the history of the CIA, one of the heroes was the first man in charge of media operations, a man named Frank Wisner. And they referred to his organization as the Mighty Wurlitzer. And there's this image of this guy sitting at one of those giant organs, you know, with seventeen keyboards and you're playing this -- sort of like The Phantom of the Opera in that scene, and there was the guy running the CIA media operations all around the world. And he really was because every single city of any size on earth, he had some employee who was -- supposedly worked for a newspaper or a magazine or a radio station or a wire service, and they could get stories anywhere. Q. Can you give just one or two more specific examples. A. Yes. There was one -- actually in an article that was published written by a former CIA officer named James Willcot, who was not in the propaganda division, he was in finance. But he was so amazed he wrote a little article about this. And he was stationed in Japan one time when there was a big debate raging there over whether nuclear power ships should be able to dock in Japanese ports. It's been a very touchy issue -- at least since Hiroshima it's been a very touchy issue in Japan -- even peaceful uses of nuclear power.
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
And the U.S. line was to promote the docking of nuclear power ships because the U.S. had more and more of them. So they wanted the Japanese papers to editorialize in favor of this in the debate that was going on. And Jim said he looked and he saw this guy at a nearby desk sit down and type -- this is a CIA officer, an employee of the U.S. Government -- type an editorial and then wave goodbye to everybody, left the office. The next morning that appeared as the editorial -- the lead editorial in the largest newspaper in Japan. Now, that level -- they didn't go to a friendly publisher and say, gee, we would sort of like it if you could maybe do something a little bit favorable to this issue. They wrote the editorial, they handed it to the guy. And the next day in Japanese it appears in the paper. Another thing showing the influence here in this country was during the Vietnam War. I don't know if -- well, some people might. People my age will remember it. There was -- Life magazine that had a cover picture of a North Vietnamese stamp that showed the Vietnamese shooting down American planes. And it showed U.S. planes with U.S. markings being burst into flames and crashing and U.S. pilots being killed. And it was a pretty bizarre and gruesome set of postage stamps. And there was a whole story in there basically trying to give the line that the Vietnamese were glorifying the killing of Americans. And they thought it was so great to kill Americans that they were putting it on their postage stamps. The only thing that was later learned is that these were not North Vietnamese stamps. They were CIA forgeries. Had never been real stamps. And the CIA was able to have them appear on the cover of Life magazine as if they were the real thing. That level of influence is something that many people don't realize. And when you read the congressional reports, page after page after page, it's absolutely astonishing how, given the urgency and given that they have hundreds of millions of dollars at their command, they could get almost anything to appear almost anywhere. Q. What about the FBI and domestic propaganda? A. Well, the FBI, there's much less documentation, again, because the official position is that the FBI doesn't do this. Whereas the official position is the CIA does do it although they tried not to talk about it. But what did come out in the congressional reports primarily is that a major FBI division that was called the crime reporting division was theoretically supposed to keep track of how federal crimes were being reported. Why that was their business, I don't know. But that's what its theory was. But in fact what it was doing was a whole division set up to keep track of journalists and reporters and magazines and newspapers to decide who could be counted on to write stories that the FBI wanted written, who would slant stories the way they wanted it. The question of whether these particular reporters were actually FBI employees, like so many were CIA employees, is unclear. That's never been admitted by the government that the FBI actually took its own employees and had them get a job as a correspondent on the newspaper, whereas we know the CIA did that in many, many places. There's no reason to think they couldn't have done it other than the fact that it hasn't yet been -- been exposed. But in any event, there were significant pressures available to the FBI to -- to use their friends. And the Church Committee report gives -- gives many, many examples -- copies of memos from Hoover on down where there would be a thing attached and say, get this information to our friends at the Copely News Service, get this information to our friends at Reader's Digest, get this to our friendly AP reporter and so on. And then, of course, they would show the clipping indicating that in fact someone had gotten it to their friends, and it would then go over the wires or appear in stories. Q. Let's turn now to the use of the media in this type of campaign against Martin Luther King, Jr. But before you do that, could you tell the Court and the Jury, what are the sources of -- underlying your testimony -- this aspect of it. http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
A. Yes. I did a goodly amount of additional research and preparation and contemplation of appearing here. And there really are two main sources. The first, of course, is the various congressional reports that we have talked about. In addition to reports about the general operations or misconduct of the CIA or the FBI, there have been specific studies -- I don't know if they have been mentioned in this case, but there have been specific studies relating to Martin Luther King, Jr., both with respect to attacks on him while he was alive and also specific reports with respect to his murder. There was an entire volume published from one of the Senate investigations on the FBI media campaign against Dr. King. [See Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, 1976, Book III, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Case Study] And there was a House Committee that published a volume investigating his assassination. And these, of course, are the -- the most important sources for what I'm talking about and what other people have written about because they have a great deal of government documentation in them which no private journalist could ever get their hands on. There are things in there that even the best of research wouldn't be able to obtain. But the congressional committees had subpoena powers and were able to amass thousands of documents, most of which were photocopied and attached to their reports. Q. For our purposes here, as well as those sources, what other sources have you used? A. Well, I've also, of course, reviewed many books that have been written on the subject -- hundreds of articles. And I've -- I've done briefcases full of clippings that were major stories written about Dr. King, particularly in the last few years of his life. And then the -- most of the coverage in the first few years of the James Earl Ray case. Both before and after his guilty plea there was intensive coverage, as you can imagine. And throughout the 60's and into the early 70's, there was quite a bit of coverage, and those clippings that I've been able to find I've reviewed. Some of the sporadic coverage in the 80's and 90's I've also been able to assemble and review, although the level of that coverage has decreased very much over the last decade or so. Q. What do the congressional reports -- if you can summarize them, give some instances, what do the congressional reports tell us about the FBI's use of the media in general but then particularly as it relates to Dr. King? A. Well, in general, the first thing they show is that throughout its history, the FBI has made relations with the media a key area. Not so much infiltrating employees as the CIA did, but cultivating very, very deep connections throughout the American media. They had the entire division of the FBI -- the crime reporting division was dealing solely with developing friendly journalists, developing ways in which you could get what you wanted to appear in the papers to be there and what you didn't want not to be there on a level that was -- nobody realized until these -- these reports came out. The crime reporting division was keeping track of virtually every journalist in America that wrote anything that had to do with the FBI. And whether everything was being classified as friendly or unfriendly, it -- of course, it was somewhat complicated because it generally meant: Did J. Edgar Hoover like what they wrote or not like what they wrote? And practically -- the opinion of nobody else at the FBI mattered while Hoover was alive. But he kept charts on every significant journalist as to who was helpful. And when you look through the reports and the documents that have come out, you will see statements by Hoover and his immediate subordinates get this information to friendly journalists. Get this to our friend at U.S. News and World Report. Get this to some friendly reporters in Memphis. And you just see all that sort of stuff. Interestingly though, this information -- it never mattered whether the information was true or false. That was not what it was about. You find FBI planting information that's true, you find them planting information that's false. The critical thing was if they had the friend at that media place, that friend was going to run what they wanted without investigating it. http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
Q. Could you just cut through -- tell us what the Church Committee said about CoIntellPro reports and explain to the Court and the Jury what were the CoIntellPro activities. A. CoIntellPro was Counter Intelligence Program, and that was the -- the major FBI program to counter what it conceived to be threats to American democracy. And it was, at least in my opinion, rather paranoid in what it considered threats. It had divisions trying to operate against communists, against socialists, against the New Left, against the Old Left, against what they referred to as Black Nationalists, what they referred to as hate groups. They had a separate section just on the Nation of Islam. They had a separate section on the Civil Rights Movement. They had a hybrid program on CommInfil which was to deal with the possibility that communists were infiltrating non-communist groups. So they had one section trying to disrupt groups they felt were communist influence or dangerous, and another one trying to infiltrate groups or find out about groups that they thought other people were infiltrating. Basically they -- and, of course, you have to understand, "counter intelligence program" was really a misnomer. Because counter intelligence normally means you're trying to find things out. Counter intelligence officers in war time and in espionage are supposed to be finding out information. But these were active committees, not passive. And what counter intelligence programs were, were overt attempts -- sometimes very, very complicated operations to disrupt organizations which they felt were a threat regardless of whether the organizations were committing any crimes. I mean, the irony of this is that while the FBI theoretically was supposed to limit itself to investigating crimes, and federal crimes at that, it basically took the position that, you know, thinking bad thoughts was a crime. Or if you didn't like the current government of that day, that was a crime. And if J. Edgar Hoover decided the group should be disrupted, then CoIntellPro would sit down and figure out how to disrupt it. Q. Where was Dr. King in this constellation? Where did they -- how did they regard him? How was he targeted? A. Well, he was just about the top of the list in terms of J. Edgar Hoover for reasons that are still unclear. Many books have been written about J. Edgar Hoover, and I don't think anybody quite understands what made him tick. He hated Dr. King. He made no bones about it. I mean, he would -- he would send letters using -- referring to him as garbage, referring to him as slime. When Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he wrote a long diatribe about how that was the most ridiculous thing he ever heard of in his life, and in fact started a whole thing to disrupt the Nobel Peace Prize program. But he and the SCLC, as Dr. King's organization, were by themselves a major target of the FBI from early on. He certainly was being investigated in the 50's. It wasn't until the early 60's that it really intensified. But Hoover was much more public about Dr. King than almost any other individual. He would be public about "the communists" or "the terrorists" or whatever. But Martin Luther King he specifically used -- used the most horrendous language to describe him. And once went on a -- the only time he ever gave a press interview called him -- called Martin Luther King the most notorious liar in the history of the United States. Q. Okay. A. And he was saying that because King had had the temerity to say that the FBI agents in the south weren't being terribly helpful to blacks who were having problems with the racism there. Q. Can you give an example of some of the media operations that the FBI and Hoover mounted against Dr. King's organization. A. Sure. The first really significant ones were -- were to -- to suggest that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was communist infiltrated and communist dominated. They -- the FBI had prepared dossiers on King http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
and on everybody who was working with him and had two people who were close to Dr. King who had at some time in the past had some affiliations with communists. You should understand, because this came out later, they had no evidence whatsoever that either of these two people was at that time a communists or that either of these two people was trying to impose some communist line on Dr. King, but they decided to say that anyway. And they prepared dossiers on these two -- one was a white lawyer, Stanley Levinson, the other was a black organizer named Jack O'Dell. And what they did is they -- the same way, get us a friend at this paper, get us a friend there. They started planting stories. And I think I've -Q. Let me -- let me -A. -- given you one of the key ones. Q. Yes, let's pull up on the stand one of the stories -- screen one of the stories that they planted. A. That's the second page. I think the headline is -- right. This was a major story about -- about Jack O'Dell and an attempt to -- I mean, they were attempting to discredit Dr. King and the organization. They were not -- they were not trying to just get rid of O'Dell because that would be better for the organization. But they spread this -this particular clipping, I believe, is from The Atlanta Constitution. But it says in it that -- it makes reference to prior articles in the St. Louis Globe Democrat, in the New Orleans Times Picayune. The story which was essentially based on the FBI spreading this -- this information appeared all over the country. Q. Other than a general attack, is there anything -- anything else significant about this -- this article? A. Well, actually, this is a good one because it demonstrates some of the techniques they used. The most significant one is being fuzzy whenever you can. It has -- in there it talks -- it refers to O'Dell and says: "Has been identified as a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party." And that -- this is sort of the passive tense to avoid saying what -- what you know. When you say someone has been -- you don't say who identified him. You don't even say whether this identification has been confirmed. You don't say whether it's true or false. I mean, you know, one person anywhere can say something about anybody, and then you say he has been identified as a such and such. That's very important, particularly because we -- that's in the present tense. It says: "Has been identified as a member of the communist party." We know now that at the time, when the FBI gave this information to its friend, they knew that was untrue. Because they knew -- whatever might have been ten years before, they knew at that time that he was not a member of the Communist Party and yet they sent out this information saying he has been identified as a member of the Communist Party. Q. Was this a part of a broader effort on the part of the FBI to discredit the Black Movement and to tie the Civil Rights Movement to communists generally and communist infiltration? A. Very much so. It was one of the -- the few instances where -- where Hoover actually testified before Congress and allowed the testimony to be public. He -- the line was that the -- the Black Movement -- the Civil Rights Movement was being exploited by communists. And this particular clipping is another example -- again, this is from the New York Times -- of this program. These are all -- despite the fact that many of them have bylines, although this one does not have a byline, these are all based on material packets -- press packets almost that were prepared by the FBI and given to their -- to their friends in these -- in these stories. And in this case, it's even more significant because this was part of a campaign that was so organized that Hoover got his friends to write stories about it before his testimony became public so that when the testimony then became public, as it did for this one, people would know about it. One of his very, very close friends was
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
Stewart -- Joseph Alsop, who was a syndicated national columnist back then. And this was Alsop's column about the terribly sad fact that the Civil Rights Movement in America was totally being run by the communists. This, again, was based on whatever the FBI handed him and asked him to publish. This was just one week before the other story where the -- where the testimony became public. Q. There was an escalating battle between Hoover's FBI and Martin Luther King's SCLC and the Civil Rights and then anti-war activities. What -- how did it intensify from the standpoint of media operations against Dr. King? A. Well, the first real escalation was in sixty -- in late '64 when I mentioned before that Hoover gave a press conference and called King the most notorious liar in the country. This was sort of a -- it was shocking that he said it, it was shocking that he said it in the context of a public meeting with journalists. And it appeared all over the country. And the whole conference was reprinted in U.S. News and World Report with a short response from -- from Dr. King. That was the start of -- of a campaign which continued right up until -- until King's death. I mentioned before that during the Nobel Peace Prize period of time this was in -- the nomination was in late '64, and he received it in January of '65. Hoover had the FBI do everything they could to minimize -- he couldn't stop the Swedish and Norwegian governments from giving him the prize. But he did everything that he could to try to stop it from being honored here. There was a major banquet in Dr. King's honor in Atlanta when he came back from receiving the prize. Hoover got the editor of the Atlanta Constitution personally to go around and try and persuade various people not to attend the banquet. There were also a series of articles around this time trying to show that -- that King was being influenced by communists which were being -- again, we learned this from reports. The FBI, as the CIA, was actually writing the articles anonymously and then trying to get their friends in papers to print the article under somebody else's name. And there were a whole series, some of which actually did get printed, some of which didn't. There were also -- I won't go -- I mean, there are big -- hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports detailing all the things that the FBI did. They -- one of the most outrageous was a doctored tape recording that was prepared that purported to -- to be a recording of Dr. King engaging in raucous and possibly sexual activities with various people. It turned out to be - most of it was totally fraudulent. And what wasn't fraudulent did not have to do with anything torrid going on. It was all put together. And the tape -- in fact, the tape was originally used -- and this is one of the things that the House Committee found the most outrageous -- in an attempt to try and drive Dr. King to commit suicide. Shortly before he went to get the Nobel Prize, the tape was mailed to him with a long letter basically saying, if you don't kill yourself, we're going to make this public. Nothing ever happened because he was getting so much mail that this thing that somebody thought was -- somebody made a tape of one of his speeches. And they put it in the back room, and they didn't get to look at it until about nine months later, long after he had come back. And then they saw the note trying to get him to commit suicide. And then, ten years later, we discover that it was the FBI who wrote that note and made that tape and mailed it to Dr. King. THE COURT: Let's take a few seconds and stretch. (Brief break taken.) THE COURT: Bring in the Jury. (Jury In.) Q. (BY MR. PEPPER) Mr. Schaap, you've described an awesome power that exists in government influenced and controlled, sometimes owned, media -- print, audio, visual media entities -- and how that http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
infrastructure gets focused on opponents of the United States such as Martin Luther King. Do you see how this incredible power was brought against Dr. King and intensified against him during the last year of his life? A. Yes. I think the -- the main reason for that was very, very specific. There was one speech that Dr. King gave in April of 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City where he came out against the war in Vietnam. And if you remember back to that period of time, this was a fundamental debate gripping every aspect of this country, the pros and cons of the involvement in Vietnam. And when Dr. King came out against the U.S. involvement there, this was immediately accepted by J. Edgar Hoover as proof that he was a communist, proof that he was a terrible person. Q. But didn't this have the effect of unifying all the forces -- all of the intelligence forces of the United States, and so now just -- it was not just an FBI matter, but it -- it seemed to spread to military intelligence, central intelligence and other areas too, didn't it? A. Absolutely. Once Dr. King made that statement, the CIA in particular considered him and his movement fair game. Even to the extent that their operations were limited to foreign policy, the -- again, because of the congressional investigations, we know that the CIA, which people thought did not operate domestically within the U.S., had a huge domestic program called Operation Chaos which was designed to counter opposition to the Vietnam War. And even though they later admitted it was illegal and later admitted they shouldn't have been doing it, there have been whole books of congressional reports about all the Operation Chaos activity in the United States, and what they called Black Nationalists were a specific target of that -- that campaign. Q. Did this continue into 1968 in his activities with the Sanitation Workers' Strike in Memphis and planning for the Poor People's Campaign in Washington? A. Absolutely. The campaign against Dr. King's activities went up to the very last day of his life. In particular, on the -- his involvement with the strike in Memphis, the FBI decided at that point to try to spread stories that he was encouraging violence. One of the -- the key articles was in the Christian Science Monitor at the end of March of '68 and, again, gives all of the -- the themes that the FBI wanted -- wanted planted, particularly about violence. The article uses bizarre language for something about a small strike in a medium-sized town that, you know, was something but was not like an earth-shaking event. This was the Sanitation Workers' Strike. And this story refers to it as a potentially cataclysmic racial confrontation. Not quite World War III, but along that kind of language. And stories that began to appear -- and this was just before Dr. King was killed -- were -- were suggesting that he was closely allied with violent forces. Q. Mr. Schaap, this Court and Jury has heard testimony from a former New York Times reporter who was told by his national editor -- Times reporters in this courtroom notwithstanding -- told by his national editor, Claude Sitton, to go to Memphis and nail Dr. King. Those were the words Earl Caldwell used in his testimony here. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about? A. Oh, absolutely. Hoover was -- you see from the memos in the report -- and Lord knows what we don't know and haven't seen -- was sending people out everywhere to talk to all of their friendly media contacts to get King. And they would usually deliver packets of information, much of it false, to be used as part of the -- of the campaign. They also were -- used a lot of interesting tactics. And you see in these stories a lot of fuzzy -- I mean, the story that's on the screen, for example, has a sentence in it near the end where it says: "Many blacks have mixed feelings about Dr. King." I mean, this is a -- they teach you in Journalism 101 not to use sentences like that. What does it mean "many blacks"? Many -- everybody had mixed feelings about everything. If you want to do it, you say who has what feelings. http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
But the whole thing was to try to say he's violent, he's hanging around with violent people, and basically the blacks in this country shouldn't support him. Q. What was this operation like -- this media blitz, this media disinformation campaign? What was it like after Dr. King was killed? A. Well, for one thing, the attempts to discredit Dr. King -- particularly the FBI attempts -- did not stop after his death. They continued to send out their little dossiers and reports and phony information to try and discredit his memory. They also -- in the beginning when, of course, the assassin had not yet been caught or, rather, no one yet had been caught and charged with the assassination, had to give the impression that the FBI was doing a great job. I mean, one of the criticisms that was unavoidable is when Hoover had already publicly attacked Dr. King in all these magazines and said he thought he was a liar and thought he was the worst problem facing the United States and so on, it became a problem for the FBI then to try and convince America that they were doing everything in their power to apprehend his killer. And to do that, they had to pull out all the stops and get all their friendly columnists writing story after story that they were doing everything they could. And also subsequently to try and add to the stories that they were convinced that James Earl Ray was the lone assassin. Q. Let me put up this article. This story relates to a Jack Anderson column. A. Yes. This is interesting for what it reveals later. This was a story that came out in 1975. That's actually an interesting example of Jack Anderson criticizing a group of people, of whom he fails to mention he was one at the time. It's something that happens often when columnists decide to clear the -- clear the slate. But he was reporting at this time about how the FBI had waged the campaign against Dr. King, how he knew about it, how he knew about all these gross accusations that were being -- being handed out. It's -- I mean, the story is only interesting because why didn't he say it at the time is one's first thought. But at least he stayed abreast of some of it. He also was able to -- to explain that a number of rumors about Dr. King had been proven to be not true. What he didn't know at the time because the Congressional Report came out a little bit later -what he didn't know is that even the FBI at the time they were spreading the stories when Dr. King was alive knew that the stories were not true. Q. Now, at the same time they were trying to discredit Dr. King and continued to discredit his name after he was killed, they were trying to enhance the -- the manhunt and the law enforcement work during that time. A. Yes. Not only enhance, but use hyperbole that was pretty bizarre. Although, of course, you can understand the pressures that were on them when no one had been caught. Drew Pearson, who was a very close friend of Hoover's, had a nationally syndicated column and wrote one basically designed to try and kill the rumors that Hoover wasn't trying hard because he didn't like King. And in it Pearson says he is convinced that the FBI is conducting perhaps the most painstaking exhaustive manhunt ever before undertaken in the United States. Why -- how he would know is beyond us, but that's clearly what Hoover told him to say. They also -- I don't have the clipping here. But they also had another one of their very close operatives, Jeremiah O'Leary, who was then with the Washington Star, did an article for the Reader's Digest. And he went one beyond Pearson and said it was the greatest manhunt in law enforcement history in the world. So he was now saying this wasn't only the greatest manhunt in America, it was the greatest manhunt ever, anywhere. There were -- there are a whole -- and, of course, when Ray was arrested, then there was a state of sort of selfcongratulatory columns done by the same friends of the FBI showing what a wonderful job they had done. Q. Are there any other aspects of this coverage after Dr. King's death that were clearly media operations? http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
A. Well, there certainly are in my opinion. At this point, once we get beyond the things that have been admitted in the Congressional Reports, I'm drawing my conclusions based on my own experience and expertise. But it certainly seems clear that there were media operations around -- not only that the FBI had done a wonderful job, but also on the -- the campaign to demonstrate that -- not only that James Earl Ray had done it, but that he had acted alone. Q. What are the possible operations that you actually see? A. Well, there -- you see in stories, again by friends of the FBI, statements like: It looks like the theory that there was a conspiracy is untrue. The FBI has exploded the theory that there was a conspiracy. The -- even people who had -- see, they -- they got caught a little bit because in the beginning they were planting stories that had conspiracy -- I mean, there was a story that the FBI planted at the very beginning saying that Dr. King had been killed by the husband -- by an irate husband of a lover of his. Now, later -- ten years later we saw that this was invented and that they had made up this story. But then they were sort of stuck. Because if you're saying that Ray was hired by somebody else to do it, that's a conspiracy. So then they had to drop that story because now the line was there was no conspiracy. Now they're saying -- and the same people. Pearson mentioned that story and then later on denounced the generally prevalent theory that the murder involved a conspiracy without pointing out that he was one of the people who were part of the original prevalent theory. Even -- particularly, actually, after the guilty plea, when it got -- there was no longer a judicial proceeding going on about which they could feed the stories they wanted to, they still felt a compulsion to periodically come up with stories that there was no conspiracy, there was no plot. This one on the screen being another one of these -these examples. Q. This is the continuation of the lone killer, lone nut gunman that was -- had to be perpetuated throughout the period of James Earl Ray's incarceration? A. Absolutely. It never -- because Ray insisted virtually from the day of the plea that there was a conspiracy, they felt compelled to -- to continue to plant these -- these stories. They -- they went on for a number of years at a very intense level, and then it sort of petered off. But in the first year after the plea of guilty, Anderson wrote a number of columns saying there just wasn't any conspiracy. Max Lerner wrote columns saying Ray was the killer, there's nothing to the conspiracy theory. And when -- another example of how they -- they fuzzied it was even at the time of the plea, there was a story on the - in the Washington Post, which I think I've given you a copy of, where they said: No evidence of any plot, Jury is told. Now that isn't really what the Jury was told. But if you read the story, it was that the prosecution was not presenting any evidence of a plot, which is very different from saying -- of course, they didn't present any evidence that there wasn't a plot either. Yet if you look at that headline, it looks like something has been said and done in court showing a jury there was no -- no plot. And that's not what happened. It wasn't -- it wasn't discussed either way. And they -- they -- there was a story I believe the next week in the Washington Post where the title of the story was: "Ray Alone Still Talks of a Plot." Which, again, journalistically was ridiculous. Because there were millions upon millions of Americans talking about whether there was a plot. And a story which, you know, tries to create the impression that James Earl Ray was stark raving mad and was the only person in America who thought there might have been a plot. That campaign went -- and, in fact, they then said, well, what we really meant was that he's the only person who is officially involved in the proceedings and thinks there's a plot, everyone else doesn't. And even that wasn't true because the next day there was a story in the papers that the -- the judge here -- the judge at the time, Judge http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
Battle, wasn't sure and thought maybe there had been a plot and certainly made it clear that under Tennessee law if further -- if co-conspirators came up or were arrested or indicted, they would be subject to -- to trial. Q. Let me pass this article to you and ask you to look at that, Mr. Schaap. That's an article that appeared in the New York Times, Column 1 on the 17th of November, 1978, right at the time when the -- both Ray brothers were being questioned and examined in public before the House Select Committee on Assassination. And that article speaks of an independent investigation by the New York Times and the FBI and the Select Committee, into an Alton, Illinois, bank robbery -- an investigation which never took place because it's now been established. Is that an example of the type of disinformation that one finds in an attempt to train the public minds? A. Oh, absolutely. Given the fact that subsequently it was shown that they were not suspects in that robbery, it -the first thing it means is that the -- the reporter is saying some things which had to have been simply fed to him and not checked. Because if you're saying something happened, which in fact very, very basic journalism would have proven didn't happen, you are either doing it on your own to spread some disinformation, which is extremely unlikely, or you're being asked to put a spin on something that you know is going to -- to be coming out. The -- again, I'm -- I don't know what happened in Alton, Illinois. But if, as I understand there's been testimony, it is clear that the Ray brothers were not suspects in that case, this story is clearly disinformation because it's designed to make it appear not only that they were suspects in that case but that they did it, and to make it appear that two investigations confirmed that whereas, since we know it wasn't true, it's impossible that either investigation could have confirmed it. Q. Let me ask you finally -- this has been a long road -- how you regard -- what is your explanation for the fact that there has been such little national media coverage of these -- of this trial and this evidence and this event here in this Memphis courtroom, which is the first trial ever to be able to produce evidence on this assassination -- what has happened here that Mighty Wurlitzer is not sounding but is in fact totally silent -- almost totally silent? A. Oh, but -- as we know, silence can be deafening. Disinformation is not only getting certain things to appear in print, it's also getting certain things not to appear in print. I mean, the first -- the first thing I would say as a way of explanation is the incredibly powerful effect of disinformation over a long period of time that I mentioned before. For 30 years the official line has been that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King and he did it all by himself. That's 30 years, not -- nothing like the short period when the line was that the Cubans raped the Angolan women. But for 30 years it's James Earl Ray killed Dr. King, did it all by himself. And when that is imprinted in the minds of the general public for 30 years, if somebody stood up and confessed and said: I did it. Ray didn't do it, I did it. Here's a movie. Here's a video showing me do it. 99 percent of the people wouldn't believe him because it just -- it just wouldn't click in the mind. It would just go right to -- it couldn't be. It's just a powerful psychological effect over 30 years of disinformation that's been imprinted on the brains of the -- the public. Something to the country couldn't -- couldn't be. Q. Not only -- excuse me. Not only psychological, but weren't you also saying neurological? A. Yes. I'm not a doctor. But what I understood is that these -- the brain's patterns of thinking are a physical aspect of the human brain. That's how we develop patterns of thought, how we develop associations. And then, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer we talked about is still there, it's still playing its tune. And even though you might think 30 years is a long time, that almost everybody who might get in trouble is probably dead by now, that's -- that's how it works. People obtain influence, people make vast sums of money through this propaganda. Those people pass that influence on to others, they pass the money down the line, and all of that can be at risk for a very, very long time. There are documents from the investigation of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that are still classified. Don't ask me why, but they were originally sealed for 100 years. And then in 1965 President Linden Johnson http://whale.to/b/schaap.html
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[1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
said, well, it's so close to the Kennedy assassination, if people read the Lincoln documents, it might make them think funny things about Kennedy, so he classified them for another 50 years. So now the grand children of anybody around Lincoln was around are long dead, and these documents are still -- still classified. And we're talking today about a case that's 100 years more immediate than Lincoln. And the establishment is still the establishment. Q. Mr. Schaap, thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. A. Thank you. MR. PEPPER: Nothing further, Your Honor. THE COURT: Just a moment. Mr. Garrison? MR. GARRISON: Your Honor, I have no questions of this witness. THE COURT: You have nothing. Very well. Sir, you may stand down. Thank you very much. THE WITNESS: Thank you, Your Honor. (Witness excused.) (Court adjourned until December 1, 1999, at 10:00 a.m.)
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Operation Mockingbird - 9/11 Review
9/11 Review Web Site: Home Page Search About Donate 911Review.Com Top Topics: FrontPage Conspiracy Of Silence Political Art Anthrax Attacks Inside Job Leahy Vs Ashcroft 200406 McMedia Patriot Act Building 7 Collapse Guardian Muslims Suspend Physics Latest Headlines OngoingCoverup Air Force Stand down Coverup By White House Flight 77 BlackBoxes Flights In His Own Words InsiderTrading OpenAndFairTrials Pentagon Attack Cctv Video Prior Knowledge Osama Bin Asset BinLaden Bin Laden Confession Cia Visas For Patsies Experienced Skeptics Hijackers Alive AndWell Hijackers Patsies Pentagon Attack Flight77 Flight 77 Sites Pentagon Attack Damage Pentagon Attack Debris Pentagon Attack Fire Pentagon Attack Legend Pentagon Mascal Pentagon Plane Rotor Pentagon Strike Flight 77 Patsies Flight77 Witnesses Killtown PentagonAttackHole Pentagon Attack Videos Pentagon Attack Witnesses Blast
Operation Mockingbird From:
International Advocates For Health Freedom.
Operation Mockingbird The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA. March 24, 2000. "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD By Alex Constantine.
http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
Who Controls the Media? Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning, doublebreasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. CocaCola. Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The AtlanticRichfield 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 politicallymotivated 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 1/28
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Operation Mockingbird - 9/11 Review
Sept 11 WebSites Grable,Rosalee TrustedNewsSites Twin Towers Whats Next
More topics... News: 911 Ommission TortureAct CanadasPatriotAct3 ChemtrailsOverOttawa TrustedNewsSites Essays: BogusWarOnTerrorism FemaTheSecretGovernment TruthLiesLegendof911 DUTrojanHorse Viewpoints: Conspiracy Of Silence FraudulentLegislation WhatsNext StanleyHiltonLawsuit Mirrors: geocities.com/killtown elitewatch.netfirms.com lightscion.com baltech.org/lederman angieon911.com
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 codenamed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Your Ad Here
"By the early 1950s," writes former Village 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 f__ind 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," "worlddominating 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."
Secret Evidence #########
http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
George Seldes, the famed antifascist 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 gobetween in his dealings with the CIA was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961. 2/28
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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 Blcher, 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 BerlinFilm 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 Dsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Dsseldorf in 1982, von Blcher 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 worldmoving 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 http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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most American highrollers, 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 threeyear 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 quartercentury 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 conflictofinterest 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, T10.' 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 horrorfilm simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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Operation Mockingbird - 9/11 Review
organizedcrime 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 lowprice 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 http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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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 fulltime 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. How the Washington Post Censors the News A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Your Ad Here
Though the Washington Post does not overextend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herdjournalism, corporate profits, and government stability the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about IranContra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIAassociated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the IranContra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. armsfordrugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drugsmuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the everaccommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan / Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a preelection release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged ReaganBush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gunshy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (DIN). who had chaired the House of Representatives IranContra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. armsfordrugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state), was charged in http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [for World WarII] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its preGulfWar support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, lawenforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas and dieselpowered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (DCT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between Mc Donnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the nowbanned, cancerproducing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decadesold war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the Britishowned AngloIranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIAplanned assassination of Congo headofstate Patrice Lumumba (*50). Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the IranContra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strongman and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilianmilitary cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safetocite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Your Ad Here http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil Mc Combs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by Mc George Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing coconspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing coldwar/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our highlevel public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drugsmuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of likeminded entrepreneurs a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of Mc Carthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies? The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his offthecuff comment into an entire column ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't". Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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face of our newsmedia "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wireservice control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200 word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a sevenpart series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98). Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, frontpage headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few microseconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Publicspirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And maybe a few others. Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "IranContra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington MerryGoRound, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 861146CIVKING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 2. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 3. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter totheEditor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E32967. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary Mc Grory, "The ContraDrug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "IranContra The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 4. 7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. 8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 5. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBHTV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "ExHostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 6. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 7. See note 5a, p.1801. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 2401. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the IranContra Affair, Senate Report No. 100216, House Report No. 100433, November 1987, p.139141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave Mc Curdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank Mc Closkey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob Mc Ewen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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8. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. 9. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 10. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 11. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 12. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of APlant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 13. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 14. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E9479. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H20052014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on PreWar Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 15. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 16. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus Luis Vasquez Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 17. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19.
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28a. James Kilpatrick, "SoftwarePiracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A HighTech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. 18. "BCCI NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 19. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 20. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. 21. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 22. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 23. See note 33, p.1367. 24. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 25. See note 33, p.164171. 26. See note 33, p.172180. 27. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 28. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 29. See note 33, p.217. 30. See note 33, p.235. 31. See note 33, p.277288. 32. See note 33, p.323. 33. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 34. William Blum, The CIA A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284291. 35. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.1457. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. 48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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49a. See note 44, p.6776. 49b. See note 48a, p.5301. 36. Ralph W. Mc Gehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 37. HR3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 38. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 39. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.2835. 40. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 41. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 42. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 43. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. 44. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 45. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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62b. See note 47b, p.6376. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 46. David E. Scheim, Contract on America The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 47. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil Mc Combs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. 65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "Heeeere's Conspiracy! Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 48. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. List of books on the bestseller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 49. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211247.
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67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: BobbsMerrill, 1972, p. 215224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402416. 67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 2734. Your Ad Here
67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 50. See note 65b. 51. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 52. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 53. See note 65c. 54. See note 65i. 55. See note 67e, p.438450. 56. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's SelfDoubts Grew Day by Day 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 57. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 58. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.1412. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983.
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79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 59. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.ivv; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.ivvi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 60. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 61. See note 79d, p.119132. 62. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wishlists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's two sentence letter reads, "We have a long standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 63. See note 79d, p.131. 64. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 65. "conspire", 4Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 66. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 67. See note 65y. 68. See note 65n. 69. See note 65d. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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70. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 71. p. 2932. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 72. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman Mc Carthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist Mc Carthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily newsblackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 73. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.367. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 74. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 75. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 76. See note 86. 77. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml
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"representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 78. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977. NOTES: A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham's attempt to suppress the Davis book,"Katherine The Great,", which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal's, "Power and Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story." For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is "All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story," by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye. An additional good short reference is "The CIA's Greatest Hits" by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein's classic "The CIA and the Media" which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, Still another recent example of the CIA's control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton's & Roger Morris' story,"The Crimes Of Mena" by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA's involvement in drug trafficing, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed without explanation. Links: Who Controls the Media?
Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps 9/11: Mae Brussell vs. Solomon and Parry SPOOKS AT MT. HOLYOKE Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen? More Spooks at Mt. Holyoke The price of freedom now is very high: Contribute
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Media 'SPIN' Part 1 of 2
apfn.org
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted December 13, 2005
[[In a wide-ranging interview, 'Wag the Dog' author Larry Beinhart describes how members of the news media censor stories -- even as they publish them. ]] In a speech this fall, Al Gore spoke of the "strangeness" in our political discourse. He bemoaned the "new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time," and the lack of desire for accountability in American journalism. On top of all this, the idea that perception is far more important than reality has become the principle of our broadcast politics, debasing our political discourse to a game of controlling the spin. Larry Beinhart has thought long and hard about the nature of message-based politics. Beinhart, author of the bestselling novel, "Wag the Dog," recently waded into the nonfiction world of 21st-century communications with his new book "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." AlterNet caught up with Beinhart outside of Woodstock, New York, in the cabin in the woods he shares with his wife and son. What are "fog facts?" Fog facts are things that have been published or are easily known but have disappeared in the fog. And there are lots of facts that should disappear in the fog; they're trivia, they're nonsense, and we don't need to know them. I'm talking about things that are important -- that once you bring them to the foreground it changes your picture of reality. How does a fact become a fog fact? With certain exceptions, news is not automatically big news. The exceptions are dead popes, the World Series, tsunamis, volcanoes, wars the wars that involve us anyway -- but most news actually becomes news -- including wars -- because of press releases. The example I always use -- because we're in the small town of Woodstock -- is the little league schedule. If the little league schedule is going to be in the newspaper, it's only because the coach or the coach's wife sends it to the newspaper. Most news originates as a press release or a press conference or an announcement. And if it's going to stay in the news, it has to get new press releases and new stories. Someone has to work at that, someone has to invest effort and time to make it a big story. And if nobody does that, it may not be a story at all, or it may be a one-time item. You know, page 12 of the New York Times, page 26. And part of what happens is that people in the media -- especially print people -- think that if they're reported it they've done their job. Their job is not to determine what effect it has on the population, how well we absorb it, how excited we get about it -- that's not their job. Their job is to get the fact and put it in the paper. They're done. Then if the fact comes back again, as a new press release or a new twist, they go with it. Two great examples are the Oil-For-Food money. Everybody in America knows that there's some kind of weird scandal about what the U.N. did with the Oil-For-Food money. They don't know exactly what it is but they there's something scandalous, that Kofi Annan is a little dirty. Now, as far as been MDT Page 1 ofknow 10 Octanybody's 10, 2016 02:57:27AM
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the U.N. did with the Oil-For-Food money. They don't know exactly what it is but they know there's something scandalous, that Kofi Annan is a little dirty. Now, as far as anybody's been able to tell so far, the corruption and malfeasance involved several hundreds of thousands of dollars at most, excluding those moneys that Saddam Hussein was able to hold onto, which was generally approved by all parties or permitted by all parties. But however much the U.N. did wrong was fairly minor. After the U.S. conquest of Iraq the Oil-For-Food money was transferred to a new entity, the CPA -- the Coalition Provisional Authority run by Paul Bremer. And about $9 billion dollars of oil money went into the CPA, plus about $10 billion dollars of other funds went into the CPA. And this money was essentially being held in trust for the Iraqi government. Now they ripped through about $19 billion dollars of it -- it has essentially disappeared. If I remember correctly out of 20 billion dollars there was about half a billion left. And it surfaced in only about three isolated stories. The reason for that is that there is no constituency that has influence in the American media that gives a damn about Iraq's money. There's a very big constituency in the United States that hates the U.N.. And they hate the U.N. because the notion of any restraint on America's sovereign, unfettered authority is something that just disturbs them to no end. So they were eager to find things that would tarnish the U.N., so they worked that story very hard -- the right wing -- they pushed that story and we heard a lot about it. So one stayed a fog fact and one's a well-known fact. Another instance is when the media itself will decide that they want to create a fog-fact -- they don't want something known. The most notorious example of this was the recount that the media itself paid for after the Florida election in 2000. There was enough controversy about it that a consortium of the major players in the media business -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company -- which is the Chicago Tribune -- the Los Angeles Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the St. Petersburg Times all got together and said we're going to recount these votes and we're going to find out who really won. And they went and they spent a million dollars on it. And who really won, presumably, was news. That was the exciting thing. If they found out that it was Al Gore who won, then obviously on the face of it that's bigger news than George Bush won. That's old news. Who cares? And when they counted all the discernible votes -- according to the standard way you could tell what the voter intended, Al Gore won. So, headlines should have been "Al Gore got more votes" or "Al Gore should have been president," or "Wrong man elected" or "Supreme Court stopped recount just in time to save Bush." Right? But those weren't the headlines. The headlines were "Bush won anyway," "Recount shows Bush won," "Recount shows Supreme Court stopping vote didn't matter." And the New York Times was the worst offender. Unless you read the story with the care of an accountant, it was literally impossible to decipher that Al Gore got more votes. The truth is, I didn't figure it out. I read the story and I thought, "oh shit, that's a disappointment." Two years later I was reading a story by the other Gore -- Vidal -- and he mentioned it. And I went back and re-read the Times story. And I thought, "Oh my God. Al Gore got more votes than George Bush. It's astonishing." And then I read all the others and I said, "This is one of the most amazing media events that I've ever seen." I want to find out how all seven of them all made the same decision to bury the story. Not to deny the story, but to bury the story so that they could in good conscience say "we reported the truth." And they did. And yet they all spun it so heavily that even dedicated lefties and the bloggers all missed it. Is this a sinister plot, or is something else afoot?
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certain structural impediments to how the media functions. We have in the United States what'sMDT Oct 10, 2016 02:57:27AM
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There are certain structural impediments to how the media functions. We have in the United States what's known as objective journalism, which contrasted with the European model. In Europe, the newspapers -and these traditions go back strictly to the newspaper days -- were all owned by political parties or affiliated with political parties. There was the Communist paper, there was the monarchist paper, there was the revisionist paper, and there was the Nazi paper, the Social Democrat, the Christian, whatever. So when you read the paper you knew there was a point of view and you expected it. We took a different tradition, which was for a long time a very effective and honorable one. The journalist tries to actually be a non-judgmental gatherer of the facts. You lay them out there in as coherent an order as possible and then you make up your own mind. Sounds like a Fox News slogan. But there are certain weaknesses in the system. For anything controversial, it essentially depends on there being two separate but equal contestants. In political issues if there's a strong liberal and strong conservative view, you get them into the paper and you can sort it out. But in certain situations like going to war, in which the administration could play the patriotism card, what happens is you have George Bush hollering for war. And George Bush got to say, "we're going to war because they have WMD and they're associated with Al Qaeda." Scott Ritter got up and said, "you know, I was a weapons inspector and I was there and we got rid of all the weapons. Let me tell you that if there's anything left -- and there might be something left -- but if there's anything left it probably doesn't work." O.K., they report it. And Bush shrugs and he goes and he says, "They have weapons of mass destruction -with nukes." And the press dutifully reports it because he's the president of the United States. So Scott Ritter goes and speaks the next time. But the press doesn't report it -- they did Scott Ritter already! Same with Hans Blix. For every three stories Hans Blix got Colin Powell got 10, Dick Cheney got 50, George Bush got 200, Condi Rice got another 150 and Rumsfeld got another 100. So in the aggregate number of stories, the number of times you heard that he had weapon of mass destruction compared to the number of times you heard he didn't means that the Scott Ritter story for most people disappeared into the fog. And the Hans Blix thing disappeared into the fog. Even now it's really hard to sort out the sequence of what I think are the really significant events that have happened. Every administration uses the media, every administration spins us. Clinton did it, FDR did it, you name it. They've all done it. Why is this administration different? It's a combination of things -- sort of a perfect storm. One is that -- this is difficult because it implies motive, and consciousness -- but these are guys who have an agenda that could not possibly be sold honestly. So, for them to even do it requires dishonesty. Clinton's dishonesty was largely in his personal life. And politically, he would attempt to do things and when he found out he couldn't do them he made adjustments and did something else. I don't know if that's lying or making adjustments, but this is something different. These are people who very much want, for example, to take Social Security. To them this is just a huge pile of money just sitting there. And they really wanted to take that money and put it -- and give it to businesses. They wanted to dump it into Wall Street. What a bonanza! And it makes them crazy that they can't. And if they know that about themselves, they could not run on that, and say "this is what we want to do," so they say "we want to save social security." So whether they can convince themselves that's true, I can't answer. But it requires them to run, in essence, on something that's not true. Bushenomics is about the use of government for transferring money from regular people to rich people. That's what government is for in their minds. And all their economic decisions have done or attempted to do exactly that. So3 these Page of 10
are people who have policies that aren't saleable so they have to lie to sell them. relations MDT Oct 10,Public 2016 02:57:27AM
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So these are people who have policies that aren't saleable so they have to lie to sell them. Public relations has reached a level of maturity -- over the last 20 years public relations has grown up immensely, especially in the corporate world. When some community group wants to force their local industry to take PCBs out of the river, the corporations will form a group called Citizens for Healthy Rivers. And whatever statement they make, it'll read: "and the spokesperson for Citizens for Healthy Rivers says it's actually better for PCBs to be stuck at the bottom of the river then be churned up by dredging." So Citizens for Healthy Rivers is opposed to dredging gets repeated over and over again. They've learned to put fake labels on what they do -- they learned it in business. And we see this administration doing it very assiduously with their bills: Healthy Forest act, Clear Skies act -- with mercury! -- the methodologies for doing this have grown up. So it's a perfect storm. It's an administration that has an agenda that's not sale-able, we have a compliant media fixated on reporting "he said she said," we have all of these Astroturf citizens groups. Let me put to you the last question, which is 9/11, before and after. How did that create a proliferation of fog facts? Once we have 9/11 we have war hysteria. The war hysteria was worst among people in the media. People in the media were just scared shitless. Perhaps more so in New York than anywhere else. I think that's what made the New York Times go off the rails. And it caused the deification of George W. Bush. Rather than point out that on 9/11 he flew to Nebraska -- you know, he didn't go stand at the helm of the ship and steer us out of trouble, he got as far away as he could get -- they just sat there until he did the bullhorn act. Then he was a hero -- thank God! And we all had to band together -- there was this tribal thing -- and we had to fight the outsiders and anyone who disagreed was a traitor. We had an administration that, after they got over being scared shitless themselves, pushed it for everything it was worth. They had had an agenda that they were waiting for an opportunity to achieve. Some argue that the new media -- we hear endlessly about the blogosphere and the relationship that's developing between the blogs and the traditional media -- are going to usher in a new era of media transparency. Others argue that announcing the death of the mainstream media is premature. What's your view, are we headed to a time when a few major outlets can emphasize X while Y falls off the screen? I really don't know. I don't know. But what I think is that objective journalism as it stands now sucks. It's got a lot of problems. One is that the guys who make money from spinning it have figured out how to do it. And the media is essentially worthless if it's all spin and that's where a lot of the distrust of the media comes from. There are two ways to change. We can fall into the European model where there's a left media and a right media. The other possibility is to redefine what objective media is. And this has been done in a small way in political campaigns. It's done with political advertising. They take a political advertisement and they take the responsibility of objectively, by their own standards -- not one from column A and one from column B -looking at an ad and going through it line by line and saying how truthful it is. So that to me is a higher standard and a useful standard of objective journalism. These guys should go out and do the work that I'm paying them for. And they're not doing the job that they want to do either. There are a lot of dissatisfied journalists out there going, "There's something wrong and we don't know how to fix it." Well there's the model to fix it. http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/29278/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MEDIA Page 4 of 10
SPIN REVOLVES AROUND THE WORD "TERRORIST"
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MEDIA SPIN REVOLVES AROUND THE WORD "TERRORIST" By Norman Solomon During the first two days of this month, CNN's website displayed an odd little announcement. "There have been false reports that CNN has not used the word 'terrorist' to refer to those who attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon," the notice said. "In fact, CNN has consistently and repeatedly referred to the attackers and hijackers as terrorists, and it will continue to do so." The CNN disclaimer was accurate -- and, by conventional media standards, reassuring. But it bypassed a basic question that festers beneath America's overwhelming media coverage of recent weeks: Exactly what qualifies as "terrorism"? For this country's mainstream journalists, that's a non-question about a no-brainer. More than ever, the proper function of the "terrorist" label seems obvious. "A group of people commandeered airliners and used them as guided missiles against thousands of people," says NBC News executive Bill Wheatley. "If that doesn't fit the definition of terrorism, what does?" True enough. At the same time, it's notable that American news outlets routinely define terrorism the same way that U.S. government officials do. Usually, editors assume that reporters don't need any formal directive because the appropriate usage is simply understood. The Wall Street Journal does provide some guidelines, telling its staff that the word terrorist "should be used carefully, and specifically, to describe those people and nongovernmental organizations that plan and execute acts of violence against civilian or noncombatant targets." In newsrooms across the United States, media professionals would agree. But -- in sharp contrast -- Reuters has stuck to a distinctive approach for decades. "As part of a policy to avoid the use of emotive words," the global news service says, "we do not use terms like 'terrorist' and 'freedom fighter' unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a third party. We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions, identity and background so that readers can make their own decisions based on the facts." Since mid-September, the Reuters management has taken a lot of heat for maintaining this policy -- and for reiterating it in an internal memo, which included the observation that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." In a clarifying statement, released on Oct. 2, the top execs at Reuters explained: "Our policy is to avoid the use of emotional terms and not make value judgments concerning the facts we attempt to report accurately and fairly." Reuters reports from 160 countries, and the "terrorist" label is highly contentious in quite a few of them. Behind the scenes, many governments have pressured Reuters to flatly describe their enemies as terrorists in news dispatches. From the vantage point of government leaders in Ankara or Jerusalem or Moscow, for example, journalists shouldn't hesitate to describe their violent foes as terrorists. But why should reporters oblige by pinning that tag on Kurdish combatants in Turkey, or Palestinian militants in occupied territories, or rebels in Chechnya? Unless we buy into the absurd pretense that governments don't engage in "terrorism," the circumscribed use of the term by U.S. media makes no sense. Turkish military forces have certainly terrorized and killed many civilians; the same is true of Israeli forces and Russian troops. As a result, plenty of Kurds, Palestinians and Chechens are grieving. American reporters could plausibly expand their working definition of terrorism to include all organized acts of terror and murder committed against civilians. But such consistency would meet with fierce opposition in high places. Page 5 ofWashington 10 Oct 10, 2016 02:57:27AM MDT
of terror and murder committed http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Spin1.htm
against civilians. But such consistency would meet with fierce opposition in
high Washington places. During the 1980s, with a non-evasive standard for terrorism, news accounts would have routinely referred to the Nicaraguan contra guerrillas -- in addition to the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments -- as U.S.-backed "terrorists." Today, for instance, such a standard would require news coverage of terrorism in the Middle East to include the Israeli assaults with bullets and missiles that take the lives of Palestinian children and other civilians. Evenhanded use of the "terrorist" label would mean sometimes affixing it directly on the U.S. government. During the past decade, from Iraq to Sudan to Yugoslavia, the Pentagon's missiles have destroyed the lives of civilians just as innocent as those who perished on Sept. 11. If journalists dare not call that "terrorism," then perhaps the word should be retired from the media lexicon. It's entirely appropriate for news outlets to describe the Sept. 11 hijackers as "terrorists" -- if those outlets are willing to use the "terrorist" label with integrity across the board. But as long as news organizations are not willing to do so, the Reuters policy is the only principled journalistic alternative. There is no credible reason to believe that mainstream U.S. media will jump off Uncle Sam's propaganda merry-go-round about "terrorism." And the problem goes far beyond the deeply hypocritical routine of condemning some murderously explosive actions against civilians while applauding or even implementing others. More than five years have passed since Madeleine Albright, then secretary of state, appeared on the CBS program "60 Minutes" and explained her lack of concern about the deaths resulting from U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq. In a broadcast that aired on May 12, 1996, the CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Albright: "We have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died when -- in -- in Hiroshima. And -- and, you know, is the price worth it?" "I think this is a very hard choice," Albright replied, "but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Since then, by continuing to impose sanctions on Iraq, the U.S. government has killed hundreds of thousands more children. Of course such present-day policies did not stop Albright's successor from immediately claiming the high moral ground on Sept. 11. Responding to the tragic events that day, Colin Powell denounced "people who feel that with the destruction of buildings, with the murder of people, they can somehow achieve a political purpose." Obviously, top U.S. officials still believe that they can "somehow achieve a political purpose" with sanctions that are killing several thousand Iraqi children every month. While standing on that policy platform, the officials fervently deplore terrorism. http://www.zmag.org/solorerr.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Science of Media Spin-Doctor Selective Cognition MANIPULATING PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS With Fraudulent Tripe! Bush Regime & U.S. Media Propaganda Game Plan
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Propaganda Game Plan strategy for the Bush Regime & U.S. Media is predictable and CERTAIN. Look Page 6 of for 10 the following 'Media Hypes' to coincide with the following events (REMEMBER Oct-10,This 2016Was 02:57:27AM MDT
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Look for the following 'Media Hypes' to coincide with the following events (REMEMBER -- This Was Written and These "Events" were Predicted in January 2003!): Minute-by-minute U.S. Media bombardment of reports of "Grandiose Heroic Acts" purportedly performed by U.S. military personnel in a propaganda coup designed to foster an image of the U.S. War as one of "building" and "helping," while designed to undermine and dispel the True image of incredible destruction and the wholesale decimation of many innocent Iraqi Civilian lives, including women and children (1,252 at last count). Minute-by-minute U.S. Media bombardment of "U.S. Military Casualty" stories, which are virtually always presented in conjunction with unsupported, unverified accounts of an alleged Iraqi military atrocity which purportedly is directly linked to the U.S. casualty. The obvious agitprop strategy here is to "INCITE" the public with fury and anger and hatred for the 'enemy' ... thus bolstering public support for the War. Minute-by-minute U.S. Media bombardment of U.S. military "Loved Ones Back Home" stories, which are virtually always presented in conjunction with unsupported, unverified accounts of an alleged Iraqi military atrocity which purportedly is directly linked to the 'Loved One' and the dangers s\he faces. The obvious agitprop strategy here is to "INCITE" the public with fury and anger and hatred for the 'enemy' ... thus bolstering public support for the War. Minute-by-minute U.S. Media bombardment of purportedly new (updated) snippets of information supposedly adding to the body of evidence and purportedly "proving conclusively" that Saddam "has and was about to use" weapons of mass destruction or chemical-biological weapons. The U.S. Media will dispense this as gospel and will always be seen putting words in the mouths of military expert interviewees to this effect. There will be a complete absence of critical media analysis or scrutiny of the accuracy or details of the information or the validity of the inferences \conclusions being hastily drawn. The U.S. Media will be seen accepting such info hastily and uncritically, because it is commonly understood that the legitimacy of this War DEMANDS that such facts be present. Minute-by-minute U.S. Media bombardment of purportedly new (updated) snippets of information supposedly adding to the body of evidence and purportedly "proving conclusively" that Saddam "had connections to Al Queda and World-Wide Terrorist networks" - in an effort to legitimize this War and despite the fact that nearly all Iraq experts have repudiated such claims as utterly implausible given Saddam's dislike for such groups. The U.S. Media will dispense this as gospel and will always be seen putting words in the mouths of military expert interviewees to this effect. There will be a complete absence of critical analysis or scrutiny of the accuracy or details of the information or the validity of the inferences \conclusions being hastily drawn. The U.S. Media will be seen accepting such info hastily and uncritically, because it is commonly understood that the legitimacy of this War DEMANDS that such facts be present. EXAMPLE: The U.S. Media is already propagating irresponsible claims that Al Queda terrorist lists have been found at an Iraqi site. They are touting this as conclusive proof of Iraq's connection to World-wide terrorism and the events of 9\11. In fact, if such information is true, it may represent divisions and disagreements within Saddam's ranks. Furthermore, such a list, if it really exists, most likely would represent a very recent 'last resort' effort by Saddam to defend against an imminent U.S. attack. This is a good example of irresponsible U.S. journalism ... and the Fox network is the worst. Minute-by-minute U.S. Media bombardment of purportedly new (updated) snippets of information supposedly further illustrating overwhelming U.S. military successes ... while confidently touting what a speedy 'slam-dunk' War this is shaping up to be. The propaganda strategy is designed to instill in viewers
the7 belief Page of 10
that "it is almost over" and just a little more patience will get you to the Promised This Oct 10,Land. 2016 02:57:27AM MDT
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the belief that "it is almost over" and just a little more patience will get you to the Promised Land. This agitprop U.S. Media strategy is in recognition of the fact that every day this War continues, support for it erodes.
Minute-by-minute U.S. Media bombardment of purportedly new (updated) polls purportedly showing non-eroding or growing public support for the War. The propaganda strategy is designed to instill in viewers the belief that support for the War is not eroding, and therefore there is no reason for anyone to abandon support. This agitprop U.S. Media strategy is in recognition of the fact that every time there is erosion of support there tends to be a rapid domino effect of further erosion of support. The polls are bogus. The poll questions are 'loaded,' suggestive and specious. The poll questions present false either\or dilemmas which force respondents to either answer favorably or refuse to answer altogether because "their" answer option is not offered in the answer choices given to them. (See special article on "Bogus U.S. Media Polling") Scant or non-existent U.S. Media reports about the number of casualties suffered by innocent Iraqi Civilians. Whatever numbers are proffered by the U.S. Media, they will be characterized as 'soft' unreliable numbers in an effort to trivialize them. The agitprop strategy here is to minimize and trivialize the grotesque harm inflicted by the U.S. and to minimize and trivialize the decimation of the people Bush claims to be liberating (1,252 at last count). Scant or in most cases, a complete NEWS VOID regarding U.S. Media reports about the "DETAILS" of casualties suffered by innocent Iraqi Civilians. Whatever generalities are proffered by the U.S. Media, they will be characterized as 'soft' unreliable accounts in an effort to trivialize them or dismiss them. This will translate as an aversion-avoidance of details about young children having their limbs torched off by U.S. bombs, or entire Iraqi families incinerated by U.S. bombs. The whole point of 'embedded journalists' was supposed to be the accurate portrayal of such facts. But the U.S. Media has become the propaganda wing of the Bush Regime and such factual information is deemed unpatriotic and off-limits. (Just ask Peter Arnett). The agitprop strategy here is to minimize and trivialize the grotesque harm inflicted by the U.S. and to minimize and trivialize the decimation of the people Bush claims to be liberating.
When Scant U.S. Media reports about the "DETAILS" of casualties suffered by innocent Iraqi victims are disseminated, they will always ... ALWAYS be presented ONLY IF THE VICTIMS or survivors EXPRESS ANTI-SADDAM SENTIMENTS. And they will always ... ALWAYS be presented ONLY in tandem with an upbeat spin-story showing how the U.S. is working with the victims and their survivors to "rebuild a better tomorrow." Whatever generalities are proffered by the U.S. Media, they will be characterized as 'soft' unreliable accounts in an effort to trivialize them or dismiss them. This will translate as an aversion-avoidance of details about young children having their limbs torched off by U.S. bombs, or entire Iraqi families incinerated by U.S. bombs. The whole point of 'embedded journalists' was supposed to be the accurate portrayal of such facts. But the U.S. Media has become the propaganda wing of the Bush Regime and such factual information is deemed unpatriotic and off-limits. (Just ask Peter Arnett). The agitprop strategy here is to minimize and trivialize the grotesque harm inflicted by the U.S. and to minimize and trivialize the decimation of the people Bush claims to be liberating. Whatever generalities are proffered by the U.S. Media about horrendous incidents involving extremely ugly, unflattering facts about casualties inflicted on innocent Iraqi Civilians by the U.S. military, they will be characterized as 'soft' unreliable accounts in an effort to trivialize them or dismiss them. report willMDT Page 8 of 10 OctNo 10, such 2016 02:57:27AM
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Spin1.htm unflattering facts about casualties
inflicted on innocent Iraqi Civilians by the U.S. military, they will be characterized as 'soft' unreliable accounts in an effort to trivialize them or dismiss them. No such report will ever be disseminated by the U.S. Media unless and until a torrent of U.S. officials and 'experts' have been copiously prepared to justify and "explain away" the incident as either "Saddam's fault" or as "understandable and defensible under the circumstances" or as "exaggerated Saddam propaganda" or as "unconfirmed at this time." The "unconfirmed at this time" U.S. Media and Bush strategist ploy is frequently used and is calculated to provide a "cooling off period" before deeming the public ready to grapple with the grim Truth. Once it is deemed that the public has largely forgotten about the incident, or when the incident has been eclipsed by some other incident, then the U.S. Media and Bush strategists will disclose, in dribs and drabs over many days and weeks, the facts surrounding the casualties inflicted on innocent Iraqi victims by the U.S. military. These accounts will always ... ALWAYS be couched in euphemistic terms that gloss-over and trivialize the significance of the disclosed facts. And these accounts will always ... ALWAYS be plagued with red-herring distraction arguments which purportedly mitigate blame or exonerate U.S. actions entirely, while castigating those who would criticize "with the benefit of 20\20 hindsight." Expect to see a torrent of "unconfirmed at this time" U.S. Media and Bush strategist responses every time a grizzly set of facts surfaces which are unflattering to the U.S. and the U.S. War effort. The U.S. Media and Bush Regime strategy is simple and obvious. The Rule is this: "Strike while the iron is HOT, when it involves flaming, hostile public sentiments against Iraq or Saddam." The Converse Rule is this: "Wait until the iron is COLD, when it involves flaming, hostile public sentiments against Bush, the U.S., the U.S. military or the U.S. War effort." The U.S. Media are full partners with the Bush Regime in sticking to this operational Propaganda GamePlan. Minute-by-minute U.S. Media bombardment of "Alleged Iraqi Military Atrocity" stories, which are virtually always presented in conjunction with unsupported, unverified accounts of alleged Iraqi military events which occurred at a totally different time and place and which cannot be directly linked to the alleged new atrocity claim. The obvious agitprop strategy here is to "INCITE" the public with fury and anger and hatred for the 'enemy' ... so the public will be inclined to accept the unsupported claims uncritically, with the presumption that "it is probably true and accurate." This U.S. Media propaganda ploy is the most commonly utilized counterfeit in their agitprop arsenal. Its overall effect is to erode the 'public scrutiny of information' standard so that little or no competent proof or evidence is necessary in order for the public to "buy into it" as though it is gospel ... as though it had legitimacy ... as though it was conclusively True and Accurate, even though it is NOT. Sincerely, Government Watch 2002 [email protected] Parents For Responsible Education Thaddeus Brandon Jacobs [email protected] http://www.geocities.com/blubakhe777/gameplan.html CIA/Media Propaganda Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation Part 1 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird.htm Part 2 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird2.htm Part 3 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird3.htm Part 4 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Mockingbird4.htm
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Page 10 of 10
Oct 10, 2016 02:57:27AM MDT
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Media 'SPIN' Part 2
apfn.org
Fox News: Iraq Civil War “Made Up By The Media?” Fox News continues its crackerjack analysis of sectarian strife in Iraq. Previously, it explored whether “an all-out civil war in Iraq” could be “a good thing.” Now they have an new theory. Where Did SPIN Originate? This is of American origin and came about during the 1980s, when the need for 'sound bites' became pressing enough to require a new class of publicist to provide them. The earliest printed references are from that period, For example, this from the New York Times, Oct. 1984: "A dozen men in good suits and women in silk dresses will circulate smoothly among the reporters, spouting confident opinions. They won't be just press agents trying to impart a favorable spin to a routine release. They'll be the Spin Doctors, senior advisers to the candidates." So, why 'spin'? For the derivation of that we need to go back to yarn. We know that sailors and other storytellers have a reputation for spinning yarns. Given a phrase in the language like 'spin a yarn', we might expect to assume that a yarn was a tall tale and that the tellers spun it out. That's not quite right though. Until the phrase was coined, yarn was just thread. The phrase was coined as an entity, just meaning 'tell a tale'. That came about in the early 19th century and was first written down in James Hardy Vaux's 'A new and comprehensive vocabulary of the flash language', in 1812: "Yarning or spinning a yarn, signifying to relate their various adventures, exploits, and escapes to each other." So, spin became associated with telling a story. It began to be used in a political and promotional context in the late 1980s. For example, in the Guardian Weekly, Jan. 1978: "The CIA can be an excellent source [of information], though, like every other, its offerings must be weighed for factuality and spin." From there it is a small step for the people employed to weave reports of factual events into palatable stories to be called 'spin doctors'. http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060901165821AAdjwPH GIs Told 'Spin Iraq War' Specialist Leonard Clark, a National Guardsman, was demoted to private and fined $1,640 for posting anti-war statements on an Internet blog. Clark wrote entries describing the company's commander as a "glory seeker" and the battalion sergeant major an "inhuman monster". His last entry before the blog was shut down told how his fellow soldiers were becoming Page 1 of 7increasingly
opposed to the US operation in Iraq.
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increasingly opposed to the US operation in Iraq. Pentagon Orders Soldiers to Promote Iraq War While on Leave /////////////////////////////////////////////////// by Doug Thompson Capitol Hill Blue http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7918.shtml December 29, 2005
Good soldiers follow orders and hundreds of American military men and women returned to the United States on holiday leave this month with orders to sell the Iraq war to a skeptical public. The program, coordinated through a Pentagon operation dubbed “Operation Homefront,” ordered military personnel to give interviews to their hometown newspapers, television stations and other media outlets and praise the American war effort in Iraq. Initial reports back to the Pentagon deem the operation a success with dozens of front page stories in daily and weekly newspapers around the country along with upbeat reports on local television stations. “We've learned as a military how to do this better,” Captain David Diaz, a military reservist, told his hometown paper, The Roanoke (VA) Times. “My worry is that we have the right military strategy and political strategies now but the patience of the American public is wearing thin.” When pressed by the paper on whether or not his commanding officers told him to talk to the press, Diaz admitted he was “encouraged” to do so. So reporter Duncan Adams asked: “Did Diaz return to the U.S. on emergency leave with an agenda -- to offer a positive spin that could help counter growing concerns among Americans about the U.S. exit strategy? How do we know that's not his strategy, especially after he discloses that superior officers encouraged him to talk about his experiences in Iraq?” Replied Diaz: “You don't. I can tell you that the direction we've gotten from on high is that there is a concern about public opinion out there and they want to set the record straight.” Diaz, an intelligence officer, knows how to avoid a direct answer. Other military personnel, however, tell Capitol Hill Blue privately that the pressure to “sell the war” back home is enormous. “I’ve been promised an early release if I do a good job promoting the war,” says one reservist who asked not to be identified. In interviews with a number of reservists home for the holidays, a pattern emerges on the Pentagon’s propaganda effort. Soldiers are encouraged to contact their local news media outlets to offer interviews about the war. A detailed set of talking points encourages them to: --Admit initial doubts about the war but claim conversion to a belief in the American mission; Page 2 of 7--Praise
military leadership in Iraq and throw in a few words of support for the Bush Oct 10, 2016 02:57:32AM MDT
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--Praise military leadership in Iraq and throw in a few words of support for the Bush administration; --Claim the mission to turn security of the country over to the Iraqis is working; --Reiterate that America must not abandon its mission and must stay until the “job is finished.” --Talk about how “things are better” now in Iraq. “My worry is that we have the right military strategy and political strategies now but the patience of the American public is wearing thin,” Diaz told The Roanoke Times. “It’s way better now (in Iraq). People are friendlier. They seem more relaxed, and they say, ’Thank you, mister,’” Sgt. Christopher Desierto told his hometown paper, The Maui News. But soldiers who are home and don’t have to return to Iraq tell a different story. “I've just been focused on trying to get the rest of these guys home,” says Sgt. Major Floyd Dubose of Jackson, MS, who returned home after 11 months in Iraq with the Mississippi Army National Guard's 155th Combat Brigade. And the Army is cracking down on soldiers who go on the record opposing the war. Specialist Leonard Clark, a National Guardsman, was demoted to private and fined $1,640 for posting anti-war statements on an Internet blog. Clark wrote entries describing the company's commander as a "glory seeker" and the battalion sergeant major an "inhuman monster". His last entry before the blog was shut down told how his fellow soldiers were becoming increasingly opposed to the US operation in Iraq. “The message is clear,” says one reservist who is home for the holidays but has to return and asked not to be identified. “If you want to get out of this man’s Army with an honorable (discharge) and full benefits you better not tell the truth about what is happening in-country.” But Sgt. Johnathan Wilson, a reservist, got his honorable discharge after he returned home earlier this month and he’s not afraid to talk on the record. “Iraq is a classic FUBAR,” he says. “The country is out of control and we can’t stop it. Anybody who tries to sell a good news story about the war is blowing it out his ass. We don’t win and eventually we will leave the country in a worse shape than it was when we invaded.” http://colorado.indymedia.org/newswire/display/12256/index.php ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------9/10/06 ...SUNDAY 9/11 SPIN SHOWS MEET THE PRESS: V.P. DICK CHENEY...KEEPS UP THE LIES! AUDIO: http://www.apfn.net/pogo/L001-tv-news-911a.MP3 9/10/06...CNN 9/11 CONSPIRACY FOLKS CRAZY CNN: WOLF INTERVIEW: SEC. RICE...BACKS UP THE LIES! Page 3 of 7AUDIO
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AUDIO http://www.apfn.net/pogo/L002-tv-news-911b.MP3 9/10/06...ABC'S THIS WEEK... INTERVIEW: FOUR OF THE FIVE MEMBERS OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION "YOU LIE AND I'LL SWEAR TOO IT!" AUDIO: http://www.apfn.net/pogo/L003-tv-news-911c.MP3 9/11 EYEWITNESS http://www.apfn.org/APFN/911_eyewitness1.htm (NEW) Media "SPIN" Doctors & Their Tactics 'SPIN' Part 1 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Spin1.htm Part 2 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Spin2.htm -------- Original Message -------Subject: A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 06:37:06 -0500 From: Carolyn Kay [email protected]
A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE Air America Radio’s programming, all day on Monday, September 11, 2006, will be in remembrance of the day, five years ago, that put horror in our hearts, but that gave us the opportunity to be one nation again. Click here to find a local station that carries the programming. Or listen on XM satellite, channel 167. Or to listen on the internet, go to the Air America Radio website, and click on the Listen Live text. What happened to the unity? The Huffington Post Brent Budowsky Historians Will Morally Impeach George W. Bush For Exploiting, Not Honoring, 9-11 09.09.2006 Who was not moved by the courage of our police and fire fighters rushing into burning buildings to save our fellow Americans? Who wasn't inspired by the courage Page 4 of 7and
valor of Pentagon workers who rushed out of the building when theOct attack first 10, 2016 02:57:32AM MDT
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and valor of Pentagon workers who rushed out of the building when the attack first struck and then, realizing their collagues and friends were in grave danger, turned around and rushed right back in, to save them? The infamy of the crime was met with the united will and the united spirit of a United America, backed by the decent opinion of men and women in every corner of the world. Never before in our history have our people been more hurt by a single act that struck on our shores. Never before in our history have our people reacted to such infamy, to such hurt, with a greater and more powerful proof of our courage and nobility. Never before in our history has the patriotism and honor of our people inspired such respect and admiration throughout the free world. And never before in our history has any leader of our Nation exploited such an event with such smallness, such partisanship, such disunity, such contempt and such vindictiveness... [Click here for more.—Caro] Lots more really good stuff at MakeThemAccountable.com. Carolyn Kay MakeThemAccountable.com The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves. – Eric Hoffer ======================================== Media "SPIN" Doctors & Their Tactics 'SPIN' Part 1 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Spin1.htm Part 2 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Spin2.htm
MSNBC Poll - Most Think 9/11 Was INSIDE JOB !! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14727720/ Do you believe any of the conspiracy theories suggesting the U.S. government was somehow involved in 9/11? * 62186 responses Page 5 of 7
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No. These theories are absurd and disrespectful -- especially to those who lost their lives on 9/11. 37% I'm not sure. 5.9% ================= "PROOF "THEY KNOW".... HERE'S THE ALERT TO AIRLINES! http://www.apfn.org/apfn/travel_6-23-01.htm Media & Government E-mail Addresses http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/Media_Email_Addresses.html
9/11 FIVE YEARS LATER: WHAT HAVE WE ACCOMPLISHED? An Assessment of the 9/11 Truth Movement http://www.septembereleventh.org/five_years_later.php "Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others. . .they send forth a ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert F. Kennedy ------------------------------------------------------- FACE THE TRUTH: For some of us, the events of September 11th brought a devastating personal loss. We lost spouses, parents, children, grandchildren, colleagues, and close friends. Nonetheless, we are grateful for the spontaneous outpouring of goodwill from friends and strangers that has helped sustain us over the past several years. We, like many others, are determined to generate even more good in the world out of our tragedy.
Our Voices Together Honors those who lost their lives through terrorist attacks by supporting worthwhile Oct 10, 2016 02:57:32AM MDT international projects, fostering goodwill and promoting
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international projects, fostering goodwill and promoting understanding. http://www.ourvoicestogether.org/ ### Audio: Media & Mind Control in America by Steven Jacobson #1 http://www.apfn.net/audio/L001I060312110344-mind-control1.MP3 (5.24MB) 22Min 52 Sec #2 http://www.apfn.net/audio/L002I060312112719-mind-control2.MP3 (4.75MB) 20Min 45 Sec CIA/Media Propaganda Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation Part 1 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird.htm Part 2 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird2.htm Part 3 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird3.htm Part 4 http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Mockingbird4.htm SpinWatch http://www.spinwatch.org/modules.php?name=News&file=categories&catid=50 Media Spin and Misperception http://www.heartheissues.com/mediaspin.html Subscribe to apfn-1
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OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD Part 3
apfn.org
How the Washington Post Censors the News [Note: Look for the paragraph indicated by asterisks] How the Washington Post Censors the News A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes ________________ April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability -- the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post Page 1 of 22
came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently,Oct two10,years 2016 02:58:17AM MDT
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Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [fo rWorld War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain Page 2 of 22
to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near02:58:17AM the Oct 10, 2016 MDT
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certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S.attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. RoyFitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, Page 3 of 22
deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on 2016 women a Oct 10, 02:58:17AM MDT
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"stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Page 4 of 22
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow in Oct by 10, the 2016CIA 02:58:17AM MDT
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British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50). Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such Page 5 of 22
conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials Oct can10,erode -2016 02:58:17AM MDT
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such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode -depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquital mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". Page 6 of 22
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out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction".
When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) -- facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to providematerial for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, "Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. ************************** Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed official Page 7 of 22 Octin 10,his 2016 02:58:17AM MDT
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personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). ****************** Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs -- a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies? The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column -- ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't".
Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Page 8 of 22 Oct 10,Crime". 2016 02:58:17AM MDT
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Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured byjournalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth -- revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98).
Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish Page 9 of 22 Oct 10, 2016 02:58:17AM MDT
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both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel -- like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "acombination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others. _______________________
Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 Page 10 of 22
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2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26,1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letterto-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra -- The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988. Page 11 of7a. 22
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7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. 8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10016. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 12. See note 5a, p.180-1. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. -- Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. Page 12 ofImprisonment 22 Oct 10, 2016 02:58:17AM MDT
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Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. 16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard-- The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend -- Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus --Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. Page 13 of29. 22
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29. "BCCI -- NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. 32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 34. See note 33, p.136-7. 35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 36. See note 33, p.164-171. 37. See note 33, p.172-180. 38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 39. See note 33, p.217. 40. See note 33, p.235. 41. See note 33, p.277-288. 42. See note 33, p.323. 43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 44. William Blum, The CIA -- A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 46. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. Page 14 of48b. 22
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48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1. 50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. 54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21,1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A.Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. Page 15 of60. 22
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60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. 62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America -- The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 64. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories -- When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned -- Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't -- In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire -- In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. Page 16 of65l. 22
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65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! -- Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts -- Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories -- Good on Film, But the Motivation Is AllWrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie -- America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken -- Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247. 67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy -- The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. Page 17 of 22
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67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 69. See note 65b. 70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 72. See note 65c. 73. See note 65i. 74. See note 67e, p.438-450. 75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day -- 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission -- Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship -- Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983. 79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men -- A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Page 18 ofPublisher 22
Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. Oct 10, 2016 02:58:17AM MDT
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Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 80. Benjamin C. Brad lee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 81. See note 79d, p.119-132. 82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media -- How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's twosentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 84. See note 79d, p.131. 85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 86. "conspire", 4Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 88. See note 65y. 89. See note 65n. 90. See note 65d. 91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 93. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in10, 28. In those Page 19 ofletters, 22 Oct 2016 02:58:17AM MDT
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letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court -- Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 99. See note 86. 100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post, April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977. NOTES A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham's attempt to suppress the Davis book,"Katherine The Great,", which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal's, "Power and Page 20 ofPrivilege 22
at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story."
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Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story." For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is "All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story," by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye. An additional good short reference is "The CIA's Greatest Hits" by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein's classic "The CIA and the Media" which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, 1977. Still another recent example of the CIA's control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton's & Roger Morris' story," THE CRIMES OF MENA" by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed without any explanation. Audio: Media & Mind Control in America by Steven Jacobson #1 http://www.apfn.net/audio/L001I060312110344-mind-control1.MP3 (5.24MB) 22Min 52 Sec #2 http://www.apfn.net/audio/L002I060312112719-mind-control2.MP3 (4.75MB) 20Min 45 Sec Subscribe to apfn-1
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Anderson Cooper, CIA Operative?
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Not only is CNN “journalist” Anderson Cooper the great-great grandson of robber baron Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt and the son of trust fund baby and designer jean hucksteress Gloria Vanderbilt, he is also a CIA operative, according to Radar Online. “Following his sophomore and junior years at Yale—a well-known recruiting ground for the CIA—Cooper spent his summers interning Thursday September 07th 2006, at the agency’s monolithic headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in a program for students interested in intelligence work. His involvement 10:27 am with the agency ended there, and he chose not to pursue a job with the agency after graduation, according to a CNN spokeswoman, who confirmed details of Cooper’s CIA involvement to Radar.” Or did he? As revealed during the Church Committee investigation in 1975, the CIA had a long-standing relationship with the corporate media, dubbed “Operation Mockingbird” by Deborah Davis, former Village Voice writer and author of Katherine The Great (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991). In her book, Davis quotes Philip Graham, the late editor Washington Post, as saying: “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.” Of course, Cooper, a bona fide Ritchie Rich, doesn’t need a couple hundred dollars a month, but may be doing the CIA’s work for other reasons, or he may be “owned” by the spook agency, as Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles owned “respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers,” according to a CIA source cited by Davis (see Alex Constantine, Tales from the Crypt: The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird). “Media assets … 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,” writes Mary Louise for Prison Planet. “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.” Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA… the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and Page 1 of 15
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disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations. According to Steve Kangas, the late journalist who mysteriously committed suicide (shot twice in the head, à la Gary Webb) in the offices of CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife, the “CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars…. Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well.” No doubt Anderson Cooper’s “interests and goals are one and the same” as the CIA and the ruling elite. However, this does not mean he is actually a snoop agency mole inserted in CNN. Nonetheless, his supposed flirtation with the agency, and his Ivy League background, specifically at Yale, are suspicious, to say the least. http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=555 Media contacts According to Carl Bernstein 400 reporters were working for the CIA as part of Operation Mockingbird. These include, but are not limited to: CBS (William S. Paley) Chattanooga Times (Charles Bartlett) Christian Science Monitor (Joseph Harrison) Copley News Services (James Copley) Louisville Courier-Journal (Barry Bingham, Sr.) The Miami News (William C. Baggs, Herb Gold, Hal Hendrix) Newsweek (Ben Bradlee) New York Herald Tribune (Stewart Alsop) New York Times (Arthur Hays Sulzberger) Time Magazine (Alfred Friendly, Charles Douglas Jackson, Henry Luce) Washington Post (Walter Pincus) Washington Star (Jerry O'Leary) Carl Bernstein. The CIA and the Media, Rolling Stone Magazine, October 20, 1977. Operation Mockingbird. A detailed article with internal links on the individuals involved and external links to other articles on the subject. Operation Mockingbird, SourceWatch. Alex Constantine. The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA, What Really Happened. Disinfopedia - Operation Mockingbird. This site compiles many of the allegations made regarding Operation Mockingbird on the web. Discussion about Operation Mockingbird and Search Engines
CIA LEAK: JUDITH MILLER OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD ASSET! http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/10-18-05/discussion.cgi.24.html Propaganda Page 2 of 15
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Propaganda Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source new!
Propaganda is a specific type of message presentation directly aimed at influencing the opinions of people, rather than impartially providing information. Literally translated from the Latin gerundive as "things which must be disseminated," in some cultures the term is neutral or even positive, while in others the term has acquired a strong negative connotation. Its connotations can also vary over time. For instance, in English, "propaganda" was originally a neutral term used to describe the dissemination of information in favor of a certain cause. Over time, however, the term acquired the negative connotation of disseminating false or misleading information in favor of a certain cause. Strictly speaking, a message does not have to be untrue to qualify as propaganda, but it may omit so many pertinent truths that it becomes highly misleading. In English the term propaganda overlaps with distinct terms like indoctrination (ideological views established by repetition rather than verification) and mass suggestion (broader strategic methods). In practice, the terms are often used synonymously. Historically, the most common use of the term propaganda is in political contexts; in particular to refer to certain efforts sponsored by governments, political groups, and other often covert interests. In the early 20th century the term was also used by the founders of the nascent public relations industry to describe their activities; this usage died out around the time of World War II. Individually propaganda functions as self-deception. Culturally it works within religions, politics, and economic entities like those which both favor and oppose globalization. At the left, right, or mainstream, propaganda knows no borders; as is detailed by Roderick Hindery. Hindery further argues that debates about most social issues can be productively revisited in the context of asking "what is or is not propaganda?" Not to be overlooked is the link between propaganda, indoctrination, and terrorism. Mere threats to destroy are often as socially disruptive as physical devastation itself. See also religious terrorism. Purpose of propaganda The aim of propaganda is to influence people's opinions actively, rather than merely to communicate the facts about something. For example, propaganda might be used to garner either support or disapproval of a certain position, rather than to simply present the position. What separates propaganda from "normal" communication is in the subtle, often insidious, ways that the message attempts to shape opinion. For example, propaganda is often presented in a way that attempts to deliberately evoke a strong emotion, especially by suggesting illogical (or non-intuitive) relationships between concepts. An appeal to one's emotions is, perhaps, a more obvious propaganda method than those utilized by some other more subtle and insidious forms. For instance, propaganda may be transmitted indirectly or implicitly, through an ostensibly fair and balanced debate or argument. This can be done to great effect in conjunction with a broadly targeted, broadcast news format. In such a setting, techniques like, "red herring", and other ploys (such as Ignoratio elenchi), are often used to divert the audience from a critical issue, while the intended message is suggested through indirect means. This sophisticated type of diversion utilizes the appearance of lively debate within, what is actually, a carefully focused spectrum, to generate and justify deliberately conceived assumptions. This technique avoids the distinctively biased appearance of one sided rhetoric, and works by presenting a contrived premise for an argument as if it were a universally accepted and obvious truth, so that the audience naturally assumes to 2016 be 02:57:17AM MDT Page 3 of 15 Octit 10,
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works by presenting a contrived premise for an argument as if it were a universally accepted and obvious truth, so that the audience naturally assumes it to be correct. By maintaining the range of debate in such a way that it appears inclusive of differing points of view, so as to suggest fairness and balance, the suppositions suggested become accepted as fact. Here is such an example of a hypothetical situation in which the opposing viewpoints are supposedly represented: the hawk (see: hawkish) says, "we must stay the course", and the dove says, "The war is a disaster and a failure", to which the hawk responds, "In war things seldom go smoothly and we must not let setbacks affect our determination", the dove retorts, "setbacks are setbacks, but failures are failures." As one can see, the actual validity of the war is not discussed and is never in contention. One may naturally assume that the war was not fundamentally wrong, but just the result of miscalculation, and therefore, an error, instead of a crime. Thus, by maintaining the appearance of equitable discourse in such debates, and through continuous inculcation, such focused arguments succeed in compelling the audience to logically deduce that the presupposions of debate are unequivocal truisms of the given subject. The method of propaganda is essential to the word's meaning as well. A message does not have to be untrue to qualify as propaganda. In fact, the message in modern propaganda is often not blatantly untrue. But even if the message conveys only "true" information, it will generally contain partisan bias and fail to present a complete and balanced consideration of the issue. Another common characteristic of propaganda is volume (in the sense of a large amount). For example, a propagandist may seek to influence opinion by attempting to get a message heard in as many places as possible, and as often as possible. The intention of this approach is to a) reinforce an idea through repetition, and b) exclude or "drown out" any alternative ideas. In English, the word "propaganda" now carries strong negative (as well as political) connotations, although it has not always done so. It was formerly common for political organizations to refer to their own material as propaganda. Other languages do not necessarily regard the term as derogatory and hence usage may lead to misunderstanding in communications with non-native English speakers. For example, in Portuguese and some Spanish language speaking countries, particularly in the Southern Cone, the word "propaganda" usually means the most common manipulation of information—"advertising". Famed public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays in his classic studies eloquently describes propaganda as the purpose of communications. In Crystallizing Public Opinion, for example, he dismisses the semantic differentiations (“Education is valuable, commendable, enlightening, instructive. Propaganda is insidious, dishonest, underhanded, misleading.”) and instead concentrates on purposes. He writes (p. 212), “Each of these nouns carries with it social and moral implications. . . . The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education,’ really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda.” The reason propaganda exists and is so widespread is because it serves various social purposes, necessary ones, often popular yet potentially corrupting. Many institutions such as media and government itself are literally propaganda-addicts, co-dependent on each other and the fueling influence of the propaganda system that they help create and maintain. Propagandists have an advantage through knowing what they want to promote and to whom, and although they often resort to various two-way forms of communication this is done in order to make sure their one-sided purposes are achieved. Special kt 10:37, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Types Page 4 of 15
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Types of propaganda Propaganda shares techniques with advertising and public relations. In fact, advertising and public relations can be thought of as propaganda that promotes a commercial product or shapes the perception of an organization, person or brand, though in post-WWII usage the word "propaganda" more typically refers to political or nationalist uses of these techniques or to the promotion of a set of ideas. Propaganda also has much in common with public information campaigns by governments, which are intended to encourage or discourage certain forms of behavior (such as wearing seat belts, not smoking, not littering and so forth). Again, the emphasis is more political in propaganda. Propaganda can take the form of leaflets, posters, TV and radio broadcasts and can also extend to any other medium. In the case of the United States, there is also an important legal distinction between advertising (a type of overt propaganda) and what the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of the United States Congress, refers to as "covert propaganda." Journalistic theory generally holds that news items should be objective, giving the reader an accurate background and analysis of the subject at hand. On the other hand, advertisements generally present an issue in a very subjective and often misleading light, primarily meant to persuade rather than inform. If the reader believes that a paid advertisement is in fact a news item, the message the advertiser is trying to communicate will be more easily "believed" or "internalized." Such advertisements are considered obvious examples of "covert" propaganda because they take on the appearance of objective information rather than the appearance of propaganda, which is misleading. Federal law specifically mandates that any advertisement appearing in the format of a news item must state that the item is in fact a paid advertisement. The Bush Administration has come under fire for allegedly producing and disseminating covert propaganda in the form of television programs, aired in the United States, which appeared to be legitimate news broadcasts and did not include any information signifying that the programs were not generated by a private-sector news source. Propaganda, in a narrower use of the term, connotates deliberately false or misleading information that supports or furthers a political cause or the interests of those in power. The propagandist seeks to change the way people understand an issue or situation for the purpose of changing their actions and expectations in ways that are desirable to the interest group. Propaganda, in this sense, serves as a corollary to censorship in which the same purpose is achieved, not by filling people's minds with approved information, but by preventing people from being confronted with opposing points of view. What sets propaganda apart from other forms of advocacy is the willingness of the propagandist to change people's understanding through deception and confusion rather than persuasion and understanding. The leaders of an organization know the information to be one sided or untrue, but this may not be true for the rank and file members who help to disseminate the propaganda. More in line with the religious roots of the term, it is also used widely in the debates about new religious movements (NRMs), both by people who defend them and by people who oppose them. The latter pejoratively call these NRMs cults. Anti-cult activists and countercult activists accuse the leaders of what they consider cults of using propaganda extensively to recruit followers and keep them. Some social scientists, such as the late Jeffrey Hadden, and
CESNUR Page 5 of 15
affiliated scholars accuse ex-members of "cults" who became vocal critics Oct 10,and 2016the 02:57:17AM MDT
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CESNUR affiliated scholars accuse ex-members of "cults" who became vocal critics and the anti-cult movement of making these unusual religious movements look bad without sufficient reasons. Propaganda is a mighty weapon in war. In this case its aim is usually to dehumanize and create hatred toward a supposed enemy, either internal or external. The technique is to create a false image in the mind. This can be done by using special words, special avoidance of words or by saying that the enemy is responsible for certain things he never did. Most propaganda wars require the home population to feel the enemy has inflicted an injustice, which may be fictitious or may be based on facts. The home population must also decide that the cause of their nation is just. Propaganda is also one of the methods used in psychological warfare, which may also involve false flag operations. The term propaganda may also refer to false information meant to reinforce the mindsets of people who already believe as the propagandist wishes. The assumption is that, if people believe something false, they will constantly be assailed by doubts. Since these doubts are unpleasant (see cognitive dissonance), people will be eager to have them extinguished, and are therefore receptive to the reassurances of those in power. For this reason propaganda is often addressed to people who are already sympathetic to the agenda. This process of reinforcement uses an individual's predisposition to self-select "agreeable" information sources as a mechanism for maintaining control. Propaganda can be classified according to the source and nature of the message. White propaganda generally comes from an openly identified source, and is characterized by gentler methods of persuasion, such as standard public relations techniques and one-sided presentation of an argument. Black propaganda is identified as being from one source, but is infact from another. This is most commonly to disguise the true origins of the propaganda, be it from an enemy country or from an organization with a negative public image. Gray propaganda Is propaganda without any identifiable souce or author. In scale, these different types of propaganda can also be defined by the potential of true and correct information to compete with the propaganda. For example, opposition to white propaganda is often readily found and may slightly discredit the propaganda source. Opposition to gray propaganda, when revealed (often by an inside source), may create some level of public outcry. Opposition to black propaganda is often unavailable and may be dangerous to reveal, because public cognizance of black propaganda tactics and sources would undermine or backfire the very campaign the black propagandist supported. Propaganda may be administered in very insidious ways. For instance, disparaging disinformation about history, certain groups or foreign countries may be encouraged or tolerated in the educational system. Since few people actually double-check what they learn at school, such disinformation will be repeated by journalists as well as parents, thus reinforcing the idea that the disinformation item is really a "well-known fact," even though no one repeating the myth is able to point to an authoritative source. The disinformation is then recycled in the media and in the educational system, without the need for direct governmental intervention on the media. Such permeating propaganda may be used for political goals: by giving citizens a false impression of the quality or policies of their country, they may be incited to rejectOct certain Page 6 of 15 10, 2016 02:57:17AM MDT
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may be used for political goals: by giving citizens a false impression of the quality or policies of their country, they may be incited to reject certain proposals or certain remarks or ignore the experience of others. See also: black propaganda, marketing, advertising History of propaganda Etymology In late Latin, propaganda meant "things to be propagated". In 1622, shortly after the start of the Thirty Years' War, Pope Gregory XV founded the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide ("Congregation for Propagating the Faith"), a committee of Cardinals with the duty of overseeing the propagation of Christianity by missionaries sent to non-Catholic countries. Therefore, the term itself originates with this Roman Catholic Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (sacra congregatio christiano nomini propagando or, briefly, propaganda fide), the department of the pontifical administration charged with the spread of Catholicism and with the regulation of ecclesiastical affairs in non-Catholic countries (mission territory). The actual Latin stem propagand- conveys a sense of "that which ought to be spread". Originally the term was not intended to refer to misleading information. The modern political sense dates from World War I, and was not originally pejorative. Propaganda has been a human activity as far back as reliable recorded evidence exists. The writings of Romans like Livy are considered masterpieces of pro-Roman statist propaganda. The Behistun Inscription, made around 515 BCE and detailing the rise of Darius I to the Persian throne, can also be seen as an early example of propaganda. 19th and 20th centuries' propaganda Gabriel Tarde's Laws of Imitation (1890) and Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1897) were two of the first codifications of propaganda techniques, which influenced many writers afterward, including Sigmund Freud. Hitler's Mein Kampf is heavily influenced by Le Bon's theories. Journalist Walter Lippman, in Public Opinion (1922) also worked on the subject, as well as psychologist Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud, early in the 20th century. During World War I, Lippman and Bernays were hired by then United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to participate in the Creel Commission, the mission of which was to sway popular opinion in favor of entering the war, on the side of the United Kingdom. The Creel Commission provided themes for speeches by "four-minute men" at public functions, and also encouraged censorship of the American press. The Commission was so unpopular that after the war, Congress closed it down without providing funding to organize and archive its papers. The war propaganda campaign of Lippman and Bernays produced within six months such an intense anti-German hysteria as to permanently impress American business (and Adolf Hitler,
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others) with the potential of large-scale propaganda to control public opinion. Oct 10,Bernays 2016 02:57:17AM MDT
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among others) with the potential of large-scale propaganda to control public opinion. Bernays coined the terms "group mind" and "engineering consent", important concepts in practical propaganda work. The current public relations industry is a direct outgrowth of Lippman's and Bernays' work and is still used extensively by the United States government. For the first half of the 20th century Bernays and Lippman themselves ran a very successful public relations firm. World War II saw continued use of propaganda as a weapon of war, both by Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the British Political Warfare Executive, as well as the United States Office of War Information. In the early 2000s, the United States government developed and freely distributed a video game known as America's Army. The stated intention of the game is to encourage players to become interested in joining the U.S. Army. According to a poll by I for I Research, 30% of young people who had a positive view of the military said that they had developed that view by playing the game. Russian revolution Russian revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries distinguished two different aspects covered by the English term propaganda. Their terminology included two terms: агитация (agitatsiya), or agitation, and пропаганда, or propaganda, see agitprop (agitprop is not, however, limited to the Soviet Union, as it was considered, before the October Revolution, to be one of the fundamental activity of any Marxist activist; this importance of agit-prop in Marxist theory may also be observed today in trotskyists circles, who insist on the importance of leaflets distribution). Soviet propaganda meant dissemination of revolutionary ideas, teachings of Marxism, and theoretical and practical knowledge of Marxist economics, while agitation meant forming favorable public opinion and stirring up political unrest. These activities did not carry negative connotations (as they usually do in English) and were encouraged. Expanding dimensions of state propaganda, the Bolsheviks actively used transportation such as trains, aircraft and other means. Josef Stalin's regime built the largest fixed-wing aircraft of the 1930s, Tupolev ANT-20, exclusively for this purpose. Named after the famous Soviet writer Maxim Gorky who had recently returned from fascist Italy, it was equipped with a powerful radio set called "Voice from the sky", printing and leaflet-dropping machinery, radiostations, photographic laboratory, film projector with sound for showing movies in flight, library, etc. The aircraft could be disassembled and transported by railroad if needed. The giant aircraft set a number of world records. Nazi Germany Most propaganda in Germany was produced by the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Propagandaministerium, or "Promi" (German abbreviation)). Joseph Goebbels was placed in charge of this ministry shortly after Hitler took power in 1933. All journalists, writers, and artists were required to register with one of the Ministry's subordinate chambers for the press, fine arts, music, theater, film, literature, or radio. The Page 8 of 15
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The Nazis believed in propaganda as a vital tool in achieving their goals. Adolf Hitler, Germany's Führer, was impressed by the power of Allied propaganda during World War I and believed that it had been a primary cause of the collapse of morale and revolts in the German home front and Navy in 1918 (see also: Dolchstoßlegende). Hitler would meet nearly every day with Goebbels to discuss the news and Goebbels would obtain Hitler's thoughts on the subject; Goebbels would then meet with senior Ministry officials and pass down the official Party line on world events. Broadcasters and journalists required prior approval before their works were disseminated. Nazi propaganda before the start of World War II had several distinct audiences: German audiences were continually reminded of the struggle of the Nazi Party and Germany against foreign enemies and internal enemies, especially Jews. Ethnic Germans in countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and the Baltic states were told that blood ties to Germany were stronger than their allegiance to their new countries. Potential enemies, such as France and the United Kingdom, were told that Germany had no quarrel with the people of the country, but that their governments were trying to start a war with Germany. All audiences were reminded of the greatness of German cultural, scientific, and military achievements. Until the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad on February 4, 1943, German propaganda emphasized the prowess of German arms and the supposed humanity German soldiers had shown to the peoples of occupied territories. Pilots of the Allied bombing fleets were depicted as cowardly murderers, and Americans in particular as gangsters in the style of Al Capone. At the same time, German propaganda sought to alienate Americans and British from each other, and both these Western belligerents from the Soviets. After Stalingrad, the main theme changed to Germany as the sole defender of what they called "Western European culture" against the "Bolshevist hordes". The introduction of the V-1 and V-2 "vengeance weapons" was emphasized to convince Britons of the hopelessness of defeating Germany. On June 23, 1944, the Nazis permitted the Red Cross to visit concentration camp Theresienstadt in order to dispel rumours about the Final Solution to the Jewish question. In reality, Theresienstadt was a transit camp for Jews en route to extermination camps, but in a sophisticated propaganda effort, fake shops and cafés were erected to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort. The guests enjoyed the performance of a children's opera, Brundibar, written by inmate Hans Krása. The hoax was so successful for the Nazis that they went on to make a propaganda film at Theresienstadt. Shooting of the film began on February 26, 1944. Directed by Kurt Gerron, it was meant to show how well the Jews lived under the "benevolent" protection of the Third Reich. After the shooting, most of the cast, and even the filmmaker himself, were deported to the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Goebbels committed suicide shortly after Hitler on April 30, 1945. In his stead, Hans Fritzsche, who had been head of the Radio Chamber, was tried and acquitted by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Cold Page 9 of 15
War propaganda
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Cold War propaganda The United States and the Soviet Union both used propaganda extensively during the Cold War. Both sides used film, television, and radio programming to influence their own citizens, each other, and Third World nations. The United States Information Agency operated the Voice of America as an official government station. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which were in part supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, provided grey propaganda in news and entertainment programs to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union respectively. The Soviet Union's official government station, Radio Moscow, broadcast white propaganda, while Radio Peace and Freedom broadcast grey propaganda. Both sides also broadcast black propaganda programs in periods of special crises. In 1948, the United Kingdom's Foreign Office created the IRD (Information Research Department) which took over from wartime and slightly post-war departments such as the Ministry of Information and dispensed propaganda via various media such as the BBC and publishing. The ideological and border dispute between the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China resulted in a number of cross-border operations. One technique developed during this period was the "backwards transmission," in which the radio program was recorded and played backwards over the air. (This was done so that messages meant to be received by the other government could be heard, while the average listener could not understand the content of the program.) Soviet propaganda appeared in Soviet Union education, as well. Propaganda went so far in school that it sometimes even interfered with learning. When one learned history, one would never learn any history except for Russia's, but even that was not at all valid. There were often lies spread about how life in America and other Western countries was, and how rich the U.S.S.R. was compared to them. Also, the Soviets used classic novels, such as the American favorite Uncle Tom's Cabin to spread communist propaganda. The overall motif and message was twisted to an anti-American message and was fed to the schools. In the Americas, Cuba served as a major source and a target of propaganda from both black and white stations operated by the CIA and Cuban exile groups. Radio Habana Cuba, in turn, broadcast original programming, relayed Radio Moscow, and broadcast The Voice of Vietnam as well as alleged confessions from the crew of the USS Pueblo. One of the most insightful authors of the Cold War was George Orwell, whose novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are virtual textbooks on the use of propaganda. Though not set in the Soviet Union, these books are about totalitarian regimes in which language is constantly corrupted for political purposes. These novels were used for explicit propaganda. The CIA, for example, secretly commissioned an animated film adaptation of Animal Farm in the 1950s with small changes to the original story to suit its own needs. Special kt 11:23, 15 August 2006 (UTC) Afghanistan In the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, psychological operations tactics were employed to demoralize the Taliban and to win the sympathies of the Afghan population. At least six EC-130E Commando Solo aircraft were used to jam local radio transmissions and transmit replacement propaganda messages. Page 10 ofLeaflets 15
were also dropped throughout Afghanistan, offering rewards for OsamaOct bin10,Laden and 2016 02:57:17AM MDT
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Leaflets were also dropped throughout Afghanistan, offering rewards for Osama bin Laden and other individuals, portraying Americans as friends of Afghanistan and emphasizing various negative aspects of the Taliban. Another shows a picture of Mohammed Omar in a set of crosshairs with the words "We are watching". Iraq During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf repeatedly claimed Iraqi forces were decisively winning every battle. Even up to the overthrow of the Iraqi government at Baghdad, he maintained that the United States would soon be defeated, in contradiction with all other media. Due to this, he quickly became a cult figure in the West, and gained recognition on the website WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com The Iraqis, misled by his propaganda, on the other hand, were shocked when instead Iraq was defeated. In November 2005, various media outlets, including The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, alleged that the United States military had manipulated news reported in Iraqi media in an effort to cast a favorable light on its actions while demoralizing the insurgency. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman in Iraq, said the program is "an important part of countering misinformation in the news by insurgents", while a spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the allegations of manipulation were troubling if true. The Department of Defense has confirmed the existence of the program. More recently, The New York Times (see external links below) published an article about how the Pentagon has started to use contractors with little experience in journalism or public relations to plant articles in the Iraqi press. These articles are usually written by US soldiers without attribution or are attributed to a non-existent organization called the "International Information Center." Planting propaganda stories in newspapers was done by both the Allies and Central Powers in the First World War and the Axis and Allies in the Second; this is the latest version of this technique. Techniques of propaganda generation A number of techniques which are based on social psychological research are used to generate propaganda. Many of these same techniques can be found under logical fallacies, since propagandists use arguments that, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid. Some time has been spent analyzing the means by which propaganda messages are transmitted. That work is important but it is clear that information dissemination strategies only become propaganda strategies when coupled with propagandistic messages. Identifying these messages is a necessary prerequisite to study the methods by which those messages are spread. That is why it is essential to have some knowledge of the following techniques for generating propaganda: Appeal to authority: Appeals to authority cite prominent figures to support a position idea, argument, or course of action. Appeal to fear: Appeals to fear seek to build support by instilling fear in the general population, for example, Joseph Goebbels exploited Theodore Kaufman's Germany Must Perish! to claim that the Allies sought the extermination of the German people. Argumentum ad nauseam: Uses tireless repetition. An idea once repeated enough Page 11 of 15
times, is taken as the truth. Works best when media sources are limited and by Octcontrolled 10, 2016 02:57:17AM MDT
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times, is taken as the truth. Works best when media sources are limited and controlled by the propagator. Bandwagon: Bandwagon and inevitable-victory appeals attempt to persuade the target audience to take the course of action that "everyone else is taking." Inevitable victory: invites those not already on the bandwagon to join those already on the road to certain victory. Those already or at least partially on the bandwagon are reassured that staying aboard is their best course of action. Join the crowd: This technique reinforces people's natural desire to be on the winning side. This technique is used to convince the audience that a program is an expression of an irresistible mass movement and that it is in their best interest to join. Black-and-White fallacy: Presenting only two choices, with the product or idea being propagated as the better choice. (Eg. You can have an unhealthy, unreliable engine, or you can use Brand X oil) Common man: The "plain folks" or "common man" approach attempts to convince the audience that the propagandist's positions reflect the common sense of the people. It is designed to win the confidence of the audience by communicating in the common manner and style of the target audience. Propagandists use ordinary language and mannerisms (and clothe their message in face-to-face and audiovisual communications) in attempting to identify their point of view with that of the average person. Direct order: This technique hopes to simplify the decision making process. The propagandist uses images and words to tell the audience exactly what actions to take, eliminating any other possible choices. Authority figures can be used to give the order, overlapping it with the Appeal to authority technique, but not necessarily. The Uncle Sam "I want you" image is an example of this technique. Euphoria: The use of an event that generates euphoria or happiness in lieu of spreading more sadness, or using a good event to try to cover up another. Or creating a celebrateable event in the hopes of boosting morale. Euphoria can be used to take one's mind from a worse feeling. i.e. a holiday or parade. Falsifying information: The creation or deletion of information from public records, in the purpose of making a false record of an event or the actions of a person during a court session, or possibly a battle, etc. Pseudoscience is often used in this way. Flag-waving: An attempt to justify an action on the grounds that doing so will make one more patriotic, or in some way benefit a group, country, or idea. The feeling of patriotism which this technique attempts to inspire may diminish or entirely omit one's capability for rational examination of the matter in question. Glittering generalities: Glittering generalities are emotionally appealing words applied to a product or idea, but which present no concrete argument or analysis. A famous example is the campaign slogan "Ford has a better idea!" Intentional vagueness: Generalities are deliberately vague so that the audience may supply its own interpretations. The intention is to move the audience by use of undefined phrases, without analyzing their validity or attempting to determine their reasonableness or application. The intent is to cause people to draw their own interpretations rather than simply being presented with an explicit idea. In trying to "figure out" the propaganda, the audience foregoes judgment of the ideas presented. Their validity, reasonableness and application is not considered.
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Obtain disapproval or Reductio ad Hitlerum: This technique is used to persuade a target audience to disapprove of an action or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated, feared, or held in contempt by the target audience. Thus if a group which supports a certain policy is led to believe that undesirable, subversive, or contemptible people support the same policy, then the members of the group may decide to change their original position. Oversimplification: Favorable generalities are used to provide simple answers to complex social, political, economic, or military problems. Rationalization: Individuals or groups may use favorable generalities to rationalize questionable acts or beliefs. Vague and pleasant phrases are often used to justify such actions or beliefs. Red herring: Presenting data that is irrelevant, then claiming that it validates your argument. Scapegoating: Assigning blame to an individual or group that isn't really responsible, thus alleviating feelings of guilt from responsible parties and/or distracting attention from the need to fix the problem for which blame is being assigned. Slogans: A slogan is a brief, striking phrase that may include labeling and stereotyping. Although slogans may be enlisted to support reasoned ideas, in practice they tend to act only as emotional appeals. Opposing slogans about warfare in Iraq or the Middle East, for example, such as "blood for oil" or "cut and run," are considered by some to have stifled debate. On the other hand, the names of the military campaigns, such as "enduring freedom" or "just cause", may also be regarded to be slogans, devised to prevent free thought on the issues. Stereotyping or Name Calling or Labeling: This technique attempts to arouse prejudices in an audience by labeling the object of the propaganda campaign as something the target audience fears, hates, loathes, or finds undesirable. For instance, reporting on a foreign country or social group may focus on the stereotypical traits that the reader expects, even though they are far from being representative of the whole country or group; such reporting often focuses on the anecdotal. Testimonial: Testimonials are quotations, in or out of context, especially cited to support or reject a given policy, action, program, or personality. The reputation or the role (expert, respected public figure, etc.) of the individual giving the statement is exploited. The testimonial places the official sanction of a respected person or authority on a propaganda message. This is done in an effort to cause the target audience to identify itself with the authority or to accept the authority's opinions and beliefs as its own. See also, damaging quotation Transfer: Also known as association, this is a technique of projecting positive or negative qualities (praise or blame) of a person, entity, object, or value (an individual, group, organization, nation, patriotism, etc.) to another in order to make the second more acceptable or to discredit it. It evokes an emotional response, which stimulates the target to identify with recognized authorities. Often highly visual, this technique often utilizes symbols (for example, the Swastika used in Nazi Germany, originally a symbol for health Page 13 of 15
and prosperity) superimposed over other visual images. An example of common use02:57:17AM of Oct 10, 2016 MDT
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and prosperity) superimposed over other visual images. An example of common use of this technique in America is for the President to be filmed or photographed in front of the American flag. Unstated assumption: This technique is used when the propaganda concept the propagandist want to transmit would seem less credible if explicitly stated. It is instead repeatedly assumed or implied. Virtue words: These are words in the value system of the target audience which tend to produce a positive image when attached to a person or issue. Peace, happiness, security, wise leadership, freedom, etc. are virtue words. See ""Transfer"". See also: doublespeak, meme, cult of personality, spin, demonization, factoid Techniques of propaganda transmission Common media for transmitting propaganda messages include news reports, government reports, historical revision, junk science, books, leaflets, movies, radio, television, and posters. In the case of radio and television, propaganda can exist on news, current-affairs or talk-show segments, as advertising or public-service announce "spots" or as long-running advertorials. The magazine Tricontinental, issued by the Cuban OSPAAAL organization, folds propaganda posters and places one in each copy, allowing a very broad distribution of pro-Fidel Castro propaganda. Ideally a propaganda campaign will follow a strategic transmission pattern to fully indoctrinate a group. This may begin with a simple transmission such as a leaflet dropped from a plane or an advertisement. Generally these messages will contain directions on how to obtain more information, via a web site, hotline, radio program, et cetera. The strategy intends to initiate the individual from information recipient to information seeker through reinforcement, and then from information seeker to opinion leader through indoctrination. A successful propaganda campaign includes this cyclical meme-reproducing process. The Propaganda Model The propaganda model is a theory advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that alleges systemic biases in the mass media and seeks to explain them in terms of structural economic causes. First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views the private media as businesses selling a product — readers and audiences (rather than news) — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Ownership of the medium Medium's funding sources Sourcing Flak Anti-communist ideology
The first three (ownership, funding, and sourcing) are generally regarded by the authors as Page 14 ofbeing 15
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being the most important. Although the model was based mainly on the characterization of United States media, Chomsky and Herman believe the theory is equally applicable to any country that shares the basic economic structure and organizing principles which the model postulates as the cause of media biases. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Chomsky stated that the new filter replacing communism would be terrorism and Islam. http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Propaganda
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American Patriot Friends Network Without Justice, there is JUST_US! APFN IS NOT A BUSINESS APFN IS SUPPORTED BY "FREE WILL" GIFT/DONATIONS Without Justice, there is JUST_US! http://www.apfn.org Thursday September 07th 2006, 10:27 am
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OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD Part 1
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Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation By Mary Louise 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 we 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 Page 1 of 45
when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry the Novreported 14, 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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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.
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).
"Who Controls the Media? The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird", "The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization", and "Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America" by Alex Constantine are an excellent source of information on this topic: www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html and www.alexconstantine.50megs.com . David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting Media" Page 2 of 45 Nov 14,the 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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and www.alexconstantine.50megs.com . David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting the Media" at www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm . Then there are two articles called "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" and "The Origins of the Overclass" by Steve Kangas that are very informative although from a more liberal perspective. Steve will not be writing anymore articles as he is no longer with us, having unfortunately met his untimely death that was 'apparently' from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. If you read about him on his web page that is still available, you will see that he did not seem like a person who was suffering from deep depression. In his memory, please take the time to read what he wrote at www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html , www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html , and www.korpios.org/resurgent/index.html . CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both owned by Time-Warner) ran a story about a secret mission called Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN site at www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html. Journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the stories on Watergate (late 70's) in the Washington Post, having gained access to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program of using journalists at home and abroad, in deliberate propaganda campaigns. It was later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House and knew many insiders including General Alexander Haig. A high-level source told Bernstein, "One journalist is worth twenty agents." CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham, in a 1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. 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." Maybe that's another reason why folks get the impression that a suspicious agenda lurks behind the headlines. "25 Ways to Suppress Truth: Rules of Disinformation" and "8 Traits of the Disinformationalist" at www.proparanoid.com/truth.htm , sums it up very well.
Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, mainly in South-East Asia where he witnessed bombing and napalming of villages, which caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He has written about Vietnam's Phoenix Program www.vwip.org/articles/m/McGeheeRalph_VietnamsPhoenixProgram.htm and after a long battle with CIA censors, he published the book "Deadly Deceits" in 1983. Ralph has been harassed by the CIA and FBI, involving bodily injury, and his CIABASE website was shut down on Spring of 2000. He copied some reports that can be found at http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase_report_1.htm (and 2.htm), http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm Page 3 of 45
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http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm , and www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Deadly_Deceits.html. He concluded that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency but rather the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisors, of which disinformation is a large part of its responsibility and the American people are the primary target of its lies. One of the primary reasons John F. Kennedy was assassinated had to do with the fact he dared to interfere in the framework of power. Kennedy was intent on exercising his ELECTED powers and not allowing them to be usurped by power-crazed individuals in the intelligence community, threatening to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." There were four things that filled the CIA with rage and sealed his fate; JFK fired Allen Dulles, was in the process of founding a panel to investigate the CIA's numerous crimes, put a damper on the breadth and scope of the CIA, and limited their ability to act under National Security Memoranda 55. There is such an overwhelming amount of information pertaining to the CIA that it is impossible to cover it all in one book, much less an article. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA.....the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations. The CIA is the epitome of organized crime run amuck! http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis.html ®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® Central Intelligence Agency ::: Official Media Relations Site In an effort to provide the American people with accurate information about the CIA, its mission, and the contributions Agency employees make to national security, the Media Relations Division staff works with print and broadcast journalists on a daily basis. The Office of Public Affairs believes that accurate media coverage of aspects of the Agency's work will build better public understanding of our efforts. The Division's objective is to be as helpful and responsive to the media as possible while still protecting classified information, including intelligence sources and methods. To accomplish this goal, the Media Relations Division staff establishes professional relationships with print and broadcast reporters, responds to press inquiries on a wide range of issues, develops media strategies in advance of newsworthy events or announcements, prepares press releases, and arranges for Agency experts to provide background briefings for U.S. media. http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/media.html ®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® A Short Peek into the Future - Part 1 Page 4 of 45
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By Wade Inganamort Click. Click. Click. The familiar sound violently awoke Sam, sending shockwaves down his spine. Click. Click. Click. His first voluntary reaction was to think - Is it me? Do they know? Wondering how far away they were, he threw back the standard issue gray bedding and planted his feet firmly on the cold cement floor. His mind was racing in one consistent direction: escape. Grabbing his overcoat, he stumbled to the door, while checking the pockets to ensure that he still had the document. I must get rid of it, he thought. Why did I have to be so damn curious? Click. Click. Click. The sound was getting closer. How he wished that he didn't have this chip in his arm, then he could've just slipped away weeks ago. It's now or never, he whispered to himself. His left hand was cleching the document in his pocket as he turned the doorknob. Swoosh. A dart flew by his right temple. It was too late. Click. Click. Click. There they were, his worse nightmare come true; a fleet of ten six-legged Lynxmotion Hexapod II walking robots were approaching from the end of the hallway. They were increasing speed, but from hearing so many rumors, the Haxapods were not what he feared. They were but mere slaves, doing reconnaissance as part of a distributed sensor network, relaying the triangulated information back to their master, ROBART. ROBART he knew, was rather slow with his dual treads powered by 12-volt electric wheelchair motors. Escape was a matter of evading the Hexapods before he was remotely located by GPS from the signals that his subdermal microchip - Digital Angel was emitting. But where would he go? This sector's grid monitor prevented any free-roaming, unless a travel plan was first logged from a public Digital Angel uplink terminal. Click. Click. Click. He made a dash to the right, hoping to get a small head start and immediately felt the first of six steel tipped darts enter his neck. Consciousness began to fade away. His left hand was still tightly gripping the illegal document. ROBART's remote camera zooms in on the torn Xeroxed paper as the puppetmasters 3,000 miles away can just barely read a portion of the title: The Constitution of the United Sta......
"We have money to blow up bridges over the Tigress and Euphrates and we don't have money to build bridges in our major cities. We have money to destroy the health of the Iraqi people and we don't have enough money to repair the health of our own people in this country. There is something fundamentally wrong with the direction this administration is taking its foreign policy, and I intend to change that if I am elected president of the United States." Dennis Kucinich on CNN's Crossfire: Friday February 21, 2003
They hang the man and flog the woman who steal the goose from the Common But the other man they let go loose who steal the Common from the goose Olde Page 5 of 45
English Nursery Rhyme
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Olde English Nursery Rhyme
®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® The Origins of the Overclass By Steve Kangas
The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere. The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds. During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America's wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent, the highest level of inequality in the 20th century. How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation's elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation's rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!" Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society's elite. By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nation's businesses, media and universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives. Their employment with the agency took a variety of forms, which included: Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official capacity. Staying in one's profession, Page 6 of 45
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profession, using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time, or on-call. Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along information useful to the CIA. Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between the agency and the business world. Historically, the CIA and society's elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government. Many common traits made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies. Both share an intense dislike of democracy, and feel they should be liberated from democratic regulations and oversight. Both share a culture of secrecy, either hiding their actions from the American public or lying about them to present the best public image. And both are in a perfect position to help each other. How? International businesses give CIA agents cover, secret funding, top-quality resources and important contacts in foreign lands. In return, the CIA gives corporations billion-dollar federal contracts (for spy planes, satellites and other hi-tech spycraft). Businessmen also enjoy the romantic thrill of participating in spy operations. The CIA also gives businesses a certain amount of protection and privacy from the media and government watchdogs, under the guise of "national security." Finally, the CIA helps American corporations remain dominant in foreign markets, by overthrowing governments hostile to unregulated capitalism and installing puppet regimes whose policies favor American corporations at the expense of their people.
The CIA's alliance with the elite turned out to be an unholy one. Each enabled the other to rise above the law. Indeed, a review of the CIA s history is one of such crime and atrocity that no one can reasonably defend it, even in the name of anticommunism. Before reviewing this alliance in detail, it is useful to know the CIA s history of atrocity first.
The Crimes of the CIA
During World War II, the OSS actively engaged in propaganda, sabotage and countless other dirty tricks. After the war, and even after the CIA was created in 1947, the American intelligence community reverted to harmless information gathering and analysis, thinking that the danger to national security had passed. That changed in 1948 with the emergence of the Cold War. In that year, the CIA recreated its covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy Coordination. Its first director was Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities included propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world. By Page 7 of 45
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By 1953, the dirty tricks department of the CIA had grown to 7,200 personnel and commanded 74 percent of the CIA s total budget. The following quotes describe the culture of lawlessness that pervaded the CIA: Stanley Lovell, a CIA recruiter for "Wild Bill" Donovan: "What I have to do is to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and say to him, 'Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell. Come help me raise it.'" (1) George Hunter White, writing of his CIA escapades: "I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun... Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?" (2) A retired CIA agency caseworker with twenty years experience: "I never gave a thought to legality or morality. Frankly, I did what worked." Blessed with secrecy and lack of congressional oversight, CIA operations became corrupt almost immediately. Using propaganda stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA felt justified in manipulating the public for its own good. The broadcasts were so patently false that for a time it was illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S. This was a classic case of a powerful organization deciding what was best for the people, and then abusing the powers it had helped itself to. During the 40s and 50s, most of the public was unaware of what the CIA was doing. Those who knew thought they were fighting the good fight against communism, like James Bond. However, they could not keep their actions secret forever, and by the 60s and 70s, Americans began learning about the agency s crimes and atrocities. (3) It turns out the CIA has: Corrupted democratic elections in Greece, Italy and dozens of other nations; Been involved to varying degrees in at least 35 assassination plots against foreign heads of state or prominent political leaders. Successful assassinations include democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende (Chile) and Patrice Lumumba (Belgian Congo); also CIA-created dictators like Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic) and Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam); and popular political leaders like Che Guevara. Unsuccessful attempts range from Fidel Castro to Charles De Gaulle. Helped launch military coups that toppled democratic governments, replacing them with brutal dictatorships or juntas. The list of overthrown democratic leaders includes Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Velasco and Arosemena (Ecuador, 1961, 1963), Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Papandreou (Greece, 1965-67), Allende (Chile, 1973), and dozens of others. Undermined the governments of Australia, Guyana, Cambodia, Jamaica and more; Supported murderous dictators like General Pinochet (Chile), the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos (Phillipines), "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier (Haiti), General Noriega (Panama), Mobutu Sese Seko (Ziare), the "reign of the colonels" (Greece), and more; Created, trained and supported death squads and secret police forces that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, leftists and political opponents, in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Page 8 of 45
Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others;
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Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others; Helped run the "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers how to overthrow democratic governments. Subjects include the use of torture, interrogation and murder; Used Michigan State "professors" to train Diem's secret police in torture; Conducted economic sabotage, including ruining crops, disrupting industry, sinking ships and creating food shortages; Paved the way for the massacre of 200,000 in East Timor, 500,000 in Indonesia and one to two million in Cambodia; Launched secret or illegal military actions or wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Cuba, Laos and Indochina; Planted false stories in the local media; Framed political opponents for crimes, atrocities, political statements and embarrassments that they did not commit; Spied on thousands of American citizens, in defiance of Congressional law; Smuggled Nazi war criminals and weapon scientists into the U.S., unpunished, for their use in the Cold War; Created organizations like the World Anti-Communist League, which became filled with ex-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, Italian terrorists, Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaaners, Latin American death squad leaders, CIA agents and other extreme right-wing militants; Conducted Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control experiment that gave LSD and other drugs to Americans against their will or without their knowledge, causing some to commit suicide; Penetrated and disrupted student antiwar organizations; Kept friendly and extensive working relations with the Mafia; Actively traded in drugs around the world since the 1950s to fund its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the iceberg - other notorious examples include Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle and Noreiga's Panama. Had their fingerprints all over the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. Even if the CIA is not responsible for these killings, the sheer amount of CIA involvement in these cases demands answers; And then routinely lied to Congress about all of the above.
The Page 9 of 45
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The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (4) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust." We should note that the CIA gets away with this because it is not accountable to democratic government. Former CIA officer Philip Agee put it best: "The CIA is the President's secret army." Prior to 1975, the agency answered only to the President (creating all the usual problems of authoritarianism). And because the CIA's activities were secret, the President rarely had to worry about public criticism and pressure. After the 1975 Church hearings, Congress tried to create congressional oversight of the CIA, but this has failed miserably. One reason is that the congressional oversight committee is a sham, filled with Cold Warriors, conservatives, businessmen, and even ex-CIA personnel.
The Business Origins of CIA Crimes
Although many people think that the CIA s primary mission during the Cold War was to "deter communism," Noam Chomksy correctly points out that its real mission was "deterring democracy." From corrupting elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has virtually always replaced democracy with dictatorship. It didn't help that the CIA was run by businessmen, whose hostility towards democracy is legendary. The reason they overthrew so many democracies is because the people usually voted for policies that multi-national corporations didn't like: land reform, strong labor unions, nationalization of their industries, and greater regulation protecting workers, consumers and the environment. So the CIA's greatest "successes" were usually more pro-corporate than anti-communist. Citing a communist threat, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mussadegh government in Iran in 1953. But there was no communist threat the Soviets stood back and watched the coup from afar. What really happened was that Mussadegh threatened to nationalize British and American oil companies in Iran. Consequently, the CIA and MI6 toppled Mussadegh and replaced him with a puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran and his murderous secret police, SAVAK. The reason why the Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionaries took 52 Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979 was because the CIA had helped SAVAK torture and murder their people.
Another "success" was the CIA s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Again, there was no communist threat. The real threat was to Guatemala s United Fruit Company, a Rockefeller-owned firm whose stockholders included CIA Director Allen Dulles. Arbenz threatened to nationalize the company, albeit with generous compensation. In response, the CIA initiated a coup that overthrew Arbenz and installed the murderous dictator Castillo Armas. For four decades, CIA-backed dicatators would torture and murder hundreds of thousands of leftists, union members and others who would fight for a more equitable distribution of the country s resources. Another "success" story was Chile. In 1973, the country's democratically elected leader, Page 10 ofSalvadore 45
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Salvadore Allende, nationalized foreign-owned interests, like Chile's lucrative copper mines and telephone system. International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) offered the CIA $1 million to overthrow Allende which the CIA allegedly refused but paid $350,000 to his political opponents. The CIA responded with a coup that murdered Allende and replaced him with a brutal tyrant, General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands of leftists, union members and political opponents as economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman installed a "free market" economy. Since then, income inequality has soared higher in Chile than anywhere else in Latin America. Even when the communist threat was real, the CIA first and foremost took care of the elite. In testimony before Congress in the early 50s, it artificially inflated Soviet military capabilities. A notorious example was the "bomber gap" that later turned out to be grossly exaggerated. Another was "Team B," a group of hawkish CIA analysts who seriously distorted Soviet military data. These scare tactics worked. Congress awarded giant defense contracts to the U.S. military-industrial complex. And not even the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of American defense contracts have stopped the CIA from serving the elite. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss writes: Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has been abuzz with talk about using the CIA for economic espionage. Stripped of euphemism, economic espionage simply means that American spies would target foreign companies, such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda, and then covertly pass stolen trade secrets and technology to U.S. corporate executives. (5) If this isn't bad enough, a worse problem arises in that the CIA doesn't hand over this technology to every American auto-related company, but only the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. In a 1975 interview, Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee summed up his personal observations of the agency: To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents, for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United Kingdom desk is said to have the "U.K. account"& American multinational corporations have built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business interests, you also find the CIA& The multinational corporations want a peaceful status quo in countries where they have investments, because that gives them undisturbed access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor and stable markets for their finished goods. The status quo suits bankers, because their money remains secure and multiplies. And, of course, the status quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA supports abroad, because all they want is to keep themselves on top of the socioeconomic pyramid and the majority of their people on the bottom. But do you realize what being on the bottom means in most parts of the world? Ignorance, poverty, often early death by starvation or disease& Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it only carries out policy. And, like everyone else, the President has to respond to forces in the society he's trying to lead, right? In America, the most powerful force is Big Business, and American Big Business has a vested interest in the Cold War. (6) Domestic Recruitment Page 11 ofThe 45
CIA had no trouble recruiting elites who sought a more exciting life. Between 1948 and09:21:36AM MST Nov 14, 2015
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The CIA had no trouble recruiting elites who sought a more exciting life. Between 1948 and 1959, more than 40,000 American individuals and companies acted as sources for the U.S. intelligence community. (7) Let's look at each area of recruitment, and see how they enabled the CIA to conduct its crimes:
Big Business The CIA co-opted big business right from the start, beginning with the most famous billionaire of the time: Howard Hughes. Hughes had inherited his father s million-dollar tool and die company at age 19. Anxious to expand his fortune, he made a conscientious decision "to go where the money is", namely, government. With a few well-placed bribes, Hughes secured defense contracts to build military planes. The result was the Hughes Aircraft company. By 1940, he had also acquired a controlling interest in Trans World Airlines. His government connections and international airline soon caught the attention of the CIA, and the two began a lifelong relationship. Hughes, whom the CIA dubbed "The Stockbroker," became the agency's largest contractor. Not only did he let the CIA use his business firms as fronts, but he also funded countless CIA operations. Perhaps the most notorious was Operation Jennifer, an allegedly failed attempt to recover nuclear codes from a sunken Soviet submarine. Hughes right-hand security man, Robert Maheu, was a CIA agent who at one time represented the CIA in negotiations with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro. The CIA's contacts with big business quickly spread. The agency showed a preference for international companies, public relations firms, media companies, law offices, banks, financiers and stockbrokers. The CIA didn't limit its activities to recruiting businessmen; sometimes the CIA bought or created entire companies outright. One benefit of co-opting big business was that the CIA was able to create a secret source of funds other than from government. With stock portfolios multiplying their profits, it's impossible now to say how flush the CIA really is. If Congress ever cut off funds for a mission, the business fraternity could easily replace them, either by donations or even setting up profitable businesses in the target country. In fact, this is precisely what happened during the Iran/Contra scandal. By allying itself with the business community, the CIA received the funds and ability it needed to remove itself from democratic control.
The Media 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. The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine Graham, today's publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was the Post's ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after the war, both in readership and influence. (8) Page 12 of 45
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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 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. After Philip's suicide in 1963, Katharine Graham took over the Post. Seduced by her husband's world of government and espionage, she expanded her newspaper's relationship with the CIA. In a 1988 speech before CIA officials at Langley, Virginia, she stated: We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that 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. This quote has since become a classic among CIA critics for its belittlement of democracy and its admission that there is a political agenda behind the Post's headlines. Ben Bradlee was the Post's managing editor during most of the Cold War. He worked in the U.S. Paris embassy from 1951 to 1953, where he followed orders by the CIA station chief to place propaganda in the European press. (9) Most Americans incorrectly believe that Bradlee personifies the liberal slant of the Post, given his role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate investigations. But neither of these two incidents are what they seem. The Post merely published the Pentagon Papers after The New York Times already had, because it wanted to appear competitive. As for Watergate, we'll examine the CIA's reasons for wanting to bring down Nixon in a moment. Someone once asked Bradlee: "Does it irk you when The Washington Post is made out to be a bastion of slanted liberal thinkers instead of champion journalists just because of Watergate?" Bradlee responded: "Damn right it does!" (10) It would be impossible to elaborate in this short space even the most important examples of the CIA/media alliance. Sig Mickelson was a CIA asset the entire time he was president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961. Later he went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Page 13 ofRadio 45
Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda.
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Radio Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda. The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies. It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse, the CIA has bought many domestic media companies. A prime example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William Casey (who would later become Reagan's CIA director). Another founder was Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC. For those who believe in "separation of press and state," the very idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with the agency. Even today, when the immorality of the CIA should be an open-and-shut case, "debate" about the issue rages in the media. Here is but one example: In 1996, The San Jose Mercury News published an investigative report suggesting that the CIA had sold crack in Los Angeles to fund the Contra war in Central America. A month later, three of the CIA's most important media allies, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times immediately leveled their guns at the Mercury report and blasted away in an attempt to discredit it. Who wrote the Post article? Walter Pincus, longtime CIA journalist. The dangers here are obvious.
Academia By the early 50s, CIA Director Allen Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale. (A disproportionate number of CIA figures, like George Bush, come from Yale's "Skull and Crossbones" Society.) CIA recruiters also approached thousands of other professors to work in place at their universities on a part-time, contract basis. Not stopping at recruiting scholars, the agency would go on to create several departments at elite universities, including Harvard's Russian Research Center and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Although most academics were supportive of the CIA in the 50s, most were unaware of its abuses. In the 60s, academia would become outraged to learn that anti-communist organizations like the National Student Association were actually creations of the CIA. The most audacious CIA front was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that attracted liberal, freethinking artists and intellectuals who nonetheless deplored communism. By the late 60s and 70s, growing reports of CIA crimes and atrocities had deeply alienated academia. Scholars were further troubled to learn that the CIA had penetrated and disrupted student antiwar groups. Unlike business and the media, academia overwhelmingly denounced the CIA after the Vietnam era. This eventually forced the CIA to turn to new places to find their analysts and scholars. The most important source was the conservative think-tank movement, which it helped to create. More on this later.
The Roman Catholic Church Page 14 of 45
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Although the CIA began as a mostly Protestant organization, Roman Catholics quickly came to dominate the new covert-action wing in 1948. All were staunchly conservative, fiercely anti-communist and socially elite. Just a few of the many Catholic operatives included future CIA directors William Colby, William Casey, and John McCone. Another well-known personality from this period was William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review and gadfly host of TV's Firing Line. Buckley, it turns out, served as a CIA agent in Mexico City, and his experiences there served as fodder for his Blackford Oakes spy novels. There were several reasons for this influx of Catholic elites. First, Wisner (himself a Wall Street lawyer) had an extensive and glamorous circle of friends to recruit from. Second, Italy was in constant crisis in the 1940s, both during World War II and after. Throughout this troubled period, the American intelligence community's greatest ally in Italy was the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, is one of the most anti-communist organizations in the world. The Marxist doctrine of atheism threatens Catholic theology, and its equality threatens the Church's strict tradition of hierarchy and authoritarianism. When Hitler invaded Communist Russia, the Vatican openly approved. Jesuit Michael Serafian wrote: "It cannot be denied that [Pope] Pius XII's closest advisors for some time regarded Hitler's armoured divisions as the right hand of God." (11) But Hitler persecuted Catholics as well, and ultimately drove the Church to the Americans. In 1943, the Vatican reached a secret agreement with OSS Chief Donovan himself a devout Catholic to let the Holy See become the center of Allied spy operations in Italy. Donovan considered the Church to be one of his prize intelligence assets, given its global power, membership and contacts. He cultivated this alliance by sending America's most prestigious Catholics to the Vatican to establish rapport and forge an alliance. After the war, half of Europe lay under Communist control, and the Italian communist party threatened to win the 1948 elections. The prospect of communism ruling over the heart of Catholicism terrified the Vatican. Once again, American intelligence gathered their most prestigious Catholics to strengthen ties with the Vatican. Because this was the first mission of the new covert action division, the American Catholic agents acquired positions of power early on, and would dominate covert operations for the rest of the Cold War. At a public level, the U.S. government sunk $350 million in social and military aid into Italy to sway the vote. On a secret level, Wisner spent $10 million in black budget funds to steal the elections. This included disseminating propaganda, beating up left-wing politicians, intimidating voters and disrupting leftist parties. The dirty tricks worked the Communists lost, and the Catholic Americans success permanently secured their power within the CIA.
The Knights of Malta (12) The Roman Catholic Church did not forget the American agents who had saved them from both Nazism and Communism. It rewarded them by making them Knights of Malta, or members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM). SMOM is one of the oldest and most elite religious orders in the Catholic Church. Until recently, limited Page 15 ofit45
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it limited its membership to Italians and foreign heads of state. In 1927, however, an exception was made for the United States, given its emerging status as a world power. SMOM opened an American branch, awarding knighthood or damehood to several American Catholic business tycoons. This group was so conservative that one, John Raskob, the Chairman of General Motors, actually became involved in an aborted military plot to remove Franklin Roosevelt from the White House. SMOM has also been embarrassed by knighting or giving awards to countless people who later turned out to be Nazi war criminals. This is the sort of culture that thrives within the leadership of SMOM. Officially, the Knights of Malta are a global charity organization. But beginning in the 1940s, knighthood was granted to countless CIA agents, and the organization has become a front for intelligence operations. SMOM is ideal for this kind of activity, because it is recognized as the world s only landless sovereignty, and members enjoy diplomatic immunity. This allows agents and supplies to pass through customs without interference from the host country. Such privileges enabled the Knights of Malta to become a major supplier of "humanitarian aid" to the Contras during their war in the 1980s. A partial list of the Knights and Dames of Malta reads like a Who's Who of American Catholicism: William Casey, CIA Director. John McCone, CIA Director. William Colby, CIA Director. William Donovan OSS Director. Donovan was given an especially prestigious form of knighthood that has only been given to a hundred other men in history. Frank Shakespeare, Director of such propaganda organizations as the U.S. Information Agency, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Also executive vice-president of CBS-TV and vice-chairman of RKO General Inc. He is currently chairman of the board of trustees at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. William Simon, Treasury Secretary under President Nixon. In the private sector, he has become one of America's 400 richest individuals by working in international finance. Today he is the President of the John M. Olin Foundation, a major funder of right-wing think tanks. William F. Buckley, Jr. , CIA agent, conservative pundit and mass media personality. James Buckley William's brother, head of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Clare Boothe Luce The grand dame of the Cold War was also a Dame of Malta. She was a popular playwright and the wife of the publishing tycoon Henry Luce, who cofounded Time magazine. Francis X Stankard - CEO of the international division of Chase Manhattan Bank, a Rockefeller institution. (Nelson Rockefeller was also a major CIA figure.) John Farrell President, U.S. Steel Lee Iacocca Chairman, General Motors William S. Schreyer Chairman, Merrill Lynch. Richard R. Shinn Chairman, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Joseph Kennedy Founder of the Kennedy empire. Baron Hilton Owner, Hilton Hotel chain. Patrick J. Frawley Jr. Heir, Schick razor fortune. Frawley is a famous funder of right-wing Catholic causes, such as the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Ralph Abplanalp - Aerosol magnate. Martin F. Shea - Executive vice president of Morgan Guaranty Trust. Joseph Brennan - Chairman of the executive committee of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York. J. Peter Grace President, W.R. Grace Company. He was a key figure in Operatio cientists and spies to the U.S. Many were war criminals whose atrocities were excused in their service to the CIA. Thomas Bolan, Of Saxe, Bacon and Bolan, the law firm of Senator McCarthy's deceased aide Roy Cohn. Bowie Kuhn Baseball Comissioner Cardinal John O'Connor Extreme right-wing leader among American Catholics, and fervent abortion opponent. Cardinal Francis Spellman The "American Pope" was at one time the most powerful Catholic in America, an arch-conservative and a rabid anti-communist. Cardinal Bernard Law One of the highest-ranking conservatives in the American church. Alexander Haig, Secretary of State under President Reagan. Admiral James D. Watkins Hard-line chief of naval operations under President Reagan. Page 16 of 45
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Jeremy Denton Senator (R Al). Pete Domenici Senator (R-New Mexico). Walter J. Hickel Governor of Alaska and secretary of the interior. When this group gets together, obviously, the topics are spying, business and politics. The CIA has also used other religious and charity organizations as fronts. For example, John F. Kennedy -- another anticommunist Roman Catholic who greatly expanded covert operations -created the U.S. Peace Corps to serve as cover for CIA operatives. The CIA has also made extensive use of missionaries, with the blessings of many right-wing, anticommunist Christian denominations. But the World Grows Wise& It was only a matter of time before other nations caught on to these fronts. They learned that when the CIA comes to their countries to commit their crimes and atrocities, they come disguised as American journalists, businessmen, missionaries and charity volunteers. Unfortunately, foreigners are now targeting these professions as hostile. In Lebanon, terrorists held U.S. journalist Terry Anderson hostage for nearly seven years, on the not unreasonable assumption that he was a spy. Whether or not this was true is beside the point. The CIA has put all Americans abroad at risk, whether they are CIA agents or not. In hearings before the Senate in 1996, many organizations urged Congress to stop using their professions as CIA cover. Don Argue of the National Association of Evangelicals testified: "Such use of missionary agents for covert activities by the CIA would be unethical and immoral." (13)
From the Cold War to the Class War As noted above, academia was the first major institution to denounce the crimes of the CIA. Why? One reason is that scholars conduct their own extensive research into world affairs, so naturally they were the first to learn the truth. This is the main reason why protest against the Vietnam War and the CIA erupted first among students on the nation's campuses. By the end of the Vietnam War, the CIA had suffered a "brain drain" as its academic allies became its most articulate, passionate and eloquent critics. The social revolutions of the 60s terrified the CIA. James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence and a truly paranoid man, was convinced the Soviets had masterminded the entire antiwar movement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shared his conviction. The CIA had always spied on student groups throughout the 60s, but in 1968 President Johnson dramatically stepped up the effort with Operation CHAOS. This initially called for 50 CIA agents to go undercover as student radicals, penetrate their antiwar organizations and root out the Russian spies who were causing the rebellion. Tellingly, they never found a single spy. The agents also began a campaign of wire-tapping, mail-opening, burglary, deception, intimidation and disruption against thousands of protesting American civilians. By the time Operation CHAOS wound down in 1973, the CIA had spied on 7,000 Americans, 1,000 organizations and traded information on more than 300,000 persons with various law agencies. (14) When academia learned of this, its outrage grew. The loss of academia was only the first blow for the CIA. Other disasters quickly followed; in the early 70s, the CIA was trying desperately to stave off a growing number of scandals. The first was Watergate. Page 17 of 45
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The CIA's fingerprints were all over Watergate. First, we should note the CIA had clear motives for helping oust Nixon. He was the ultimate "outsider," a poor California Quaker who grew up feeling bitter resentment towards the elite "Eastern establishment." Nixon, for all his arch-conservatism, was surprisingly liberal on economic issues, enfuriating businessmen with statements like "We are all Keynesians now." He created a whole host of new agencies to regulate business, like the FDA, EPA and OSHA. He signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which forced businesses to clean up their toxic emissions. He imposed price controls to fight inflation, and took the nation fully off the gold standard. Nixon also strengthened affirmative action. Even his staffers were famously anti-elitist, like Kevin Philips, who would eventually write the bible on inequality during the 1980s, The Politics of Rich and Poor. Add to this Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam and Détente with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had not only tried to remove control of foreign policy from the CIA, but had also taken measures to bring the CIA itself under control. Not surprisingly, Nixon and his CIA Director, Richard Helms, couldn't stand each other. (Nixon fired him for failing to cover up for Watergate.) Clearly, Nixon was fighting at cross-purposes with the CIA and the nation's elite.
As it turns out, the CIA had inside knowledge of Nixon's dirty work. Nixon had created his own covert action team, "The Committee to Reelect the President," more amusingly known by its acronym, CREEP. The team consisted of two CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and James McCord as well as former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. They also employed four Cubans with long CIA histories. In fact, a CIA front called the Mullen Company funded their activities, which ranged from disrupting Democratic campaigns to laundering Nixon's illegal campaign contributions. The CIA not only had intimate knowledge of Nixon's crimes, but it also acted as though it wanted the world to know them. When the FBI began investigating Watergate, Nixon tried using the CIA to cover up for him. At first the CIA half-heartedly complied, telling the FBI that the investigation would endanger CIA operations in Mexico. But a few weeks later it gave the FBI a green light again to proceed again with their investigation. Furthermore, Watergate was exposed by the CIA's main newspaper in America, The Washington Post. One of the two journalists who investigated the scandal, Robert Woodward, had only recently become a journalist. Previously Woodward had worked as a Naval intelligence liaison to the White House, privy to some of the nation's highest secrets. He would later write a sympathetic portrait of CIA Director Bill Casey in a book entitled Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. It was Woodward who personally knew and interviewed "Deep Throat," the unnamed source who revealed inside information on Nixon's activities. Many Watergate researchers consider one of Woodward's old intelligence contacts to be a prime candidate for Deep Throat. (15) Despite all the facts of CIA involvement, Woodward and Bernstein made virtually no mention of the CIA in their Watergate reporting. Even during Senate hearings on Watergate, the CIA somehow managed to stay out of the spotlight. In 1974, the House would clear the CIA of any involvement in Watergate. The CIA was not as lucky in 1974, when the Senate held hearings on James Jesus Angleton's illegal surveillance of American citizens. These disclosures resulted in his firing. But that was nothing compared to the 1975 Church Committee. This Senate investigation looked into virtually every type of CIA crime, from assassination to secret war to manipulating the domestic Page 18 ofmedia. 45
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media. The "reforms" that resulted from these hearings were mostly cosmetic, but the details that emerged shattered the CIA's reputation forever. Interestingly enough, the two Senators who held these hearings/ Frank Church and Otis Pike, were both defeated for reelection, despite a 98 percent reelection rate for incumbents. The CIA wasn't the only conservative institution that found itself embattled in the early 70s. This was a bad time for conservatives everywhere. America had lost the war in Vietnam. U.S. corporations had to cope with the rise of OPEC. The anti-poverty programs of Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society were causing a major redistribution of wealth. And Nixon was making things worse with his own anti-poverty and regulatory programs. Between 1960 and 1973, these efforts cut poverty in half, from 22 to 11 percent. Meanwhile, between 1965 and 1976, the richest 1 percent had gone from owning 37 percent of America's wealth to only 22 percent. (16) At a 1973 Conference Board meeting of top American business leaders, executives declared: "We are fighting for our lives," "We are fighting a delaying action," and "If we don't take action now, we will see our own demise. We will evolve into another social democracy." (17)
The CIA to the rescue In the mid-1970s, at this historic low point in American conservatism, the CIA began a major campaign to turn corporate fortunes around. They did this in several ways. First, they helped create numerous foundations to finance their domestic operations. Even before 1973, the CIA had co-opted the most famous ones, like the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. But after 1973, they created more. One of their most notorious recruits was billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. During World War II, Scaife's father served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. By his mid-twenties, both of Scaife's parents had died, and he inherited a fortune under four foundations: the Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundations and the Allegheny Foundation. In the early 1970s, Scaife was encouraged by CIA agent Frank Barnett to begin investing his fortune to fight the "Soviet menace." (18) From 1973 to 1975, Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world. Shortly afterwards he began donating millions to fund the New Right. Scaife's CIA roots are typical of those who head the new conservative foundations. By 1994 the most active were: Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Carthage Foundation Earhart Foundation Charles G. Koch David H. Koch Claude R. Lambe Philip M. McKenna J.M. Foundation John M. Olin Foundation Henry Salvatori Foundation Sarah Scaife Foundation Smith Richardson Foundation Between 1992 and 1994, these foundations gave $210 million to conservative causes. Here is the breakdown of their donations: $88.9 million for conservative scholarships; $79.2 million to enhance a national infrastructure of think tanks and advocacy groups; $16.3 million for alternative media outlets and watchdog groups; $10.5 million for conservative pro-market law firms; $9.3 million for regional and state think tanks and advocacy groups; $5.4 million to "organizations working to transform the nations social views and giving practices of the nation's religious and philanthropic leaders." (19) The political machine they built is broad and comprehensive, covering every aspect of the political fight. It includes right-wing departments and chairs in the nation's top universities, think Page 19 oftanks, 45
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tanks, public relations firms, media companies, fake grassroots organizations that pressure Congress (irreverently known as "Astroturf" movements), "Roll-out-the-vote" machines, pollsters, fax networks, lobbyist organizations, economic seminars for the nation's judges, and more. And because corporations are the richest sector of society, their greater financing overwhelms similar efforts by Democrats. Besides creating foundations, the CIA helped organize the business community. There have always been special interest groups representing business, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, and the CIA has long been involved with them. However, after 1973, a spate of powerful new groups would come into existence, like the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission. These organizations quickly became powerhouses in promoting the business agenda.
Their efforts clearly succeeded. With the 1975 SUN-PAC decision, corporations persuaded government to legalize corporate Political Action Committees (the lobbyist organizations that bribe our government). By 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all PACs, and they donated 79 percent of all campaign contributions to political parties. (20) In two landmark elections, 1980 and 1994, corporations gave heavily and one-sidedly to Republicans, turning one or both houses of Congress over to the GOP. Democratic incumbents were shocked by the threat of being rolled completely out of power, so they quietly shifted to the right on economic issues, even though they continued a public façade of liberalism. Corporations went ahead and donated to Democratic incumbents in all other elections, but only as long as they abandoned the interests of workers, consumers, minorities and the poor. As expected, the new pro-corporate Congress passed laws favoring the rich: between 1975 and 1992, the amount of national household wealth owned by the richest 1 percent soared from 22 to 42 percent. (21)
The CIA also helped create the conservative think tank movement. Prior to the 70s, think tanks spanned the political spectrum, with moderate think tanks receiving three times as much funding as conservative ones. At these early think tanks, scholars typically brainstormed for creative solutions to policy problems. This would all change after the rise of conservative foundations in the early 70s. The Heritage Foundation opened its doors in 1973, the recipient of $250,000 in seed money from the Coors Foundation. A flood of conservative think tanks followed shortly thereafter, and by 1980 they overwhelmed the scene. The new think tanks turned out to be little more than propaganda mills, rigging studies to "prove" that their corporate sponsors needed tax breaks, deregulation and other favors from government. Of course, think-tank studies are useless without publicity, and here the CIA proved especially valuable. Using propaganda techniques it had perfected at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA and its allies turned American AM radio into a haven for conservative talk show hosts. Yes, Rush Limbaugh uses the same propaganda techniques that Muscovites once heard from Voice of America. The CIA has also developed countless other media outlets, like Capital Cities (which eventually bought ABC), major PR firms like Hill & Knowlton, and of course, all the Agency's connections in the national news media. (22) The following is a typical example of how the "New Media" operates. As most political observers know, the Republicans suffer from a "gender gap," in which women prefer Democrats by huge majorities. This is, in fact, why Clinton has twice won the presidency. But, enough, as the 90s progressed, conservative female pundits began popping up 09:21:36AM MST Page 20 ofcuriously 45 Nov 14, 2015
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This is, in fact, why Clinton has twice won the presidency. But, curiously enough, as the 90s progressed, conservative female pundits began popping up everywhere in the media. Hard-right pundits like Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Laura Ingraham, Barbara Olson, Melinda Sidak, Anita Blair and Whitney Adams conditioned us to the idea of the conservative woman. This phenomenon was no accident. It turns out that Richard Mellon Scaife donated $450,000 over three years to the Independent Women's Forum, a booking agency that heavily seeds such female conservative pundits into the media. (23)
Conclusion
The most obvious criticism of the New Over class is that their political machine is undemocratic. Using subversive techniques once aimed at communists, and with all the money they ever need to succeed, the Over class undemocratically controls our government, our media, and even a growing part of academia. These institutions in turn allow the Over class to control the supposedly "free" market. It doesn't win all the time, of course witness Bill Clinton's impeachment trial but it does score an endless string of other victories elsewhere, all to the detriment of workers, consumers, women, minorities and the poor. We need to fight it with everything we've got. Endnotes: 1. Mind Manipulators, Scheflin and Opton. p.241. 2. Captain George White in a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. 3. All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is summarized from William Blum s encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen s The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997). Information about CIA drug running can be found at http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/cia/blum1.html and http://speech.csun.edu/ben/news/cia/index.html. 4. Coleman McCarthy, "The Consequences of Covert Tactics" Washington Post, December 13, 1987. 5. Robert Dreyfuss, "Company Spies," Mother Jones. Website: http://www.mojones.com/mother_jones/MJ94/dreyfuss.html 6. Philip Agee: The Playboy Interview. Website: http://www.connix.com/~harry/agee.htm 7. Lara Shohet, "Intelligence, Academia and Industry," The Final Report of the Snyder Commission, Edward Cheng and Diane C. Snyder, eds., (Princeton Unversity: The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, January 1997). Website: http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/snyder/academia.htm. 8. Website: http://www.europa.com/~johnlf/cn/cn9-35. 9. Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great and the Washington Post, 2nd ed. (Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987) 10. "Forum for Ben Bradlee," Watergate 25. Website: http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/97/bradlee.htm. 11. Lewy, Guenter, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (London and New York, 1964), pp. 249-250. 12. National Catholic Reporter, Jan 89, Mar 89, Apr 89, May 89, "Nazis, the Vatican and the CIA," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986, Number 25 Website: . Page 21 ofhttp://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/knightsofmaltalist.html 45
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http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/knightsofmaltalist.html. 13. Anthony Collings, "Journalists tell Senate they want no CIA ties," CNN, July 18, 1996. Website: http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/18/spies.journalists/ . 14. Morton Halperin, et al, eds., The Lawless State (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 153. 15. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. 16. Edward N. Wolff, "How the Pie is Sliced" The American Prospect no. 22 (Summer 1995), pp. 58-64. Website: http://epn.org/prospect/22/22wolf.html. 17. Quoted in Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 44-47. 18. Karen Rothmyer, "The man behind the mask," Salon, April 7, 1998. 19. Study conducted by National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, July 1997, as reported by the National Education Association. Website: http://www.nea.org/publiced/paycheck/paychkf.html. 20. Center for Responsive Politics, Washington D.C., 1993. 21. Wolff. 22. For CIA involvement in Capital Cities/ABC, see Dennis Mazzocco, Networks of Power (Boston: South End Press, 1994). For CIA involvement in the PR industry, see John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good for You! (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), pp. 49-51,153,157,160-63. 23. Jonathon Broder and Murray Waas, [Untitled] Salon, April 20, 1998. Website: http://www.salonmag.com/news/1998/04/20news.html http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/L-overclass.html
®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® The CIA and the Media Here's just a snippet from Carl Bernstein's famous 1977 article entitled "The CIA & The Media" from Rolling Stone, 10/20/77. Anyone with access to a library should try to find this - it's a truly breakthrough piece - 16 pages long in the reprint! 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 tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading Page 22 ofperform 45 Nov 14,news 2015 09:21:36AM MST
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird.htm 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. http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/media/ciamedia.htm
®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® Author: Ashley Overbeck Title: A Report on CIA Infiltration and Manipulation of the Mass Media
original source: http://www.geocities.com/cpa_blacktown/20000318mediaoverb.htm Should CIA agents be allowed to pose as journalists to further the aims of their clandestine activities? Members of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on the future of U.S. intelligence in the post-Cold War world say yes, and a CIA official recently came forward to admit that the Agency already occasionally does so despite regulations barring the practice. But is this a breaking story or just the latest chapter in a spy story that traces its roots back to the 1950's? While they may act like strangers in public, the press and the CIA have a sordid past that spans more than four decades. The CIA-Press Connection in the 1950s and 60s The CIA-press connection traces its roots back to the early days of the Cold War, when Allen Page 23 ofDulles 45
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Dulles (who became CIA director in 1953) began courting the nation's most prestigious journalistic institutions for Agency operations. The mood of the day precluded the need for secretive infiltration, as Carl Bernstein points out in his 1977 expose on the topic. "American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against global Communism," he writes. "Accordingly, the line separating the American press corps was often indistinguishable." That's not to say that reporters acted as spies in the James Bond sense. Media outlets offered services that fell into the broad categories of providing "cover" for CIA operatives (i.e. jobs and credentials) or sharing information gathered by reporters on staff. While the Agency ran a formal training program in the 50's that attempted to teach rank-and-file agents to be reporters, this was among the least common of the more than 400 relationships with the press described in CIA files. Most involved were journalists before their involvement with the CIA began. Reporters, especially foreign correspondents, typically served as "eyes and ears" for the CIA. Often they were briefed by agents before a trip and debriefed when they returned; they shared their notebooks, relayed things that they had seen or overheard and offered their impressions. More complex arrangements found reporters planting misinformation for the Agency or serving as liaisons between agents and foreign contacts, often in return for information or access. "In return for our giving them information, we'd ask them to do things that fit their roles as journalists but that they wouldn't have thought of unless we put it in their minds," one agent told Bernstein. "For instance, a reporter in Vienna would say to our man, 'I met an interesting second secretary at the Czech Embassy.' We'd say, 'Can you get to know him? And after you get to know him, can you assess him? And then, could you put him in touch with us -- would you mind us using your apartment?'" Another senior CIA official offered the following description of "reporting" by cooperating journalists: "We would ask them, 'Will you do us a favor? We understand that you're going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved 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." It was a symbiotic relationship: reporters got the scoop and the spooks got the dirt. Correspondents with Agency ties were highly valued by their bosses for the stories they brought home. And agents saw in the press a perfect vehicle for information gathering: who else besides a reporter enjoyed such free access in a foreign country, could cultivate so many sources among foreign governments and elites and ask lots of probing questions without arousing suspicion? CIA-press operations in the 50's and 60's relied heavily on journalists working in Latin America and Western Europe. Members of the press were used as go-betweens to deliver messages and money to European Christian Democrats and also helped the Agency track the movements of people coming from Eastern Europe. Additionally, the CIA owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American, a now-defunct English-language newspaper in Italy. Reporters funneled CIA dollars to opponents of Salvador Allende in Chile and wrote anti-Allende propaganda stories for CIA proprietary publications in that country. By Bernstein's account, two of the Agency's most valuable relationships in the 60's were with reporters who covered Latin America: Hal Hendrix, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the Miami News, and Jerry of the Washington Star. CIA files on Hendrix (who went on to become aNov high-ranking Page 24 ofO'Leary 45 14, 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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Hendrix, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the Miami News, and Jerry O'Leary of the Washington Star. CIA files on Hendrix (who went on to become a high-ranking official at ITT) detail information that he provided agents about Cuban exiles in Miami. O'Leary's file lists him as a valued asset in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, although he denies having a formal relationship with the Agency. "I might call them up and say something like, "Papa Doc has the clap, did you know that? and they'd put it in the file," O'Leary told Bernstein. "I don't consider that reporting for them. It's useful to be friendly to them, and generally I felt friendly to them. But I think that they were more helpful to me than I was to them." Doing the "Right Thing" To greater and lesser degrees, many journalists at the time shared the belief that relationships with the intelligence community were useful and that lending aid was the right thing to do. "Many (journalists working with the CIA) had gone to the same schools as their CIA handlers, moved in the same circles, shared fashionably liberal, anti-Communist political values, and were part of the 'old boy' network that constituted something of an establishment elite in the media, politics and academia of postwar America," Bernstein writes. "The most valued lent themselves for reasons of national service, not money." This was true of syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, who is open and unapologetic about his extensive CIA ties. Alsop's tasks in the 50's included a trip to Laos to investigate whether American reporters there were using anti-American sources and a visit to the Philippines at the behest of the CIA, who believed that his presence there might influence the outcome of an election. "I'm proud they asked me and proud to have done it," Alsop said of his involvement. "The notion that a newspaperman doesn't have a duty to his country is perfect balls." According to one high-ranking official, Alsop's brother Stewart, also a columnist, was a CIA agent. He was rumored to have been particularly useful in obtaining information from foreign governments, planting misinformation and tipping off the Agency about potential foreign recruits, although his brother denies this. "I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close," Joseph Alsop once said. "I dare say he did perform some tasks -- he just did the correct thing as an American." Also notable is New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger (CFR), who the CIA lists as a valuable source of information throughout the 50's. Sulzberger claims that he "would never get near the spook business," but admits to sharing information with agents, many of whom were close personal friends: "I'm sure they consider me an asset. They can ask me questions. They find out you're going to Slobovia and they say, 'Can we talk to you when you get back?' Or they'll want to know if the head of the Ruritanian government is suffering from psoriasis. But I never took an assignment from one of those guys." However, Sulzberger does "think" that he signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA (as did his uncle, Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger [CFR]), though. Many CIA officials long for the days when there were more journalists like Sulzberger and the Alsops. "There was a time when it wasn't considered a crime to serve your government," one official bitterly told Bernstein. "This all has to be considered in the context of the morality of the times, rather than the against latter-day standards -- and hypocritical standards at that." "(I)n the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces -- shredded the consensus and threw it in the air." But another agent remarked in Bernstein's expose, "there was a point when the ethical issues
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most people submerged finally surfaced. Today a lot of these guys vehemently that Nov 14, deny 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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which most people submerged finally surfaced. Today a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency." The Church Committee Investigation
A flurry of public attention began to cast doubts upon the ethics of a press wedded to the Central Intelligence Agency after a Washington Star-News story by Oswald Johnson reported that the CIA had three dozen American newsmen on its payroll at that time (November 1973). Then-CIA director William Colby (CFR) leaked this information to Johnson, fearing an embarrassing fallout after both the Star-News and New York Times approached him to ask if any of their staff members were receiving payments from the Agency. (A Times investigation four years later showed the number of CIA-funded journalists to be closer to 50; Bernstein's expose in Rolling Stone that same year claimed it was more like 400.) By now, the times they had a-changed: In a 1974 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, former reporter Stuart Loory chastised fellow journalists for their history of chumming it up with the CIA and for their lax coverage of the issue once it came to light. "There is little question that if even one American overseas carrying a press card is paid by the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect," he wrote. "We automatically... consider Soviet and Chinese newsmen as mouthpieces and informants for their governments, while at the same time congratulating ourselves for our independence. Now we know that some of that independence has, with the stealth required of clandestine operations, been taken away from us -- or given away." In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Frank Church (the Church Committee) focused its attention on the Agency's use of American news outlets. The CIA went to great lengths to curtail this part of the committee's investigation, though, and some members of the committee later admitted that the Agency was able to get the upper hand. Colby and his successor, George Bush (CFR, TC), were able to convince the Senate that a full inquiry would cripple their intelligence-gathering capabilities and would unleash a "witch-hunt" on the nation's reporters, editors and publishers. "The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its hands," one congressional source told Carl Bernstein. "Church and some of the other members were much more interested in making headlines than in doing serious, tough investigating. The Agency pretended to be giving up a lot whenever it was asked about the flashy stuff -- assassinations and secret weapons and James Bond operations. Then, when it came to things they didn't want to give away, that were much more important to the Agency, Colby in particular called in his chits. And the committee bought it." Former intelligence officer William Bader (who returned to the Agency as a deputy to Stansfield Turner) and David Aaron (who later served as deputy to President Carter's national security advisor) supervised the committee's investigation of the CIA-press angle. CIA director Bush balked at all of Bader's requests for specific information about the scope of the Agency's media activities. Under pressure from the entire committee, Bush finally agreed to pull records on journalists and have his deputies condense them into one-paragraph summaries. The Agency would not make the raw files available, and neither the names of journalists nor their affiliations would be included. More than 400 summaries were compiled (a number that officials acknowledge was probably on the low side) in an attempt to give committee members "a broad, picture." "We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities Page 26 ofrepresentative 45 Nov 14, 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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on the low side) in an attempt to give committee members "a broad, representative picture." "We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities over 25 years, or the number of journalists that have done things for us," one official conceded. Still, even these sketchy details were enough for the committee to conclude that the CIA's relationships with the press were of a far greater magnitude than they had expected -- and that they needed to know more. But Bush was intransigent. Heated confrontations produced a bizarre agreement: Bader and director of the committee staff William Miller (CFR) could have access to 25 "sanitized" files from among the 400 (still without journalists' identities). Church and committee vice-chairman John Tower would see five unsanitized files to verify that the CIA had included all but the names. No information on current CIA-press relationships would be divulged, and the whole deal was contingent upon Bader, Miller, Church and Tower's promises not to reveal the files' contents to the other committee members. In the end, with time running out on the committee, the senators decided to drop the matter and leave a more detailed investigation to the CIA oversight committee that would succeed them. The committee interviewed none of the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast executives detailed in the files. And although members concluded that "from the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive covert program of all," and "a much larger part of the operational system than had been indicated," this was hardly part of the official findings when they were made public. The tcommittee dedicated a scant en pages of its final report to covert relationships with the media. The information included in the report was vague and misleading and, according to committee member Gary Hart, "hardly reflected what we found." Bernstein offered the following commentary on the Church committee's output: "No mention was made of the 400 summaries or what they showed. Instead the report noted blandly that some fifty recent contacts had been studied by the committee staff -- thus conveying the impression that the Agency's dealings with the press had been limited to those instances. Colby's misleading public statements about the use of journalists were repeated without serious contradiction or elaboration. The role of cooperating news executives was given short shrift. The fact that the Agency had concentrated its relationships in the most prominent sectors of the press went unmentioned. That the CIA continued to regard the press as up for grabs was not even suggested."
Prominent CIA-Press Relationships
A source close to the Church committee remarked on the investigation that, "if this stuff got out some of the biggest names in journalism would get smeared." So just who was involved, and what was the nature of their relationships with the intelligence community? The following is a sampling of prominent organizations identified by Carl Bernstein and other researchers as high profile news outlets with low profile ties to the CIA. CBS: CIA Broadcasting System?
Bernstein asserts that a good relationship between former CIA director Allen Dulles and former CBS president William Paley (CFR) made the network the CIA's most valuable broadcasting Page 27 ofasset. 45
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asset. "Over the years," Bernstein writes, "the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communications between the Washington bureau chief and the agency; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents... to be routinely monitored by the CIA." Paley chose Sig Mickelson (CFR), president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961, as his liaison with the CIA. Mickelson (who went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty) recalls complaining about having to use a pay phone to contact the CIA, and later installing a private line that bypassed the CBS switchboard for this purpose. A CBS investigation of his files revealed that he was involved in passing on CBS film and outtakes to CIA officials in exchange for payment and that he regularly forwarded copies of CBS' internal newsletter to his CIA handlers. The same investigation revealed that two CBS employees -stringer Austin Goodrich and Frank Kearns, a network reporter from 1958-1971 -- were undercover CIA operatives. Mickelson has discussed his CIA activities with Bernstein and others. "When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA," he has recalled. "He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and the film arrangements. I assumed that this was the normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating -- though the Goodrich matter was compromising." Mickelson's successor Richard Salant says he continued some of these practices when he took the CBS helm. "I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes," he explains. "This went on for a number of years -- into the Seventies." Sign of the Times
The New York Times was for the CIA in the realm of newspapers what CBS was to the Agency among broadcasters. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger (CFR) arranged for cover for approximately 10 CIA employees between 1950 and 1966 as part of his general policy of providing assistance to the CIA whenever possible. According to CIA officials, the Agency's ties to the Times were stronger than to any other papers because of its large foreign news operation and because of close ties between publisher Sulzberger and director Dulles (a relationship described by one staff member as "the mighty dealing with the mighty.") The output of this close relationship generally included reporting for CIA agents and "spotting" new prospective foreign operatives. Sulzberger is said to have signed a secrecy agreement with the Agency in the 1950's -- some say he did so as a pledge not to reveal the classified information he was privy to; others claim it was a pact never to reveal the Times' dealings with the CIA. Former Times reporter Wayne Phillips said CIA agents approached and tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952, advising him that the Agency has a "working relationship" with Sulzberger. A Freedom of Information Act request later revealed that agents hoped to put him to work as an "asset" abroad. The Times ran a story about the attempted recruitment in 1976, in which Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (CFR) asserted that he had "never heard of the Times being approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son of the late Mr. Sulzberger." Page 28 ofA45CIA
Post?
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A CIA Post? Bernstein's former employers at the Washington Post escaped his expose unscathed, but other investigators have documented extensive CIA ties at the paper. According to John Kelly of CounterSpy magazine, Post reporter Walter Pincus (CFR) worked for the CIA in 1959 as an Agency trained and funded delegate sent to the International Youth Festival in Vienna to disrupt the festival and spy on fellow Americans. After briefing agents on his activities and taking a pledge of secrecy, he went on attend youth conferences in Ghana and Guinea. Pincus claims that he was offered, but turned down, a permanent CIA position, although he did attend a political meeting in New Delhi at the Agency's request before going on to bigger and better things at the Post. Pincus has written several pieces sympathetic to CIA operations. He published an article just prior to the release of Bernstein's Rolling Stone expose downplaying the article's claims, even though his report essentially let Post publisher Katherine Graham off the hook. Reporter Russell Warren Howe also has a long history of CIA service. In 1958, he once said, his "days as an asset had just begun." He worked for the CIA proprietary "Information Bulletin, Ltd." and its successor, "Forum Service" (later known as Forum World Features), in addition to the CIA-funded "Africa Report and "Survey." Howe was fully aware of his employer's CIA ties, referring once to the FWF as "the principal CIA media in the world." According to the Church Committee, the Post management was aware that one of their reporters worked for a CIA publication, and that on several occasions they knowingly reprinted propaganda from that paper in the Post. Philip Geyelin (CFR) on the other hand was a CIA agent before taking a job as a Post reporter. Geyelin joined the Agency for 11 months during a leave from the Wall Street Journal. While at the Journal, CIA memos about Geyelin (which number in the hundreds, according to CounterSpy) described him as "a CIA resource" and a "willing collaborator." Geyelin has come to the CIA's defense in the Post: in response to a statement by Post ombudsman Charles Seib that the CIA should stick to dirty work, the press should inform the public, "and never the twain can meet," Geyelin replied that to the contrary, agents and journalists were "all searching for the same nuggets of truth about the outside world." He took this a step further when he protested Congressional efforts to regulate CIA-media ties, invoking journalists' constitutional right to be co-opted by spooks. "(I)n its zeal to restrict the freedom of the agency to subvert the press," he wrote, "Congress could wind up making a law that would in fact abridge -- or threaten to abridge -- some part of the freedom of the press that the First Amendment was intended to protect." Publisher Katherine Graham is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations with close ties to former CIA directors Dulles and William Casey (CFR). She hired CIA-linked Wackenhut Security Corporation to break up a Post union strike, and invited former Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (CFR) to join the Post's board of directors despite his well-documented past as a CIA apologist. Katzenbach is said to have asked a past Post editorial page editor to tone down an upcoming editorial about the CIA, and he chaired a presidential panel that "investigated" CIA domestic operations (but actually served as a rubber stamp for the Agency's activities). While he asserted that both the FBI and CIA were "the most decent and effective intelligence agencies in the world," Katzenbach had first hand knowledge of the seedier side of intelligence: the Church committee produced several memos documenting his suggestions to J. Edgar Hoover that he might undertake wiretap operations as part of the Bureau's campaign to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. Making Time for Spooks Page 29 of 45
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Time and Life founder Henry Luce was considered one of the CIA's most cooperative sources in the media. Luce, another of Dulles' personal friends in the media, was said to freely allow staff members to work with the CIA and willingly provide credentials for agents who lacked journalistic experience. Throughout the 50's and 60's Time correspondents attended CIA briefing dinners, and Luce encouraged his foreign correspondents to meet with CIA officials after returning from trips abroad. C.D. Jackson, a Life magazine vice president in the early 1960's, co-authored a CIA study on reorganization of the intelligence community during his tenure at Time-Life, and approved specific plans for granting cover to CIA operatives. Former Life managing editors Edward Thompson and George Hunt told Stuart Loory that they regularly allowed military intelligence agents to come to the Life office to look at photos and, since they were public domain, sometimes gave them prints. CIA agents were allowed to interview correspondents returning from overseas assignments too, Hunt said, although he did not consider this to be "working with" intelligence agencies. "We never cooperated with the CIA," Hunt claimed. "We didn't have any of that nonsense going on at Life."
Other News Outlets With Documented CIA Ties Management at the Christian Science Monitor admitted the paper had an ongoing relationship with the CIA throughout the 1950's and early 60's. Joseph Harrison, who became editor in 1950, said he discovered that agents paid frequent visits to the news office to get information on Monitor stories. "I inherited the situation and I continued it," he said of the arrangement, which included allowing the Agency access to uncut versions of stories and letters from Monitor foreign correspondents. While Johnson characterized such activities as "helping out as an American," he drew the line at pursuing stories at the Agency's behest or allowing his employees to moonlight with the CIA. "That," according to his distinction, "would have been espionage." CIA files show that ABC News provided cover for agents throughout the 1960's. During the Church committee hearings the Agency refused to reveal whether its relationship with the network was ongoing. As with ties to other high profile news outlets, arrangements were made at the highest level, with the full knowledge of network executives. CIA officials claim that Sam Jaffe and one other unnamed correspondent performed clandestine tasks for the Agency. Jaffe admits that he was approached by agents who offered to get him a job with CBS, who would send him on assignment in Moscow if he agreed to cooperate, but claims he never agreed to the deal. Jaffe did go on to do some work for CBS, though, and said he believed that the CIA had a hand in getting him the assignment. One of the more unusual accounts of the CIA-press connection involves the Louisville Courier-Journal. Undercover operative Robert H. Campbell spent three months at the paper as a reporter in 1964-1965 as part of an arrangement made by the Agency and Courier-Journal executive editor Norman Issacs. The first account of Campbell's tenure at the paper appeared in a front-page story in 1976 -- in the Courier-Journal (one of the few self-investigative pieces written on this topic). James Herzog reported that Campbell had been hired in spite of the fact that he could not type Page 30 ofand 45 knew little about newswriting. "Norman said that when he was in Washington, Nov he 14, had 2015 been 09:21:36AM MST
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that Campbell had been hired in spite of the fact that he could not type and knew little about newswriting. "Norman said that when he was in Washington, he had been called to lunch with some friend of his who was with the CIA [who] wanted to send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of newspapering," the paper's former managing editor recalled in the article. CIA sources say that the Courier-Journal arrangements were made so that Johnson could amass a record of journalistic experience (he also worked briefly for the Hornell, New York Evening Tribune). The Agency even sent funds to the Courier-Journal to pay Johnson's salary. These same sources claim that the deal was made with Issacs and approved by the paper's publisher, but neither man recalls being involved. "All I can do is repeat the simple truth," Issacs said in response to Herzog's story, "that never, under any circumstances or at any time, have I ever knowingly hired a government agent." But, he added, "none of this is to say that I couldn't have been 'had.'" But clues were there. No one looked into Johnson's credentials when he was hired, and his file included the curious notation "Hired for temporary work -- no reference checks completed or needed." Johnson's journalistic prowess (or lack thereof) should have given him away: his editors characterized his work as "unreadable" and it was never published. If that was not clue enough, his penchant for announcing to patrons at a bar a few steps from his office that he was a CIA agent should have done the trick. Who else? Bernstein compiled the following list of additional organizations known to have provided CIA cover: the New York Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, the Associated Press, United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. The CFR Report on "Making Intelligence Smarter"
A Council on Foreign Relations task force thrust the CIA-media connection back into the spotlight this year with the release of their report on post-Cold War intelligence. "Making Intelligence Smarter," released in February 1996, stresses the importance of "human intelligence" in successful clandestine operations. But many of the "innovations" the CFR suggests for cases when "the targeted activity is not easily captured by reconnaissance or eavesdropping," are all too familiar. "Clandestine operations for whatever purpose currently are circumscribed by a number of legal and policy constraints," the report states. "These deserve review to avoid diminishing the potential contribution of this instrument. At a minimum, the Task Force recommended that a fresh look be taken at limits on the use of nonofficial 'covers' for hiding and protecting those involved in clandestine activities." Though the task force doesn't explicitly address the use of the press as cover, the implication is obvious. If nothing else, the Church committee investigation showed CIA-press relationships to be among the Agency's most secret -- and most valuable -- operations for nearly two decades. And congressional scrutiny, however ineffectual, led the Agency to codify the constraints alluded to in the report. Former CIA director William Colby claimed in 1973 to have scaled back covert media operations in response to mounting criticism of the practice. His successor, George Bush, issued a statement pledging that the Agency would not enter into "paid or contractual relationships with full- or part-time news correspondents from accredited news organizations" when he took the Agency helm in 1976. (The statement was ambiguous on stringers and other news staffers, and included a statement that the Agency would "welcome" journalists' unpaid cooperation. Stansfield Turner, Bush's replacement, put theseNov assurances in Page 31 ofvoluntary, 45 14, 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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a statement that the Agency would "welcome" journalists' voluntary, unpaid cooperation. Stansfield Turner, Bush's replacement, put these assurances in writing the following year. Contrary to the report's implication that all "nonofficial" covers are currently off limits, there is a loophole in the policy Turner drafted in 1977 allowing for exceptions "with the specific approval" of the Director of Central Intelligence. An unnamed source brought the loophole to attention of the Washington Post last month, indicating that such exceptions had been made "in extraordinarily rare circumstances" in the past 19 years. At least one such exception was granted for a CIA agent posing as a reporter during the Iranian hostage crisis. Spies R Not Us?
Reaction from the press to the CFR report has been mixed. Many have invoked the First Amendment and uttered platitudes about the separation of press and state, while remaining silent about the two institutions' sordid pasts. Notably absent from both the CFR's report and the media's reaction is any historical frame of reference: the issue is presented as a stand-alone current event, taken out of its context as a legacy of CIA meddling and media complicity. Evan Thomas, an assistant editor at Newsweek told the Post that while there were "inherent conflicts" in using the press as cover, "You would not want to rule out forever an opportunity in which a journalist might be the only one who could help in a desperate situation." But Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's journal Extra!, seemed to have a better appreciation of the underlying implications. "Under no circumstance should CIA agents pose as journalists," he said. "Given the CIA's record in setting up fake press organs and manipulating the press, they have really lost the right to get involved with journalists. You can't combine their work with journalism, which is about the free and open exchange of ideas." Washington Times columnist Ken Adelman charged that the uproar was much ado about nothing. "That such verbal waffling aroused such a ruckus says a great deal," he wrote in his March 6, 1996 column. "Not so much about the Council or the CIA -- but about the narcissism of today's journalists." Contrary to the policy of his predecessors, Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr. said he was disturbed by the possibility that the CIA had either used journalistic organizations for cover or recruited journalists. Independence from the government, he said, was essential for both credibility and the safety of correspondents. The CFR, the CIA, the Media and the New World Order
Will economic warfare replace the Cold War in the New World Order? In the wake of the Cold War, debate has erupted over the future use of intelligence agencies by the U.S. government. Many of America's political and business elite want to see a shift towards economic intelligence, to counter other nations' economic intelligence ops, as well as to further the goals of international capitalism. It is therefore especially noteworthy that the CFR issued the report on "Making Intelligence Page 32 ofSmarter." 45
The roster of the Council on Foreign Relations is a Who's Who directory Novof 14,the 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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Smarter." The roster of the Council on Foreign Relations is a Who's Who directory of the political, military, and economic elite in the United States. President Clinton's administration is staffed by nearly 100 of the CFR's 3,000 members. It has been said by political commentators on both the left and the right that if you want to find out what U.S. foreign policy will be next year, you should read the CFR's periodical Foreign Affairs this year. Members of the CFR exert influence over a gigantic portion of the media in America. Many of the newspeople who operated with the CIA in the past were or are CFR members. The chief directors and news anchors of CBS, ABC, NBC, Time Inc., Public Broadcast Service, CNN, Newsweek, and many other major media outlets are CFR members. So are many CEOs and board members at Chase Manhattan Corp., Chemical Bank, Citicorp, Shell Oil, AT&T, General Motors, General Electric, and other multinational corporations. It is also worth noting that three of the Task Force panel members who wrote the "Making Intelligence Smarter" report included past or present journalists. Leslie Gelb, CFR president, is a former foreign affairs columnist and Op-Ed page editor for The New York Times. Henry Grunwald is former Editor-in-Chief of Time magazine, and Jessica Mathews is a Post columnist. Critics of the CFR on both sides of the political spectrum voice strong opposition to the Council's agenda of expansion of multinational capitalism and world government -- what has become known as the New World Order. A report from the CFR such as "Making Intelligence Smarter" will therefore make plenty of waves. The fact that the report was composed in part by members of the working press who are also CFR members is a brazen conflict of interest, in light of the CFR's history. Will there be a shift in CIA/media operations towards global economic intelligence and propaganda? Only time will tell as the debate rages on. But if history serves as any sort of lesson, we could be standing on the threshold of a new flap of covert media manipulation. Sources "The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered it Up," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.55-67. "CIA in America," CounterSpy, Spring 1980, p. 42-43. "Washington Post -- Speaking for Whom?" CounterSpy, May-July 1981, p. 13-19. Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: the CIA in a Democratic Society, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 182-311. "'Loophole Revealed in Prohibition on CIA Use of Journalistic Cover," New York Times, February 16, 1996, p. A24. "Making Intelligence Smarter," report of a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1996. "Disinformation and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Spring-Summer 1983, p. 3-12. "The CIA's use of the press: a 'mighty Wurlitzer,'" Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1974, p. 9-18. http://www.911-strike.com/CIAinmedia.htm
O'Reilly's Information Tech CIA Connection ::: Download Presentation
In-Q-Tel, Inc. is a private, venture capital firm chartered by the CIA. In-Q-Tel strives to extend the Agency's access to new IT companies, solutions, and approaches to address their priority In-Q-Tel invests in technologies that addresses critical CIA needs, and can 09:21:36AM also Page 33 ofproblems. 45 Novthat 14, 2015 MST
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird.htm the Agency's access to new
IT companies, solutions, and approaches to address their priority problems. In-Q-Tel invests in technologies that addresses critical CIA needs, and that can also become commercially viable. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2002/view/e_sess/2282 ®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA
"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. The Alex Constantine Article Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD 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 Page 34 ofHarrisburg, 45
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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 former Village 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 tha__t "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. Page 35 of 45
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One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Blücher, 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 Düsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in 1982, von Blücher 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 Page 36 ofage 45
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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 transistorhas 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 Page 37 ofseries 45
that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People and Politics, "study" Nov 14,a2015 09:21:36AM MST
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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. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." -- President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® Massive Media: Facts and Figures http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/fcc.html Page 38 of 45
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The world of the mass media is shrinking. How a handful of companies came to exercise such control over the media is one of the astonishing stories of our time. But there are real consequences to what's happening that affect democracy and consumers.
Merging Media
Approximate number of newspapers in North America: 1800 Approximate number of magazines in North America: 11,000 Approximate number of radio stations in North America: 11,000 Approximate number of television stations in North America: 2000 Approximate number of book publishers in North America: 3000 Number of companies owning a controlling interest in the media listed above in 1984: 50 Number of companies owning a controlling interest in the media listed above in 1987: 26 Number of companies owning a controlling interest in the media listed above in 1996: 10
The Massing of the Media
# THE LAW: Many media watchers point to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as crucial to the growth of media giants. The Act lowered some long-standing limits on the number of media outlets that any one company could own in any single market. For television there's currently a cap limiting any one company from reaching more than 35 percent of the national audience. The Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) website has a complete listing of public hearings on this issue and a facility for filing comments online.
# TELEVISION: The U.S. seems awash with TV choices. Between cable, dish and digital channels, choices number in the hundreds. A recent study by THE ECONOMIST found that though the market continues to grow, most people routinely watch only 15 channels. The top ten cable channels and the five networks still make up 90% of the watching audience. And what are they watching? American cable fare breaks down as follows:
# Entertainment ................36.6% # Children's programming .21.1% # News ...............................14.1% # Nature/Education ............11.1% # Women .............................7.0% # Music ...............................5.4% # Sport ............................... 4.7% Page 39 of 45
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# NEWS: A few years ago, newspeople were lamenting the results of a study by Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy which showed a marked decrease in international news coverage from 45% in the 1970s to just 14% in 1995. In the wake of September 11, some news organizations were revitalized. Overseas bureaus were saved from closure and hard news seemed important again but the companies lost money. Just this week, CNN announced its biggest prime-time audience of 2002 for...the arrest of Robert Blake.
Media analysis Andrew Tyndall watches the news every night and publishes the results in the Tyndall Report. Here's a round-up of the top stories on the three big networks for selected weeks past from the Tyndall Report:
July 19-31, 2001 (av. number of minutes): # Disappearance of Chandra Levy (24 minutes) # Human embryo stem cell research (14 minutes) # Shark attacks (14 minutes)
April 8-12, 2002 # Enron bankruptcy (12 minutes) # Anti-U.S. sentiment in Islamic world (10 minutes) # Catholic pedophile priests (10 minutes) October 14-18, 2002 # DC sniper (76 minutes) # Iraq: Saddam Hussein (28 minutes) # Bali bombings (19 minutes)
Andrew Tyndall also recently completed an evaluation of three major cable news networks for THE NEWSHOUR WITH JIM LEHRER. Although he found that the three had different presentations and viewpoints the news they covered was similar in content (and very male-dominated). Read the whole report at Cable News Wars.
# BOOKS: Big media holds sway over more than the airwaves, many conglomerates have interest in major publishing houses as well. # TimeWarner -- Warner Books/Little Brown/Time-Life # Viacom -- Simon and Schuster/Pocket Books, etc. # Bertelsmann is the largest book publisher in the United States # Walt Disney -- Hyperion/Talk Miramax Books # Vivendi International -- Houghton Mifflin
Links and add'l info: Page 40 of 45
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Telecommunications Act of 1996
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in almost 62 years. The goal of this new law is to let anyone enter any communications business -- to let any communications business compete in any market against any other. http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html
Milestones in the History of Media and Politics
Robert McChesney comments, "And the founding fathers...their legacy here is very rich. They understood that setting up a diverse, well funded media system with a broad range of viewpoints was the essence of building of the oxygen for democracy. And it took conscious policies. It didn't happen naturally you had to work at it." What events have shaped the media's role in reporting politics since the beginning of American history? And how has the press developed in the years since the Bill of Rights outlined its freedoms? NOW's history of media and politics takes us to the early recorded instances of journalism for some background.
In Renaissance Europe, newsletters containing information about everything from wars and economic conditions to social customs were handwritten and circulated among merchants. By the late 1400's, the first printed forerunners of the newspaper appeared in Germany as pamphlets or broadsides, often highly sensationalized in content. In the English-speaking world, the first successfully published title was THE WEEKLY NEWES. View the front page of CORANT OR WEEKLY NEWES, FROM ITALY, GERMANY, HUNGARIA, POLONIA, BOHEMIA, FRANCE, AND THE LOW-COUNTRIES published in London on October 11, 1621. In the 1640's and 50's, it was followed by a multitude of different titles in the similar newsbook format. Another prominent early paper (today the oldest continually published paper in the world) was the LONDON GAZETTE. See the GAZETTE coverage of the Great Fire of London.
Publication of information about contemporary affairs began in North America in the early 18th century, but they did not yet resemble the newspapers of today. In fact, at first, the notion that "news" should provide timely accounts of recent events was not self-evident. Read about some of the milestones in America's history of media and politics: More: http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/mediahistory.html
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®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® FCC and Media Deregulation sites: Below are sites which contain more information about the issue of media deregulation and ways to take action on either side of the issue. The FCC site provides an area to make views on deregulation known, and provides contact information for the agency.
Center for Digital Democracy The Web site of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving media diversity, provides information regarding the issue of media concentration. The Center highlights the 1945 Supreme Court decision (Associated Press v. United States) which maintains that mergers that narrow the dissemination of information are unconstitutional. Other features include press headlines, articles, and resource links.
Colombia Journalism Review: Who Owns What? "Who Owns What?" by the Colombia Journalism Review (CJR) features a list of media conglomerates and what they own. The page also provides a selected list of articles from the CJR archive on media concentration.
Consumer Federation of America The Consumer Federation of America provides press releases, studies, brochures, and testimony to educate the American public about telecommunications issues and to advocate for pro-consumer policies.
Consumers Union: Nonprofit Publisher of Consumer Reports The Consumers Union Web page, devoted to telephone-telecommunications regulation, provides a long list of articles, studies, and research describing how the deregulation of the telecommunications industry in 1996 has hurt consumers.
Economic and Political Consequences of the 1996 Telecommunications Act Thomas Hazlett of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the 1996 Telecommunications Act resulted both in benefits to consumers and in "megamergers" that have benefited stockholders and market function. He contends that increased competition in the market had an effect on the political process, where the Telecommunications industry outspent all other industries in political contributions.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) The Federal Communication Commission is an independent government organization Page 42 ofaccountable 45
to Congress. The FCC regulates "interstate and international communications by Nov 14, 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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accountable to Congress. The FCC regulates "interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable" within U.S. jurisdiction. The FCC Web site features a special section on media ownership which includes information on the Broadcast-Newspaper Cross-Ownership Rule and the Local Radio Ownership Rule in the form of announcements, press releases, and policy studies.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 This Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Web page is devoted to the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996, which promoted deregulation of the telecommunication industry (cable, long distance telephone service, local telephone service, and broadband) to create a competitive communications market and deliver better services and prices to consumers. The Web site features the complete text of the legislation and provides relevant FCC materials related to the implementation and guidelines of the Act.
FRONTLINE: The Merchants of Cool - Media Giants On PBS.org, the FRONTLINE Web site features a diagram of the seven largest media conglomerates and their numerous holdings. This information is provided within a larger context, asking how media mega-mergers and the products they sell affect children's psychological development. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/giants/
What's Wrong With This Picture? Crispin Miller of THE NATION magazine describes and analyzes the media cartel that has integrated all cultural industries into a few large corporations. Miller fears that American culture will become more homogenous with less dissent and fewer independent voices.. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020107&s=miller
FCC and Media Deregulation sites: http://www.pbs.org/now/resources/fcc.html
And having justified Bush/Cheney's coup, the media continue to betray American democracy. Media devoted to the public interest would investigate the poor performance by the CIA, the FBI, the FAA and the CDC, so that those agencies might be improved for our protection--but the news teams (just like Congress) haven't bothered to look into it. So, too, in the public interest, should the media report on all the current threats to our security--including those far-rightists targeting abortion clinics and, apparently, conducting bioterrorism; but the telejournalists are unconcerned (just like John Ashcroft). So should the media highlight, not play down, this government's attack on civil liberties--the mass detentions, secret evidence, increased surveillance, suspension of attorney-client privilege, the encouragements to spy, the warnings not to disagree, the censored images, sequestered public papers, unexpected visits from the Secret Service and so on. And so should the media not parrot what the Pentagon says about the current war, because such prettified accounts make us complacent and preserve us Page 43 ofin 45our
fatal ignorance of what people really think of us--and why--beyond our borders. Nov 14, And 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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in our fatal ignorance of what people really think of us--and why--beyond our borders. And there's much more--about the stunning exploitation of the tragedy, especially by the Republicans; about the links between the Bush and the bin Laden families; about the ongoing shenanigans in Florida--that the media would let the people know, if they were not (like Michael Powell) indifferent to the public interest.
In short, the news divisions of the media cartel appear to work against the public interest--and for their parent companies, their advertisers and the Bush Administration. The situation is completely un-American. It is the purpose of the press to help us run the state, and not the other way around. As citizens of a democracy, we have the right and obligation to be well aware of what is happening, both in "the homeland" and the wider world. Without such knowledge we cannot be both secure and free. We therefore must take steps to liberate the media from oligopoly, so as to make the government our own. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020107&c=2&s=miller
Media Access Project is a non-profit, public interest law firm which promotes the public's First Amendment right to hear and be heard on the electronic media of today and tomorrow. http://www.mediaaccess.org/
ACT NOW.... TOP ISSUES: http://www.mediaaccess.org/programs/ ®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® "If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it." -- Anton Chekov "Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it." -- Robert F. Kennedy "A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war." -- Ayn Rand "What distinguishes the New Right from other American reactionary movements and what it shares with the early phase of German fascism, is its incorporation of conservative impulses into a system of representation consisting largely of media techniques and media images." Philip Bishop: "The New Right and the Media" "I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Page 44 ofSecond 45
Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of myNov time a 14, being 2015 09:21:36AM MST
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Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." -- Major General Smedley Butler, 1933
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell MetaMagic MediaMinistry @ Abracadabra Communications http://metamagic.org Hidden Elitist Conspiracies? Visit BeamShip MUTANEX http://mutanex.com News of the Strange & Supernatural Mark Fiore's FlashToon ::: "Preemptive Diplomacy" http://metamagic.org/strange Operation Mockingbird (Continued) http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird2.htm
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10/10/2016
The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA
To: IAHF LIST Subject: Operation Mockingbird - The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA: Control of the Masses from Tit- to Tomb (Or- Why You Never Learned of the Codex Vitamin Issue in the Mainstream Media) From: "International Advocates for Health Freedom" [email protected] Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 23:28:37 -0400 IAHF List: People ask me all the time why they never see any reports in the mainstream media about the Codex vitamin issue or other health freedom issues unless they are articles attacking vitamins and alternative medicine. They're often incredulous to learn of the degree to which the press is actually controlled, but it sure is something Ive seen up close and personal. Jurgen Kundke, the Press Officer for the German government at Codex refused to honor my valid press credentials prior to the last Codex meeting in Berlin because he knows what I write and only wants people to report on those meetings if they are pro UN. In my last message, the article by Robert Lederer about his observations of the press in NYC wherein he concluded that the media were the CIA, he provided numerous references to support his contention. The article below is just one of his many references. You may wonder why I'm discussing this. The reason is because I am trying to awaken as many people as possible to the truth which is that the genocidal campaign to block our access to vitamins is just one small part of the ruling elites efforts to enslave us and force us into a microchipped psychocivilized society under mind control. This article explains the extent to which the mainstream media is controlled by our would be masters. You might be surprised to learn that the CIA is not part of our government. Its run by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the same people who run British Intelligence. Well I got news for 'em: they got to go through ME first, and the 100th monkey syndrome is gonna kick in soon and whip their butts very hard, so forward this massively and repost it to your website! Anyone can be on the IAHF list by sending email to [email protected] or by signing on at http://www.iahf.com/" Please spread the good news, and kindly send a contribution to IAHF POB 625 Floyd VA 24091 USA so we can continue to counteract the CIA controlled media. http://www.sightings.com/politics6/mockingbird.htm
SIGHTINGS Operation Mockingbird The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA 3-24-00 "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. The Alex Constantine Article
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The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA
Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD 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 former Village 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 f__ind 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 tha__t "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 http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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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 Blcher, 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 Dsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Dsseldorf in 1982, von Blcher 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 http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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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 federallysponsored 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. http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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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.
How the Washington Post Censors the News [Note: Look for the paragraph indicated by asterisks] How the Washington Post Censors the News A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability -- the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIAassociated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [for World War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50). Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode -- depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's nonconspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) -- facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs --a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies? The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column -- ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't". Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth -- revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98). Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel --like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others. Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra -- The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988. 7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. 8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10016. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 12. See note 5a, p.180-1. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. -- Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard-- The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend -- Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus -- Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. 29. "BCCI -- NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 34. See note 33, p.136-7. 35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 36. See note 33, p.164-171. 37. See note 33, p.172-180. 38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 39. See note 33, p.217. 40. See note 33, p.235. 41. See note 33, p.277-288. 42. See note 33, p.323. 43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 44. William Blum, The CIA -- A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 46. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. 48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1. 50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. 60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. 62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America -- The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 64. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories -- When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned --Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't -- In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire --In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. 65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! --Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts -- Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories --Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie --America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken -- Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5.
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65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247. 67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy -- The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. 67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 69. See note 65b. 70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 72. See note 65c. 73. See note 65i. 74. See note 67e, p.438-450. 75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day -- 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission -- Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship -- Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983.
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79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men -- A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 81. See note 79d, p.119-132. 82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media -- How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's two- sentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 84. See note 79d, p.131. 85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 86. "conspire", 4Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 88. See note 65y. 89. See note 65n. 90. See note 65d. 91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 93. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court -- Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 99. See note 86. 100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977. NOTES A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham's attempt to suppress the Davis book,"Katherine The Great,", which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal's, "Power and Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story." For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is "All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story," by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye. An additional good short reference is "The CIA's Greatest Hits" by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein's classic "The CIA and the Media" which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, 1977. http://www.iahf.com/usa/20000916a.html
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Still another recent example of the CIA's control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton's & Roger Morris' story,"THE CRIMES OF MENA" by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA's involvement in drug trafficing, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed withouty explanation.
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The CIA's Project MOCKINGBIRD - Ongoing Covert Control of the Media
bibliotecapleyades.net
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.
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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 former Village 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) 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." Page 2 of 26
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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 Bleucher, 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. Page 3 of 26
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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 Dusseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Dusseldorf in 1982, von Bleucher 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 totaling 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 Page 4 of 26
the Annenberg mansion that Nixon's cabinet was chosen, and the state's social and contributor Sep 12, 2016 03:07:42PM MDT
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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. Page 5 of 26
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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, Page 6 of 26
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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. How The Washington Post... Censors The News - A Letter to The Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes from Whale Website April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall Page 7 of 26
how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra.
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Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its cover-up of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release (an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On Page 8 of 26
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On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben... of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [for World War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable exposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). Page 9 of 26
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The Bush Administration cover-up of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" ( BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the cover-ups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36).
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Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be Sep 12, 2016 03:07:42PM MDT
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol03.htm Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy
drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. taxpayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers, Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problems relating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50).
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Or the deliberate and willful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nixon and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic cover-ups of police violence (*59). Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). Page 12 of 26
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When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Page 13 of 26
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Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the, "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for Page 14 of 26
countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..."Sep 12, 2016 03:07:42PM MDT
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countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, "Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictment was announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we Page 15 of 26
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are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies? The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that, "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column ending it with: "We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't". Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Page 16 of 26
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Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Page 17 ofUndermines 26
Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later,Sep Post 12,journalists 2016 03:07:42PM MDT
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Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98). Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading:
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INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
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AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others.
Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992:
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1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. Sep 12, 2016 03:07:42PM MDT
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol03.htm 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall,
Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988. 7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. 8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10016. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 12. See note 5a, p.180-1. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert
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Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989.
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Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. 16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. 29. "BCCI NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, Page 21 of 26
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September 18, 1991, p.9. 32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 34. See note 33, p.136-7. 35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 36. See note 33, p.164-171. 37. See note 33, p.172-180. 38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 39. See note 33, p.217. 40. See note 33, p.235. 41. See note 33, p.277-288. 42. See note 33, p.323. 43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 44. William Blum, The CIA A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 46. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. 48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1. 50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. 54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. Page 22 of 26
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59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. 60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. 62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 64. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. 65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, Page 23 of 26
1991.
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1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247. 67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. 67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 69. See note 65b. 70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Page 24 of 26
Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3.
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Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 72. See note 65c. 73. See note 65i. 74. See note 67e, p.438-450. 75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983. 79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 81. See note 79d, p.119-132. 82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's two- sentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Page 25 of 26
Fernandez."
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Fernandez." 84. See note 79d, p.131. 85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 86. "conspire", ß4ßRandom House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 88. See note 65y. 89. See note 65n. 90. See note 65d. 91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 93. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists - Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 99. See note 86. 100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977. Page 26 of 26
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OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD Part 1
apfn.org
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation By Mary Louise 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 we 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 Page 1 of 45
when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry the Julreported 14, 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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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.
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).
"Who Controls the Media? The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird", "The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization", and "Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America" by Alex Constantine are an excellent source of information on this topic: www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html and www.alexconstantine.50megs.com . David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting Media" Page 2 of 45 Jul 14,the 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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and www.alexconstantine.50megs.com . David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting the Media" at www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm . Then there are two articles called "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" and "The Origins of the Overclass" by Steve Kangas that are very informative although from a more liberal perspective. Steve will not be writing anymore articles as he is no longer with us, having unfortunately met his untimely death that was 'apparently' from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. If you read about him on his web page that is still available, you will see that he did not seem like a person who was suffering from deep depression. In his memory, please take the time to read what he wrote at www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html , www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html , and www.korpios.org/resurgent/index.html . CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both owned by Time-Warner) ran a story about a secret mission called Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN site at www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html. Journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the stories on Watergate (late 70's) in the Washington Post, having gained access to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program of using journalists at home and abroad, in deliberate propaganda campaigns. It was later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House and knew many insiders including General Alexander Haig. A high-level source told Bernstein, "One journalist is worth twenty agents." CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham, in a 1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. 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." Maybe that's another reason why folks get the impression that a suspicious agenda lurks behind the headlines. "25 Ways to Suppress Truth: Rules of Disinformation" and "8 Traits of the Disinformationalist" at www.proparanoid.com/truth.htm , sums it up very well.
Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, mainly in South-East Asia where he witnessed bombing and napalming of villages, which caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He has written about Vietnam's Phoenix Program www.vwip.org/articles/m/McGeheeRalph_VietnamsPhoenixProgram.htm and after a long battle with CIA censors, he published the book "Deadly Deceits" in 1983. Ralph has been harassed by the CIA and FBI, involving bodily injury, and his CIABASE website was shut down on Spring of 2000. He copied some reports that can be found at http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase_report_1.htm (and 2.htm), http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm Page 3 of 45
, and
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http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm , and www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Deadly_Deceits.html. He concluded that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency but rather the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisors, of which disinformation is a large part of its responsibility and the American people are the primary target of its lies. One of the primary reasons John F. Kennedy was assassinated had to do with the fact he dared to interfere in the framework of power. Kennedy was intent on exercising his ELECTED powers and not allowing them to be usurped by power-crazed individuals in the intelligence community, threatening to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." There were four things that filled the CIA with rage and sealed his fate; JFK fired Allen Dulles, was in the process of founding a panel to investigate the CIA's numerous crimes, put a damper on the breadth and scope of the CIA, and limited their ability to act under National Security Memoranda 55. There is such an overwhelming amount of information pertaining to the CIA that it is impossible to cover it all in one book, much less an article. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA.....the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations. The CIA is the epitome of organized crime run amuck! http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis.html ®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® Central Intelligence Agency ::: Official Media Relations Site In an effort to provide the American people with accurate information about the CIA, its mission, and the contributions Agency employees make to national security, the Media Relations Division staff works with print and broadcast journalists on a daily basis. The Office of Public Affairs believes that accurate media coverage of aspects of the Agency's work will build better public understanding of our efforts. The Division's objective is to be as helpful and responsive to the media as possible while still protecting classified information, including intelligence sources and methods. To accomplish this goal, the Media Relations Division staff establishes professional relationships with print and broadcast reporters, responds to press inquiries on a wide range of issues, develops media strategies in advance of newsworthy events or announcements, prepares press releases, and arranges for Agency experts to provide background briefings for U.S. media. http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/media.html ®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® A Short Peek into the Future - Part 1 Page 4 of 45
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By Wade Inganamort Click. Click. Click. The familiar sound violently awoke Sam, sending shockwaves down his spine. Click. Click. Click. His first voluntary reaction was to think - Is it me? Do they know? Wondering how far away they were, he threw back the standard issue gray bedding and planted his feet firmly on the cold cement floor. His mind was racing in one consistent direction: escape. Grabbing his overcoat, he stumbled to the door, while checking the pockets to ensure that he still had the document. I must get rid of it, he thought. Why did I have to be so damn curious? Click. Click. Click. The sound was getting closer. How he wished that he didn't have this chip in his arm, then he could've just slipped away weeks ago. It's now or never, he whispered to himself. His left hand was cleching the document in his pocket as he turned the doorknob. Swoosh. A dart flew by his right temple. It was too late. Click. Click. Click. There they were, his worse nightmare come true; a fleet of ten six-legged Lynxmotion Hexapod II walking robots were approaching from the end of the hallway. They were increasing speed, but from hearing so many rumors, the Haxapods were not what he feared. They were but mere slaves, doing reconnaissance as part of a distributed sensor network, relaying the triangulated information back to their master, ROBART. ROBART he knew, was rather slow with his dual treads powered by 12-volt electric wheelchair motors. Escape was a matter of evading the Hexapods before he was remotely located by GPS from the signals that his subdermal microchip - Digital Angel was emitting. But where would he go? This sector's grid monitor prevented any free-roaming, unless a travel plan was first logged from a public Digital Angel uplink terminal. Click. Click. Click. He made a dash to the right, hoping to get a small head start and immediately felt the first of six steel tipped darts enter his neck. Consciousness began to fade away. His left hand was still tightly gripping the illegal document. ROBART's remote camera zooms in on the torn Xeroxed paper as the puppetmasters 3,000 miles away can just barely read a portion of the title: The Constitution of the United Sta......
"We have money to blow up bridges over the Tigress and Euphrates and we don't have money to build bridges in our major cities. We have money to destroy the health of the Iraqi people and we don't have enough money to repair the health of our own people in this country. There is something fundamentally wrong with the direction this administration is taking its foreign policy, and I intend to change that if I am elected president of the United States." Dennis Kucinich on CNN's Crossfire: Friday February 21, 2003
They hang the man and flog the woman who steal the goose from the Common But the other man they let go loose who steal the Common from the goose Olde Page 5 of 45
English Nursery Rhyme
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Olde English Nursery Rhyme
®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® The Origins of the Overclass By Steve Kangas
The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere. The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds. During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America's wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent, the highest level of inequality in the 20th century. How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation's elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation's rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!" Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society's elite. By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nation's businesses, media and universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives. Their employment with the agency took a variety of forms, which included: Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official capacity. Staying in one's profession, Page 6 of 45
using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity couldJul be14, full-time, 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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profession, using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time, or on-call. Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along information useful to the CIA. Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between the agency and the business world. Historically, the CIA and society's elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government. Many common traits made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies. Both share an intense dislike of democracy, and feel they should be liberated from democratic regulations and oversight. Both share a culture of secrecy, either hiding their actions from the American public or lying about them to present the best public image. And both are in a perfect position to help each other. How? International businesses give CIA agents cover, secret funding, top-quality resources and important contacts in foreign lands. In return, the CIA gives corporations billion-dollar federal contracts (for spy planes, satellites and other hi-tech spycraft). Businessmen also enjoy the romantic thrill of participating in spy operations. The CIA also gives businesses a certain amount of protection and privacy from the media and government watchdogs, under the guise of "national security." Finally, the CIA helps American corporations remain dominant in foreign markets, by overthrowing governments hostile to unregulated capitalism and installing puppet regimes whose policies favor American corporations at the expense of their people.
The CIA's alliance with the elite turned out to be an unholy one. Each enabled the other to rise above the law. Indeed, a review of the CIA s history is one of such crime and atrocity that no one can reasonably defend it, even in the name of anticommunism. Before reviewing this alliance in detail, it is useful to know the CIA s history of atrocity first.
The Crimes of the CIA
During World War II, the OSS actively engaged in propaganda, sabotage and countless other dirty tricks. After the war, and even after the CIA was created in 1947, the American intelligence community reverted to harmless information gathering and analysis, thinking that the danger to national security had passed. That changed in 1948 with the emergence of the Cold War. In that year, the CIA recreated its covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy Coordination. Its first director was Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities included propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world. By Page 7 of 45
1953, the dirty tricks department of the CIA had grown to 7,200 personnel and Julcommanded 14, 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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By 1953, the dirty tricks department of the CIA had grown to 7,200 personnel and commanded 74 percent of the CIA s total budget. The following quotes describe the culture of lawlessness that pervaded the CIA: Stanley Lovell, a CIA recruiter for "Wild Bill" Donovan: "What I have to do is to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and say to him, 'Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell. Come help me raise it.'" (1) George Hunter White, writing of his CIA escapades: "I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun... Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?" (2) A retired CIA agency caseworker with twenty years experience: "I never gave a thought to legality or morality. Frankly, I did what worked." Blessed with secrecy and lack of congressional oversight, CIA operations became corrupt almost immediately. Using propaganda stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA felt justified in manipulating the public for its own good. The broadcasts were so patently false that for a time it was illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S. This was a classic case of a powerful organization deciding what was best for the people, and then abusing the powers it had helped itself to. During the 40s and 50s, most of the public was unaware of what the CIA was doing. Those who knew thought they were fighting the good fight against communism, like James Bond. However, they could not keep their actions secret forever, and by the 60s and 70s, Americans began learning about the agency s crimes and atrocities. (3) It turns out the CIA has: Corrupted democratic elections in Greece, Italy and dozens of other nations; Been involved to varying degrees in at least 35 assassination plots against foreign heads of state or prominent political leaders. Successful assassinations include democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende (Chile) and Patrice Lumumba (Belgian Congo); also CIA-created dictators like Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic) and Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam); and popular political leaders like Che Guevara. Unsuccessful attempts range from Fidel Castro to Charles De Gaulle. Helped launch military coups that toppled democratic governments, replacing them with brutal dictatorships or juntas. The list of overthrown democratic leaders includes Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Velasco and Arosemena (Ecuador, 1961, 1963), Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Papandreou (Greece, 1965-67), Allende (Chile, 1973), and dozens of others. Undermined the governments of Australia, Guyana, Cambodia, Jamaica and more; Supported murderous dictators like General Pinochet (Chile), the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos (Phillipines), "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier (Haiti), General Noriega (Panama), Mobutu Sese Seko (Ziare), the "reign of the colonels" (Greece), and more; Created, trained and supported death squads and secret police forces that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, leftists and political opponents, in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Page 8 of 45
Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others;
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Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others; Helped run the "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers how to overthrow democratic governments. Subjects include the use of torture, interrogation and murder; Used Michigan State "professors" to train Diem's secret police in torture; Conducted economic sabotage, including ruining crops, disrupting industry, sinking ships and creating food shortages; Paved the way for the massacre of 200,000 in East Timor, 500,000 in Indonesia and one to two million in Cambodia; Launched secret or illegal military actions or wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Cuba, Laos and Indochina; Planted false stories in the local media; Framed political opponents for crimes, atrocities, political statements and embarrassments that they did not commit; Spied on thousands of American citizens, in defiance of Congressional law; Smuggled Nazi war criminals and weapon scientists into the U.S., unpunished, for their use in the Cold War; Created organizations like the World Anti-Communist League, which became filled with ex-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, Italian terrorists, Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaaners, Latin American death squad leaders, CIA agents and other extreme right-wing militants; Conducted Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control experiment that gave LSD and other drugs to Americans against their will or without their knowledge, causing some to commit suicide; Penetrated and disrupted student antiwar organizations; Kept friendly and extensive working relations with the Mafia; Actively traded in drugs around the world since the 1950s to fund its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the iceberg - other notorious examples include Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle and Noreiga's Panama. Had their fingerprints all over the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. Even if the CIA is not responsible for these killings, the sheer amount of CIA involvement in these cases demands answers; And then routinely lied to Congress about all of the above.
The Page 9 of 45
Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million peopleJulhad died03:32:16AM as a 14, 2016 MDT
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The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (4) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust." We should note that the CIA gets away with this because it is not accountable to democratic government. Former CIA officer Philip Agee put it best: "The CIA is the President's secret army." Prior to 1975, the agency answered only to the President (creating all the usual problems of authoritarianism). And because the CIA's activities were secret, the President rarely had to worry about public criticism and pressure. After the 1975 Church hearings, Congress tried to create congressional oversight of the CIA, but this has failed miserably. One reason is that the congressional oversight committee is a sham, filled with Cold Warriors, conservatives, businessmen, and even ex-CIA personnel.
The Business Origins of CIA Crimes
Although many people think that the CIA s primary mission during the Cold War was to "deter communism," Noam Chomksy correctly points out that its real mission was "deterring democracy." From corrupting elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has virtually always replaced democracy with dictatorship. It didn't help that the CIA was run by businessmen, whose hostility towards democracy is legendary. The reason they overthrew so many democracies is because the people usually voted for policies that multi-national corporations didn't like: land reform, strong labor unions, nationalization of their industries, and greater regulation protecting workers, consumers and the environment. So the CIA's greatest "successes" were usually more pro-corporate than anti-communist. Citing a communist threat, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mussadegh government in Iran in 1953. But there was no communist threat the Soviets stood back and watched the coup from afar. What really happened was that Mussadegh threatened to nationalize British and American oil companies in Iran. Consequently, the CIA and MI6 toppled Mussadegh and replaced him with a puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran and his murderous secret police, SAVAK. The reason why the Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionaries took 52 Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979 was because the CIA had helped SAVAK torture and murder their people.
Another "success" was the CIA s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Again, there was no communist threat. The real threat was to Guatemala s United Fruit Company, a Rockefeller-owned firm whose stockholders included CIA Director Allen Dulles. Arbenz threatened to nationalize the company, albeit with generous compensation. In response, the CIA initiated a coup that overthrew Arbenz and installed the murderous dictator Castillo Armas. For four decades, CIA-backed dicatators would torture and murder hundreds of thousands of leftists, union members and others who would fight for a more equitable distribution of the country s resources. Another "success" story was Chile. In 1973, the country's democratically elected leader, Page 10 ofSalvadore 45
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Salvadore Allende, nationalized foreign-owned interests, like Chile's lucrative copper mines and telephone system. International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) offered the CIA $1 million to overthrow Allende which the CIA allegedly refused but paid $350,000 to his political opponents. The CIA responded with a coup that murdered Allende and replaced him with a brutal tyrant, General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands of leftists, union members and political opponents as economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman installed a "free market" economy. Since then, income inequality has soared higher in Chile than anywhere else in Latin America. Even when the communist threat was real, the CIA first and foremost took care of the elite. In testimony before Congress in the early 50s, it artificially inflated Soviet military capabilities. A notorious example was the "bomber gap" that later turned out to be grossly exaggerated. Another was "Team B," a group of hawkish CIA analysts who seriously distorted Soviet military data. These scare tactics worked. Congress awarded giant defense contracts to the U.S. military-industrial complex. And not even the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of American defense contracts have stopped the CIA from serving the elite. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss writes: Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has been abuzz with talk about using the CIA for economic espionage. Stripped of euphemism, economic espionage simply means that American spies would target foreign companies, such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda, and then covertly pass stolen trade secrets and technology to U.S. corporate executives. (5) If this isn't bad enough, a worse problem arises in that the CIA doesn't hand over this technology to every American auto-related company, but only the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. In a 1975 interview, Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee summed up his personal observations of the agency: To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents, for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United Kingdom desk is said to have the "U.K. account"& American multinational corporations have built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business interests, you also find the CIA& The multinational corporations want a peaceful status quo in countries where they have investments, because that gives them undisturbed access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor and stable markets for their finished goods. The status quo suits bankers, because their money remains secure and multiplies. And, of course, the status quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA supports abroad, because all they want is to keep themselves on top of the socioeconomic pyramid and the majority of their people on the bottom. But do you realize what being on the bottom means in most parts of the world? Ignorance, poverty, often early death by starvation or disease& Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it only carries out policy. And, like everyone else, the President has to respond to forces in the society he's trying to lead, right? In America, the most powerful force is Big Business, and American Big Business has a vested interest in the Cold War. (6) Domestic Recruitment Page 11 ofThe 45
CIA had no trouble recruiting elites who sought a more exciting life. BetweenJul1948 and03:32:16AM MDT 14, 2016
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The CIA had no trouble recruiting elites who sought a more exciting life. Between 1948 and 1959, more than 40,000 American individuals and companies acted as sources for the U.S. intelligence community. (7) Let's look at each area of recruitment, and see how they enabled the CIA to conduct its crimes:
Big Business The CIA co-opted big business right from the start, beginning with the most famous billionaire of the time: Howard Hughes. Hughes had inherited his father s million-dollar tool and die company at age 19. Anxious to expand his fortune, he made a conscientious decision "to go where the money is", namely, government. With a few well-placed bribes, Hughes secured defense contracts to build military planes. The result was the Hughes Aircraft company. By 1940, he had also acquired a controlling interest in Trans World Airlines. His government connections and international airline soon caught the attention of the CIA, and the two began a lifelong relationship. Hughes, whom the CIA dubbed "The Stockbroker," became the agency's largest contractor. Not only did he let the CIA use his business firms as fronts, but he also funded countless CIA operations. Perhaps the most notorious was Operation Jennifer, an allegedly failed attempt to recover nuclear codes from a sunken Soviet submarine. Hughes right-hand security man, Robert Maheu, was a CIA agent who at one time represented the CIA in negotiations with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro. The CIA's contacts with big business quickly spread. The agency showed a preference for international companies, public relations firms, media companies, law offices, banks, financiers and stockbrokers. The CIA didn't limit its activities to recruiting businessmen; sometimes the CIA bought or created entire companies outright. One benefit of co-opting big business was that the CIA was able to create a secret source of funds other than from government. With stock portfolios multiplying their profits, it's impossible now to say how flush the CIA really is. If Congress ever cut off funds for a mission, the business fraternity could easily replace them, either by donations or even setting up profitable businesses in the target country. In fact, this is precisely what happened during the Iran/Contra scandal. By allying itself with the business community, the CIA received the funds and ability it needed to remove itself from democratic control.
The Media 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. The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine Graham, today's publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was the Post's ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after the war, both in readership and influence. (8) Page 12 of 45
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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 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. After Philip's suicide in 1963, Katharine Graham took over the Post. Seduced by her husband's world of government and espionage, she expanded her newspaper's relationship with the CIA. In a 1988 speech before CIA officials at Langley, Virginia, she stated: We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that 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. This quote has since become a classic among CIA critics for its belittlement of democracy and its admission that there is a political agenda behind the Post's headlines. Ben Bradlee was the Post's managing editor during most of the Cold War. He worked in the U.S. Paris embassy from 1951 to 1953, where he followed orders by the CIA station chief to place propaganda in the European press. (9) Most Americans incorrectly believe that Bradlee personifies the liberal slant of the Post, given his role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate investigations. But neither of these two incidents are what they seem. The Post merely published the Pentagon Papers after The New York Times already had, because it wanted to appear competitive. As for Watergate, we'll examine the CIA's reasons for wanting to bring down Nixon in a moment. Someone once asked Bradlee: "Does it irk you when The Washington Post is made out to be a bastion of slanted liberal thinkers instead of champion journalists just because of Watergate?" Bradlee responded: "Damn right it does!" (10) It would be impossible to elaborate in this short space even the most important examples of the CIA/media alliance. Sig Mickelson was a CIA asset the entire time he was president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961. Later he went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Page 13 ofRadio 45
Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda.
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Radio Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda. The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies. It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse, the CIA has bought many domestic media companies. A prime example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William Casey (who would later become Reagan's CIA director). Another founder was Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC. For those who believe in "separation of press and state," the very idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with the agency. Even today, when the immorality of the CIA should be an open-and-shut case, "debate" about the issue rages in the media. Here is but one example: In 1996, The San Jose Mercury News published an investigative report suggesting that the CIA had sold crack in Los Angeles to fund the Contra war in Central America. A month later, three of the CIA's most important media allies, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times immediately leveled their guns at the Mercury report and blasted away in an attempt to discredit it. Who wrote the Post article? Walter Pincus, longtime CIA journalist. The dangers here are obvious.
Academia By the early 50s, CIA Director Allen Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale. (A disproportionate number of CIA figures, like George Bush, come from Yale's "Skull and Crossbones" Society.) CIA recruiters also approached thousands of other professors to work in place at their universities on a part-time, contract basis. Not stopping at recruiting scholars, the agency would go on to create several departments at elite universities, including Harvard's Russian Research Center and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Although most academics were supportive of the CIA in the 50s, most were unaware of its abuses. In the 60s, academia would become outraged to learn that anti-communist organizations like the National Student Association were actually creations of the CIA. The most audacious CIA front was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that attracted liberal, freethinking artists and intellectuals who nonetheless deplored communism. By the late 60s and 70s, growing reports of CIA crimes and atrocities had deeply alienated academia. Scholars were further troubled to learn that the CIA had penetrated and disrupted student antiwar groups. Unlike business and the media, academia overwhelmingly denounced the CIA after the Vietnam era. This eventually forced the CIA to turn to new places to find their analysts and scholars. The most important source was the conservative think-tank movement, which it helped to create. More on this later.
The Roman Catholic Church Page 14 of 45
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Although the CIA began as a mostly Protestant organization, Roman Catholics quickly came to dominate the new covert-action wing in 1948. All were staunchly conservative, fiercely anti-communist and socially elite. Just a few of the many Catholic operatives included future CIA directors William Colby, William Casey, and John McCone. Another well-known personality from this period was William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review and gadfly host of TV's Firing Line. Buckley, it turns out, served as a CIA agent in Mexico City, and his experiences there served as fodder for his Blackford Oakes spy novels. There were several reasons for this influx of Catholic elites. First, Wisner (himself a Wall Street lawyer) had an extensive and glamorous circle of friends to recruit from. Second, Italy was in constant crisis in the 1940s, both during World War II and after. Throughout this troubled period, the American intelligence community's greatest ally in Italy was the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, is one of the most anti-communist organizations in the world. The Marxist doctrine of atheism threatens Catholic theology, and its equality threatens the Church's strict tradition of hierarchy and authoritarianism. When Hitler invaded Communist Russia, the Vatican openly approved. Jesuit Michael Serafian wrote: "It cannot be denied that [Pope] Pius XII's closest advisors for some time regarded Hitler's armoured divisions as the right hand of God." (11) But Hitler persecuted Catholics as well, and ultimately drove the Church to the Americans. In 1943, the Vatican reached a secret agreement with OSS Chief Donovan himself a devout Catholic to let the Holy See become the center of Allied spy operations in Italy. Donovan considered the Church to be one of his prize intelligence assets, given its global power, membership and contacts. He cultivated this alliance by sending America's most prestigious Catholics to the Vatican to establish rapport and forge an alliance. After the war, half of Europe lay under Communist control, and the Italian communist party threatened to win the 1948 elections. The prospect of communism ruling over the heart of Catholicism terrified the Vatican. Once again, American intelligence gathered their most prestigious Catholics to strengthen ties with the Vatican. Because this was the first mission of the new covert action division, the American Catholic agents acquired positions of power early on, and would dominate covert operations for the rest of the Cold War. At a public level, the U.S. government sunk $350 million in social and military aid into Italy to sway the vote. On a secret level, Wisner spent $10 million in black budget funds to steal the elections. This included disseminating propaganda, beating up left-wing politicians, intimidating voters and disrupting leftist parties. The dirty tricks worked the Communists lost, and the Catholic Americans success permanently secured their power within the CIA.
The Knights of Malta (12) The Roman Catholic Church did not forget the American agents who had saved them from both Nazism and Communism. It rewarded them by making them Knights of Malta, or members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM). SMOM is one of the oldest and most elite religious orders in the Catholic Church. Until recently, limited Page 15 ofit45
its membership to Italians and foreign heads of state. In 1927, however,Julan14,exception 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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it limited its membership to Italians and foreign heads of state. In 1927, however, an exception was made for the United States, given its emerging status as a world power. SMOM opened an American branch, awarding knighthood or damehood to several American Catholic business tycoons. This group was so conservative that one, John Raskob, the Chairman of General Motors, actually became involved in an aborted military plot to remove Franklin Roosevelt from the White House. SMOM has also been embarrassed by knighting or giving awards to countless people who later turned out to be Nazi war criminals. This is the sort of culture that thrives within the leadership of SMOM. Officially, the Knights of Malta are a global charity organization. But beginning in the 1940s, knighthood was granted to countless CIA agents, and the organization has become a front for intelligence operations. SMOM is ideal for this kind of activity, because it is recognized as the world s only landless sovereignty, and members enjoy diplomatic immunity. This allows agents and supplies to pass through customs without interference from the host country. Such privileges enabled the Knights of Malta to become a major supplier of "humanitarian aid" to the Contras during their war in the 1980s. A partial list of the Knights and Dames of Malta reads like a Who's Who of American Catholicism: William Casey, CIA Director. John McCone, CIA Director. William Colby, CIA Director. William Donovan OSS Director. Donovan was given an especially prestigious form of knighthood that has only been given to a hundred other men in history. Frank Shakespeare, Director of such propaganda organizations as the U.S. Information Agency, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Also executive vice-president of CBS-TV and vice-chairman of RKO General Inc. He is currently chairman of the board of trustees at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. William Simon, Treasury Secretary under President Nixon. In the private sector, he has become one of America's 400 richest individuals by working in international finance. Today he is the President of the John M. Olin Foundation, a major funder of right-wing think tanks. William F. Buckley, Jr. , CIA agent, conservative pundit and mass media personality. James Buckley William's brother, head of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Clare Boothe Luce The grand dame of the Cold War was also a Dame of Malta. She was a popular playwright and the wife of the publishing tycoon Henry Luce, who cofounded Time magazine. Francis X Stankard - CEO of the international division of Chase Manhattan Bank, a Rockefeller institution. (Nelson Rockefeller was also a major CIA figure.) John Farrell President, U.S. Steel Lee Iacocca Chairman, General Motors William S. Schreyer Chairman, Merrill Lynch. Richard R. Shinn Chairman, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Joseph Kennedy Founder of the Kennedy empire. Baron Hilton Owner, Hilton Hotel chain. Patrick J. Frawley Jr. Heir, Schick razor fortune. Frawley is a famous funder of right-wing Catholic causes, such as the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Ralph Abplanalp - Aerosol magnate. Martin F. Shea - Executive vice president of Morgan Guaranty Trust. Joseph Brennan - Chairman of the executive committee of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York. J. Peter Grace President, W.R. Grace Company. He was a key figure in Operatio cientists and spies to the U.S. Many were war criminals whose atrocities were excused in their service to the CIA. Thomas Bolan, Of Saxe, Bacon and Bolan, the law firm of Senator McCarthy's deceased aide Roy Cohn. Bowie Kuhn Baseball Comissioner Cardinal John O'Connor Extreme right-wing leader among American Catholics, and fervent abortion opponent. Cardinal Francis Spellman The "American Pope" was at one time the most powerful Catholic in America, an arch-conservative and a rabid anti-communist. Cardinal Bernard Law One of the highest-ranking conservatives in the American church. Alexander Haig, Secretary of State under President Reagan. Admiral James D. Watkins Hard-line chief of naval operations under President Reagan. Page 16 of 45
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Jeremy Denton Senator (R Al). Pete Domenici Senator (R-New Mexico). Walter J. Hickel Governor of Alaska and secretary of the interior. When this group gets together, obviously, the topics are spying, business and politics. The CIA has also used other religious and charity organizations as fronts. For example, John F. Kennedy -- another anticommunist Roman Catholic who greatly expanded covert operations -created the U.S. Peace Corps to serve as cover for CIA operatives. The CIA has also made extensive use of missionaries, with the blessings of many right-wing, anticommunist Christian denominations. But the World Grows Wise& It was only a matter of time before other nations caught on to these fronts. They learned that when the CIA comes to their countries to commit their crimes and atrocities, they come disguised as American journalists, businessmen, missionaries and charity volunteers. Unfortunately, foreigners are now targeting these professions as hostile. In Lebanon, terrorists held U.S. journalist Terry Anderson hostage for nearly seven years, on the not unreasonable assumption that he was a spy. Whether or not this was true is beside the point. The CIA has put all Americans abroad at risk, whether they are CIA agents or not. In hearings before the Senate in 1996, many organizations urged Congress to stop using their professions as CIA cover. Don Argue of the National Association of Evangelicals testified: "Such use of missionary agents for covert activities by the CIA would be unethical and immoral." (13)
From the Cold War to the Class War As noted above, academia was the first major institution to denounce the crimes of the CIA. Why? One reason is that scholars conduct their own extensive research into world affairs, so naturally they were the first to learn the truth. This is the main reason why protest against the Vietnam War and the CIA erupted first among students on the nation's campuses. By the end of the Vietnam War, the CIA had suffered a "brain drain" as its academic allies became its most articulate, passionate and eloquent critics. The social revolutions of the 60s terrified the CIA. James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence and a truly paranoid man, was convinced the Soviets had masterminded the entire antiwar movement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shared his conviction. The CIA had always spied on student groups throughout the 60s, but in 1968 President Johnson dramatically stepped up the effort with Operation CHAOS. This initially called for 50 CIA agents to go undercover as student radicals, penetrate their antiwar organizations and root out the Russian spies who were causing the rebellion. Tellingly, they never found a single spy. The agents also began a campaign of wire-tapping, mail-opening, burglary, deception, intimidation and disruption against thousands of protesting American civilians. By the time Operation CHAOS wound down in 1973, the CIA had spied on 7,000 Americans, 1,000 organizations and traded information on more than 300,000 persons with various law agencies. (14) When academia learned of this, its outrage grew. The loss of academia was only the first blow for the CIA. Other disasters quickly followed; in the early 70s, the CIA was trying desperately to stave off a growing number of scandals. The first was Watergate. Page 17 of 45
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The CIA's fingerprints were all over Watergate. First, we should note the CIA had clear motives for helping oust Nixon. He was the ultimate "outsider," a poor California Quaker who grew up feeling bitter resentment towards the elite "Eastern establishment." Nixon, for all his arch-conservatism, was surprisingly liberal on economic issues, enfuriating businessmen with statements like "We are all Keynesians now." He created a whole host of new agencies to regulate business, like the FDA, EPA and OSHA. He signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which forced businesses to clean up their toxic emissions. He imposed price controls to fight inflation, and took the nation fully off the gold standard. Nixon also strengthened affirmative action. Even his staffers were famously anti-elitist, like Kevin Philips, who would eventually write the bible on inequality during the 1980s, The Politics of Rich and Poor. Add to this Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam and Détente with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had not only tried to remove control of foreign policy from the CIA, but had also taken measures to bring the CIA itself under control. Not surprisingly, Nixon and his CIA Director, Richard Helms, couldn't stand each other. (Nixon fired him for failing to cover up for Watergate.) Clearly, Nixon was fighting at cross-purposes with the CIA and the nation's elite.
As it turns out, the CIA had inside knowledge of Nixon's dirty work. Nixon had created his own covert action team, "The Committee to Reelect the President," more amusingly known by its acronym, CREEP. The team consisted of two CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and James McCord as well as former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. They also employed four Cubans with long CIA histories. In fact, a CIA front called the Mullen Company funded their activities, which ranged from disrupting Democratic campaigns to laundering Nixon's illegal campaign contributions. The CIA not only had intimate knowledge of Nixon's crimes, but it also acted as though it wanted the world to know them. When the FBI began investigating Watergate, Nixon tried using the CIA to cover up for him. At first the CIA half-heartedly complied, telling the FBI that the investigation would endanger CIA operations in Mexico. But a few weeks later it gave the FBI a green light again to proceed again with their investigation. Furthermore, Watergate was exposed by the CIA's main newspaper in America, The Washington Post. One of the two journalists who investigated the scandal, Robert Woodward, had only recently become a journalist. Previously Woodward had worked as a Naval intelligence liaison to the White House, privy to some of the nation's highest secrets. He would later write a sympathetic portrait of CIA Director Bill Casey in a book entitled Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. It was Woodward who personally knew and interviewed "Deep Throat," the unnamed source who revealed inside information on Nixon's activities. Many Watergate researchers consider one of Woodward's old intelligence contacts to be a prime candidate for Deep Throat. (15) Despite all the facts of CIA involvement, Woodward and Bernstein made virtually no mention of the CIA in their Watergate reporting. Even during Senate hearings on Watergate, the CIA somehow managed to stay out of the spotlight. In 1974, the House would clear the CIA of any involvement in Watergate. The CIA was not as lucky in 1974, when the Senate held hearings on James Jesus Angleton's illegal surveillance of American citizens. These disclosures resulted in his firing. But that was nothing compared to the 1975 Church Committee. This Senate investigation looked into virtually every type of CIA crime, from assassination to secret war to manipulating the domestic Page 18 ofmedia. 45
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media. The "reforms" that resulted from these hearings were mostly cosmetic, but the details that emerged shattered the CIA's reputation forever. Interestingly enough, the two Senators who held these hearings/ Frank Church and Otis Pike, were both defeated for reelection, despite a 98 percent reelection rate for incumbents. The CIA wasn't the only conservative institution that found itself embattled in the early 70s. This was a bad time for conservatives everywhere. America had lost the war in Vietnam. U.S. corporations had to cope with the rise of OPEC. The anti-poverty programs of Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society were causing a major redistribution of wealth. And Nixon was making things worse with his own anti-poverty and regulatory programs. Between 1960 and 1973, these efforts cut poverty in half, from 22 to 11 percent. Meanwhile, between 1965 and 1976, the richest 1 percent had gone from owning 37 percent of America's wealth to only 22 percent. (16) At a 1973 Conference Board meeting of top American business leaders, executives declared: "We are fighting for our lives," "We are fighting a delaying action," and "If we don't take action now, we will see our own demise. We will evolve into another social democracy." (17)
The CIA to the rescue In the mid-1970s, at this historic low point in American conservatism, the CIA began a major campaign to turn corporate fortunes around. They did this in several ways. First, they helped create numerous foundations to finance their domestic operations. Even before 1973, the CIA had co-opted the most famous ones, like the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. But after 1973, they created more. One of their most notorious recruits was billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. During World War II, Scaife's father served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. By his mid-twenties, both of Scaife's parents had died, and he inherited a fortune under four foundations: the Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundations and the Allegheny Foundation. In the early 1970s, Scaife was encouraged by CIA agent Frank Barnett to begin investing his fortune to fight the "Soviet menace." (18) From 1973 to 1975, Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world. Shortly afterwards he began donating millions to fund the New Right. Scaife's CIA roots are typical of those who head the new conservative foundations. By 1994 the most active were: Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Carthage Foundation Earhart Foundation Charles G. Koch David H. Koch Claude R. Lambe Philip M. McKenna J.M. Foundation John M. Olin Foundation Henry Salvatori Foundation Sarah Scaife Foundation Smith Richardson Foundation Between 1992 and 1994, these foundations gave $210 million to conservative causes. Here is the breakdown of their donations: $88.9 million for conservative scholarships; $79.2 million to enhance a national infrastructure of think tanks and advocacy groups; $16.3 million for alternative media outlets and watchdog groups; $10.5 million for conservative pro-market law firms; $9.3 million for regional and state think tanks and advocacy groups; $5.4 million to "organizations working to transform the nations social views and giving practices of the nation's religious and philanthropic leaders." (19) The political machine they built is broad and comprehensive, covering every aspect of the political fight. It includes right-wing departments and chairs in the nation's top universities, think Page 19 oftanks, 45
public relations firms, media companies, fake grassroots organizations that Jul pressure 14, 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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tanks, public relations firms, media companies, fake grassroots organizations that pressure Congress (irreverently known as "Astroturf" movements), "Roll-out-the-vote" machines, pollsters, fax networks, lobbyist organizations, economic seminars for the nation's judges, and more. And because corporations are the richest sector of society, their greater financing overwhelms similar efforts by Democrats. Besides creating foundations, the CIA helped organize the business community. There have always been special interest groups representing business, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, and the CIA has long been involved with them. However, after 1973, a spate of powerful new groups would come into existence, like the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission. These organizations quickly became powerhouses in promoting the business agenda.
Their efforts clearly succeeded. With the 1975 SUN-PAC decision, corporations persuaded government to legalize corporate Political Action Committees (the lobbyist organizations that bribe our government). By 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all PACs, and they donated 79 percent of all campaign contributions to political parties. (20) In two landmark elections, 1980 and 1994, corporations gave heavily and one-sidedly to Republicans, turning one or both houses of Congress over to the GOP. Democratic incumbents were shocked by the threat of being rolled completely out of power, so they quietly shifted to the right on economic issues, even though they continued a public façade of liberalism. Corporations went ahead and donated to Democratic incumbents in all other elections, but only as long as they abandoned the interests of workers, consumers, minorities and the poor. As expected, the new pro-corporate Congress passed laws favoring the rich: between 1975 and 1992, the amount of national household wealth owned by the richest 1 percent soared from 22 to 42 percent. (21)
The CIA also helped create the conservative think tank movement. Prior to the 70s, think tanks spanned the political spectrum, with moderate think tanks receiving three times as much funding as conservative ones. At these early think tanks, scholars typically brainstormed for creative solutions to policy problems. This would all change after the rise of conservative foundations in the early 70s. The Heritage Foundation opened its doors in 1973, the recipient of $250,000 in seed money from the Coors Foundation. A flood of conservative think tanks followed shortly thereafter, and by 1980 they overwhelmed the scene. The new think tanks turned out to be little more than propaganda mills, rigging studies to "prove" that their corporate sponsors needed tax breaks, deregulation and other favors from government. Of course, think-tank studies are useless without publicity, and here the CIA proved especially valuable. Using propaganda techniques it had perfected at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA and its allies turned American AM radio into a haven for conservative talk show hosts. Yes, Rush Limbaugh uses the same propaganda techniques that Muscovites once heard from Voice of America. The CIA has also developed countless other media outlets, like Capital Cities (which eventually bought ABC), major PR firms like Hill & Knowlton, and of course, all the Agency's connections in the national news media. (22) The following is a typical example of how the "New Media" operates. As most political observers know, the Republicans suffer from a "gender gap," in which women prefer Democrats by huge majorities. This is, in fact, why Clinton has twice won the presidency. But, enough, as the 90s progressed, conservative female pundits began popping up 03:32:16AM MDT Page 20 ofcuriously 45 Jul 14, 2016
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This is, in fact, why Clinton has twice won the presidency. But, curiously enough, as the 90s progressed, conservative female pundits began popping up everywhere in the media. Hard-right pundits like Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Laura Ingraham, Barbara Olson, Melinda Sidak, Anita Blair and Whitney Adams conditioned us to the idea of the conservative woman. This phenomenon was no accident. It turns out that Richard Mellon Scaife donated $450,000 over three years to the Independent Women's Forum, a booking agency that heavily seeds such female conservative pundits into the media. (23)
Conclusion
The most obvious criticism of the New Over class is that their political machine is undemocratic. Using subversive techniques once aimed at communists, and with all the money they ever need to succeed, the Over class undemocratically controls our government, our media, and even a growing part of academia. These institutions in turn allow the Over class to control the supposedly "free" market. It doesn't win all the time, of course witness Bill Clinton's impeachment trial but it does score an endless string of other victories elsewhere, all to the detriment of workers, consumers, women, minorities and the poor. We need to fight it with everything we've got. Endnotes: 1. Mind Manipulators, Scheflin and Opton. p.241. 2. Captain George White in a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. 3. All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is summarized from William Blum s encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen s The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997). Information about CIA drug running can be found at http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/cia/blum1.html and http://speech.csun.edu/ben/news/cia/index.html. 4. Coleman McCarthy, "The Consequences of Covert Tactics" Washington Post, December 13, 1987. 5. Robert Dreyfuss, "Company Spies," Mother Jones. Website: http://www.mojones.com/mother_jones/MJ94/dreyfuss.html 6. Philip Agee: The Playboy Interview. Website: http://www.connix.com/~harry/agee.htm 7. Lara Shohet, "Intelligence, Academia and Industry," The Final Report of the Snyder Commission, Edward Cheng and Diane C. Snyder, eds., (Princeton Unversity: The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, January 1997). Website: http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/snyder/academia.htm. 8. Website: http://www.europa.com/~johnlf/cn/cn9-35. 9. Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great and the Washington Post, 2nd ed. (Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987) 10. "Forum for Ben Bradlee," Watergate 25. Website: http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/97/bradlee.htm. 11. Lewy, Guenter, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (London and New York, 1964), pp. 249-250. 12. National Catholic Reporter, Jan 89, Mar 89, Apr 89, May 89, "Nazis, the Vatican and the CIA," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986, Number 25 Website: . Page 21 ofhttp://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/knightsofmaltalist.html 45
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http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/knightsofmaltalist.html. 13. Anthony Collings, "Journalists tell Senate they want no CIA ties," CNN, July 18, 1996. Website: http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/18/spies.journalists/ . 14. Morton Halperin, et al, eds., The Lawless State (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 153. 15. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. 16. Edward N. Wolff, "How the Pie is Sliced" The American Prospect no. 22 (Summer 1995), pp. 58-64. Website: http://epn.org/prospect/22/22wolf.html. 17. Quoted in Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 44-47. 18. Karen Rothmyer, "The man behind the mask," Salon, April 7, 1998. 19. Study conducted by National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, July 1997, as reported by the National Education Association. Website: http://www.nea.org/publiced/paycheck/paychkf.html. 20. Center for Responsive Politics, Washington D.C., 1993. 21. Wolff. 22. For CIA involvement in Capital Cities/ABC, see Dennis Mazzocco, Networks of Power (Boston: South End Press, 1994). For CIA involvement in the PR industry, see John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good for You! (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), pp. 49-51,153,157,160-63. 23. Jonathon Broder and Murray Waas, [Untitled] Salon, April 20, 1998. Website: http://www.salonmag.com/news/1998/04/20news.html http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/L-overclass.html
®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® The CIA and the Media Here's just a snippet from Carl Bernstein's famous 1977 article entitled "The CIA & The Media" from Rolling Stone, 10/20/77. Anyone with access to a library should try to find this - it's a truly breakthrough piece - 16 pages long in the reprint! 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 tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading Page 22 ofperform 45 Jul 14,news 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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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. http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/media/ciamedia.htm
®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® Author: Ashley Overbeck Title: A Report on CIA Infiltration and Manipulation of the Mass Media
original source: http://www.geocities.com/cpa_blacktown/20000318mediaoverb.htm Should CIA agents be allowed to pose as journalists to further the aims of their clandestine activities? Members of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on the future of U.S. intelligence in the post-Cold War world say yes, and a CIA official recently came forward to admit that the Agency already occasionally does so despite regulations barring the practice. But is this a breaking story or just the latest chapter in a spy story that traces its roots back to the 1950's? While they may act like strangers in public, the press and the CIA have a sordid past that spans more than four decades. The CIA-Press Connection in the 1950s and 60s The CIA-press connection traces its roots back to the early days of the Cold War, when Allen Page 23 ofDulles 45
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Dulles (who became CIA director in 1953) began courting the nation's most prestigious journalistic institutions for Agency operations. The mood of the day precluded the need for secretive infiltration, as Carl Bernstein points out in his 1977 expose on the topic. "American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against global Communism," he writes. "Accordingly, the line separating the American press corps was often indistinguishable." That's not to say that reporters acted as spies in the James Bond sense. Media outlets offered services that fell into the broad categories of providing "cover" for CIA operatives (i.e. jobs and credentials) or sharing information gathered by reporters on staff. While the Agency ran a formal training program in the 50's that attempted to teach rank-and-file agents to be reporters, this was among the least common of the more than 400 relationships with the press described in CIA files. Most involved were journalists before their involvement with the CIA began. Reporters, especially foreign correspondents, typically served as "eyes and ears" for the CIA. Often they were briefed by agents before a trip and debriefed when they returned; they shared their notebooks, relayed things that they had seen or overheard and offered their impressions. More complex arrangements found reporters planting misinformation for the Agency or serving as liaisons between agents and foreign contacts, often in return for information or access. "In return for our giving them information, we'd ask them to do things that fit their roles as journalists but that they wouldn't have thought of unless we put it in their minds," one agent told Bernstein. "For instance, a reporter in Vienna would say to our man, 'I met an interesting second secretary at the Czech Embassy.' We'd say, 'Can you get to know him? And after you get to know him, can you assess him? And then, could you put him in touch with us -- would you mind us using your apartment?'" Another senior CIA official offered the following description of "reporting" by cooperating journalists: "We would ask them, 'Will you do us a favor? We understand that you're going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved 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." It was a symbiotic relationship: reporters got the scoop and the spooks got the dirt. Correspondents with Agency ties were highly valued by their bosses for the stories they brought home. And agents saw in the press a perfect vehicle for information gathering: who else besides a reporter enjoyed such free access in a foreign country, could cultivate so many sources among foreign governments and elites and ask lots of probing questions without arousing suspicion? CIA-press operations in the 50's and 60's relied heavily on journalists working in Latin America and Western Europe. Members of the press were used as go-betweens to deliver messages and money to European Christian Democrats and also helped the Agency track the movements of people coming from Eastern Europe. Additionally, the CIA owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American, a now-defunct English-language newspaper in Italy. Reporters funneled CIA dollars to opponents of Salvador Allende in Chile and wrote anti-Allende propaganda stories for CIA proprietary publications in that country. By Bernstein's account, two of the Agency's most valuable relationships in the 60's were with reporters who covered Latin America: Hal Hendrix, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the Miami News, and Jerry of the Washington Star. CIA files on Hendrix (who went on to become a Jul high-ranking Page 24 ofO'Leary 45 14, 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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Hendrix, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the Miami News, and Jerry O'Leary of the Washington Star. CIA files on Hendrix (who went on to become a high-ranking official at ITT) detail information that he provided agents about Cuban exiles in Miami. O'Leary's file lists him as a valued asset in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, although he denies having a formal relationship with the Agency. "I might call them up and say something like, "Papa Doc has the clap, did you know that? and they'd put it in the file," O'Leary told Bernstein. "I don't consider that reporting for them. It's useful to be friendly to them, and generally I felt friendly to them. But I think that they were more helpful to me than I was to them." Doing the "Right Thing" To greater and lesser degrees, many journalists at the time shared the belief that relationships with the intelligence community were useful and that lending aid was the right thing to do. "Many (journalists working with the CIA) had gone to the same schools as their CIA handlers, moved in the same circles, shared fashionably liberal, anti-Communist political values, and were part of the 'old boy' network that constituted something of an establishment elite in the media, politics and academia of postwar America," Bernstein writes. "The most valued lent themselves for reasons of national service, not money." This was true of syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, who is open and unapologetic about his extensive CIA ties. Alsop's tasks in the 50's included a trip to Laos to investigate whether American reporters there were using anti-American sources and a visit to the Philippines at the behest of the CIA, who believed that his presence there might influence the outcome of an election. "I'm proud they asked me and proud to have done it," Alsop said of his involvement. "The notion that a newspaperman doesn't have a duty to his country is perfect balls." According to one high-ranking official, Alsop's brother Stewart, also a columnist, was a CIA agent. He was rumored to have been particularly useful in obtaining information from foreign governments, planting misinformation and tipping off the Agency about potential foreign recruits, although his brother denies this. "I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close," Joseph Alsop once said. "I dare say he did perform some tasks -- he just did the correct thing as an American." Also notable is New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger (CFR), who the CIA lists as a valuable source of information throughout the 50's. Sulzberger claims that he "would never get near the spook business," but admits to sharing information with agents, many of whom were close personal friends: "I'm sure they consider me an asset. They can ask me questions. They find out you're going to Slobovia and they say, 'Can we talk to you when you get back?' Or they'll want to know if the head of the Ruritanian government is suffering from psoriasis. But I never took an assignment from one of those guys." However, Sulzberger does "think" that he signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA (as did his uncle, Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger [CFR]), though. Many CIA officials long for the days when there were more journalists like Sulzberger and the Alsops. "There was a time when it wasn't considered a crime to serve your government," one official bitterly told Bernstein. "This all has to be considered in the context of the morality of the times, rather than the against latter-day standards -- and hypocritical standards at that." "(I)n the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces -- shredded the consensus and threw it in the air." But another agent remarked in Bernstein's expose, "there was a point when the ethical issues
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which most people submerged finally surfaced. Today a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency." The Church Committee Investigation
A flurry of public attention began to cast doubts upon the ethics of a press wedded to the Central Intelligence Agency after a Washington Star-News story by Oswald Johnson reported that the CIA had three dozen American newsmen on its payroll at that time (November 1973). Then-CIA director William Colby (CFR) leaked this information to Johnson, fearing an embarrassing fallout after both the Star-News and New York Times approached him to ask if any of their staff members were receiving payments from the Agency. (A Times investigation four years later showed the number of CIA-funded journalists to be closer to 50; Bernstein's expose in Rolling Stone that same year claimed it was more like 400.) By now, the times they had a-changed: In a 1974 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, former reporter Stuart Loory chastised fellow journalists for their history of chumming it up with the CIA and for their lax coverage of the issue once it came to light. "There is little question that if even one American overseas carrying a press card is paid by the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect," he wrote. "We automatically... consider Soviet and Chinese newsmen as mouthpieces and informants for their governments, while at the same time congratulating ourselves for our independence. Now we know that some of that independence has, with the stealth required of clandestine operations, been taken away from us -- or given away." In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Frank Church (the Church Committee) focused its attention on the Agency's use of American news outlets. The CIA went to great lengths to curtail this part of the committee's investigation, though, and some members of the committee later admitted that the Agency was able to get the upper hand. Colby and his successor, George Bush (CFR, TC), were able to convince the Senate that a full inquiry would cripple their intelligence-gathering capabilities and would unleash a "witch-hunt" on the nation's reporters, editors and publishers. "The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its hands," one congressional source told Carl Bernstein. "Church and some of the other members were much more interested in making headlines than in doing serious, tough investigating. The Agency pretended to be giving up a lot whenever it was asked about the flashy stuff -- assassinations and secret weapons and James Bond operations. Then, when it came to things they didn't want to give away, that were much more important to the Agency, Colby in particular called in his chits. And the committee bought it." Former intelligence officer William Bader (who returned to the Agency as a deputy to Stansfield Turner) and David Aaron (who later served as deputy to President Carter's national security advisor) supervised the committee's investigation of the CIA-press angle. CIA director Bush balked at all of Bader's requests for specific information about the scope of the Agency's media activities. Under pressure from the entire committee, Bush finally agreed to pull records on journalists and have his deputies condense them into one-paragraph summaries. The Agency would not make the raw files available, and neither the names of journalists nor their affiliations would be included. More than 400 summaries were compiled (a number that officials acknowledge was probably on the low side) in an attempt to give committee members "a broad, picture." "We never pretended it was a total description of the range of 2016 activities Page 26 ofrepresentative 45 Jul 14, 03:32:16AM MDT
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on the low side) in an attempt to give committee members "a broad, representative picture." "We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities over 25 years, or the number of journalists that have done things for us," one official conceded. Still, even these sketchy details were enough for the committee to conclude that the CIA's relationships with the press were of a far greater magnitude than they had expected -- and that they needed to know more. But Bush was intransigent. Heated confrontations produced a bizarre agreement: Bader and director of the committee staff William Miller (CFR) could have access to 25 "sanitized" files from among the 400 (still without journalists' identities). Church and committee vice-chairman John Tower would see five unsanitized files to verify that the CIA had included all but the names. No information on current CIA-press relationships would be divulged, and the whole deal was contingent upon Bader, Miller, Church and Tower's promises not to reveal the files' contents to the other committee members. In the end, with time running out on the committee, the senators decided to drop the matter and leave a more detailed investigation to the CIA oversight committee that would succeed them. The committee interviewed none of the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast executives detailed in the files. And although members concluded that "from the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive covert program of all," and "a much larger part of the operational system than had been indicated," this was hardly part of the official findings when they were made public. The tcommittee dedicated a scant en pages of its final report to covert relationships with the media. The information included in the report was vague and misleading and, according to committee member Gary Hart, "hardly reflected what we found." Bernstein offered the following commentary on the Church committee's output: "No mention was made of the 400 summaries or what they showed. Instead the report noted blandly that some fifty recent contacts had been studied by the committee staff -- thus conveying the impression that the Agency's dealings with the press had been limited to those instances. Colby's misleading public statements about the use of journalists were repeated without serious contradiction or elaboration. The role of cooperating news executives was given short shrift. The fact that the Agency had concentrated its relationships in the most prominent sectors of the press went unmentioned. That the CIA continued to regard the press as up for grabs was not even suggested."
Prominent CIA-Press Relationships A source close to the Church committee remarked on the investigation that, "if this stuff got out some of the biggest names in journalism would get smeared." So just who was involved, and what was the nature of their relationships with the intelligence community? The following is a sampling of prominent organizations identified by Carl Bernstein and other researchers as high profile news outlets with low profile ties to the CIA. CBS: CIA Broadcasting System?
Bernstein asserts that a good relationship between former CIA director Allen Dulles and former CBS president William Paley (CFR) made the network the CIA's most valuable broadcasting Page 27 ofasset. 45
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asset. "Over the years," Bernstein writes, "the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communications between the Washington bureau chief and the agency; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents... to be routinely monitored by the CIA." Paley chose Sig Mickelson (CFR), president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961, as his liaison with the CIA. Mickelson (who went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty) recalls complaining about having to use a pay phone to contact the CIA, and later installing a private line that bypassed the CBS switchboard for this purpose. A CBS investigation of his files revealed that he was involved in passing on CBS film and outtakes to CIA officials in exchange for payment and that he regularly forwarded copies of CBS' internal newsletter to his CIA handlers. The same investigation revealed that two CBS employees -stringer Austin Goodrich and Frank Kearns, a network reporter from 1958-1971 -- were undercover CIA operatives. Mickelson has discussed his CIA activities with Bernstein and others. "When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA," he has recalled. "He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and the film arrangements. I assumed that this was the normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating -- though the Goodrich matter was compromising." Mickelson's successor Richard Salant says he continued some of these practices when he took the CBS helm. "I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes," he explains. "This went on for a number of years -- into the Seventies." Sign of the Times
The New York Times was for the CIA in the realm of newspapers what CBS was to the Agency among broadcasters. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger (CFR) arranged for cover for approximately 10 CIA employees between 1950 and 1966 as part of his general policy of providing assistance to the CIA whenever possible. According to CIA officials, the Agency's ties to the Times were stronger than to any other papers because of its large foreign news operation and because of close ties between publisher Sulzberger and director Dulles (a relationship described by one staff member as "the mighty dealing with the mighty.") The output of this close relationship generally included reporting for CIA agents and "spotting" new prospective foreign operatives. Sulzberger is said to have signed a secrecy agreement with the Agency in the 1950's -- some say he did so as a pledge not to reveal the classified information he was privy to; others claim it was a pact never to reveal the Times' dealings with the CIA. Former Times reporter Wayne Phillips said CIA agents approached and tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952, advising him that the Agency has a "working relationship" with Sulzberger. A Freedom of Information Act request later revealed that agents hoped to put him to work as an "asset" abroad. The Times ran a story about the attempted recruitment in 1976, in which Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (CFR) asserted that he had "never heard of the Times being approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son of the late Mr. Sulzberger." Page 28 ofA45CIA
Post?
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A CIA Post? Bernstein's former employers at the Washington Post escaped his expose unscathed, but other investigators have documented extensive CIA ties at the paper. According to John Kelly of CounterSpy magazine, Post reporter Walter Pincus (CFR) worked for the CIA in 1959 as an Agency trained and funded delegate sent to the International Youth Festival in Vienna to disrupt the festival and spy on fellow Americans. After briefing agents on his activities and taking a pledge of secrecy, he went on attend youth conferences in Ghana and Guinea. Pincus claims that he was offered, but turned down, a permanent CIA position, although he did attend a political meeting in New Delhi at the Agency's request before going on to bigger and better things at the Post. Pincus has written several pieces sympathetic to CIA operations. He published an article just prior to the release of Bernstein's Rolling Stone expose downplaying the article's claims, even though his report essentially let Post publisher Katherine Graham off the hook. Reporter Russell Warren Howe also has a long history of CIA service. In 1958, he once said, his "days as an asset had just begun." He worked for the CIA proprietary "Information Bulletin, Ltd." and its successor, "Forum Service" (later known as Forum World Features), in addition to the CIA-funded "Africa Report and "Survey." Howe was fully aware of his employer's CIA ties, referring once to the FWF as "the principal CIA media in the world." According to the Church Committee, the Post management was aware that one of their reporters worked for a CIA publication, and that on several occasions they knowingly reprinted propaganda from that paper in the Post. Philip Geyelin (CFR) on the other hand was a CIA agent before taking a job as a Post reporter. Geyelin joined the Agency for 11 months during a leave from the Wall Street Journal. While at the Journal, CIA memos about Geyelin (which number in the hundreds, according to CounterSpy) described him as "a CIA resource" and a "willing collaborator." Geyelin has come to the CIA's defense in the Post: in response to a statement by Post ombudsman Charles Seib that the CIA should stick to dirty work, the press should inform the public, "and never the twain can meet," Geyelin replied that to the contrary, agents and journalists were "all searching for the same nuggets of truth about the outside world." He took this a step further when he protested Congressional efforts to regulate CIA-media ties, invoking journalists' constitutional right to be co-opted by spooks. "(I)n its zeal to restrict the freedom of the agency to subvert the press," he wrote, "Congress could wind up making a law that would in fact abridge -- or threaten to abridge -- some part of the freedom of the press that the First Amendment was intended to protect." Publisher Katherine Graham is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations with close ties to former CIA directors Dulles and William Casey (CFR). She hired CIA-linked Wackenhut Security Corporation to break up a Post union strike, and invited former Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (CFR) to join the Post's board of directors despite his well-documented past as a CIA apologist. Katzenbach is said to have asked a past Post editorial page editor to tone down an upcoming editorial about the CIA, and he chaired a presidential panel that "investigated" CIA domestic operations (but actually served as a rubber stamp for the Agency's activities). While he asserted that both the FBI and CIA were "the most decent and effective intelligence agencies in the world," Katzenbach had first hand knowledge of the seedier side of intelligence: the Church committee produced several memos documenting his suggestions to J. Edgar Hoover that he might undertake wiretap operations as part of the Bureau's campaign to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. Making Time for Spooks Page 29 of 45
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Time and Life founder Henry Luce was considered one of the CIA's most cooperative sources in the media. Luce, another of Dulles' personal friends in the media, was said to freely allow staff members to work with the CIA and willingly provide credentials for agents who lacked journalistic experience. Throughout the 50's and 60's Time correspondents attended CIA briefing dinners, and Luce encouraged his foreign correspondents to meet with CIA officials after returning from trips abroad. C.D. Jackson, a Life magazine vice president in the early 1960's, co-authored a CIA study on reorganization of the intelligence community during his tenure at Time-Life, and approved specific plans for granting cover to CIA operatives. Former Life managing editors Edward Thompson and George Hunt told Stuart Loory that they regularly allowed military intelligence agents to come to the Life office to look at photos and, since they were public domain, sometimes gave them prints. CIA agents were allowed to interview correspondents returning from overseas assignments too, Hunt said, although he did not consider this to be "working with" intelligence agencies. "We never cooperated with the CIA," Hunt claimed. "We didn't have any of that nonsense going on at Life."
Other News Outlets With Documented CIA Ties Management at the Christian Science Monitor admitted the paper had an ongoing relationship with the CIA throughout the 1950's and early 60's. Joseph Harrison, who became editor in 1950, said he discovered that agents paid frequent visits to the news office to get information on Monitor stories. "I inherited the situation and I continued it," he said of the arrangement, which included allowing the Agency access to uncut versions of stories and letters from Monitor foreign correspondents. While Johnson characterized such activities as "helping out as an American," he drew the line at pursuing stories at the Agency's behest or allowing his employees to moonlight with the CIA. "That," according to his distinction, "would have been espionage." CIA files show that ABC News provided cover for agents throughout the 1960's. During the Church committee hearings the Agency refused to reveal whether its relationship with the network was ongoing. As with ties to other high profile news outlets, arrangements were made at the highest level, with the full knowledge of network executives. CIA officials claim that Sam Jaffe and one other unnamed correspondent performed clandestine tasks for the Agency. Jaffe admits that he was approached by agents who offered to get him a job with CBS, who would send him on assignment in Moscow if he agreed to cooperate, but claims he never agreed to the deal. Jaffe did go on to do some work for CBS, though, and said he believed that the CIA had a hand in getting him the assignment. One of the more unusual accounts of the CIA-press connection involves the Louisville Courier-Journal. Undercover operative Robert H. Campbell spent three months at the paper as a reporter in 1964-1965 as part of an arrangement made by the Agency and Courier-Journal executive editor Norman Issacs. The first account of Campbell's tenure at the paper appeared in a front-page story in 1976 -- in the Courier-Journal (one of the few self-investigative pieces written on this topic). James Herzog reported that Campbell had been hired in spite of the fact that he could not type Page 30 ofand 45 knew little about newswriting. "Norman said that when he was in Washington, Jul he 14, had 2016 been 03:32:16AM MDT
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that Campbell had been hired in spite of the fact that he could not type and knew little about newswriting. "Norman said that when he was in Washington, he had been called to lunch with some friend of his who was with the CIA [who] wanted to send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of newspapering," the paper's former managing editor recalled in the article. CIA sources say that the Courier-Journal arrangements were made so that Johnson could amass a record of journalistic experience (he also worked briefly for the Hornell, New York Evening Tribune). The Agency even sent funds to the Courier-Journal to pay Johnson's salary. These same sources claim that the deal was made with Issacs and approved by the paper's publisher, but neither man recalls being involved. "All I can do is repeat the simple truth," Issacs said in response to Herzog's story, "that never, under any circumstances or at any time, have I ever knowingly hired a government agent." But, he added, "none of this is to say that I couldn't have been 'had.'" But clues were there. No one looked into Johnson's credentials when he was hired, and his file included the curious notation "Hired for temporary work -- no reference checks completed or needed." Johnson's journalistic prowess (or lack thereof) should have given him away: his editors characterized his work as "unreadable" and it was never published. If that was not clue enough, his penchant for announcing to patrons at a bar a few steps from his office that he was a CIA agent should have done the trick. Who else? Bernstein compiled the following list of additional organizations known to have provided CIA cover: the New York Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, the Associated Press, United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. The CFR Report on "Making Intelligence Smarter"
A Council on Foreign Relations task force thrust the CIA-media connection back into the spotlight this year with the release of their report on post-Cold War intelligence. "Making Intelligence Smarter," released in February 1996, stresses the importance of "human intelligence" in successful clandestine operations. But many of the "innovations" the CFR suggests for cases when "the targeted activity is not easily captured by reconnaissance or eavesdropping," are all too familiar. "Clandestine operations for whatever purpose currently are circumscribed by a number of legal and policy constraints," the report states. "These deserve review to avoid diminishing the potential contribution of this instrument. At a minimum, the Task Force recommended that a fresh look be taken at limits on the use of nonofficial 'covers' for hiding and protecting those involved in clandestine activities." Though the task force doesn't explicitly address the use of the press as cover, the implication is obvious. If nothing else, the Church committee investigation showed CIA-press relationships to be among the Agency's most secret -- and most valuable -- operations for nearly two decades. And congressional scrutiny, however ineffectual, led the Agency to codify the constraints alluded to in the report. Former CIA director William Colby claimed in 1973 to have scaled back covert media operations in response to mounting criticism of the practice. His successor, George Bush, issued a statement pledging that the Agency would not enter into "paid or contractual relationships with full- or part-time news correspondents from accredited news organizations" when he took the Agency helm in 1976. (The statement was ambiguous on stringers and other news staffers, and included a statement that the Agency would "welcome" journalists' unpaid cooperation. Stansfield Turner, Bush's replacement, put theseJul assurances in Page 31 ofvoluntary, 45 14, 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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a statement that the Agency would "welcome" journalists' voluntary, unpaid cooperation. Stansfield Turner, Bush's replacement, put these assurances in writing the following year. Contrary to the report's implication that all "nonofficial" covers are currently off limits, there is a loophole in the policy Turner drafted in 1977 allowing for exceptions "with the specific approval" of the Director of Central Intelligence. An unnamed source brought the loophole to attention of the Washington Post last month, indicating that such exceptions had been made "in extraordinarily rare circumstances" in the past 19 years. At least one such exception was granted for a CIA agent posing as a reporter during the Iranian hostage crisis. Spies R Not Us? Reaction from the press to the CFR report has been mixed. Many have invoked the First Amendment and uttered platitudes about the separation of press and state, while remaining silent about the two institutions' sordid pasts. Notably absent from both the CFR's report and the media's reaction is any historical frame of reference: the issue is presented as a stand-alone current event, taken out of its context as a legacy of CIA meddling and media complicity. Evan Thomas, an assistant editor at Newsweek told the Post that while there were "inherent conflicts" in using the press as cover, "You would not want to rule out forever an opportunity in which a journalist might be the only one who could help in a desperate situation." But Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's journal Extra!, seemed to have a better appreciation of the underlying implications. "Under no circumstance should CIA agents pose as journalists," he said. "Given the CIA's record in setting up fake press organs and manipulating the press, they have really lost the right to get involved with journalists. You can't combine their work with journalism, which is about the free and open exchange of ideas." Washington Times columnist Ken Adelman charged that the uproar was much ado about nothing. "That such verbal waffling aroused such a ruckus says a great deal," he wrote in his March 6, 1996 column. "Not so much about the Council or the CIA -- but about the narcissism of today's journalists." Contrary to the policy of his predecessors, Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr. said he was disturbed by the possibility that the CIA had either used journalistic organizations for cover or recruited journalists. Independence from the government, he said, was essential for both credibility and the safety of correspondents. The CFR, the CIA, the Media and the New World Order
Will economic warfare replace the Cold War in the New World Order? In the wake of the Cold War, debate has erupted over the future use of intelligence agencies by the U.S. government. Many of America's political and business elite want to see a shift towards economic intelligence, to counter other nations' economic intelligence ops, as well as to further the goals of international capitalism. It is therefore especially noteworthy that the CFR issued the report on "Making Intelligence Page 32 ofSmarter." 45
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Smarter." The roster of the Council on Foreign Relations is a Who's Who directory of the political, military, and economic elite in the United States. President Clinton's administration is staffed by nearly 100 of the CFR's 3,000 members. It has been said by political commentators on both the left and the right that if you want to find out what U.S. foreign policy will be next year, you should read the CFR's periodical Foreign Affairs this year. Members of the CFR exert influence over a gigantic portion of the media in America. Many of the newspeople who operated with the CIA in the past were or are CFR members. The chief directors and news anchors of CBS, ABC, NBC, Time Inc., Public Broadcast Service, CNN, Newsweek, and many other major media outlets are CFR members. So are many CEOs and board members at Chase Manhattan Corp., Chemical Bank, Citicorp, Shell Oil, AT&T, General Motors, General Electric, and other multinational corporations. It is also worth noting that three of the Task Force panel members who wrote the "Making Intelligence Smarter" report included past or present journalists. Leslie Gelb, CFR president, is a former foreign affairs columnist and Op-Ed page editor for The New York Times. Henry Grunwald is former Editor-in-Chief of Time magazine, and Jessica Mathews is a Post columnist. Critics of the CFR on both sides of the political spectrum voice strong opposition to the Council's agenda of expansion of multinational capitalism and world government -- what has become known as the New World Order. A report from the CFR such as "Making Intelligence Smarter" will therefore make plenty of waves. The fact that the report was composed in part by members of the working press who are also CFR members is a brazen conflict of interest, in light of the CFR's history. Will there be a shift in CIA/media operations towards global economic intelligence and propaganda? Only time will tell as the debate rages on. But if history serves as any sort of lesson, we could be standing on the threshold of a new flap of covert media manipulation. Sources "The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered it Up," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.55-67. "CIA in America," CounterSpy, Spring 1980, p. 42-43. "Washington Post -- Speaking for Whom?" CounterSpy, May-July 1981, p. 13-19. Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: the CIA in a Democratic Society, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 182-311. "'Loophole Revealed in Prohibition on CIA Use of Journalistic Cover," New York Times, February 16, 1996, p. A24. "Making Intelligence Smarter," report of a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1996. "Disinformation and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Spring-Summer 1983, p. 3-12. "The CIA's use of the press: a 'mighty Wurlitzer,'" Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1974, p. 9-18. http://www.911-strike.com/CIAinmedia.htm
O'Reilly's Information Tech CIA Connection ::: Download Presentation
In-Q-Tel, Inc. is a private, venture capital firm chartered by the CIA. In-Q-Tel strives to extend the Agency's access to new IT companies, solutions, and approaches to address their priority In-Q-Tel invests in technologies that addresses critical CIA needs, and can03:32:16AM also Page 33 ofproblems. 45 Julthat 14, 2016 MDT
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IT companies, solutions, and approaches to address their priority problems. In-Q-Tel invests in technologies that addresses critical CIA needs, and that can also become commercially viable. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2002/view/e_sess/2282 ®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. The Alex Constantine Article Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD 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
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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 former Village 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 tha__t "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. Page 35 of 45
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One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Blücher, 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 Düsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in 1982, von Blücher 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 Page 36 ofage 45
of Big Brother. George Orwell glimpsed the possibilities when he installed omniscient Jul 14, 2016 video 03:32:16AM MDT
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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 transistorhas 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 Page 37 ofseries 45
that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People and Politics, "study" Jul 14,a2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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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. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." -- President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® Massive Media: Facts and Figures http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/fcc.html Page 38 of 45
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The world of the mass media is shrinking. How a handful of companies came to exercise such control over the media is one of the astonishing stories of our time. But there are real consequences to what's happening that affect democracy and consumers.
Merging Media Approximate number of newspapers in North America: 1800 Approximate number of magazines in North America: 11,000 Approximate number of radio stations in North America: 11,000 Approximate number of television stations in North America: 2000 Approximate number of book publishers in North America: 3000 Number of companies owning a controlling interest in the media listed above in 1984: 50 Number of companies owning a controlling interest in the media listed above in 1987: 26 Number of companies owning a controlling interest in the media listed above in 1996: 10
The Massing of the Media
# THE LAW: Many media watchers point to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as crucial to the growth of media giants. The Act lowered some long-standing limits on the number of media outlets that any one company could own in any single market. For television there's currently a cap limiting any one company from reaching more than 35 percent of the national audience. The Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) website has a complete listing of public hearings on this issue and a facility for filing comments online.
# TELEVISION: The U.S. seems awash with TV choices. Between cable, dish and digital channels, choices number in the hundreds. A recent study by THE ECONOMIST found that though the market continues to grow, most people routinely watch only 15 channels. The top ten cable channels and the five networks still make up 90% of the watching audience. And what are they watching? American cable fare breaks down as follows:
# Entertainment ................36.6% # Children's programming .21.1% # News ...............................14.1% # Nature/Education ............11.1% # Women .............................7.0% # Music ...............................5.4% # Sport ............................... 4.7% Page 39 of 45
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# NEWS: A few years ago, newspeople were lamenting the results of a study by Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy which showed a marked decrease in international news coverage from 45% in the 1970s to just 14% in 1995. In the wake of September 11, some news organizations were revitalized. Overseas bureaus were saved from closure and hard news seemed important again but the companies lost money. Just this week, CNN announced its biggest prime-time audience of 2002 for...the arrest of Robert Blake.
Media analysis Andrew Tyndall watches the news every night and publishes the results in the Tyndall Report. Here's a round-up of the top stories on the three big networks for selected weeks past from the Tyndall Report:
July 19-31, 2001 (av. number of minutes): # Disappearance of Chandra Levy (24 minutes) # Human embryo stem cell research (14 minutes) # Shark attacks (14 minutes)
April 8-12, 2002 # Enron bankruptcy (12 minutes) # Anti-U.S. sentiment in Islamic world (10 minutes) # Catholic pedophile priests (10 minutes) October 14-18, 2002 # DC sniper (76 minutes) # Iraq: Saddam Hussein (28 minutes) # Bali bombings (19 minutes)
Andrew Tyndall also recently completed an evaluation of three major cable news networks for THE NEWSHOUR WITH JIM LEHRER. Although he found that the three had different presentations and viewpoints the news they covered was similar in content (and very male-dominated). Read the whole report at Cable News Wars.
# BOOKS: Big media holds sway over more than the airwaves, many conglomerates have interest in major publishing houses as well. # TimeWarner -- Warner Books/Little Brown/Time-Life # Viacom -- Simon and Schuster/Pocket Books, etc. # Bertelsmann is the largest book publisher in the United States # Walt Disney -- Hyperion/Talk Miramax Books # Vivendi International -- Houghton Mifflin
Links and add'l info: Page 40 of 45
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Telecommunications Act of 1996 The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in almost 62 years. The goal of this new law is to let anyone enter any communications business -- to let any communications business compete in any market against any other. http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html
Milestones in the History of Media and Politics
Robert McChesney comments, "And the founding fathers...their legacy here is very rich. They understood that setting up a diverse, well funded media system with a broad range of viewpoints was the essence of building of the oxygen for democracy. And it took conscious policies. It didn't happen naturally you had to work at it." What events have shaped the media's role in reporting politics since the beginning of American history? And how has the press developed in the years since the Bill of Rights outlined its freedoms? NOW's history of media and politics takes us to the early recorded instances of journalism for some background.
In Renaissance Europe, newsletters containing information about everything from wars and economic conditions to social customs were handwritten and circulated among merchants. By the late 1400's, the first printed forerunners of the newspaper appeared in Germany as pamphlets or broadsides, often highly sensationalized in content. In the English-speaking world, the first successfully published title was THE WEEKLY NEWES. View the front page of CORANT OR WEEKLY NEWES, FROM ITALY, GERMANY, HUNGARIA, POLONIA, BOHEMIA, FRANCE, AND THE LOW-COUNTRIES published in London on October 11, 1621. In the 1640's and 50's, it was followed by a multitude of different titles in the similar newsbook format. Another prominent early paper (today the oldest continually published paper in the world) was the LONDON GAZETTE. See the GAZETTE coverage of the Great Fire of London.
Publication of information about contemporary affairs began in North America in the early 18th century, but they did not yet resemble the newspapers of today. In fact, at first, the notion that "news" should provide timely accounts of recent events was not self-evident. Read about some of the milestones in America's history of media and politics: More: http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/mediahistory.html
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®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® FCC and Media Deregulation sites: Below are sites which contain more information about the issue of media deregulation and ways to take action on either side of the issue. The FCC site provides an area to make views on deregulation known, and provides contact information for the agency.
Center for Digital Democracy The Web site of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving media diversity, provides information regarding the issue of media concentration. The Center highlights the 1945 Supreme Court decision (Associated Press v. United States) which maintains that mergers that narrow the dissemination of information are unconstitutional. Other features include press headlines, articles, and resource links.
Colombia Journalism Review: Who Owns What? "Who Owns What?" by the Colombia Journalism Review (CJR) features a list of media conglomerates and what they own. The page also provides a selected list of articles from the CJR archive on media concentration.
Consumer Federation of America The Consumer Federation of America provides press releases, studies, brochures, and testimony to educate the American public about telecommunications issues and to advocate for pro-consumer policies.
Consumers Union: Nonprofit Publisher of Consumer Reports The Consumers Union Web page, devoted to telephone-telecommunications regulation, provides a long list of articles, studies, and research describing how the deregulation of the telecommunications industry in 1996 has hurt consumers.
Economic and Political Consequences of the 1996 Telecommunications Act Thomas Hazlett of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the 1996 Telecommunications Act resulted both in benefits to consumers and in "megamergers" that have benefited stockholders and market function. He contends that increased competition in the market had an effect on the political process, where the Telecommunications industry outspent all other industries in political contributions.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) The Federal Communication Commission is an independent government organization Page 42 ofaccountable 45
to Congress. The FCC regulates "interstate and international communications by Jul 14, 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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accountable to Congress. The FCC regulates "interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable" within U.S. jurisdiction. The FCC Web site features a special section on media ownership which includes information on the Broadcast-Newspaper Cross-Ownership Rule and the Local Radio Ownership Rule in the form of announcements, press releases, and policy studies.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 This Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Web page is devoted to the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996, which promoted deregulation of the telecommunication industry (cable, long distance telephone service, local telephone service, and broadband) to create a competitive communications market and deliver better services and prices to consumers. The Web site features the complete text of the legislation and provides relevant FCC materials related to the implementation and guidelines of the Act.
FRONTLINE: The Merchants of Cool - Media Giants On PBS.org, the FRONTLINE Web site features a diagram of the seven largest media conglomerates and their numerous holdings. This information is provided within a larger context, asking how media mega-mergers and the products they sell affect children's psychological development. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/giants/
What's Wrong With This Picture? Crispin Miller of THE NATION magazine describes and analyzes the media cartel that has integrated all cultural industries into a few large corporations. Miller fears that American culture will become more homogenous with less dissent and fewer independent voices.. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020107&s=miller
FCC and Media Deregulation sites: http://www.pbs.org/now/resources/fcc.html
And having justified Bush/Cheney's coup, the media continue to betray American democracy. Media devoted to the public interest would investigate the poor performance by the CIA, the FBI, the FAA and the CDC, so that those agencies might be improved for our protection--but the news teams (just like Congress) haven't bothered to look into it. So, too, in the public interest, should the media report on all the current threats to our security--including those far-rightists targeting abortion clinics and, apparently, conducting bioterrorism; but the telejournalists are unconcerned (just like John Ashcroft). So should the media highlight, not play down, this government's attack on civil liberties--the mass detentions, secret evidence, increased surveillance, suspension of attorney-client privilege, the encouragements to spy, the warnings not to disagree, the censored images, sequestered public papers, unexpected visits from the Secret Service and so on. And so should the media not parrot what the Pentagon says about the current war, because such prettified accounts make us complacent and preserve us Page 43 ofin 45our
fatal ignorance of what people really think of us--and why--beyond our borders. Jul 14, And 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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in our fatal ignorance of what people really think of us--and why--beyond our borders. And there's much more--about the stunning exploitation of the tragedy, especially by the Republicans; about the links between the Bush and the bin Laden families; about the ongoing shenanigans in Florida--that the media would let the people know, if they were not (like Michael Powell) indifferent to the public interest.
In short, the news divisions of the media cartel appear to work against the public interest--and for their parent companies, their advertisers and the Bush Administration. The situation is completely un-American. It is the purpose of the press to help us run the state, and not the other way around. As citizens of a democracy, we have the right and obligation to be well aware of what is happening, both in "the homeland" and the wider world. Without such knowledge we cannot be both secure and free. We therefore must take steps to liberate the media from oligopoly, so as to make the government our own. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020107&c=2&s=miller
Media Access Project is a non-profit, public interest law firm which promotes the public's First Amendment right to hear and be heard on the electronic media of today and tomorrow. http://www.mediaaccess.org/
ACT NOW.... TOP ISSUES: http://www.mediaaccess.org/programs/ ®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§®¢§® "If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it." -- Anton Chekov "Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it." -- Robert F. Kennedy "A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war." -- Ayn Rand "What distinguishes the New Right from other American reactionary movements and what it shares with the early phase of German fascism, is its incorporation of conservative impulses into a system of representation consisting largely of media techniques and media images." Philip Bishop: "The New Right and the Media" "I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Page 44 ofSecond 45
Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my Jul time a 14, being 2016 03:32:16AM MDT
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Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." -- Major General Smedley Butler, 1933
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell MetaMagic MediaMinistry @ Abracadabra Communications http://metamagic.org Hidden Elitist Conspiracies? Visit BeamShip MUTANEX http://mutanex.com News of the Strange & Supernatural Mark Fiore's FlashToon ::: "Preemptive Diplomacy" http://metamagic.org/strange Operation Mockingbird (Continued) http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird2.htm
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OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD Part 2
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Operation Mockingbird 3-24-00 Operation Mockingbird The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA http://www.psychicspy.com/ciamed.txt "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. The Alex Constantine Article Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD 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 Page 1 of 5of
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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 former Village 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 point 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 f__ind 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 tha__t "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 Blcher, the son of A German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that that he was Page 2 of 5trained
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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 Dsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Dsseldorf in 1982, von Blcher 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 {{ Anniversary of Terror: October 12 - Operation Octopus I was reminded this morning - as if
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could ever forget - by a newsman that October 11 would mark the one-month Jul 14, 2016 03:33:31AM MDT
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anyone could ever forget - by a newsman that October 11 would mark the one-month anniversary of the terrorist attack on America. Memorial services will be held in New York and Washington for the victims http://www.theperspective.org/octopus.html ]] 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. Page 4 of 5
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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. -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD Part 3
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How the Washington Post Censors the News [Note: Look for the paragraph indicated by asterisks] How the Washington Post Censors the News A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes ________________ April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability -- the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post Page 1 of 21
came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, Jul two14,years 2016 03:34:41AM MDT
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Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [fo rWorld War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain Page 2 of 21
to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near03:34:41AM the Jul 14, 2016 MDT
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certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S.attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. RoyFitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, Page 3 of 21
deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on 2016 women a Jul 14, 03:34:41AM MDT
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"stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Page 4 of 21
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow in Jul by 14, the 2016CIA 03:34:41AM MDT
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British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50). Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such Page 5 of 21
conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode -Jul 14, 2016 03:34:41AM MDT
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such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode -depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquital mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". Page 6 of 21
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out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction".
When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) -- facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to providematerial for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, "Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. ************************** Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed official Page 7 of 21 Julin 14,his 2016 03:34:41AM MDT
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personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). ****************** Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs -- a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies? The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column -- ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't".
Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Page 8 of 21 Jul 14,Crime". 2016 03:34:41AM MDT
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Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured byjournalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth -- revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98).
Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish Page 9 of 21 Jul 14, 2016 03:34:41AM MDT
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both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel -- like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "acombination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others. _______________________
Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 Page 10 of 21
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2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26,1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letterto-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra -- The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988. Page 11 of7a. 21
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7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. 8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10016. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 12. See note 5a, p.180-1. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. -- Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. Page 12 ofImprisonment 21 Jul 14, 2016 03:34:41AM MDT
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Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. 16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard-- The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend -- Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus --Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. Page 13 of29. 21
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29. "BCCI -- NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. 32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 34. See note 33, p.136-7. 35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 36. See note 33, p.164-171. 37. See note 33, p.172-180. 38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 39. See note 33, p.217. 40. See note 33, p.235. 41. See note 33, p.277-288. 42. See note 33, p.323. 43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 44. William Blum, The CIA -- A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 46. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. Page 14 of48b. 21
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48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1. 50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. 54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21,1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A.Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. Page 15 of60. 21
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60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. 62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America -- The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 64. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories -- When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned -- Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't -- In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire -- In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. Page 16 of65l. 21
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65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! -- Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts -- Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories -- Good on Film, But the Motivation Is AllWrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie -- America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken -- Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247. 67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy -- The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. Page 17 of 21
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67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 69. See note 65b. 70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 72. See note 65c. 73. See note 65i. 74. See note 67e, p.438-450. 75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day -- 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission -- Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship -- Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983. 79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men -- A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Page 18 ofPublisher 21
Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. Jul 14, 2016 03:34:41AM MDT
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Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 80. Benjamin C. Brad lee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 81. See note 79d, p.119-132. 82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media -- How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's twosentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 84. See note 79d, p.131. 85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 86. "conspire", 4Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 88. See note 65y. 89. See note 65n. 90. See note 65d. 91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 93. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry AgranJulin14, 28. In those Page 19 ofletters, 21 2016 03:34:41AM MDT
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letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court -- Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 99. See note 86. 100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post, April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977. NOTES A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham's attempt to suppress the Davis book,"Katherine The Great,", which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal's, "Power and Page 20 ofPrivilege 21
at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story."
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Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story." For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is "All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story," by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye. An additional good short reference is "The CIA's Greatest Hits" by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein's classic "The CIA and the Media" which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, 1977. Still another recent example of the CIA's control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton's & Roger Morris' story," THE CRIMES OF MENA" by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed without any explanation.
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American History > The Assassination of JFK >
Operation Mockingbird In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. 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 the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) : "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 organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative". One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), C. D. Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), Walter Winchell (New York Daily Mirror), Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, William Allen White, Edgar Ansel Mowrer (Chicago Daily News), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Whitelaw Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles L. Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh, the author of A Very Private Woman, (1998) these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work. After 1953 the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Helen Rogers Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Dorothy Schiff (New York Post), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Barry Bingham (Louisville Courier-Journal) and James S. Copley (Copley News Services).
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The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning of funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers. Frank Wisner was constantly looked for ways to help convince the public of the dangers of communism. In 1954 Wisner arranged for the funding the Hollywood production of Animal Farm, the animated allegory based on the book written by George Orwell. According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts". Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala.
Henry Luce, the owner of a large media empire, became a key figure in Operation Mockingbird. David Halberstam has pointed out in The Powers That Be (1979): "Luce's politics hardened in the postwar years and Time had become increasingly Republican in its tone. He had been stunned by Truman's defeat of Dewey in 1948. Then in the fall of 1949 China had fallen, the Democratic administration had failed to save Chiang, and that was too much; Truman, and even more Acheson, would have to pay the price. Time was now committed and politicized, an almost totally partisan instrument. The smell of blood was in the air. There was a hunger now in Luce to put a Republican back in power. It was as if Luce, between elections, stood as the leader of the opposition, a kingmaker who had failed to produce a king. The fall of China and the rise of a post-war anti-Communist mood had produced the essential issue to use against the Democrats: softness on Communism." Luce used his magazines to get Dwight D. Eisenhower elected as president. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed Clare Booth Luce ambassador to Italy; the first American woman ambassador to a major country. Claudio Accogli, a Italian historian, argues that luce was heavily involved in covert anti-communist activities with local cia personnel. Larry Hancock adds: "With no-holds barred political activism and heavy spending (including the support of the SIFAR/Italian Army Secret Service), Luce and the CIA managed to block the probable takeover of the center-left governments, an alliance between Christian Democrats (DC) and the Socialist Democratic Party (PSI)." Jonathan P. Herzog, the author of The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War (2011), has argued that Luce was motivated by his religious faith: "While he counted anti-Communists like Mundt, Cardinal Spellman, and Chambers as allies, he viewed the Communist threat differently. In his view, it was a symptom and not a disease. Like his wife, Clare, he understood faith as a psychological imperative sought by all people. If religious faith waned, other dogmas would take its place. The success of Communism, then, was not attributable to its message but rather to the fact that it offered people the spiritual certainty they no longer found in Christianity. All the shocking anti-Communist propaganda and shopworn tributes to democracy that America could muster would fail to arrest the Marxian surge. But if Americans filled the spiritual vacuum, if they made religious faith commensurate with military and economic power, then Communism would dissipate." Warren Hinckle has argued: "Henry Luce believed that a morally slanted press was a responsible press... Life, the flagship picture book of the Luce fleet, afforded photojournalism some of its finest moments, while the text accompanying the pictures that were worth thousands of words was slanted with an ideological warp sufficient to stir Caxton in his grave." The cartoonist, Herbert Block, was equally critical: "Luce's unique contribution to American journalism... is that he placed into the hands of the people yesterday's newspaper and today's garbage homogenized into one neat package. (If you are enjoying this article, please feel free to share. You can follow John Simkin on Twitter and Google+ or subscribe to our monthly newsletter.) http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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Thomas Braden, head of the of 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." In August, 1952, the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged to form the Directorate of Plans (DPP). Frank Wisner became head of this new organization and Richard Helms became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DPP. J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the CIA's growing power. He described the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to 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. Joseph McCarthy also began accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists" and claimed he intended to 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 Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added to the smear by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and both came to his defence and refused to permit a FBI interrogation of Meyer. Joseph McCarthy did not realise what he was taking on. Wisner unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all went into attack mode and McCarthy was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner. Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. People like Henry Luce was able to censor stories that appeared too sympathetic towards the plight of Arbenz. Allen W. Dulles was even able to keep left-wing journalists from travelling to Guatemala. This including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times. Frank Wisner was also interested in influencing Hollywood. As Hugh Wilford points out in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008): “Fortunately for the CIA, two factors predisposed the major Hollywood studios that dominated the industry to take a responsible position in the cultural Cold War. One was a strong tendency toward self-censorship, the result of many years' experience avoiding the commercially disastrous effects of giving offense to either domestic pressure groups like the American Legion or foreign audiences. The other was the fact that the men who ran the studios were intensely patriotic and anticommunist - they saw it as their duty to help their government defeat the Soviet threat." Frank Wisner was helped by the fact that the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, was carrying out an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses". During their interviews they named nineteen people who they accused of holding left-wing views. http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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One of those named, Bertolt Brecht, a playwright, gave evidence and then left for East Germany. Ten others: Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any questions and were sent to prison and were blacklisted from the industry. The CIA and FBI also provided right-wing television producer, Vincent Harnett, with information about leftwing figures in the industry. In June 1950 Harnett published Red Channels, a pamphlet listing the names of 151 writers, directors and performers who they claimed had been members of subversive organisations before the Second World War but had not so far been blacklisted. Lee J. Cobb was one of those actors who was originally blacklisted but eventually cooperated with the HUAC: “When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit - being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HCUA did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again.” According to Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper? (2000), Frank Wisner recruited several important figures for Operation Mockingbird. This included former OSS filmmaker John Ford and studio bosses Cecil B. DeMille (Paramount Pictures) and Darryl Zanuck (Twentieth Century-Fox). Another important figure in this group was Howard Hughes, the boss of RKO Pictures. As Charles Higham points out in Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (2004), this was also good for business: “Hughes’s crusade against Communism” was “exacerbated by his desire to have Hughes Aircraft profit from the Korean and any future anti-Soviet wars”. For example, in June 1950, General Ira Eaker "signed an across-the-board agreement giving Hughes a monopoly in interceptors for the U.S. Air Force… despite the fact that it was in breach of the Sherman anti-monopolies act… By the end of 1950, the war had made Hughes even richer than before.” Another important figure in this conspiracy was C. D. Jackson. He had joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1943. The following year he was appointed Deputy Chief at the Psychological Warfare Division at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). After the war, he became Managing Director of Time-Life International. When it became clear that Dwight D. Eisenhower stood a good chance of becoming president, the CIA arranged for Jackson to join his campaign. This involved Jackson writing speeches for Eisenhower. Jackson was rewarded in February 1953 by being appointed as Special Assistant to the President. This included the role of Eisenhower's liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon. According to the Eisenhower Presidential Library files in Abilene, Kansas, Jackson's "area responsibility was loosely defined as international affairs, cold war planning, and psychological warfare. His main function was the coordination of activities aimed at interpreting world situations to the best advantage of the United States and her allies and exploiting incidents which reflected negatively on the Soviet Union , Communist China and other enemies in the Cold War." Jackson was also involved in Operation Mockingbird. This was revealed after the death of Jackson. On December 15, 1971, Mrs. C.D. Jackson gave her husband’s papers to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. This included details that Jackson was in contact with a CIA agent in Hollywood's Paramount Studios. The agent is not named by Jackson but Frances Stonor Saunders claims in Who Paid the Piper? (2000) that it was Carleton Alsop, a CIA agent employed by Frank Wisner. There is no doubt that Alsop was one of the CIA agents working at Paramount. However, Hugh Wilford argues in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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America (2008) that it was a senior executive at Paramount, Lugi G. Laraschi, was the most important CIA figure at the studio. Laraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship at the studio, whose job was to "iron out any political, moral or religious problems". Other studios, including MGM and RKO, had similar officers, and were probably CIA placements. In a private letter to Sherman Adams, Jackson claims the role of these CIA placements was "to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with the proper subtlety". Although the main objective of Operation Mockingbird was to influence the production of commercial films the CIA also occasionally initiated film projects. The best documented instance of this concerns an animated version of Animal Farm, a satirical allegory about Stalinism by George Orwell. The book was highly popular when it was published in 1945 and it was only natural that the studios should be interested in making a film of the book. The problem for the CIA was that Orwell was a socialist whose book attacked both communism and capitalism. Therefore, it was important to make a film that restricted it to a condemnation of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. In 1950 Wisner’s OPC arranged for Joe Bryan to recruit anti-communist documentary-maker Louis de Rochemont to produce a movie version of the tale. It was decided to get the film made in Britain to disguise CIA involvement in the project. Rochemont employed the British animation studio of husband and wife John Halas and Joy Batchelor to make the film. Most of the funding came from a CIA shell corporation, Touchstone. E. Howard Hunt was one of those agents involved in the production of the film whose role was to remove the socialist elements in Orwell’s allegory. One unnamed member of the OPC sent a letter to John Halas called for the addition of scenes showing the other farms (that represented capitalist countries) in a more flattering light. The most important demand was to change the ending of Animal Farm. The CIA did not like the scene where the pigs and dogs face a liberation-style uprising of the other animals. The letter included the following: “It is reasonable to expect that if Orwell were to write the book today, it would be considerably different and that the changes would tend to make it even more positively anti-Communist and possibly somewhat more favorable to the Western powers.” One of the main concerns of the CIA was the portrayal of race-relations in Hollywood movies. It was argued that the left was using this issue to undermine the idea that America was a democracy based on equal rights. Letters from Jackson sent to the producers of films called for scenes showing African Americans mixing on equal terms with whites. One of Jackson’s proposals involved “planting black spectators in a crowd watching a golf game in the Martin and Lewis comedy The Caddy”. In 1955 Graham Greene published The Quiet American. The novel is set in Vietnam and involves the relationship between Thomas Fowler and Alden Pyle. Fowler is a veteran British journalist in his fifties, who has been covering the war in Vietnam for over two years. Pyle, the “Quiet American” of the title, is officially an aid worker, but is really employed by the CIA. It is believed that the Pyle character is partly based on that of Edward Lansdale. Greene had worked for the British Secret Service during the Second World War. Although a fairly successful novelist at the time, Greene was also employed by The Times and Le Figaro as a journalist. Between 1951 to 1954 spent a long period of time in Saigon. In 1953 Lansdale became a CIA advisor on special counter-guerrilla operations to French forces against the Viet Minh. While it is true that Graham Greene admitted that he never had the "misfortune to meet" Lansdale, the two men did know a lot about each other. Lansdale recalls that in 1954 he had dinner with Peg and Tilman Durdin at the Continental Hotel in Saigon. Greene was also there having a meal with several French officers. Lansdale claims that after he and the Durdins were leaving, Greene said something in French to his companions and the men began booing him. http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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Lansdale definitely thought that Pyle was based on him. He told Cecil B. Currey on 15th February, 1984: "Pyle was close to Trinh Minh Thé, the guerrilla leader, and also had a dog that went with him everywhere - and I was the only American close to Trinh Minh Thé and my poodle Pierre went everything with me." In the book Pyle is sent to Vietnam by his government, ostensibly as a member of the American Economic Mission, but that assignment was only a cover for his real role as a CIA agent. According to one critic "Pyle was the embodiment of well-meaning American-style politics, and he blundered through the intrigue, treachery, and confusion of Vietnamese politics, leaving a trail of blood and suffering behind him." As Fowler points out in the novel, Pyle was attempting to "win the East for Democracy". However, according to Fowler, what the people of Vietnam really wanted was "enough rice" to eat. What is more: "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want." When the book was published in the United States in 1956 it was condemned as anti-American. Pyle (Lansdale) is portrayed as someone whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions. It was criticized by The New Yorker for portraying Americans as murderers. The director, producer and screenwriter, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was chosen to make the film of The Quiet American. He visited Saigon in 1956 and was introduced to Edward Lansdale, whose cover was working at the International Rescue Committee’s office. The most controversial scene in the book is the bombing of a Saigon square in 1952 by a Vietnamese associate of Lansdale’s, General Trinh Minh Thé. In the novel, Greene suggests that Pyle/Lansdale, was behind the bombing. Lansdale suggested to Mankiewicz that the film should show that the bombing was “actually having been a Communist action”. When he returned home Mankiewicz wrote to John O’Daniel, the chairman of the American Friends of Vietnam that he intended to completely change the anti-American attitude of Greene’s book. This included the casting of Second World War hero, Audie Murphy, as Alden Pyle. In a letter that Edward Lansdale wrote to Ngo Dinh Diem he praised Mankiewicz’s treatment of the story as “an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel of despair” and “that it will help win more friends for you and Vietnam in many places in the world where it is shown." As Hugh Wilford pointed out: “It was a brilliantly devious maneuver of postmodern literary complexity: by helping to rewrite a story featuring a character reputedly based on himself, Lansdale had transformed an anti-American tract into a cinematic apology for U.S. policy - and his own actions-in Vietnam.” Graham Greene was furious with Mankiewicz’s treatment of his novel. "Far was it from my mind, when I wrote The Quiet American that the book would become a source of spiritual profit to one of the most corrupt governments in Southeast Asia." In 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower established the 5412 Committee in order to keep 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 Defence and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were "proper" and in the national interest. It was also decided to include Richard B. Russell, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible deniability" planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee. Dwight Eisenhower became concerned about CIA covert activities and in 1956 appointed David 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 20th December, 1956. Bruce argued that the CIA's covert actions were "responsible in great measure for stirring up the turmoil and http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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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 handling money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office." After Richard Bissell lost his post as Director of Plans in 1962, Tracy Barnes took over the running of Mockingbird. According to Evan Thomas (The Very Best Men) Barnes planted editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA. It has been argued by Larry Hancock, the author of Someone Would Have Talked (2006), that Virginia Prewett was a close associate of David Attlee Phillips and was involved in promoting the activities of Alpha 66, led by Antonio Veciana: "Virginia Prewett appears to have been one of Phillips' significant media contacts and certainly one of the most consistent sources of media coverage for Alpha 66 activities. The other major source was Life magazine, part of the Luce Media family managed by Claire Booth Luce's husband Henry Robinson "Harry" Luce (a member of the Citizens Committee to Free Cuba, along with Phillips' friends Hal Hendrix and Paul Bethel). Articles by Prewitt and editorials by Time-Life provided the strongest challenge to the Kennedy position on Cuba and were quite consistent with the type of embarrass and back-to-the wall agendas Veciana attributed to Maurice Bishop." In September, 1963, Hal Hendrix joined Scripps-Howard News Service as a Latin American specialist. Instead of moving to Washington he remained in Miami "where his contacts were". In an article on 24th September, 1963, Hendrix was able to describe and justify the coup that overthrew Juan Bosch, the president of Dominican Republic. The only problem was the coup took place on the 25th September. Some journalists claimed that Hendrix must have got this information from the CIA. A few hours after John F. Kennedy had been killed, Hendrix provided background information to a colleague, Seth Kantor, about Lee Harvey Oswald. This included details of his defection to the Soviet Union and his work for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This surprised Kantor because he had this information before it was released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation later that evening.
Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia
William E. Kelly later explained: "Seith Kantor, a local Dallas reporter who was in the Press Bus in the motorcade, knew something was wrong as they rode through Dealey Plaza, but the bus driver refused to follow the rest of the motorcade to Parkland Hospital and instead drove to their original destination, the Dallas Trade Mart. Once there however, Kantor got a ride to Parkand Hospital, where he interviewed a number of local Dallas officials and had a brief conversation with Jack Ruby, who had frequently fed Kantor interesting leads he developed into feature articles. While the Warren Commission rejected http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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Kantor’s sworn testimony that Ruby was at Parkland, Kantor did make some phone calls, including one to his editor at the Scripps-Howard News Service (SHNS), and there are records of these calls. Years later, in 1975, Kantor learned that the records of one of the phone calls on that day was classified for reasons of national security, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and obtained them to find out the big secret. He discovered that after taking to his editor, he was told to call another SHNS correspondent in Florida, Harold "Hal" Hendrix. From Florida, Hendrix supplied Kantor with detailed background information on Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just been arrested and named as the chief suspect in the assassination. Hendrix had more information in Florida than Kantor did at the scene of the crime, and we later learn why Kantor’s call to Hendrix was considered worthy of being classified for reasons of national security." When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Charles Douglas Jackson purchased the Zapruder Film on behalf of Henry Luce. The author, David Lifton, points out in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2004) that: "Abraham Zapruder in fact sold the film to Time-Life for the sum of $150,000 - about $900,000 dollars in today's money... Moreover, although Life had a copy of the film, it did little to maximize the return on its extraordinary investment. Specifically, it did not sell this unique property - as a film - to any broadcast media or permit it to be seen in motion, the logical way to maximize the financial return on its investment... A closer look revealed something else. The film wasn't just sold to Life - the person whose name was on the agreement was C. D. Jackson." Luce published individual frames of Zapruder's film but did not allow the film to be screened in its entirety. Soon after the assassination Charles Douglas Jackson also successfully negotiated with Marina Oswald the exclusive rights to her story. Peter Dale Scott argues in his book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1996) that Jackson, on the urging of Allen Dulles, employed Isaac Don Levine, a veteran CIA publicist, to ghostwrite Marina's story. This story never appeared in print. In 1963, John McCone, the director of the CIA, discovered that Random House intended to publish Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross. McCone discovered that the book intended to look at his links with the Military Industrial Congress Complex. The authors also claimed that the CIA was having a major influence on American foreign policy. This included the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954). The book also covered the role that the CIA played in the Bay of Pigs operation, the attempts to remove President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam. McCone called in Wise and Ross to demand deletions on the basis of galleys the CIA had secretly obtained from Random House. The authors refused to made these changes and Random House decided to go ahead and publish the book. 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. McCone now formed a special group to deal with the book and tried to arrange for it to get bad reviews. It was the first full account of America's intelligence and espionage apparatus. In the book Wise and Ross argued that the "Invisible Government is made up of many agencies and people, including the intelligence branches of the State and Defense Departments, of the Army, Navy and Air Force". However, they claimed that the most important organization involved in this process was the CIA. John McCone also attempted to stop Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary.
In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, was planning to publish that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association. http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. 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." This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing this story 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 it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. It named Cord Meyer as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary journal Encounter. In May 1967 Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article entitled, I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral, in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress. As he pointed out in the article: "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." Meyer's role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. The book was highly critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer's when he was a liberal activist after the war. Further details of Operation Mockingbird was revealed as a result of the 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." Church argued that the cost of misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year. Frank Church showed that it was CIA policy to use clandestine handling of journalists and authors to get information published initially in the foreign media in order to get it disseminated in the United States. Church quotes from one document written by the Chief of the Covert Action Staff on how this process worked (page 193). For example, he writes: “Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publicans or booksellers.” Later in the document he writes: “Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability”. Church goes onto report that “over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967”. All these books eventually found their way into the American market-place. Either in their original form (Church gives the example of the Penkovskiy Papers) or repackaged as articles for American newspapers and magazines. In another document published in 1961 the Chief of the Agency’s propaganda unit wrote: “The advantage of our direct contact with the author is that we can acquaint him in great detail with our intentions; that we can provide him with whatever material we want him to include and that we can check the manuscript http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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at every stage… (the Agency) must make sure the actual manuscript will correspond with our operational and propagandistic intention.” Church quotes Thomas H. Karamessines as saying: “If you plant an article in some paper overseas, and it is a hard-hitting article, or a revelation, there is no way of guaranteeing that it is not going to be picked up and published by the Associated Press in this country” (page 198). By analyzing CIA documents Church was able to identify over 50 U.S. journalists who were employed directly by the Agency. He was aware that there were a lot more who enjoyed a very close relationship with the CIA who were “being paid regularly for their services, to those who receive only occasional gifts and reimbursements from the CIA” (page 195). Church pointed out that this was probably only the tip of the iceberg because the CIA refused to “provide the names of its media agents or the names of media organizations with which they are connected” (page 195). Church was also aware that most of these payments were not documented. This was the main point of the Otis Pike Report. If these payments were not documented and accounted for, there must be a strong possibility of financial corruption taking place. This includes the large commercial contracts that the CIA was responsible for distributing. Pike’s report actually highlighted in 1976 what eventually emerged in the 1980s via the activities of CIA operatives such as Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, Ted Shackley, Raphael Quintero, Richard Secord and Felix Rodriguez. Church also identified E. Howard Hunt as an important figure in Operation Mockingbird. He points out how Hunt arranged for books to be reviewed by certain writers in the national press. He gives the example of how Hunt arranged for a “CIA writer under contract” to write a hostile review of a Edgar Snow book in the New York Times (page 198). Church comes up with this conclusion to his examination of this issue: “In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.” In February, 1976, George 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.” However, he added that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Carl Bernstein, who had worked with Bob Woodward in the investigation of Watergate, provided further information about Operation Mockingbird in an article in The Rolling Stone in October, 1977. Bernstein claimed that over a 25 year period over 400 American journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA: "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 it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad." It is almost certain that Bernstein had encountered Operation Mockingbird while working on his Watergate investigation. For example, Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great) has argued that Deep Throat was senior CIA official, Richard Ober, who was running Operation Chaos for Richard Nixon during this period.
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On 18th September, 1976, Orlando Letelier, who served as foreign minister under Salvador Allende, was traveling to work at the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington when a bomb was ignited under his car. Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, a 25 year old woman who was campaigning for democracy in Chile, both died of their injuries. According to Gaeton Fonzi, the author of The Last Investigation (1993), Virginia Prewett, who was working for the Council for Inter-American Security, a right-wing think tank, attacked the journalists who assumed that Chilean generals were involved in murdering Letelier. "She, too, suggested that Letelier may have been sacrificed by leftists to turn world opinion and U.S. policy against the Pinochet regime." According to researchers such as Steve Kangas, Angus Mackenzie and Alex Constantine, Operation Mockingbird was not closed down by the CIA in 1976. For example, in 1998 Kangas argued that CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife ran "Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world." On 8th February, 1999, Kangas was found dead in the bathroom of the Pittsburgh offices of Scaife. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: "Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?
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By John Simkin ([email protected]) © September 1997 (updated August 2014).
Primary Sources (1) Thomas Braden, Saturday Evening Post (20th May, 1967)
In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our (CIA) projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare. (2) John Playford, Political Scientists and the CIA, Australian Left Review (1968)
The role of US trade unions and student bodies in Cold War, projects inspired and financed by the huge, international agency of subversion known as the Central Intelligence Agency, is now widely known in Australia. Far less publicity has been given to the ties that were shown to exist between the CIA and the US Information Agency (USIA), the propaganda arm of the US government, while nothing at all has appeared in the press on the links revealed between the USIA and Dr. Evron M. Kirkpatrick, Executive Director of the prestigious American Political Science Association (APSA), which has a membership of about 16,000. 4 Before being appointed the first full-time Executive Director of APSA in 1954, Kirkpatrick held a succession of senior posts in the State Department: Chief of the External Research Staff 1948-52, Chief of the Psychological Intelligence and Research Staff 1952-54, and Deputy Director of the Office of Intelligence Research 1954. In 1956 he edited Target: The World Communist Propaganda Activities in 1955, which was published by the Macmillan Co. of New York. In the Preface, he drew attention to the fact that the US Government had devoted systematic attention to research on Communist propaganda: http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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“Many social scientists are aware of the work the government is doing and have seen some of its results; many have participated in it. The present volume has been made possible only by drawing upon this government research, and it is the product, therefore, of the work of many people.” In the following year, Kirkpatrick edited and Macmillan published a companion volume entitled Year of Crisis - Communist Propaganda Activities in 1956. Both works bear all the earmarks of a USIA operation... Kirkpatrick has also been President of Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR) since its formation in 1955. A non-profit research organisation set up by a group of social Scientists, lawyers and businessmen to help the USIA distribute more persuasive and polished literature both in the US and abroad, OPR reads and gives expert opinion on books which USIA then plants with publishers, without the sponsorship being publicized. It employed on a part-time basis, according to Kirkpatrick, more than a hundred social scientists, many of them members of APSA. Sol Stern has correctly summed up OPR as “a Cold War-oriented strategy organization.” Kirkpatrick’s wife, Mrs. Jean J. Kirkpatrick, is a staff member of Trinity College in Washington DC, a Catholic women’s college conducted by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. From 1951 to 1953 she had been an intelligence research analyst in the State Department, and since 1956 she has been a consultant to OPR. Mrs. Kirkpatrick has also had close connections with the USIA. She edited and wrote the introductory essay for The Strategy of Deception: A Study in World-Wide Communist Tactics, which was published in 1963 by Farrar, Straus and Co. of New York, and made a “special alternate selection” by the Book-of-the-Month Club. At no time was it mentioned that the USIA subsidised the book’s creation. The USIA described its venture into covert publishing as the “book development program,” of which the USIA official then in charge of it, Reed Harris, stated in testimony before the House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee in March 1964: This is a program under which we can have books written to our own specifications, books that would not otherwise be put out, especially those books that have strong anti-communist content, and follow other themes that are particularly useful for our program. Under the book development program, we control the thing from the very idea down to the final edited manuscript. Subsequently, the Director of the USIA, Leonard Marks, appeared before the same body in September 1966 and was asked why it was wrong “to let the American people know when they buy and read the book that it was developed under government sponsorship?” His reply was straight to the point: “It minimises their value.” The USIA did not pay Farrar, Straus; it paid $US 16,500 to The New Leader, whose editor, the late S. M. Levitas, conceived of the book and sold the idea to the USIA. A liberal militantly anti-Communist journal, The New Leader was for more than thirty years under the editorship of Levitas, “a bitter anti-Communist out of the East European Socialist tradition” who died in 1961. In recent years, The New Leader has lost much of the blind anti-Communism which allowed it to accept too readily the positions of the “China Lobby” and the “Vietnam Lobby.” (3) Nina Burleigh, A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer (1998)
The social connections with journalists were a crucial part of the CIA's propaganda machine. Chief among CIA friends were the Alsop brothers. Joseph Alsop wrote a column with his brother Stewart for the New York Herald Tribune and they occasionally penned articles at the suggestion of Frank Wisner, based upon classified information leaked to them. In exchange, they provided CIA friends with observations gathered on trips abroad. Such give-and-take was not unusual among the Georgetown set in the 1950s. The CIA also made friends with Washington Post publisher Phil Graham, Post managing editor Alfred Friendly, and New York Times Washington bureau chief James Reston, whose next-door neighbor was http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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Frank Wisner. Ben Bradlee, while working for the State Department as a press attache in the American embassy in Paris, produced propaganda regarding the Rosenbergs' spying conviction and death sentence in cooperation with the CIA... Some newspaper executives - Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, among them - actually signed secrecy agreements with the CIA... When Carl Bernstein reported that one CIA official had called Stewart Alsop a CIA agent, Joe Alsop defended his brother to Bernstein, saying: "I dare say he did perform some tasks-he just did the correct things as an American.... The Founding Fathers (of the CIA) were close personal friends of ours.... It was a social thing, my dear fellow." Cord Meyer developed and nurtured his own friendships among journalists. He seconded the nomination of Washington Post writer Walter Pincus for membership in the Waltz Group, a Washington social organization. Pincus went on to become the Post's premier intelligence reporter. Cord also maintained friendly ties with William C. Baggs of the Miami News and foreign-affairs writer Herb Gold. Cord's ties to academia served him when he needed favors from publishers and journalists. In some accounts, he and Time writer C. D. Jackson together recruited Steinem. According to his journal, Cord dined at the Paris home of American novelist James Jones. He was also close to Chattanooga Times writer Charles Bartlett throughout his life. (4) Thomas Braden, interview included in the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (June, 1975)
It never had to account for the money it spent except to the President if the President wanted to know how much money it was spending. But otherwise the funds were not only unaccountable, they were unvouchered, so there was really no means of checking them - "unvouchered funds" meaning expenditures that don't have to be accounted for.... 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... I don't mean to imply that there were a great many of them that were handed out as Christmas presents. They were handed out for work well performed or in order to perform work well.... Politicians in Europe, particularly right after the war, got a lot of money from the CIA.... Since it was unaccountable, it could hire as many people as it wanted. It never had to say to any committee - no committee said to it - "You can only have so many men." It could do exactly as it pleased. It made preparations therefore for every contingency. It could hire armies; it could buy banks. 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. They set up a successful communist labor union in France right after the war. We countered it with Force Ouvriere. They set up this very successful communist labor union in Italy, and we countered it with another union.... We had a vast project targeted on the intellectuals - "the battle for Picasso's mind," if you will. The communists set up fronts which they effectively enticed a great many particularly the French intellectuals to join. We tried to set up a counterfront. (This was done through funding of social and cultural organizations such as the Pan-American Foundation, the International Marketing Institute, the International Development Foundation, the American Society of African Culture, and the Congress of Cultural Freedom.) I think the budget for the Congress of Cultural Freedom one year that I had charge of it was about $800,000, $900,000, which included, of course, the subsidy for the Congress's magazine, Encounter. That doesn't mean that everybody that worked for Encounter or everybody who wrote for Encounter knew anything about it. Most of the people who worked for Encounter and all but one of the men who ran it had no idea that it was paid for by the CIA. http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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(5) Angus Mackenzie, Secrets: The CIA War at Home (1997)
Following the buildup of U.S. troops in Vietnam and the assassination of Diem, Sheinbaum decided it was his patriotic duty to publicize information that he hoped might put the brakes on U.S. involvement. Writing about the connections between Michigan State University, the CIA, and the Saigon police (with the help of Robert Scheer, a young investigative reporter), the Sheinbaum story was to appear in the June 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine. The article disposed that Michigan State University had been secretly used by the CIA to train Saigon police and to keep an inventory of ammunition for grenade launchers, Browning automatic rifles, and .50 caliber machine guns, as well as to write the South Vietnamese constitution. The problem, in Sheinbaum's view, was that such secret funding of academics to execute government programs undercut scholarly integrity. When scholars are forced into a conflict of interest, he wrote, "where is the source of serious intellectual criticism that would help us avoid future Vietnams?" Word of Sheinbaum's forthcoming article caused consternation on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters. On April 18, 1966, Director of Central Intelligence William F. Raborn Jr. notified his director of security that he wanted a "run down" on Ramparts magazine on a "high priority basis." This strongly worded order would prove to be a turning point for the Agency. To "run down" a domestic news publication because it had exposed questionable practices of the CIA was clearly in violation of the 1947 National Security Act's prohibition on domestic operations and meant the CIA eventually would have to engage in a cover-up. The CIA director of security, Howard J. Osborn, was also told: "The Director [Raborn] is particularly interested in the authors of the article, namely, Stanley Sheinbaum and Robert Scheer. He is also interested in any other individuals who worked for the magazine." Word of Sheinbaum's forthcoming article caused consternation on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters. On April 18, 1966, Director of Central Intelligence William F. Raborn Jr. notified his director of security that he wanted a "run down" on Ramparts magazine on a "high priority basis." This strongly worded order would prove to be a turning point for the Agency. To "run down" a domestic news publication because it had exposed questionable practices of the CIA was clearly in violation of the 1947 National Security Act's prohibition on domestic operations and meant the CIA eventually would have to engage in a cover-up. The CIA director of security, Howard J. Osborn, was also told: "The Director [Raborn] is particularly interested in the authors of the article, namely, Stanley Sheinbaum and Robert Scheer. He is also interested in any other individuals who worked for the magazine." Osborn's deputies had just two days to prepare a special briefing on Ramparts for the director. By searching existing CIA files they were able to assemble dossiers on approximately twenty-two of the fiftyfive Ramparts writers and editors, which itself indicates the Agency's penchant for collecting information on American critics of government policies. Osborn was able to tell Raborn that Ramparts had grown from a Catholic lay journal into a publication with a staff of more than fifty people in New York, Paris, and Munich, including two active members of the U.S. Communist Party. The most outspoken of the CIA critics at the magazine was not a Communist but a former Green Beret veteran, Donald Duncan. Duncan had written, according to then CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms, "We will continue to be in danger as long as the CIA is deciding policy and manipulating nations." Of immediate concern to Raborn, however, was Osborn's finding that Sheinbaum was in the process of exposing more CIA domestic organizations. The investigation of Ramparts was to be intensified, Raborn told Osborn. At the same time, Helms passed information to President Lyndon Johnson's aide, William D. Moyers, about the plans of two Ramparts editors to run for Congress on an antiwar platform. Within days, the CIA had progressed from investigating a news publication to sending domestic political intelligence to the White House, just as a few members of Congress had feared nineteen years earlier. Upon publication, Sheinbaum's article triggered a storm of protests from academicians and legislators across the country who saw the CIA's infiltration of a college campus as a threat to academic freedom. http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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The outcry grew so loud that President Johnson felt he had to make a reassuring public statement and establish a task force to review any government activities that might endanger the integrity of the educational community. The task force was a collection of political statesmen--such as Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare John Gardner--but also included Richard Helms, the CIA official who himself had been dealing in political espionage. The purpose of the task force, it soon became clear, was to forestall further embarrassment and preclude any congressional investigation of CIA operations. Helms, furthermore, organized an internal task force of directorate chiefs to examine all CIA relationships with academic institutions but that review, from all appearances, was designed only to ensure that these operations remained secret... Meanwhile, CIA officers spent April and May of 1966 identifying the source of Ramparts's money. Their target was executive editor Warren Hinckle, the magazine's chief fund-raiser and a man easy to track. He wore a black patch over one eye and made no secret of the difficult state of the magazine's finances as he continually begged a network of rich donors for operating funds. The agents also reported that Hinckle had launched a $2.5 million lawsuit against Alabama Governor George Wallace for calling the magazine pro-Communist (information that Osborn dutifully passed on to Raborn). The real point of the CIA investigation, however, was to place Ramparts reporters under such dose surveillance that any CIA officials involved in domestic operations would have time to rehearse cover stories before the reporters arrived to question them. Next, Raborn broadened the scope of his investigation of Ramparts's staff by recruiting help from other agencies. On June 16, 1966, he ordered Osborn to "urge" the FBI to "investigate these people as a subversive unit." Osborn forwarded this request to the FBI, expressing the CIA's interest in anything the FBI might develop "of a derogatory nature." One CIA officer, who later inspected the CIA file of the Ramparts investigation, said that the Agency was trying to find a way of shutting down the magazine that would stand up in court, notwithstanding the constraints of the First Amendment... On March 4, 1967, Richard Ober got a report from a person who attended a Ramparts staff meeting at which magazine reporters had discussed their interviews of high executive branch government officials and their attempts to meet with White House staff members. Now Ober knew who was saying what to whom. Three days later, Ober's task force found out that a Ramparts reporter was going to interview a CIA "asset": that is, someone under CIA control. In preparation, CIA officers told the asset how to handle the reporter, and after the interview the asset reported back to the CIA. On March 16, two of Ober's men drove from CIA headquarters to a nearby airport to pick up a CIA agent who was a good friend of a Ramparts reporter. They went to a hotel, where the CIA agent was debriefed. Then the agent and his case officers reviewed his cover story, which he went on to tell his Ramparts contact as a means of obtaining more information. During the same period Ober was trying to recruit five former Ramparts employees as informants. "Maybe they were unhappy," a CIA agent would later explain. On April 4, Ober completed a status report on his Ramparts task force. His men had identified and investigated 127 Ramparts writers and researchers, as well as nearly 200 other American civilians with some link to the magazine. Three more CIA officers joined Ober's team, bringing to twelve the number of full-time or part-time officers coordinating intelligence and operations on Ramparts at the headquarters level. On April 5, 1967, the task force completed its tentative assessment and recommendations, setting forth future actions-which, the CIA was still insisting in 1994, cannot be released under the Freedom of Information Act. CIA officer Louis Dube described the recommendations as "heady shit" but refused to be more specific. It is known that Ober became fascinated with Ramparts advertisers. "One of our officers was in contact with a source who provided us with information about Ramparts's advertising," Dube admitted. On April
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28, a CIA analyst working for Ober tried to learn if the CIA had any friends who might have influence with Ramparts advertisers, apparently with the intention of getting them to drop their accounts. (6) Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (April, 1976)
The Covert Use of Books and Publishing Houses: The Committee has found that the Central Intelligence Agency attaches a particular importance to book publishing activities as a form of covert propaganda. A former officer in the Clandestine Service stated that books are "the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda." Prior to 1967, the Central Intelligence Agency sponsored, subsidized, or produced over 1,000 books; approximately 25 percent of them in English. In 1967 alone, the CIA published or subsidized over 200 books, ranging from books on African safaris and wildlife to translations of Machiavelli's The Prince into Swahili and works of T. S. Eliot into Russian, to a competitor to Mao's little red book, which was entitled Quotations from Chairman Liu. The Committee found that an important number of the books actually produced by the Central Intelligence Agency were reviewed and marketed in the United States: * A book about a young student from a developing country who had studied in a communist country was described by the CIA as "developed by (two areas divisions) and, produced by the Domestic Operations Division... and has had a high impact in the United States as well as in the (foreign area) market." This book, which was produced by the European outlet of a United States publishing house was published in condensed form in two major U.S. magazines." * Another CIA book, The Penkorsky Papers, was published in United States in 1965. The book was prepared and written by omitting agency assets who drew on actual case materials and publication rights to the manuscript were sold to the publisher through a trust fund which was established for the purpose. The publisher was unaware of any US Government interest. In 1967, the CIA stopped publishing within the United States. Since then, the Agency has published some 250 books abroad, most of them in foreign languages. The CIA has given special attention to publication and circulation abroad of books about conditions in the Soviet Bloc. Of those targeted at audiences outside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a large number has also been available in English. Domestic "Fallout": The Committee finds that covert media operations can result in manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. Despite efforts to minimize it, CIA employees, past and present, have conceded that there is no way to shield the American public completely from "fallout" in the United States from Agency propaganda or placements overseas. Indeed, following the Katzenbach inquiry, the Deputy Director for Operations issued a directive stating: "Fallout in the United States from a foreign publication which we support is inevitable and consequently permissible." The domestic fallout of covert propaganda comes from many sources: books intended primarily for an English-speaking foreign audience; CIA press placements that are picked up by an international wire service; and publications resulting from direct CIA funding of foreign institutes. For example, a book written for an English-speaking foreign audience by one CIA operative was reviewed favorably by another CIA agent in the New York Times. The Committee also found that the CIA helped create and support various Vietnamese periodicals and publications. In at least one instance, a CIA supported Vietnamese publication was used to propagandize the American public and the members and staff of both houses of Congress. So effective was this propaganda that some members quoted from the publication in debating the controversial question of United States involvement in Vietnam.
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The Committee found that this inevitable domestic fallout was compounded when the Agency circulated its subsidized books in the United States prior to their distribution abroad in order to induce a favorable reception overseas. The Covert Use of 11.5. Journalists and Media Institutions on, February 11, 1976, CIA Director George Bush announced new guidelines governing the Agency's relationship with United States media organizations: "Effective immediately, CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual 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." Agency officials who testified after the February 11, 1976, announcement told the Committee that the prohibition extends to non-Americans accredited to specific United States media organizations. 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. Approximately 50 of the assets are individual American journalists or employees of US media organizations. Of these, fewer than half are "accredited" by US media organizations and thereby affected by the new prohibitions on the use of accredited newsmen. The remaining individuals are non-accredited freelance contributors and media representatives abroad, and thus are not affected by the new CIA prohibition. More than a dozen United States news organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad. A few of these organizations were unaware that they provided this cover. The Committee notes that the new CIA prohibitions do not apply to "unaccredited" Americans serving in media organizations such as representatives of US media organizations abroad or freelance writers. Of the more than 50 CIA relationships with United States journalists, or employees in American media organizations, fewer than one half will be terminated under the new CIA guidelines. The Committee is concerned that the use of American :journalists and media organizations for clandestine operations is a threat to the integrity of the press. All American journalists, whether accredited to a United States news organization or just a stringer, may be suspects when any are engaged in covert activities. (7) Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (April, 1976)
In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations. (8) Alex Constantine, Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA (2000)
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. http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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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 Mockingbird... "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... 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 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. (9) Deborah Davis, interviewed by Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press (1992)
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Kenn Thomas: Let's get back to Ben Bradlee. I know part of what's in the book and part of what upset those forces that caused the withdrawal of its first publication is what you've said about Ben Bradlee and his connection to the Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg trial. Would you talk about that a bit? Deborah Davis: In the first edition, the one that was recalled and shredded, I looked in State Department lists for '52 and '53 when Bradlee was serving as a press attache supposedly in the American embassy in Paris. This was during the Marshall Plan when the United States over in Europe had hundreds of thousands of people making an intensive effort to keep Western Europe from going Communist. Bradlee wanted to be part of that effort. So he was over in the American embassy in Paris and the embassy list had these letters after his name that said USIE. And I asked the State Department what that meant and it said United States Information Exchange. It was the forerunner of the USIA, the United States Information Agency. It was the propaganda arm of the embassy. They produced propaganda that was then disseminated by the CIA all over Europe. They planted newspaper stories. They had a lot of reporters on their payrolls. They routinely would produce stories out of the embassy and give them to these reporters and they would appear in the papers in Europe. It's very important to understand how influential newspaper stories are to people because this is what people think of as their essential source of facts about what is going on. They don't question it, and even if they do question it they have nowhere else to go to find out anything else. So Bradlee was involved in producing this propaganda. But at that point in the story I didn't know exactly what he was doing. I published the first book just saying that he worked for USIE and that this agency produced propaganda for the CIA. He went totally crazy after the book came out. One person who knew him told me then that he was going all up and down the East Coast having lunch with every editor he could think of saying that it was not true, he did not produce any propaganda. And he attacked me viciously and he said that I had falsely accused him of being a CIA agent. And the reaction was totally out of proportion to what I had said. Kenn Thomas: You make a good point in the book that other people who have had similar kinds of--I don't even know if you want to call them accusations--but reports that they in some way cooperated with the CIA in the '5Os, that the times were different and people were expected to do that kind of thing out of a sense of patriotism and they blow it off. Deborah Davis : That's right. People say, yeah, this is what I did back then, you know. But Bradlee doesn't want to be defined that way because, I don't know, somehow he thinks it's just too revealing of him, of who he is. He doesn't want to admit a true fact about his past because somehow he doesn't want it known that this is where he came from. Because this is the beginning of his journalistic career. This is how he made it big. Subsequent to my book being shredded in 1979, early 1980, I got some documents through the Freedom of Information Act and they revealed that Bradlee had been the person who was running an entire propaganda operation against Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg that covered forty countries on four continents. He always claimed that he had been a low level press flack in the embassy in Paris, just a press flack, nothing more. Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg had already been convicted of being atomic spies and they were on death row waiting to be executed. And the purpose of Bradlee's propaganda operation was to convince the Europeans that they really were spies, they really had given the secret of the atomic bomb to the Russians and therefore they did deserve to be put to death. The Europeans, having just very few years before defeated Hitler, were very concerned that the United States was going fascist the way their countries had. And this was a very real fear to the Europeans. They saw the same thing happening in the United States that had happened in their own countries. And so Bradlee used the Rosenberg case to say, "No this isn't what you think it is. These people really did this bad thing and they really do deserve to die. It doesn't mean that the United States is becoming fascist." http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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So he had a very key role in creating European public opinion and it was very, very important. This was the key issue that was going to determine how the Europeans felt about the United States. Some of the documents that I had showed him writing letters to the prosecutors of the Rosenbergs saying "I'm working for the head of the CIA in Paris and he wants me to come and look at your files." And this kind of thing. So in the second edition, which came out in 1987, I reprinted those documents, the actual documents, the readers can see them and it's got his signature and it's very, very interesting. He subsequently has said nothing about it at all. He won't talk about it all. He won't answer any questions about it. So I guess the point about Bradlee is that he went from this job to being European bureau chief for Newsweek magazine and to the executive editorship of the Post. So this is how he got where he is. It's very clear line of succession. Philip Graham was Katharine Graham's husband, who ran the Post in the '50s and he committed suicide in 1963. That's when Katharine Graham took over. Bradlee was close friends with Allen Dulles and Phil Graham. The paper wasn't doing very well for a while and he was looking for a way to pay foreign correspondents and Allen Dulles was looking for a cover. Allen Dulles was head of the CIA back then and he was looking for a cover for some of his operatives so that they could get in and out of places without arousing suspicion. So the two of them hit on a plan: Allen Dulles would pay for the reporters and they would give the CIA the information that they found as well as give it to the Post. So he helped to develop this operation and it subsequently spread to other newspapers and magazines. And it was called Operation Mockingbird. This operation, I believe, was revealed for the first time in my book. (10) Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (1995)
He (Frank Wisner) considered his friends Joe and Stewart Alsop to be reliable purveyors of the company line in their columns, and he would not hesitate to call Cyrus Sulzberger, the brother of the publisher of the New York Times. "You'd be sitting there, and he'd be on the phone to Times Washington bureau chief Scotty Reston explaining why some sentence in the paper was entirely wrong. "I want that to go to Sulzberger!" he'd say. He'd pick up newspapers and edit them from the CIA point of view," said Braden. (11) Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great (1979)
The Washington Post was in many ways like other "companies," as Walter Lippmann called the news organizations, fighting deadlines, living uneasily with unions, suffering with "technical conditions (that) do not favor genuine and productive debate." But the Post was also unique among news companies in that its managers, living and working in Washington, thought of themselves simultaneously as journalists, businessmen, and patriots, a state of mind that made them singularly able to expand the company while promoting the national interest. Their individual relations with intelligence had in fact been the reason that the Post Company had grown as fast as it did after the war; their secrets were its corporate secrets, beginning with MOCKINGBIRD. Philip Graham's commitment to intelligence gave his friends Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles an interest in helping to make The Washington Post the dominant news vehicle in Washington, which they did by assisting with its two most crucial acquisitions, the TimesHerald and WTOP. The Post men most essential to these transactions, other than Phil, were Wayne Coy, the Post executive who had been Phil's former New Deal boss, and John S. Hayes, who replaced Coy in 1947 when Coy was appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. (12) Mary Louise, Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation (2003)
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 http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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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 we 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 IranContra 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 news gathering, 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. (13) David Guyatt, Subverting the Media (undated)
In an October 1977, article published by Rolling Stone magazine, Bernstein reported that more than 400 American journalists worked for the CIA. Bernstein went on to reveal that this cozy arrangement had covered the preceding 25 years. Sources told Bernstein that the New York Times, America’s most respected newspaper at the time, was one of the CIA’s closest media collaborators. Seeking to spread the blame, the New York Times published an article in December 1977, revealing that “more than eight hundred news and public information organisations and individuals,” had participated in the CIA’s covert subversion of the media.
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“One journalist is worth twenty agents,” a high-level source told Bernstein. Spies were trained as journalists and then later infiltrated – often with the publishers consent - into the most prestigious media outlets in America, including the New York Times and Time Magazine. Likewise, numerous reputable journalists underwent training in various aspects of “spook-craft” by the CIA. This included techniques as varied as secret writing, surveillance and other spy crafts. The subversion operation was orchestrated by Frank Wisner, an old CIA hand who’s clandestine activities dated back to WW11. Wisner’s media manipulation programme became known as the “Wisner Wurlitzer,” and proved an effective technique for sending journalists overseas to spy for the CIA. Of the fifty plus overseas news proprietary’s owned by the CIA were The Rome Daily American, The Manilla Times and the Bangkok Post. Yet, according to some experts, there was another profound reason for the CIA’s close relations with the media. In his book, “Virtual Government,” author Alex Constantine goes to some lengths to explore the birth and spread of Operation Mockingbird. This, Constantine explains, was a CIA project designed to influence the major media for domestic propaganda purposes. One of the most important “assets” used by the CIA’s Frank Wisner was Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. A decade later both Wisner and Graham committed suicide – leading some to question the exact nature of their deaths. More recently doubts have been cast on Wisner’s suicide verdict by some observers who believed him to have been a Soviet agent. (14) Michael Hasty, Secret Admirers: The Bushes and the Washington Post (5th 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. http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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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." (15) 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 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.
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(16) Carl Bernstein, CIA and the Media, Rolling Stone Magazine (20th October, 1977)
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 twenty-five 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 it 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 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... 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 Service. 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. From the Agency’s perspective, there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community... Many journalists were used by the CIA to assist in this process and they had the reputation of being among the best in the business. The peculiar nature of the job of the foreign correspondent is ideal for such work; he is accorded unusual access, by his host country, permitted to travel in areas often off-limits to other Americans, spends much of his time cultivating sources in governments, academic institutions, the military establishment and the scientific communities. He has the opportunity to form long-term personal relationships with sources and -- perhaps more than any other category of American operative is in a position to make correct judgments about the susceptibility and availability of foreign nationals for recruitment as spies. The Agency’s dealings with the press began during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting-and-cover capability within America’s most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover.
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American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing us commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against “global Communism.” Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner; publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA era and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. “Let’s not pick on some poor reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee’s investigators. “Let’s go to the managements. They were witting” In all, about twenty-five news organizations (including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency... Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue. Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. “You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it,” said one Agency official. “They were genuinely motivated and highly susceptible to intrigue and being on the inside. Then in the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces - shredded the consensus and threw it in the air.” Another Agency official observed: “Many journalists didn’t give a second thought to associating with the Agency. But there was a point when the ethical issues which most people had submerged finally surfaced. Today, a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency.” The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told, “You’re going to be a journalist,” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400-some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency. The Agency’s relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories: * Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations - usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis. * Stringers and freelancers. Most were payrolled by the Agency under standard contractual terms. * Employees of so-called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty-five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers -- both English and foreign language -- which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. * Columnists and commentators. There are perhaps a dozen well-known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as “known assets” and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects. Murky details of CIA relationships with individuals and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency’s use of journalists for intelligence purposes. http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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The New York Times - The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible... CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency’s working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions... The Columbia Broadcasting System - CBS was unquestionably the CIA’s most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS president William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings... At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley’s cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite the denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant’s investigators. “It wouldn’t do any good,” said one CBS executive. “It is the single subject about which his memory has failed.” At Newsweek, Agency sources reported, the CIA engaged the services of several foreign correspondents and stringers under arrangements approved by senior editors at the magazine... “To the best of my knowledge:’ said [Harry] Kern, [Newsweek’s foreign editor from 1945 to 1956] “nobody at Newsweek worked for the CIA.... The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department.... When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on .... We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side.” CIA officials say that Kern's dealings with the Agency were extensive... When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. “It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,” said a former deputy director of the Agency... But Graham, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said... Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements... Other major news organizations - according to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news gathering organizations, among others: the New York Herald Tribune, Saturday Evening Post, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, Associated Press, United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and The Miami Herald... “And that's just a small part of the list,” in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. Like many sources, this official said that the only way to end the uncertainties about aid furnished the Agency by journalists is to disclose the contents of the CIA files - a course opposed by almost all of the thirty-five present and former CIA officials interviewed over the course of a year.
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The CIA’s use of journalists continued virtually unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency. He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his most valuable intelligence assets in the journalistic community... At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley’s cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite the denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant’s investigators. “It wouldn’t do any good,” said one CBS executive. “It is the single subject about which his memory has failed.” Time and Newsweek magazines. According to CIA and Senate sources, Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news magazines. The same sources refused to say whether the CIA has ended all its associations with individuals who work for the two publications. Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience. At Newsweek, Agency sources reported, the CIA engaged the services of several foreign correspondents and stringers under arrangements approved by senior editors at the magazine... After Colby left the Agency on January 28th, 1976, and was succeeded by George Bush, 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 US news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” ... The text of the announcement noted that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Thus, many relationships were permitted to remain intact. (17) David Guyatt, Subverting the Media (undated)
In discussing the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Dan Rather, the well-loved anchorman for CBS Television, described the now famous Zapruder film that captured footage of the shot which killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie, taken by amateur cameraman, Abraham Zapruder, was quickly snapped-up by Life magazine for $250,000.00. Although Life published still frames of the movie, the 18 second film was kept under lock and key – not to be seen by Americans until 1975. But Rather’s remarks were misleading. He told his viewers that the film showed JFK falling forward – confirming the official view that Kennedy had been shot from behind. However, the film clearly showed Kennedy lurching violently backwards, evidence of a frontal shot. To add to the confusion, the Warren Commission report printed two frames of the film in reverse – again implying a rear shot - an accident the FBI typified as a “printing error.” Meanwhile, still pictures lifted from the Zapruder film were also published by Life magazine. Remarkably, they too were published in reverse order, thereby creating the impression that the President had been shot from behind by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. Until the film was shown to Americans in its entirity, no one was the wiser. Following the broadcast in 1975, a massive controversy followed giving rise to ongoing allegations of conspiracy. The Zapruder film clearly showed President Kennedy had also been shot from the front. The result immeasurably strengthened the charge - that had been bubbling in the background – that the President http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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had been assassinated as a result of a well orchestrated conspiracy, and that this was covered-up to protect the guilty, who many now believe involved senior figures in the CIA and US military. Not least it was pointed out that Henry Luce, the founder of Life magazine was a close personal friend of Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA. Moreover, the individual who purchased the Zapruder film for Life magazine was C.J. Jackson, formerly a “psychological warfare” consultant to the President. Inevitably, these events were to lead to accusations that the media were culpable of the worst form of toadying and propaganda. This, in turn raised serious questions about the role and integrity of the mass media. Some years later, Washington Post reporter, Carl Bernstein – who came to fame with his colleague Bob Woodward, for their expose of the Nixon administration’s illegal re-election campaign activities, known as “Watergate” – dropped a media bombshell on an unsuspecting America. In an October 1977, article published by Rolling Stone magazine, Bernstein reported that more than 400 American journalists worked for the CIA. Bernstein went on to reveal that this cozy arrangement had covered the preceding 25 years. Sources told Bernstein that the New York Times, America’s most respected newspaper at the time, was one of the CIA’s closest media collaborators. Seeking to spread the blame, the New York Times published an article in December 1977, revealing that “more than eight hundred news and public information organisations and individuals,” had participated in the CIA’s covert subversion of the media. “One journalist is worth twenty agents,” a high-level source told Bernstein. Spies were trained as journalists and then later infiltrated – often with the publishers consent - into the most prestigious media outlets in America, including the New York Times and Time Magazine. Likewise, numerous reputable journalists underwent training in various aspects of “spook-craft” by the CIA. This included techniques as varied as secret writing, surveillance and other spy crafts. The subversion operation was orchestrated by Frank Wisner, an old CIA hand who’s clandestine activities dated back to WW11. Wisner’s media manipulation programme became known as the “Wisner Wurlitzer,” and proved an effective technique for sending journalists overseas to spy for the CIA. Of the fifty plus overseas news proprietary’s owned by the CIA were The Rome Daily American, The Manilla Times and the Bangkok Post. Yet, according to some experts, there was another profound reason for the CIA’s close relations with the media. In his book, “Virtual Government,” author Alex Constantine goes to some lengths to explore the birth and spread of Operation Mockingbird. This, Constantine explains, was a CIA project designed to influence the major media for domestic propaganda purposes. One of the most important “assets” used by the CIA’s Frank Wisner was Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. A decade later both Wisner and Graham committed suicide – leading some to question the exact nature of their deaths. More recently doubts have been cast on Wisner’s suicide verdict by some observers who believed him to have been a Soviet agent. Meanwhile, however, Wisner had “implemented his plan and owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers…” according to Deborah Davis in her biography of Katharine Graham – wife of Philip Graham - and current publisher of the Washington Post. The operation was overseen by Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence. Operation Mockingbird continued to flourish with CIA agents boasting at having “important assets” inside every major news outlet in the country.” The list included such luminaries of the US media as Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, of the New York Times and C.D. Jackson of Fortune Magazine, according to Constantine. But there was another aspect to Mockingbird, Constantine reveals in an Internet essay. Citing historian C. Vann Woodward’s New York Times article of 1987, Ronald Reagan, later to become President of the US, was a FBI snitch earlier in his life. This dated back to the time when Reagan was President of the Actor’s http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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Guild. Woodward says that Reagan “fed the names of suspect people in his organisation to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned an informer’s code number, T.10.” The purpose was to purge the film industry of “subversives.” As these stories hit the news, Senate investigators began to probe the CIA sponsored manipulation of the media – the “Fourth Estate” that supposedly was dedicated to acting as a check and balance on the excesses of the executive. This investigation was, however, curtailed at the insistence of Central Intelligence Agency Directors, William Colby and George Bush – who would later be elected US President. The information gathered by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church, was “deliberately buried” Bernstein reported. Despite this suppression of evidence, information leaked out that revealed the willing role of media executives to subvert their own industry. “Let’s not pick on some reporters,” CIA Director William Colby stated during an interview. “Let’s go to the managements. They were witting.” Bernstein concluded that “America’s leading publishers allowed themselves and their news services to become handmaidens to the intelligence services.” Of the household names that went along with this arrangement were: Columbia Broadcasting System, Copley News Service – which gave the CIA confidential information on antiwar and black protestors – ABC TV, NBC, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Newsweek, Time, Scripps-Howard, Hearst Newspapers and the Miami Herald. Bernstein additionally stated that the two most bullish media outlets to co-operate were the new York Times and CBS Television. The New York Times even went so far as to submit stories to Allen Dulles and his replacement, John McCone, to vet and approve before publication. Slowly, the role of Mockingbird in muzzling and manipulating the press began to be revealed. In 1974, two former CIA agents, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, published a sensational book entitled “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.” The book caused uproar for the many revelations it contained. Included amongst them was the fact that the, until then, widely respected Encounter magazine was indirectly funded by the CIA. The vehicle used to covertly transfer funds to Encounter and many other publications, was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)– a CIA front. A decade earlier, in 1965, the CCF was renamed Forum World Features (FWF) and purchased by Kern House Enterprises, under the direction of John Hay Whitney, publisher of the International Herald Tribune and former US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The Chairman of Forum World Features was Brian Crozier, who resigned his position shortly before the explosive book went on sale. Crozier, a former “Economist” journalist, was a “contact” of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His employment to head up the CIA financed Forum World Features in 1965, caused a row with MI6 who felt the CIA had breached the secret agreement between the UK and USA by recruiting one of their own assets. Crozier’s media style was more discrete than Mockingbird. He preferred, when possible, to insert his prespun propaganda stories to unwitting members of the media, who would reprint them unaware of the bias they contained. In time, Crozier would go on to head up a shadowy anti subversive and dirty tricks group called the “61,” that sought to counter communist propaganda. Another group of which he was a member was the Pinay Cercle – a right wing Atlanticist group funded by the CIA - that claimed credit for getting Margaret Thatcher elected as British Prime Minister. Another propaganda operation, run from Lisburn barracks in Northern Ireland, and under nominal British Army control, participated in extensive media manipulation around the same time. Known as “Clockwork Orange” this involved the construction of propaganda material designed to discredit prominent members of the then Labour government as well as some in the Conservative shadow cabinet. Especially targeted was then Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Clockwork Orange relied heavily on forged documents that would be given to selected journalists for publication. Many of these forgeries http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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sought to demonstrate secret communist ties – or east bloc intelligence affiliations – amongst high profile politicians. The aim was to destabilise Wilson and the Labour government by falsely showing them to be soft on communism or even pro communist. This operation clearly favoured a right wing Conservative administration under the leadership of Mrs. Thatcher. In the event, Wilson resigned, said to have been sickened by the numerous personal snipe attacks against him. During the time he was under siege, Wilson experienced numerous break ins at his office, as well as having his phone lines tapped -courtesy of unnamed officials in the security service, it is believed. By 1979 the Conservative party was returned to power. Yet, with the demise of the cold war the motive for media propaganda has collapsed. Or has it? James Lilly, former Director of Operations at the CIA later became Director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute – a think tank heavily staffed by former intelligence types. Lilly, in giving testimony to a Senate committee during 1996 observed: “Journalists, I think, you don’t recruit them. We can’t do that. They’ve told us not to do that. But you certainly sit down with your journalists, and I’ve done this and the Station Chief has done it, others have done it…” But even as the cold war rationale for subverting the media recedes into the distance, press manipulation continues anon. A classified CIA report surfaced in 1992, that revealed the Agency’s public affairs office “… has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation.” The report added that the benefits of these continued contacts had been fruitful to the CIA by turning “Intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories…” Basking in a glow of self satisfaction, the report continued “In many cases, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests.” But the last word goes to Noam Chomsky. A Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky has extensively investigated the role of today’s media. His analysis is un-nerving. The democratic postulate, Chomsky says, “is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth…” Despite this axiom, Chomsky finds that the media supports “established power” and is “responsive to the needs of government and major power groups.” He additionally argues that the media is a mechanism for pervasive “thought control” of elite interests and that ordinary citizens need to “undertake a course of intellectual self-defence to protect themselves from manipulation and control…” The covert role of the media has now apparently shifted its focus. One time expediter of the “cold war,” it now clamours for the extension of “corporate power.” (18) Steve Kangas, The Origins of the Overclass (1998)
The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere. The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface - and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds. http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America’s wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent - the highest level of inequality in the 20th century. How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation’s rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!" Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society’s elite... Although many people think that the CIA’s primary mission during the Cold War was to "deter communism," Noam Chomksy correctly points out that its real mission was "deterring democracy." From corrupting elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has virtually always replaced democracy with dictatorship. It didn’t help that the CIA was run by businessmen, whose hostility towards democracy is legendary. The reason they overthrew so many democracies is because the people usually voted for policies that multinational corporations didn't like: land reform, strong labor unions, nationalization of their industries, and greater regulation protecting workers, consumers and the environment... 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. The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine Graham, today’s publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was the Post’s ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after the war, both in readership and influence. 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... The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies. It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse, the CIA has bought many domestic media companies. A prime example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William Casey (who would later become Reagan’s CIA director). Another founder was Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Another founder was http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC. For those who believe in "separation of press and state," the very idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with the agency. Even today, when the immorality of the CIA should be an open-and-shut case, "debate" about the issue rages in the media... In the mid-1970s, at this historic low point in American conservatism, the CIA began a major campaign to turn corporate fortunes around. They did this in several ways. First, they helped create numerous foundations to finance their domestic operations. Even before 1973, the CIA had co-opted the most famous ones, like the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. But after 1973, they created more. One of their most notorious recruits was billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. During World War II, Scaife's father served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. By his mid-twenties, both of Scaife's parents had died, and he inherited a fortune under four foundations: the Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundations and the Allegheny Foundation. In the early 1970s, Scaife was encouraged by CIA agent Frank Barnett to begin investing his fortune to fight the "Soviet menace." From 1973 to 1975, Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world. Shortly afterwards he began donating millions to fund the New Right. (19) CIA Document Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report (undated)
1. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results. 2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.
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3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active [business] addresses are requested: a. To discuss the publicity problem with and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation. b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (I) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing than Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.) 4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful: a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attack on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, AJ.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.) b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent - and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason. c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions. d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties. e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms. g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.) 5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics. (20) Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (1991)
More than a decade after the assassination, when I won a lawsuit against various police and spy organizations in the United States district court in Washington, D.C., pursuant to the order of the court, I received many long-suppressed documents. Among them was a top-secret CIA report. It stated that the CIA was deeply troubled by my work in questioning the conclusions of the Warren Report and that polls that had been taken revealed that almost half of the American people believed as I did. The report stated, "Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse, results." This "trend of opinion," the CIA said, "is a matter of concern" to "our organization." To counter developing opinion within the United States, the CIA suggested that steps be taken. It should be emphasized, the CIA said, that "the members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience, and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. The purpose of the CIA secret document was apparent. In this instance, there was no need for incisive analysis. The CIA report stated "The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments." The commission had been chosen in such a fashion so that it might subsequently be asserted that those who questioned its finding, by comparing the known facts to the false conclusions offered by the commission, might be said to be subversive.
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Who were these people who wished to throw suspicion upon the leaders of the land? The CIA report listed them as Mark Lane, Joachim Joesten, as well as a French writer, Leo Sauvage. Most of the criticism was directed at me. The CIA directed that this matter be discussed with "liaison and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)," instructing these persons "that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition." The CIA continued: "Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation." The CIA was quite specific about the means that should be employed to prevent criticism of the report: "Employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passage to assets. Our play should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (i) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (ii) politically interested, (iii) financially interested, (iv) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (v) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Edward Jay Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher Knebel article and Spectator piece for background." According to the CIA, my book, Rush to Judgment, was "much more difficult to answer as a whole." The agency document did not list any errors in the book. Just in case the book reviewers did not get the point, the CIA offered specific language that they might incorporate into their critiques. "Reviewers" of the books "might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the Report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics." Among those who criticized Rush to Judgment and other books along lines similar to those suggested by the CIA were the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and, especially, Walter Cronkite and CBS. Among those who did not march in lockstep with the intelligence agencies' effort to destroy the First Amendment were the Houston Post; Norman Mailer, who reviewed Rush to Judgment in the United States and Len Deighton, who reviewed it in London. The question persists, in view of the elaborate and illegal program undertaken by the CIA to malign American citizens and to discourage publishers from printing dissents from the Warren Commission Report, as to the motivation for these efforts. Again, we turn to the CIA dispatch: "Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation." Yes, the CIA was directly involved and it did make its contribution to the investigation. What else the CIA did to constitute its "direct" involvement in the assassination was left unsaid by the authors of its report. Let us focus at this point upon the information that the CIA contributed. Its major contribution was the presentation of the Mexico City story to Earl Warren. The CIA seemed desperately concerned that its Mexico City story might be questioned. Indeed, it was this aberrant behavior by the CIA with this aspect of the case that led me to focus more intently on the case. The first book review of Rush to Judgment was never printed in any newspaper or journal, at least not in the form in which the review originally appeared. The book was published in mid-August 1966. Before I saw the printer's proofs, the CIA had obtained a copy. On August 2, 1966, the CIA published a document entitled "Review of Book - Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane." I did not learn the existence of that document for almost a decade. The review centered upon statements I had written about Oswald in Mexico City: "On pages 351 and 352, Lane discusses the photograph of the unknown individual which was taken by the CIA in Mexico City. The photograph was furnished by this Agency to the FBI after the assassination of President Kennedy. The FBI then showed it to Mrs. Marguerite Oswald who later claimed the photograph to be that of lack Ruby. A discussion of the incident, the photograph itself, and related affidavits, all appear in the Commission's Report (Vol. XI, p. 469; Vol. XVI, p. 638). Lane asserts that the
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photograph was evidently taken in front of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City on 27 September 1963, and that it was furnished to the FBI on the morning of 22 November." The concern about my relatively nonincriminating disclosure was surprising to me at the time, however, a decade after the assassination it became apparent that the case that the CIA had so painstakingly constructed, placing Oswald in Mexico City at the two embassies, had fallen apart as if it were a house of cards. Not one material bit of evidence remained. It was a new day. The war in Vietnam and crimes committed by authorities, including President Nixon, were beginning to convince the American people that simplistic explanations of past national tragedies might be challenged. Statements by leaders of government or federal police officials were no longer sacrosanct. (21) Karl Cohen, The Guardian (7th March, 2003)
The CIA's choice of George Orwell's Animal Farm to produce as an animated film almost makes sense. Almost, but not quite, because the book's ending shows both the pigs and humans joined together as corrupt and evil powers. To use Animal Farm for its purpose, as Stonor Saunders reveals, the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, which directed covert government operations, had two members of their Psychological Warfare Workshop staff obtain the screen rights to the novel. Howard Hunt, who became infamous as a member of the Watergate break-in team, is identified as head of the operation. His contact in Hollywood was Carleton Alsop, brother of writer Joseph Alsop, who was working undercover at Paramount. Working with Alsop was Finis Farr, a writer living in Los Angeles. It was Alsop and Farr who went to England to negotiate the rights to the property from Sonia Orwell. Mrs Orwell probably knew Farr as she moved in literary and artistic circles as an assistant to the editor of Horizon magazine. This is well documented in The Girl from the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling. Mrs Orwell signed after Alsop and Farr agreed to arrange for her to meet her hero, Clark Gable. "As a measure of thanks", a CIA official named Joe Bryan made the arrangements for the meeting, according to The Paper Trail, edited by Jon Elliston. Hunt selected Louis De Rochemont to be the film's producer at Paramount. Before the war, in 1935, De Rochemont had created The March of Time, a new form of screen journalism that combined the newsreel and documentary film into a 15- to 20-minute entertaining short that went behind the news to explain the significance of an event. The March of Time, sponsored by the Time-Life Company, was a popular monthly series for over a decade before ending in 1951. Hunt probably chose De Rochemont because he had once worked for him on The March of Time series. De Rochemont had also worked on socially and politically sensitive films for many years. He produced the anti-Nazi spy film The House on 92nd Street (1945) and Lost Boundaries (1949), one of the first racially aware films (it is about a black doctor who passes for white until he is unmasked by the black community). A recently published book, British Cinema and the Cold War: the State, Propaganda and the Consensus by Tony Shaw, suggests De Rochemont chose Halas and Batchelor to animate the film as production costs were lower in England and because he questioned the loyalty of some American animators. The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on communists in the film industry began in earnest in 1951 (Disney testified at short-lived hearings that were held in 1947) and several people in the animation industry were blacklisted, careers were ruined or disrupted. On the other hand, Vivien Halas, daughter of the film's co-directors John Halas and Joy Batchelor, suggests the real reason they got the contract is that Louis De Rochemont was a Navy buddy and good friend of screenwriters-producers Philip Stapp and Lothar Wolff. De Rochemont had worked with them in the Navy's film unit and Vivien's mother had worked closely with Stapp in 1949 on a Marshall Plan film http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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produced by Halas and Batchelor, The Shoemaker and the Hatter. Eventually Stapp and Wolff would be hired to work on Animal Farm's script. Although the decision on what firm to hire came at a bleak moment for some American animation companies (the film could have been produced in Los Angeles by a studio whose reputation was beyond reproach), I suspect Halas and Batchelor's reputation, personal friendships and budgetary restraints were important factors in the decision to award them the contract. Animal Farm was the first animated feature produced in England. John Halas (1912-1995) was born in Budapest and had worked as an animator before moving to Paris. He moved to England and in 1940 formed Halas and Batchelor with Joy Batchelor (1914-1991), a British animator and scriptwriter. They were married a year later. During the war they were kept busy with training, propaganda and other forms of government-sponsored films. The animation firm was awarded the contract to make the feature in November 1951 and it was completed in April 1954. It is logical to assume that before the contract was signed De Rochemont made it quite clear that the film would not be identical to the book and he may have had a rough script or other guidelines. Vivien says that during the production, the script went through several changes before it was finalised... Vivien recalls, "The changes came about as the film evolved. There were at least nine versions of the script and heated discussions about the end. My mother especially felt it was wrong to change the ending." She has a tape recording of her father saying that the ending they used offers a glimmer of hope for the future. In an interview on British television in 1980, he defended the ending as being necessary to give the audience hope for the future. "You can not send home millions in the audience being puzzled"... The film did well at the box office and the reviews were favourable, but some critics suggested people should read the book to learn what was left out. The film was later distributed around the world by the United States Information Agency (USIA) through its overseas libraries. (22) Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008)
Fortunately for the CIA, two factors predisposed the major Hollywood studios that dominated the industry to take a "responsible" position in the cultural Cold War. One was a strong tendency toward selfcensorship, the result of many years' experience avoiding the commercially disastrous effects of giving offense to either domestic pressure groups like the American Legion or foreign audiences. The other was the fact that the men who ran the studios were intensely patriotic and anticommunist - they saw it as their duty to help their government defeat the Soviet threat. This spontaneous willingness of the moviemakers to cooperate with U.S. officialdom manifested itself in many ways. Some ways were overt (boosting the Army or Navy in war movies, for example, or helping the United States Information Agency make pro-American documentaries), others covert. The most dramatic instance of the latter was Militant Liberty, a multi-agency propaganda campaign devised in 1954 with the aim of embedding American-style democratic values in foreign cultures, especially in such new theaters of the Cold War as Central America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. (Secret planning documents identified "target" countries for "testing" the program, including Japan.) Although the architects of Militant Liberty did not limit themselves to cinema other "informational" techniques discussed included letter-writing and leader exchanges - they did attach particular importance to film production, reflecting the common assumption of Cold War western propagandists that the moving image was the most appropriate medium for "Third World" audiences. Among the http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
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several Hollywood personalities who volunteered their services for this program were eminent director and former OSS filmmaker John Ford; the cinematic embodiment of the American masculine ideal, actor John Wayne; and world-famous studio boss/director Cecil B. DeMille (who had already agreed to serve as film consultant to the recently created USIA). Along with a few other key studio players, such as Twentieth Century-Fox boss Darryl Zanuck, this group composed what Frances Stonor Saunders has called the "Hollywood consortium," an informal but powerful group of movie artists and moguls who shared the belief that (in the words of foreign market specialist Eric Johnston), "We need to make certain our films are doing a good job for our nation and our industry." First World War | Second World War | The Tudors | British History | Vietnam War | Military History | Watergate | Assassination of JFK | Assocation Football | Normans | American West | Famous Crimes | Black People in Britain | The Monarchy | Blitz | United States | Cold War | English Civil War | Making of the United Kingdom | Russia | Germany | The Medieval World | Nazi Germany | American Civil War | Spanish Civil War | Civil Rights Movement | McCarthyism | Slavery | Child Labour | Women's Suffrage | Parliamentary Reform | Railways | Trade Unions | Textile Industry | Russian Revolution | Travel Guide | Spartacus Blog | Winston Churchill | John F. Kennedy | Lyndon B. Johnson | Robert F. Kennedy | Queen Victoria | J. Edgar Hoove | Ku Klux Klan | Martin Luther King | Adolf Hitler | Joseph Stalin | Jim Crow Laws | Benito Mussolini | Franklin D. Roosevelt | Abraham Lincoln | Lee Harvey Oswald |
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Black History Facts 365 http://blackhistorymonth2014.com
Operation Mockingbird Author : Darlene Dancy Tagged as : media disception, media mind control, Operation Mockingbird Date : April 14, 2014
Operation Mockingbird: Are You Chatting With a CIA Agent Online?
oday, Operation Mockingbird has evolved into a new brand of media control. CIA Agents are now hired and given shill accounts on social media outlets like Facebook to argue any ideology they are instructed to. The agents have up to 10 fake shill accounts used to troll and create the illusion of having a genuine network of friends. They will defend current administration decisions with relentless irrational stubbornness that one can only be paid to do. The government is using tax money to spread lies and disinformation to the public. Is this the best use for our tax money? Are you chatting with a CIA Agent online? It’s possible you may already have. Last year Abby Martin from RT’s “Breaking the Set” reported on an up to date Operation Mockingbird where the CIA packed a building full of CIA agents with the sole purpose of misleading the public. In the congressional hearing from 1976 (below) listen to how many agents are in the media to write false stories.
According to the Congress report published in 1976:
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“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.”
- See more at: http://asheepnomore.net/2014/04/01/operation-mockingbird-chatting-cia-agentonline/#sthash.Aq2P6snO.dpuf
Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) campaign to influence media to promote false propaganda or print misleading stories. Operation Mockingbird was the brainstorm project of Frank Wisner in collaboration with Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles who are listed as the “principal operatives” of Operation Mockingbird.
Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) campaign to influence media to promote false propaganda or print misleading stories. Operation Mockingbird was the brainstorm project of Frank Wisner in collaboration with Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles who are listed as the “principal operatives” of Operation Mockingbird.
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Black History Facts 365 http://blackhistorymonth2014.com
Today, Operation Mockingbird has evolved into a new brand of media control. CIA Agents are now hired and given shill accounts on social media outlets like Facebook to argue any ideology they are instructed to. The agents have up to 10 fake shill accounts used to troll and create the illusion of having a genuine network of friends. They will defend current administration decisions with relentless irrational stubbornness that one can only be paid to do. The government is using tax money to spread lies and disinformation to the public. Is this the best use for our tax money? Are you chatting with a CIA Agent online? It’s possible you may already have. Last year Abby Martin from RT’s “Breaking the Set” reported on an up to date Operation Mockingbird where the CIA packed a building full of CIA agents with the sole purpose of misleading the public. In the congressional hearing from 1976 (below) listen to how many agents are in the media to write false stories.
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.”
- See more at: http://asheepnomore.net/2014/04/01/operation-mockingbird-chatting-cia-agentonline/#sthash.Aq2P6snO.dpuf
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Black History Facts 365 http://blackhistorymonth2014.com
Today, Operation Mockingbird has evolved into a new brand of media control. CIA Agents are now hired and given shill accounts on social media outlets like Facebook to argue any ideology they are instructed to. The agents have up to 10 fake shill accounts used to troll and create the illusion of having a genuine network of friends. They will defend current administration decisions with relentless irrational stubbornness that one can only be paid to do. The government is using tax money to spread lies and disinformation to the public. Is this the best use for our tax money? Are you chatting with a CIA Agent online? It’s possible you may already have. Last year Abby Martin from RT’s “Breaking the Set” reported on an up to date Operation Mockingbird where the CIA packed a building full of CIA agents with the sole purpose of misleading the public.
In the congressional hearing from 1976 (below) listen to how many agents are in the media to write false stories.
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Black History Facts 365 http://blackhistorymonth2014.com
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.”
By the year 1953 Operation Mockingbird dictated information in over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William 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).
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Even Rolling Stone claimed that a journalist Joseph Alsop was under the control of Operation Mockingbird in 1977. His articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by Rolling Stone Magazine to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA
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included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), Herb Gold (The Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, passed as part of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, will allow the CIA to flood America with more government propaganda. Well now openly anyway. They are now telling us they will be lying to us on purpose to misguide and push their agenda. They are openly admitting to crime.
source:wideawakeamerica.com
By the year 1953 Operation Mockingbird dictated information in over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William 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). - See more at: http://asheepnomore.net/2014/04/01/operation-mockingbird-chatting-cia-agentonline/#sthash.Aq2P6snO.dpufBy the year 1953 Operation Mockingbird dictated information in over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with wellknown right-wing views such as William 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). - See more at: http://asheepnomore.net/2014/04/01/operationmockingbird-chatting-cia-agent-online/#sthash.Aq2P6snO.dpuf
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EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE CIA BUT WERE AFRAID TO FIND OUT...
"If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it." - Anton Chekov
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation By Mary Louise 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 we have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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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. 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, TeleCommunications, 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). "Who Controls the Media? The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird", "The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization", and "Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America" by Alex Constantine are an excellent source of information on this topic: www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html and www.alexconstantine.50megs.com. David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting the Media" at www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm. Then there are two articles called "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" and "The Origins of the Overclass" by Steve Kangas that are very informative although from a more liberal perspective. Steve will not be writing anymore articles as he is no longer with us, having unfortunately met his untimely death that was 'apparently' from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. If you read about him on his web page that is still available, you will see that he did not seem like a person who was suffering from deep depression. In his memory, please take the time to read http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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what he wrote at www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, and www.korpios.org/resurgent/index.html. CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both owned by Time-Warner) ran a story about a secret mission called Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN site at www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html. Journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the stories on Watergate (late 70's) in the Washington Post, having gained access to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program of using journalists at home and abroad, in deliberate propaganda campaigns. It was later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House and knew many insiders including General Alexander Haig. A high-level source told Bernstein, "One journalist is worth twenty agents." CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham, in a 1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. 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." Maybe that's another reason why folks get the impression that a suspicious agenda lurks behind the headlines. "25 Ways to Suppress Truth: Rules of Disinformation" and "8 Traits of the Disinformationalist" at www.proparanoid.com/truth.htm, sums it up very well. Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, mainly in South-East Asia where he witnessed bombing and napalming of villages, which caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He has written about Vietnam's onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">Phoenix Program and after a long battle with CIA censors, he published the book "Deadly Deceits" in 1983. Ralph has been harassed by the CIA and FBI, involving bodily injury, and his CIABASE website was shut down on Spring of 2000. He copied some reports that can be found at: onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase_report_1.htm (and 2.htm), onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm, and onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Deadly_Deceits.html. He concluded that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency but rather the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisors, of which disinformation is a large part of its responsibility and the American people are the primary target of its lies. One of the primary reasons John F. Kennedy was assassinated had to do with the fact he dared to interfere in the framework of power. Kennedy was intent on exercising his ELECTED powers and not allowing them to be usurped by power-crazed individuals in the intelligence community, threatening to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." There were four things that filled the CIA with rage and sealed his fate; JFK fired Allen Dulles, was in the process of founding a panel to investigate the CIA's numerous crimes, put a damper on the breadth and scope of the CIA, and limited their ability to act under National Security Memoranda 55. There is such an overwhelming amount of information pertaining to the CIA that it is impossible to cover it all in one book, much less an article. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA..... the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth.
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One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations. The CIA is the epitome of organized crime run amuck! onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis.html
Central Intelligence Agency Official Media Relations Site In an effort to provide the American people with accurate information about the CIA, its mission, and the contributions Agency employees make to national security, the Media Relations Division staff works with print and broadcast journalists on a daily basis. The Office of Public Affairs believes that accurate media coverage of aspects of the Agency’s work will build better public understanding of our efforts. The Division's objective is to be as helpful and responsive to the media as possible while still protecting classified information, including intelligence sources and methods. To accomplish this goal, the Media Relations Division staff establishes professional relationships with print and broadcast reporters, responds to press inquiries on a wide range of issues, develops media strategies in advance of newsworthy events or announcements, prepares press releases, and arranges for Agency experts to provide background briefings for U.S. media. onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/media.html
A Short Peek into the Future By Wade Inganamort
Click. Click. Click. The familiar sound violently awoke Sam, sending shockwaves down his spine. Click. Click. Click. His first voluntary reaction was to think - Is it me? Do they know? Wondering how far away they were, he threw back the standard issue gray bedding and planted his feet firmly on the cold cement floor. His mind was racing in one consistent direction: escape. Grabbing his overcoat, he stumbled to the door, while checking the pockets to ensure that he still had the document. I must get rid of it, he thought. Why did I have to be so damn curious? Click. Click. Click. The sound was getting closer. How he wished that he didn't have this chip in his arm, then he could've just slipped away weeks ago. It's now or never, he whispered to himself. His left hand was cleching the document in his pocket as he turned the doorknob. Swoosh. A dart flew by his right temple. It was too late. Click. Click. Click. There they were, his worse nightmare come true; a fleet of ten six-legged Lynxmotion Hexapod II walking robots were approaching from the end of the hallway. They were increasing speed, but from hearing so many rumors, the Hexapods were not what he feared. They were but mere slaves, doing reconnaissance as part of a distributed sensor network, relaying the triangulated information back to their master, ROBART. ROBART he knew, was rather slow with his dual treads powered by 12-volt electric wheelchair motors. Escape was a matter of evading the Hexapods before he was remotely located by GPS from the signals that his subdermal microchip - Digital Angel was emitting. But where would he go? This sector's grid monitor prevented any freehttp://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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roaming, unless a travel plan was first logged from a public Digital Angel uplink terminal. Click. Click. Click. He made a dash to the right, hoping to get a small head start and immediately felt the first of six steel tipped darts enter his neck. Consciousness began to fade away. His left hand was still tightly gripping the illegal document. ROBART's remote camera zooms in on the torn Xeroxed paper as the puppetmasters 3,000 miles away can just barely read a portion of the title: The Constitution of the United Sta......
"We have money to blow up bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates and we don't have money to build bridges in our major cities. We have money to destroy the health of the Iraqi people and we don't have enough money to repair the health of our own people in this country. There is something fundamentally wrong with the direction this administration is taking its foreign policy, and I intend to change that if I am elected president of the United States." - Dennis Kucinich on CNN's Crossfire: Friday February 21, 2003. "They hang the man and flog the woman who steal the goose from the Common. But the other man they let go loose who steal the Common from the goose." - Olde English Nursery Rhyme
The Origins of the Overclass By Steve Kangas The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere. The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface — and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds. During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America’s wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent — the highest level of inequality in the 20th century. How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation’s rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!" Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of
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interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society’s elite. By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nation’s businesses, media and universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives. Their employment with the agency took a variety of forms, which included: Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official capacity. Staying in one's profession, using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time, or on-call. Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along information useful to the CIA. Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between the agency and the business world. Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government. Many common traits made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies. Both share an intense dislike of democracy, and feel they should be liberated from democratic regulations and oversight. Both share a culture of secrecy, either hiding their actions from the American public or lying about them to present the best public image. And both are in a perfect position to help each other. How? International businesses give CIA agents cover, secret funding, top-quality resources and important contacts in foreign lands. In return, the CIA gives corporations billion-dollar federal contracts (for spy planes, satellites and other hi-tech spycraft). Businessmen also enjoy the romantic thrill of participating in spy operations. The CIA also gives businesses a certain amount of protection and privacy from the media and government watchdogs, under the guise of "national security." Finally, the CIA helps American corporations remain dominant in foreign markets, by overthrowing governments hostile to unregulated capitalism and installing puppet regimes whose policies favor American corporations at the expense of their people. The CIA’s alliance with the elite turned out to be an unholy one. Each enabled the other to rise above the law. Indeed, a review of the CIA’s history is one of such crime and atrocity that no one can reasonably defend it, even in the name of anticommunism. Before reviewing this alliance in detail, it is useful to know the CIA’s history of atrocity first. The Crimes of the CIA During World War II, the OSS actively engaged in propaganda, sabotage and countless other dirty tricks. After the war, and even after the CIA was created in 1947, the American intelligence community reverted to harmless information gathering and analysis, thinking that the danger to national security had passed. That changed in 1948 with the emergence of the Cold War. In that year, the CIA recreated its covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy Coordination. Its first director was Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities included propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world. By 1953, the dirty tricks department of the CIA had grown to 7,200 personnel and commanded 74 percent of the CIA’s total budget. The following quotes describe the culture of lawlessness that pervaded the CIA: Stanley Lovell, a CIA recruiter for "Wild Bill" Donovan: "What I have to do is to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and say to him, 'Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell. Come help me raise it.'" 1 George Hunter White, writing of his CIA escapades: "I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun... Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?" 2 A retired CIA agency caseworker with twenty years experience: "I never gave a thought to legality or morality. Frankly, I did what worked." http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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Blessed with secrecy and lack of congressional oversight, CIA operations became corrupt almost immediately. Using propaganda stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA felt justified in manipulating the public for its own good. The broadcasts were so patently false that for a time it was illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S. This was a classic case of a powerful organization deciding what was best for the people, and then abusing the powers it had helped itself to. During the 40s and 50s, most of the public was unaware of what the CIA was doing. Those who knew thought they were fighting the good fight against communism, like James Bond. However, they could not keep their actions secret forever, and by the 60s and 70s, Americans began learning about the agency’s crimes and atrocities.3 It turns out the CIA has: - Corrupted democratic elections in Greece, Italy and dozens of other nations; - Been involved to varying degrees in at least 35 assassination plots against foreign heads of state or prominent political leaders. Successful assassinations include democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende (Chile) and Patrice Lumumba (Belgian Congo); also CIA-created dictators like Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic) and Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam); and popular political leaders like Che Guevara. Unsuccessful attempts range from Fidel Castro to Charles De Gaulle. - Helped launch military coups that toppled democratic governments, replacing them with brutal dictatorships or juntas. The list of overthrown democratic leaders includes Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Velasco and Arosemena (Ecuador, 1961, 1963), Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Papandreou (Greece, 1965-67), Allende (Chile, 1973), and dozens of others. Undermined the governments of Australia, Guyana, Cambodia, Jamaica and more; Supported murderous dictators like General Pinochet (Chile), the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos (Phillipines), "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier (Haiti), General Noriega (Panama), Mobutu Sese Seko (Ziare), the "reign of the colonels" (Greece), and more; Created, trained and supported death squads and secret police forces that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, leftists and political opponents, in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others; Helped run the "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers how to overthrow democratic governments. Subjects include the use of torture, interrogation and murder; Used Michigan State "professors" to train Diem’s secret police in torture; Conducted economic sabotage, including ruining crops, disrupting industry, sinking ships and creating food shortages; Paved the way for the massacre of 200,000 in East Timor, 500,000 in Indonesia and one to two million in Cambodia; Launched secret or illegal military actions or wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Cuba, Laos and Indochina; Planted false stories in the local media; Framed political opponents for crimes, atrocities, political statements and embarrassments that they did not commit; Spied on thousands of American citizens, in defiance of Congressional law; Smuggled Nazi war criminals and weapon scientists into the U.S., unpunished, for their use in the Cold War; Created organizations like the World Anti-Communist League, which became filled with ex-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, Italian terrorists, Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaaners, Latin American death squad leaders, CIA agents and other extreme right-wing militants; Conducted Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control experiment that gave LSD and other drugs to Americans against their will or without their knowledge, causing some to commit suicide; Penetrated and disrupted student antiwar organizations; Kept friendly and extensive working relations with the Mafia; Actively traded in drugs around the world since the 1950s to fund its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the iceberg – other notorious examples include Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and Noriega’s Panama. Had their fingerprints all over the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. Even if the CIA is not responsible for these killings, the sheer amount of CIA involvement in these cases demands answers; And then routinely lied to Congress about all of the above. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations.4 Former State http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust." We should note that the CIA gets away with this because it is not accountable to democratic government. Former CIA officer Philip Agee put it best: "The CIA is the President's secret army." Prior to 1975, the agency answered only to the President (creating all the usual problems of authoritarianism). And because the CIA’s activities were secret, the President rarely had to worry about public criticism and pressure. After the 1975 Church hearings, Congress tried to create congressional oversight of the CIA, but this has failed miserably. One reason is that the congressional oversight committee is a sham, filled with Cold Warriors, conservatives, businessmen, and even ex-CIA personnel. The Business Origins of CIA Crimes Although many people think that the CIA’s primary mission during the Cold War was to "deter communism," Noam Chomksy correctly points out that its real mission was "deterring democracy." From corrupting elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has virtually always replaced democracy with dictatorship. It didn’t help that the CIA was run by businessmen, whose hostility towards democracy is legendary. The reason they overthrew so many democracies is because the people usually voted for policies that multinational corporations didn't like: land reform, strong labor unions, nationalization of their industries, and greater regulation protecting workers, consumers and the environment. So the CIA’s greatest "successes" were usually more pro-corporate than anti-communist. Citing a communist threat, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. But there was no communist threat — the Soviets stood back and watched the coup from afar. What really happened was that Mossadegh threatened to nationalize British and American oil companies in Iran. Consequently, the CIA and MI6 toppled Mossadegh and replaced him with a puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran and his murderous secret police, SAVAK. The reason why the Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionaries took 52 Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979 was because the CIA had helped SAVAK torture and murder their people. Another "success" was the CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Again, there was no communist threat. The real threat was to Guatemala’s United Fruit Company, a Rockefeller-owned firm whose stockholders included CIA Director Allen Dulles. Arbenz threatened to nationalize the company, albeit with generous compensation. In response, the CIA initiated a coup that overthrew Arbenz and installed the murderous dictator Castillo Armas. For four decades, CIA-backed dicatators would torture and murder hundreds of thousands of leftists, union members and others who would fight for a more equitable distribution of the country’s resources. Another "success" story was Chile. In 1973, the country’s democratically elected leader, Salvadore Allende, nationalized foreign-owned interests, like Chile’s lucrative copper mines and telephone system. International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) offered the CIA $1 million to overthrow Allende — which the CIA allegedly refused — but paid $350,000 to his political opponents. The CIA responded with a coup that murdered Allende and replaced him with a brutal tyrant, General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands of leftists, union members and political opponents as economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman installed a "free market" economy. Since then, income inequality has soared higher in Chile than anywhere else in Latin America. Even when the communist threat was real, the CIA first and foremost took care of the elite. In testimony before Congress in the early 50s, it artificially inflated Soviet military capabilities. A notorious example was the "bomber gap" that later turned out to be grossly exaggerated. Another was "Team B," a group of hawkish CIA analysts who seriously distorted Soviet military data. These scare tactics worked. Congress awarded giant defense contracts to the U.S. military-industrial complex. And not even the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of American defense contracts have stopped the CIA from serving the elite. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss writes: Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has been abuzz with talk about using the CIA for economic espionage. Stripped of euphemism, economic espionage simply means that American spies would target foreign companies, such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda, and then covertly pass stolen trade secrets and technology to U.S. http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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corporate executives.5 If this isn’t bad enough, a worse problem arises in that the CIA doesn’t hand over this technology to every American auto-related company, but only the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. In a 1975 interview, Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee summed up his personal observations of the agency: To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents, for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United Kingdom desk is said to have the "U.K. account"… American multinational corporations have built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business interests, you also find the CIA… The multinational corporations want a peaceful status quo in countries where they have investments, because that gives them undisturbed access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor and stable markets for their finished goods. The status quo suits bankers, because their money remains secure and multiplies. And, of course, the status quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA supports abroad, because all they want is to keep themselves on top of the socioeconomic pyramid and the majority of their people on the bottom. But do you realize what being on the bottom means in most parts of the world? Ignorance, poverty, often early death by starvation or disease… Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it only carries out policy. And, like everyone else, the President has to respond to forces in the society he's trying to lead, right? In America, the most powerful force is Big Business, and American Big Business has a vested interest in the Cold War.6 Domestic Recruitment The CIA had no trouble recruiting elites who sought a more exciting life. Between 1948 and 1959, more than 40,000 American individuals and companies acted as sources for the U.S.intelligence community.7 Let’s look at each area of recruitment, and see how they enabled the CIA to conduct its crimes: Big Business The CIA co-opted big business right from the start, beginning with the most famous billionaire of the time: Howard Hughes. Hughes had inherited his father’s million-dollar tool and die company at age 19. Anxious to expand his fortune, he made a conscientious decision "to go where the money is" - namely, government. With a few well-placed bribes, Hughes secured defense contracts to build military planes. The result was the Hughes Aircraft company. By 1940, he had also acquired a controlling interest in Trans World Airlines. His government connections and international airline soon caught the attention of the CIA, and the two began a lifelong relationship. Hughes, whom the CIA dubbed "The Stockbroker," became the agency’s largest contractor. Not only did he let the CIA use his business firms as fronts, but he also funded countless CIA operations. Perhaps the most notorious was Operation Jennifer, an allegedly failed attempt to recover nuclear codes from a sunken Soviet submarine. Hughes’ right-hand security man, Robert Maheu, was a CIA agent who at one time represented the CIA in negotiations with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro. The CIA’s contacts with big business quickly spread. The agency showed a preference for international companies, public relations firms, media companies, law offices, banks, financiers and stockbrokers. The CIA didn’t limit its activities to recruiting businessmen; sometimes the CIA bought or created entire companies outright. One benefit of co-opting big business was that the CIA was able to create a secret source of funds other than from government. With stock portfolios multiplying their profits, it’s impossible now to say how flush the CIA really is. If Congress ever cut off funds for a mission, the business fraternity could easily replace them, either by donations or even setting up profitable businesses in the target country. In fact, this is precisely what happened during the Iran/Contra scandal. By allying itself with the business community, the CIA received the funds and ability it needed to remove itself from democratic control. The Media http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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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. The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine Graham, today’s publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was the Post’s ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after the war, both in readership and influence.8 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 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. After Philip’s suicide in 1963, Katharine Graham took over the Post. Seduced by her husband’s world of government and espionage, she expanded her newspaper’s relationship with the CIA. In a 1988 speech before CIA officials at Langley, Virginia, she stated: We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that 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. This quote has since become a classic among CIA critics for its belittlement of democracy and its admission that there is a political agenda behind the Post’s headlines. Ben Bradlee was the Post’s managing editor during most of the Cold War. He worked in the U.S. Paris embassy from 1951 to 1953, where he followed orders by the CIA station chief to place propaganda in the European press.9 Most Americans incorrectly believe that Bradlee personifies the liberal slant of the Post, given his role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate investigations. But neither of these two incidents are what they seem. The Post merely published the Pentagon Papers after The New York Times already had, because it wanted to appear competitive. As for Watergate, we’ll examine the CIA’s reasons for wanting to bring down Nixon in a moment. Someone once asked Bradlee: "Does it irk you when The Washington Post is made out to be a bastion of slanted liberal thinkers instead of champion journalists just because of Watergate?" Bradlee responded: "Damn right it does!"10 It would be impossible to elaborate in this short space even the most important examples of the CIA/media alliance. Sig Mickelson was a CIA asset the entire time he was president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961. Later he went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda. The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies. It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse, the CIA has bought http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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many domestic media companies. A prime example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William Casey (who would later become Reagan’s CIA director). Another founder was Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC. For those who believe in "separation of press and state," the very idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with the agency. Even today, when the immorality of the CIA should be an open-and-shut case, "debate" about the issue rages in the media. Here is but one example: In 1996, The San Jose Mercury News published an investigative report suggesting that the CIA had sold crack in Los Angeles to fund the Contra war in Central America. A month later, three of the CIA’s most important media allies — The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times — immediately leveled their guns at the Mercury report and blasted away in an attempt to discredit it. Who wrote the Post article? Walter Pincus, longtime CIA journalist. The dangers here are obvious. Academia By the early 50s, CIA Director Allen Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale. (A disproportionate number of CIA figures, like George Bush, come from Yale’s "Skull and Crossbones" Society.) CIA recruiters also approached thousands of other professors to work in place at their universities on a part-time, contract basis. Not stopping at recruiting scholars, the agency would go on to create several departments at elite universities, including Harvard's Russian Research Center and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Although most academics were supportive of the CIA in the 50s, most were unaware of its abuses. In the 60s, academia would become outraged to learn that anti-communist organizations like the National Student Association were actually creations of the CIA. The most audacious CIA front was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that attracted liberal, freethinking artists and intellectuals who nonetheless deplored communism. By the late 60s and 70s, growing reports of CIA crimes and atrocities had deeply alienated academia. Scholars were further troubled to learn that the CIA had penetrated and disrupted student antiwar groups. Unlike business and the media, academia overwhelmingly denounced the CIA after the Vietnam era. This eventually forced the CIA to turn to new places to find their analysts and scholars. The most important source was the conservative thinktank movement, which it helped to create. More on this later. The Roman Catholic Church Although the CIA began as a mostly Protestant organization, Roman Catholics quickly came to dominate the new covert-action wing in 1948. All were staunchly conservative, fiercely anticommunist and socially elite. Just a few of the many Catholic operatives included future CIA directors William Colby, William Casey, and John McCone. Another well-known personality from this period was William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review and gadfly host of TV’s Firing Line. Buckley, it turns out, served as a CIA agent in Mexico City, and his experiences there served as fodder for his Blackford Oakes spy novels. There were several reasons for this influx of Catholic elites. First, Wisner (himself a Wall Street lawyer) had an extensive and glamorous circle of friends to recruit from. Second, Italy was in constant crisis in the 1940s, both during World War II and after. Throughout this troubled period, the American intelligence community’s greatest ally in Italy was the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, is one of the most anti-communist organizations in the world. The Marxist doctrine of atheism threatens Catholic theology, and its equality threatens the Church’s strict tradition of hierarchy and authoritarianism. When Hitler invaded Communist Russia, the Vatican openly approved. Jesuit Michael Serafian wrote: "It cannot be denied that [Pope] Pius XII's closest advisors for some time regarded Hitler's armoured divisions as the right hand of God."11 But Hitler persecuted Catholics as well, and ultimately drove the Church to the Americans. In 1943, the Vatican reached a secret
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agreement with OSS Chief Donovan — himself a devout Catholic — to let the Holy See become the center of Allied spy operations in Italy. Donovan considered the Church to be one of his prize intelligence assets, given its global power, membership and contacts. He cultivated this alliance by sending America’s most prestigious Catholics to the Vatican to establish rapport and forge an alliance. After the war, half of Europe lay under Communist control, and the Italian communist party threatened to win the 1948 elections. The prospect of communism ruling over the heart of Catholicism terrified the Vatican. Once again, American intelligence gathered their most prestigious Catholics to strengthen ties with the Vatican. Because this was the first mission of the new covert action division, the American Catholic agents acquired positions of power early on, and would dominate covert operations for the rest of the Cold War. At a public level, the U.S. government sunk $350 million in social and military aid into Italy to sway the vote. On a secret level, Wisner spent $10 million in black budget funds to steal the elections. This included disseminating propaganda, beating up left-wing politicians, intimidating voters and disrupting leftist parties. The dirty tricks worked — the Communists lost, and the Catholic Americans’ success permanently secured their power within the CIA. The Knights of Malta12 The Roman Catholic Church did not forget the American agents who had saved them from both Nazism and Communism. It rewarded them by making them Knights of Malta, or members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM). SMOM is one of the oldest and most elite religious orders in the Catholic Church. Until recently, it limited its membership to Italians and foreign heads of state. In 1927, however, an exception was made for the United States, given its emerging status as a world power. SMOM opened an American branch, awarding knighthood or damehood to several American Catholic business tycoons. This group was so conservative that one, John Raskob, the Chairman of General Motors, actually became involved in an aborted military plot to remove Franklin Roosevelt from the White House. SMOM has also been embarrassed by knighting or giving awards to countless people who later turned out to be Nazi war criminals. This is the sort of culture that thrives within the leadership of SMOM. Officially, the Knights of Malta are a global charity organization. But beginning in the 1940s, knighthood was granted to countless CIA agents, and the organization has become a front for intelligence operations. SMOM is ideal for this kind of activity, because it is recognized as the world’s only landless sovereignty, and members enjoy diplomatic immunity. This allows agents and supplies to pass through customs without interference from the host country. Such privileges enabled the Knights of Malta to become a major supplier of "humanitarian aid" to the Contras during their war in the 1980s. A partial list of the Knights and Dames of Malta reads like a Who’s Who of American Catholicism: William Casey – CIA Director. John McCone – CIA Director. William Colby – CIA Director. William Donovan – OSS Director. Donovan was given an especially prestigious form of knighthood that has only been given to a hundred other men in history. Frank Shakespeare – Director of such propaganda organizations as the U.S. Information Agency, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Also executive vice-president of CBS-TV and vice-chairman of RKO General Inc. He is currently chairman of the board of trustees at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. William Simon – Treasury Secretary under President Nixon. In the private sector, he has become one of America’s 400 richest individuals by working in international finance. Today he is the President of the John M. Olin Foundation, a major funder of right-wing think tanks. William F. Buckley, Jr. – CIA agent, conservative pundit and mass media personality. James Buckley – William’s brother, head of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Clare Boothe Luce - The grand dame of the Cold War was also a Dame of Malta. She was a popular playwright and the wife of the publishing tycoon Henry Luce, who cofounded Time magazine. Francis X Stankard - CEO of the international division of Chase Manhattan Bank, a Rockefeller institution. (Nelson Rockefeller was also a major CIA figure.) John Farrell – President, U.S. Steel Lee Iacocca – Chairman, General Motors William S. Schreyer – Chairman, Merrill Lynch. Richard R. Shinn – Chairman, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Joseph Kennedy http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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– Founder of the Kennedy empire. Baron Hilton – Owner, Hilton Hotel chain. Patrick J. Frawley Jr. – Heir, Schick razor fortune. Frawley is a famous funder of right-wing Catholic causes, such as the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Ralph Abplanalp - Aerosol magnate. Martin F. Shea - Executive vice president of Morgan Guaranty Trust. Joseph Brennan - Chairman of the executive committee of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York. J. Peter Grace – President, W.R. Grace Company. He was a key figure in Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists and spies to the U.S. Many were war criminals whose atrocities were excused in their service to the CIA. Thomas Bolan – Of Saxe, Bacon and Bolan, the law firm of Senator McCarthy's deceased aide Roy Cohn. Bowie Kuhn – Baseball Comissioner Cardinal John O'Connor – Extreme right-wing leader among American Catholics, and fervent abortion opponent. Cardinal Francis Spellman – The "American Pope" was at one time the most powerful Catholic in America, an arch-conservative and a rabid anti-communist. Cardinal Bernard Law - One of the highest-ranking conservatives in the American church. Alexander Haig – Secretary of State under President Reagan. Admiral James D. Watkins – Hard-line chief of naval operations under President Reagan. Jeremy Denton – Senator (R–Al). Pete Domenici – Senator (RNew Mexico). Walter J. Hickel - Governor of Alaska and secretary of the interior. When this group gets together, obviously, the topics are spying, business and politics. The CIA has also used other religious and charity organizations as fronts. For example, John F. Kennedy -- another anticommunist Roman Catholic who greatly expanded covert operations -- created the U.S. Peace Corps to serve as cover for CIA operatives. The CIA has also made extensive use of missionaries, with the blessings of many right-wing, anticommunist Christian denominations. But the World Grows Wise… It was only a matter of time before other nations caught on to these fronts. They learned that when the CIA comes to their countries to commit their crimes and atrocities, they come disguised as American journalists, businessmen, missionaries and charity volunteers. Unfortunately, foreigners are now targeting these professions as hostile. In Lebanon, terrorists held U.S. journalist Terry Anderson hostage for nearly seven years, on the not unreasonable assumption that he was a spy. Whether or not this was true is beside the point. The CIA has put all Americans abroad at risk, whether they are CIA agents or not. In hearings before the Senate in 1996, many organizations urged Congress to stop using their professions as CIA cover. Don Argue of the National Association of Evangelicals testified: "Such use of missionary agents for covert activities by the CIA would be unethical and immoral."13 From the Cold War to the Class War As noted above, academia was the first major institution to denounce the crimes of the CIA. Why? One reason is that scholars conduct their own extensive research into world affairs, so naturally they were the first to learn the truth. This is the main reason why protest against the Vietnam War and the CIA erupted first among students on the nation’s campuses. By the end of the Vietnam War, the CIA had suffered a "brain drain" as its academic allies became its most articulate, passionate and eloquent critics. The social revolutions of the 60s terrified the CIA. James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence and a truly paranoid man, was convinced the Soviets had masterminded the entire antiwar movement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shared his conviction. The CIA had always spied on student groups throughout the 60s, but in 1968 President Johnson dramatically stepped up the effort with Operation CHAOS. This initially called for 50 CIA agents to go undercover as student radicals, penetrate their antiwar organizations and root out the Russian spies who were causing the rebellion. Tellingly, they never found a single spy. The agents also began a campaign of wire-tapping, mail-opening, burglary, deception, intimidation and disruption against thousands of protesting American civilians. By the time Operation CHAOS wound down in 1973, the CIA had spied on 7,000 Americans, 1,000 organizations and traded information on more than 300,000 persons with various law agencies.14 When academia learned of this, its outrage grew. The loss of academia was only the first blow for the CIA. Other disasters quickly followed; in the early 70s, the CIA was trying desperately to stave off a growing number of scandals. The first was Watergate. The CIA’s fingerprints were all over Watergate. First, we should note the CIA had clear motives for helping oust Nixon. He was the ultimate "outsider," a poor California Quaker who grew up feeling bitter resentment towards the elite "Eastern establishment." http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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Nixon, for all his arch-conservatism, was surprisingly liberal on economic issues, enfuriating businessmen with statements like "We are all Keynesians now." He created a whole host of new agencies to regulate business, like the FDA, EPA and OSHA. He signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which forced businesses to clean up their toxic emissions. He imposed price controls to fight inflation, and took the nation fully off the gold standard. Nixon also strengthened affirmative action. Even his staffers were famously anti-elitist, like Kevin Philips, who would eventually write the bible on inequality during the 1980s, The Politics of Rich and Poor. Add to this Nixon’s withdrawal from Vietnam and Détente with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had not only tried to remove control of foreign policy from the CIA, but had also taken measures to bring the CIA itself under control. Not surprisingly, Nixon and his CIA Director, Richard Helms, couldn’t stand each other. (Nixon fired him for failing to cover up for Watergate.) Clearly, Nixon was fighting at cross-purposes with the CIA and the nation’s elite. As it turns out, the CIA had inside knowledge of Nixon’s dirty work. Nixon had created his own covert action team, "The Committee to Reelect the President," more amusingly known by its acronym, CREEP. The team consisted of two CIA agents — E. Howard Hunt and James McCord — as well as former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. They also employed four Cubans with long CIA histories. In fact, a CIA front called the Mullen Company funded their activities, which ranged from disrupting Democratic campaigns to laundering Nixon’s illegal campaign contributions. The CIA not only had intimate knowledge of Nixon’s crimes, but it also acted as though it wanted the world to know them. When the FBI began investigating Watergate, Nixon tried using the CIA to cover up for him. At first the CIA half-heartedly complied, telling the FBI that the investigation would endanger CIA operations in Mexico. But a few weeks later it gave the FBI a green light again to proceed again with their investigation. Furthermore, Watergate was exposed by the CIA’s main newspaper in America, The Washington Post. One of the two journalists who investigated the scandal, Robert Woodward, had only recently become a journalist. Previously Woodward had worked as a Naval intelligence liaison to the White House, privy to some of the nation’s highest secrets. He would later write a sympathetic portrait of CIA Director Bill Casey in a book entitled Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. It was Woodward who personally knew and interviewed "Deep Throat," the unnamed source who revealed inside information on Nixon’s activities. Many Watergate researchers consider one of Woodward’s old intelligence contacts to be a prime candidate for Deep Throat.15 Despite all the facts of CIA involvement, Woodward and Bernstein made virtually no mention of the CIA in their Watergate reporting. Even during Senate hearings on Watergate, the CIA somehow managed to stay out of the spotlight. In 1974, the House would clear the CIA of any involvement in Watergate. The CIA was not as lucky in 1974, when the Senate held hearings on James Jesus Angleton’s illegal surveillance of American citizens. These disclosures resulted in his firing. But that was nothing compared to the 1975 Church Committee. This Senate investigation looked into virtually every type of CIA crime, from assassination to secret war to manipulating the domestic media. The "reforms" that resulted from these hearings were mostly cosmetic, but the details that emerged shattered the CIA’s reputation forever. Interestingly enough, the two Senators who held these hearings — Frank Church and Otis Pike — were both defeated for reelection, despite a 98 percent reelection rate for incumbents. The CIA wasn’t the only conservative institution that found itself embattled in the early 70s. This was a bad time for conservatives everywhere. America had lost the war in Vietnam. U.S. corporations had to cope with the rise of OPEC. The anti-poverty programs of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society were causing a major redistribution of wealth. And Nixon was making things worse with his own antipoverty and regulatory programs. Between 1960 and 1973, these efforts cut poverty in half, from 22 to 11 percent. Meanwhile, between 1965 and 1976, the richest 1 percent had gone from owning 37 percent of America’s wealth to only 22 percent.16 At a 1973 Conference Board meeting of top American business leaders, executives declared: "We are fighting for our lives," "We are fighting a delaying action," and "If we don’t take action now, we will see our own demise. We will evolve into another social democracy."17 The CIA to the rescue In the mid-1970s, at this historic low point in American conservatism, the CIA began a major campaign to turn corporate fortunes around. http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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They did this in several ways. First, they helped create numerous foundations to finance their domestic operations. Even before 1973, the CIA had co-opted the most famous ones, like the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. But after 1973, they created more. One of their most notorious recruits was billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. During World War II, Scaife's father served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. By his mid-twenties, both of Scaife's parents had died, and he inherited a fortune under four foundations: the Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundations and the Allegheny Foundation. In the early 1970s, Scaife was encouraged by CIA agent Frank Barnett to begin investing his fortune to fight the "Soviet menace."18 From 1973 to 1975, Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world. Shortly afterwards he began donating millions to fund the New Right. Scaife's CIA roots are typical of those who head the new conservative foundations. By 1994 the most active were: Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Carthage Foundation Earhart Foundation Charles G. Koch David H. Koch Claude R. Lambe Philip M. McKenna J.M. Foundation John M. Olin Foundation Henry Salvatori Foundation Sarah Scaife Foundation Smith Richardson Foundation Between 1992 and 1994, these foundations gave $210 million to conservative causes. Here is the breakdown of their donations: $88.9 million for conservative scholarships; $79.2 million to enhance a national infrastructure of think tanks and advocacy groups; $16.3 million for alternative media outlets and watchdog groups; $10.5 million for conservative pro-market law firms; $9.3 million for regional and state think tanks and advocacy groups; $5.4 million to "organizations working to transform the nations social views and giving practices of the nation's religious and philanthropic leaders."19 The political machine they built is broad and comprehensive, covering every aspect of the political fight. It includes right-wing departments and chairs in the nation’s top universities, think tanks, public relations firms, media companies, fake grassroots organizations that pressure Congress (irreverently known as "Astroturf" movements), "Roll-out-the-vote" machines, pollsters, fax networks, lobbyist organizations, economic seminars for the nation’s judges, and more. And because corporations are the richest sector of society, their greater financing overwhelms similar efforts by Democrats. Besides creating foundations, the CIA helped organize the business community. There have always been special interest groups representing business, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, and the CIA has long been involved with them. However, after 1973, a spate of powerful new groups would come into existence, like the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission. These organizations quickly became powerhouses in promoting the business agenda. Their efforts clearly succeeded. With the 1975 SUN-PAC decision, corporations persuaded government to legalize corporate Political Action Committees (the lobbyist organizations that bribe our government). By 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all PACs, and they donated 79 percent of all campaign contributions to political parties.20 In two landmark elections — 1980 and 1994 — corporations gave heavily and one-sidedly to Republicans, turning one or both houses of Congress over to the GOP. Democratic incumbents were shocked by the threat of being rolled completely out of power, so they quietly shifted to the right on economic issues, even though they continued a public façade of liberalism. Corporations went ahead and donated to Democratic incumbents in all other elections, but only as long as they abandoned the interests of workers, consumers, minorities and the poor. As expected, the new pro-corporate Congress passed laws favoring the rich: between 1975 and 1992, the amount of national household wealth owned by the richest 1 percent soared from 22 to 42 percent.21 The CIA also helped create the conservative think tank movement. Prior to the 70s, think tanks spanned the political spectrum, with moderate think tanks receiving three times as much funding as conservative ones. At these early think tanks, scholars typically brainstormed for creative solutions to policy problems. This would all change after the rise of conservative foundations in the early 70s. The Heritage Foundation opened its doors in 1973, the recipient of $250,000 in seed money from the Coors Foundation. A flood of conservative think tanks followed shortly thereafter, and by 1980 they overwhelmed the scene. The new think tanks turned out to be little more than propaganda mills, rigging studies to "prove" that their corporate sponsors needed tax breaks, deregulation and other favors from http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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government. Of course, think-tank studies are useless without publicity, and here the CIA proved especially valuable. Using propaganda techniques it had perfected at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA and its allies turned American AM radio into a haven for conservative talk show hosts. Yes — Rush Limbaugh uses the same propaganda techniques that Muscovites once heard from Voice of America. The CIA has also developed countless other media outlets, like Capital Cities (which eventually bought ABC), major PR firms like Hill & Knowlton, and of course, all the Agency’s connections in the national news media.22 The following is a typical example of how the "New Media" operates. As most political observers know, the Republicans suffer from a "gender gap," in which women prefer Democrats by huge majorities. This is, in fact, why Clinton has twice won the presidency. But, curiously enough, as the 90s progressed, conservative female pundits began popping up everywhere in the media. Hard-right pundits like Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Laura Ingraham, Barbara Olson, Melinda Sidak, Anita Blair and Whitney Adams conditioned us to the idea of the conservative woman. This phenomenon was no accident. It turns out that Richard Mellon Scaife donated $450,000 over three years to the Independent Women's Forum, a booking agency that heavily seeds such female conservative pundits into the media.23 Conclusion The most obvious criticism of the New Overclass is that their political machine is undemocratic. Using subversive techniques once aimed at communists, and with all the money they ever need to succeed, the Overclass undemocratically controls our government, our media, and even a growing part of academia. These institutions in turn allow the Overclass to control the supposedly "free" market. It doesn't win all the time, of course — witness Bill Clinton's impeachment trial — but it does score an endless string of other victories elsewhere, all to the detriment of workers, consumers, women, minorities and the poor. We need to fight it with everything we've got.
Endnotes: 1. Mind Manipulators, Scheflin and Opton. p.241. 2. Captain George White in a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. 3. All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is summarized from William Blum’s encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen’s The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997). Information about CIA drug running can be found at http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/cia/blum1.html and http://speech.csun.edu/ben/news/cia/index.html. 4. Coleman McCarthy, "The Consequences of Covert Tactics" Washington Post, December 13, 1987. 5. Robert Dreyfuss, "Company Spies," Mother Jones. Website: http://www.mojones.com/mother_jones/MJ94/dreyfuss.html 6. Philip Agee: The Playboy Interview. Website: http://www.connix.com/~harry/agee.htm 7. Lara Shohet, "Intelligence, Academia and Industry," The Final Report of the Snyder Commission, Edward Cheng and Diane C. Snyder, eds., (Princeton Unversity: The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, January 1997). Website: http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/snyder/academia.htm. 8. Website: http://www.europa.com/~johnlf/cn/cn9-35. 9. Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great and the Washington Post, 2nd ed. (Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987) 10. "Forum for Ben Bradlee," Watergate 25. Website: http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/97/bradlee.htm. 11. Lewy, Guenter, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (London and New York, 1964), pp. 249-250. 12. National Catholic Reporter, Jan 89, Mar 89, Apr 89, May 89, "Nazis, the Vatican and the CIA," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986, Number 25 Website: http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/knightsofmaltalist.html. 13. Anthony Collings, "Journalists tell Senate they want no CIA ties," CNN, July 18, 1996. Website: http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/18/spies.journalists/. 14. Morton Halperin, et al, eds., The Lawless State (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 153. http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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15. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. 16. Edward N. Wolff, "How the Pie is Sliced" The American Prospect no. 22 (Summer 1995), pp. 58-64. Website: http://epn.org/prospect/22/22wolf.html. 17. Quoted in Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 44-47. 18. Karen Rothmyer, "The man behind the mask," Salon, April 7, 1998. 19. Study conducted by National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, July 1997, as reported by the National Education Association. Website: http://www.nea.org/publiced/paycheck/paychkf.html. 20. Center for Responsive Politics, Washington D.C., 1993. 21. Wolff. 22. For CIA involvement in Capital Cities/ABC, see Dennis Mazzocco, Networks of Power (Boston: South End Press, 1994). For CIA involvement in the PR industry, see John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good for You! (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), pp. 49-51,153,157,160-63. 23. Jonathon Broder and Murray Waas, [Untitled] Salon, April 20, 1998. Website: http://www.salonmag.com/news/1998/04/20news.html http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/L-overclass.html
The CIA and the Media Here's just a snippet from Carl Bernstein's famous 1977 article entitled "The CIA & The Media" from Rolling Stone, 10/20/77. Anyone with access to a library should try to find this - it's a truly breakthrough piece - 16 pages long in the reprint!
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, ScrippsHoward, 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, http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/media/ciamedia.htm
Author: Ashley Overbeck Title: A Report on CIA Infiltration and Manipulation of the Mass Media original source: onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">www.geocities.com/cpa_blacktown/20000318mediaoverb.htm Should CIA agents be allowed to pose as journalists to further the aims of their clandestine activities? Members of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on the future of U.S. intelligence in the post-Cold War world say yes, and a CIA official recently came forward to admit that the Agency already occasionally does so despite regulations barring the practice. But is this a breaking story or just the latest chapter in a spy story that traces its roots back to the 1950's? While they may act like strangers in public, the press and the CIA have a sordid past that spans more than four decades.
The CIA-Press Connection in the 1950s and 60s The CIA-press connection traces its roots back to the early days of the Cold War, when Allen Dulles (who became CIA director in 1953) began courting the nation's most prestigious journalistic institutions for Agency operations. The mood of the day precluded the need for secretive infiltration, as Carl Bernstein points out in his 1977 expose on the topic. "American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against global Communism," he writes. "Accordingly, the line separating the American press corps was often indistinguishable." That's not to say that reporters acted as spies in the James Bond sense. Media outlets offered services that fell into the broad categories of providing "cover" for CIA operatives (i.e. jobs and credentials) or sharing information gathered by reporters on staff. While the Agency ran a formal training program in the 50's that attempted to teach rank-and-file agents to be reporters, this was among the least common of the more than 400 relationships with the press described in CIA files. Most involved were journalists before their involvement with the CIA began. Reporters, especially foreign correspondents, typically served as "eyes and ears" for the CIA. Often they were briefed by agents before a trip and debriefed when they returned; they shared their notebooks, relayed things that they had seen or overheard and offered their impressions. More complex arrangements found reporters planting misinformation for the Agency or serving as liaisons between agents and foreign contacts, often in return for information or access. "In return for our giving them information, we'd ask them to do things that fit their roles as journalists but that they wouldn't have thought of unless we put it in their minds," one agent told Bernstein. "For instance, a reporter in Vienna would say to our man, 'I met an interesting second secretary at the Czech Embassy.' We'd say, 'Can you get to know him? And after you get to know him, can you assess him? And then, could you put him in touch with us - would you mind us using your apartment?'" Another senior CIA official offered the following description of "reporting" by cooperating journalists: "We would ask them, 'Will you do us a favor? We understand that you're going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved 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." It was a symbiotic relationship: reporters got the scoop and the spooks got the dirt. Correspondents with Agency ties were highly valued by their bosses for the stories they brought home. And agents saw in the press a perfect vehicle for information gathering: who else besides a reporter enjoyed such free access in a foreign country, could cultivate so many sources among foreign governments and elites and ask lots of probing questions without arousing suspicion? CIA-press operations in the 50's and 60's relied heavily on journalists working in Latin America and Western Europe. Members of the press were used as go-betweens to deliver messages and money to European Christian Democrats and also helped the Agency track the movements of people coming from Eastern Europe. Additionally, the CIA owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American, a nowdefunct English-language newspaper in Italy. Reporters funneled CIA dollars to opponents of Salvador Allende in Chile and wrote anti-Allende propaganda stories for CIA proprietary publications in that country. By Bernstein's account, two of the Agency's most valuable relationships in the 60's were with reporters who covered Latin America: Hal Hendrix, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the Miami News, and Jerry O'Leary of the Washington Star. CIA files on Hendrix (who went on to become a high-ranking official at ITT) detail information that he provided agents about Cuban exiles in Miami. O'Leary's file lists him as a valued asset in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, although he denies having a formal relationship with the Agency. "I might call them up and say something like, "Papa Doc has the clap, did you know that? and they'd put it in the file," O'Leary told Bernstein. "I don't consider that reporting for them. It's useful to be friendly to them, and generally I felt friendly to them. But I think that they were more helpful to me than I was to them."
Doing the "Right Thing" To greater and lesser degrees, many journalists at the time shared the belief that relationships with the intelligence community were useful and that lending aid was the right thing to do. "Many (journalists working with the CIA) had gone to the same schools as their CIA handlers, moved in the same circles, shared fashionably liberal, anti-Communist political values, and were part of the 'old boy' network that constituted something of an establishment elite in the media, politics and academia of postwar America," Bernstein writes. "The most valued lent themselves for reasons of national service, not money." This was true of syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, who is open and unapologetic about his extensive CIA ties. Alsop's tasks in the 50's included a trip to Laos to investigate whether American reporters there were using anti-American sources and a visit to the Philippines at the behest of the CIA, who believed that his presence there might influence the outcome of an election. "I'm proud they asked me and proud to have done it," http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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Alsop said of his involvement. "The notion that a newspaperman doesn't have a duty to his country is perfect balls." According to one high-ranking official, Alsop's brother Stewart, also a columnist, was a CIA agent. He was rumored to have been particularly useful in obtaining information from foreign governments, planting misinformation and tipping off the Agency about potential foreign recruits, although his brother denies this. "I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close," Joseph Alsop once said. "I dare say he did perform some tasks -- he just did the correct thing as an American." Also notable is New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger (CFR), who the CIA lists as a valuable source of information throughout the 50's. Sulzberger claims that he "would never get near the spook business," but admits to sharing information with agents, many of whom were close personal friends: "I'm sure they consider me an asset. They can ask me questions. They find out you're going to Slobovia and they say, 'Can we talk to you when you get back?' Or they'll want to know if the head of the Ruritanian government is suffering from psoriasis. But I never took an assignment from one of those guys." However, Sulzberger does "think" that he signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA (as did his uncle, Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger [CFR]), though. Many CIA officials long for the days when there were more journalists like Sulzberger and the Alsops. "There was a time when it wasn't considered a crime to serve your government," one official bitterly told Bernstein. "This all has to be considered in the context of the morality of the times, rather than the against latter-day standards -- and hypocritical standards at that." "(I)n the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces -shredded the consensus and threw it in the air." But another agent remarked in Bernstein's expose, "there was a point when the ethical issues which most people submerged finally surfaced. Today a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency."
The Church Committee Investigation A flurry of public attention began to cast doubts upon the ethics of a press wedded to the Central Intelligence Agency after a Washington Star-News story by Oswald Johnson reported that the CIA had three dozen American newsmen on its payroll at that time (November 1973). Then-CIA director William Colby (CFR) leaked this information to Johnson, fearing an embarrassing fallout after both the Star-News and New York Times approached him to ask if any of their staff members were receiving payments from the Agency. (A Times investigation four years later showed the number of CIA-funded journalists to be closer to 50; Bernstein's expose in Rolling Stone that same year claimed it was more like 400.) By now, the times they had a-changed: In a 1974 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, former reporter Stuart Loory chastised fellow journalists for their history of chumming it up with the CIA and for their lax coverage of the issue once it came to light. "There is little question that if even one American overseas carrying a press card is paid by the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect," he wrote. "We automatically... consider Soviet and Chinese newsmen as mouthpieces and informants for their governments, while at the same time congratulating ourselves for our independence. Now we know that some of that independence has, with the stealth required of clandestine operations, been taken away from us -- or given away." In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Frank Church (the Church Committee) focused its attention on the Agency's use of American news outlets. The CIA went to great lengths to curtail this part of the committee's investigation, though, and some members of the committee later admitted that the Agency was able to get the upper hand. Colby and his successor, George Bush (CFR, TC), were able to convince the Senate that a full inquiry would cripple their intelligence-gathering capabilities and would unleash a "witch-hunt" on the nation's reporters, editors and publishers. "The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its hands," one congressional source told Carl Bernstein. "Church and some of the other members were much more interested in making headlines than in doing serious, tough investigating. The Agency pretended to be giving up a lot whenever it was asked about the flashy stuff -- assassinations and secret weapons and James Bond operations. Then, when it came to things they didn't want to give away, that were much more important to the Agency, Colby in particular called in his chits. And the committee bought it." Former intelligence officer William Bader (who returned to the Agency as a deputy to Stansfield Turner) and David Aaron (who later served as deputy to President Carter's national security advisor) supervised the committee's investigation of the CIA-press angle. CIA director Bush balked at all of Bader's requests for specific information about the scope of the Agency's media activities. Under pressure from the entire committee, Bush finally agreed to pull records on journalists and have his deputies condense them into oneparagraph summaries. The Agency would not make the raw files available, and neither the names of journalists nor their affiliations would be included. More than 400 summaries were compiled (a number that officials acknowledge was probably on the low side) in an attempt to give committee members "a broad, representative picture." "We never pretended it was a total description of the range of activities over 25 years, or the number of journalists that have done things for us," one official conceded. Still, even these sketchy details were enough for the committee to conclude that the CIA's relationships with the press were of a far greater magnitude than they had expected -- and that they needed to know more. But Bush was intransigent. Heated confrontations produced a bizarre agreement: Bader and director of the committee staff William Miller (CFR) could have access to 25 "sanitized" files from among the 400 (still without journalists' identities). Church and committee vice-chairman John Tower would see five unsanitized files to verify that the CIA had included all but the names. No information on current CIA-press relationships would be divulged, and the whole deal was contingent upon Bader, Miller, Church and Tower's promises not to reveal the files' contents to the other committee members. In the end, with time running out on the committee, the senators decided to drop the matter and leave a more detailed investigation to the CIA oversight committee that would succeed them. The committee interviewed none of the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast executives detailed in the files. And although members concluded http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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that "from the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive covert program of all," and "a much larger part of the operational system than had been indicated," this was hardly part of the official findings when they were made public. The committee dedicated a scant ten pages of its final report to covert relationships with the media. The information included in the report was vague and misleading and, according to committee member Gary Hart, "hardly reflected what we found." Bernstein offered the following commentary on the Church committee's output: "No mention was made of the 400 summaries or what they showed. Instead the report noted blandly that some fifty recent contacts had been studied by the committee staff -- thus conveying the impression that the Agency's dealings with the press had been limited to those instances. Colby's misleading public statements about the use of journalists were repeated without serious contradiction or elaboration. The role of cooperating news executives was given short shrift. The fact that the Agency had concentrated its relationships in the most prominent sectors of the press went unmentioned. That the CIA continued to regard the press as up for grabs was not even suggested." Prominent CIA-Press Relationships A source close to the Church committee remarked on the investigation that, "if this stuff got out some of the biggest names in journalism would get smeared." So just who was involved, and what was the nature of their relationships with the intelligence community? The following is a sampling of prominent organizations identified by Carl Bernstein and other researchers as high profile news outlets with low profile ties to the CIA. CBS: CIA Broadcasting System? Bernstein asserts that a good relationship between former CIA director Allen Dulles and former CBS president William Paley (CFR) made the network the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset. "Over the years," Bernstein writes, "the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one wellknown foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communications between the Washington bureau chief and the agency; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents... to be routinely monitored by the CIA." Paley chose Sig Mickelson (CFR), president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961, as his liaison with the CIA. Mickelson (who went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty) recalls complaining about having to use a pay phone to contact the CIA, and later installing a private line that bypassed the CBS switchboard for this purpose. A CBS investigation of his files revealed that he was involved in passing on CBS film and outtakes to CIA officials in exchange for payment and that he regularly forwarded copies of CBS' internal newsletter to his CIA handlers. The same investigation revealed that two CBS employees -- stringer Austin Goodrich and Frank Kearns, a network reporter from 1958-1971 -- were undercover CIA operatives. Mickelson has discussed his CIA activities with Bernstein and others. "When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA," he has recalled. "He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and the film arrangements. I assumed that this was the normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating -- though the Goodrich matter was compromising." Mickelson's successor Richard Salant says he continued some of these practices when he took the CBS helm. "I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes," he explains. "This went on for a number of years -into the Seventies." Sign of the Times The New York Times was for the CIA in the realm of newspapers what CBS was to the Agency among broadcasters. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger (CFR) arranged for cover for approximately 10 CIA employees between 1950 and 1966 as part of his general policy of providing assistance to the CIA whenever possible. According to CIA officials, the Agency's ties to the Times were stronger than to any other papers because of its large foreign news operation and because of close ties between publisher Sulzberger and director Dulles (a relationship described by one staff member as "the mighty dealing with the mighty.") The output of this close relationship generally included reporting for CIA agents and "spotting" new prospective foreign operatives. Sulzberger is said to have signed a secrecy agreement with the Agency in the 1950's -- some say he did so as a pledge not to reveal the classified information he was privy to; others claim it was a pact never to reveal the Times' dealings with the CIA. Former Times reporter Wayne Phillips said CIA agents approached and tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952, advising him that the Agency has a "working relationship" with Sulzberger. A Freedom of Information Act request later revealed that agents hoped to put him to work as an "asset" abroad. The Times ran a story about the attempted recruitment in 1976, in which Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (CFR) asserted that he had "never heard of the Times being approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son of the late Mr. Sulzberger." A CIA Post? Bernstein's former employers at the Washington Post escaped his expose unscathed, but other investigators have documented extensive CIA ties at the paper. According to John Kelly of CounterSpy magazine, Post reporter Walter Pincus (CFR) worked for the CIA in 1959 as an Agency trained and funded delegate sent to the International Youth Festival in Vienna to disrupt the festival and spy on fellow Americans. After briefing agents on his activities and taking a pledge of secrecy, he went on attend youth conferences in Ghana and Guinea. Pincus claims that he was offered, but turned down, a permanent CIA position, although he did attend a political meeting in New Delhi at the Agency's request before going on to bigger and better things at the Post. Pincus has written several pieces sympathetic to CIA operations. He published an article just prior to the release of Bernstein's Rolling Stone expose downplaying the article's claims, even though his report essentially let Post publisher Katherine Graham off the hook. Reporter Russell Warren Howe also has a long history of CIA service. In 1958, he once said, his "days as an asset had just begun." He worked for the CIA proprietary "Information Bulletin, Ltd." and its successor, "Forum Service" (later known as Forum World Features), in addition to the CIA-funded "Africa Report and "Survey." Howe was fully aware of his employer's CIA ties, referring once to the FWF as "the principal CIA media in the world." According to the Church Committee, the Post management was aware that one of their reporters worked for a CIA publication, and that on several occasions they knowingly reprinted propaganda from that paper in the Post. Philip Geyelin (CFR) on the other hand was a CIA agent before taking a job as a Post reporter. Geyelin joined the http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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Agency for 11 months during a leave from the Wall Street Journal. While at the Journal, CIA memos about Geyelin (which number in the hundreds, according to CounterSpy) described him as "a CIA resource" and a "willing collaborator." Geyelin has come to the CIA's defense in the Post: in response to a statement by Post ombudsman Charles Seib that the CIA should stick to dirty work, the press should inform the public, "and never the twain can meet," Geyelin replied that to the contrary, agents and journalists were "all searching for the same nuggets of truth about the outside world." He took this a step further when he protested Congressional efforts to regulate CIA-media ties, invoking journalists' constitutional right to be co-opted by spooks. "(I)n its zeal to restrict the freedom of the agency to subvert the press," he wrote, "Congress could wind up making a law that would in fact abridge -- or threaten to abridge -- some part of the freedom of the press that the First Amendment was intended to protect." Publisher Katherine Graham is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations with close ties to former CIA directors Dulles and William Casey (CFR). She hired CIA-linked Wackenhut Security Corporation to break up a Post union strike, and invited former Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (CFR) to join the Post's board of directors despite his well-documented past as a CIA apologist. Katzenbach is said to have asked a past Post editorial page editor to tone down an upcoming editorial about the CIA, and he chaired a presidential panel that "investigated" CIA domestic operations (but actually served as a rubber stamp for the Agency's activities). While he asserted that both the FBI and CIA were "the most decent and effective intelligence agencies in the world," Katzenbach had first hand knowledge of the seedier side of intelligence: the Church committee produced several memos documenting his suggestions to J. Edgar Hoover that he might undertake wiretap operations as part of the Bureau's campaign to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. Making Time for Spooks Time and Life founder Henry Luce was considered one of the CIA's most cooperative sources in the media. Luce, another of Dulles' personal friends in the media, was said to freely allow staff members to work with the CIA and willingly provide credentials for agents who lacked journalistic experience. Throughout the 50's and 60's Time correspondents attended CIA briefing dinners, and Luce encouraged his foreign correspondents to meet with CIA officials after returning from trips abroad. C.D. Jackson, a Life magazine vice president in the early 1960's, co-authored a CIA study on reorganization of the intelligence community during his tenure at TimeLife, and approved specific plans for granting cover to CIA operatives. Former Life managing editors Edward Thompson and George Hunt told Stuart Loory that they regularly allowed military intelligence agents to come to the Life office to look at photos and, since they were public domain, sometimes gave them prints. CIA agents were allowed to interview correspondents returning from overseas assignments too, Hunt said, although he did not consider this to be "working with" intelligence agencies. "We never cooperated with the CIA," Hunt claimed. "We didn't have any of that nonsense going on at Life." Other News Outlets With Documented CIA Ties Management at the Christian Science Monitor admitted the paper had an ongoing relationship with the CIA throughout the 1950's and early 60's. Joseph Harrison, who became editor in 1950, said he discovered that agents paid frequent visits to the news office to get information on Monitor stories. "I inherited the situation and I continued it," he said of the arrangement, which included allowing the Agency access to uncut versions of stories and letters from Monitor foreign correspondents. While Johnson characterized such activities as "helping out as an American," he drew the line at pursuing stories at the Agency's behest or allowing his employees to moonlight with the CIA. "That," according to his distinction, "would have been espionage." CIA files show that ABC News provided cover for agents throughout the 1960's. During the Church committee hearings the Agency refused to reveal whether its relationship with the network was ongoing. As with ties to other high profile news outlets, arrangements were made at the highest level, with the full knowledge of network executives. CIA officials claim that Sam Jaffe and one other unnamed correspondent performed clandestine tasks for the Agency. Jaffe admits that he was approached by agents who offered to get him a job with CBS, who would send him on assignment in Moscow if he agreed to cooperate, but claims he never agreed to the deal. Jaffe did go on to do some work for CBS, though, and said he believed that the CIA had a hand in getting him the assignment. One of the more unusual accounts of the CIA-press connection involves the Louisville Courier-Journal. Undercover operative Robert H. Campbell spent three months at the paper as a reporter in 1964-1965 as part of an arrangement made by the Agency and Courier-Journal executive editor Norman Issacs. The first account of Campbell's tenure at the paper appeared in a front-page story in 1976 -- in the Courier-Journal (one of the few self-investigative pieces written on this topic). James Herzog reported that Campbell had been hired in spite of the fact that he could not type and knew little about newswriting. "Norman said that when he was in Washington, he had been called to lunch with some friend of his who was with the CIA [who] wanted to send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of newspapering," the paper's former managing editor recalled in the article. CIA sources say that the Courier-Journal arrangements were made so that Johnson could amass a record of journalistic experience (he also worked briefly for the Hornell, New York Evening Tribune). The Agency even sent funds to the Courier-Journal to pay Johnson's salary. These same sources claim that the deal was made with Issacs and approved by the paper's publisher, but neither man recalls being involved. "All I can do is repeat the simple truth," Issacs said in response to Herzog's story, "that never, under any circumstances or at any time, have I ever knowingly hired a government agent." But, he added, "none of this is to say that I couldn't have been 'had.'" But clues were there. No one looked into Johnson's credentials when he was hired, and his file included the curious notation "Hired for temporary work -- no reference checks completed or needed." Johnson's journalistic prowess (or lack thereof) should have given him away: his editors characterized his work as "unreadable" and it was never published. If that was not clue enough, his penchant for announcing to patrons at a bar a few steps from his office that he was a CIA agent should have done the trick. Who else? Bernstein compiled the following list of additional organizations known to have provided CIA cover: the New York Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, the Associated Press, United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. The CFR Report on "Making Intelligence Smarter" A Council on Foreign Relations task force thrust the CIA-media connection back into the spotlight this year with the release of their report on post-Cold War intelligence. "Making Intelligence Smarter," released in http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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February 1996, stresses the importance of "human intelligence" in successful clandestine operations. But many of the "innovations" the CFR suggests for cases when "the targeted activity is not easily captured by reconnaissance or eavesdropping," are all too familiar. "Clandestine operations for whatever purpose currently are circumscribed by a number of legal and policy constraints," the report states. "These deserve review to avoid diminishing the potential contribution of this instrument. At a minimum, the Task Force recommended that a fresh look be taken at limits on the use of nonofficial 'covers' for hiding and protecting those involved in clandestine activities." Though the task force doesn't explicitly address the use of the press as cover, the implication is obvious. If nothing else, the Church committee investigation showed CIA-press relationships to be among the Agency's most secret -- and most valuable -- operations for nearly two decades. And congressional scrutiny, however ineffectual, led the Agency to codify the constraints alluded to in the report. Former CIA director William Colby claimed in 1973 to have scaled back covert media operations in response to mounting criticism of the practice. His successor, George Bush, issued a statement pledging that the Agency would not enter into "paid or contractual relationships with full- or part-time news correspondents from accredited news organizations" when he took the Agency helm in 1976. (The statement was ambiguous on stringers and other news staffers, and included a statement that the Agency would "welcome" journalists' voluntary, unpaid cooperation. Stansfield Turner, Bush's replacement, put these assurances in writing the following year. Contrary to the report's implication that all "nonofficial" covers are currently off limits, there is a loophole in the policy Turner drafted in 1977 allowing for exceptions "with the specific approval" of the Director of Central Intelligence. An unnamed source brought the loophole to attention of the Washington Post last month, indicating that such exceptions had been made "in extraordinarily rare circumstances" in the past 19 years. At least one such exception was granted for a CIA agent posing as a reporter during the Iranian hostage crisis. Spies R Not Us? Reaction from the press to the CFR report has been mixed. Many have invoked the First Amendment and uttered platitudes about the separation of press and state, while remaining silent about the two institutions' sordid pasts. Notably absent from both the CFR's report and the media's reaction is any historical frame of reference: the issue is presented as a stand-alone current event, taken out of its context as a legacy of CIA meddling and media complicity. Evan Thomas, an assistant editor at Newsweek told the Post that while there were "inherent conflicts" in using the press as cover, "You would not want to rule out forever an opportunity in which a journalist might be the only one who could help in a desperate situation." But Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's journal Extra!, seemed to have a better appreciation of the underlying implications. "Under no circumstance should CIA agents pose as journalists," he said. "Given the CIA's record in setting up fake press organs and manipulating the press, they have really lost the right to get involved with journalists. You can't combine their work with journalism, which is about the free and open exchange of ideas." Washington Times columnist Ken Adelman charged that the uproar was much ado about nothing. "That such verbal waffling aroused such a ruckus says a great deal," he wrote in his March 6, 1996 column. "Not so much about the Council or the CIA -- but about the narcissism of today's journalists." Contrary to the policy of his predecessors, Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr. said he was disturbed by the possibility that the CIA had either used journalistic organizations for cover or recruited journalists. Independence from the government, he said, was essential for both credibility and the safety of correspondents. The CFR, the CIA, the Media and the New World Order Will economic warfare replace the Cold War in the New World Order? In the wake of the Cold War, debate has erupted over the future use of intelligence agencies by the U.S. government. Many of America's political and business elite want to see a shift towards economic intelligence, to counter other nations' economic intelligence ops, as well as to further the goals of international capitalism. It is therefore especially noteworthy that the CFR issued the report on "Making Intelligence Smarter." The roster of the Council on Foreign Relations is a Who's Who directory of the political, military, and economic elite in the United States. President Clinton's administration is staffed by nearly 100 of the CFR's 3,000 members. It has been said by political commentators on both the left and the right that if you want to find out what U.S. foreign policy will be next year, you should read the CFR's periodical Foreign Affairs this year. Members of the CFR exert influence over a gigantic portion of the media in America. Many of the newspeople who operated with the CIA in the past were or are CFR members. The chief directors and news anchors of CBS, ABC, NBC, Time Inc., Public Broadcast Service, CNN, Newsweek, and many other major media outlets are CFR members. So are many CEOs and board members at Chase Manhattan Corp., Chemical Bank, Citicorp, Shell Oil, AT&T, General Motors, General Electric, and other multinational corporations. It is also worth noting that three of the Task Force panel members who wrote the "Making Intelligence Smarter" report included past or present journalists. Leslie Gelb, CFR president, is a former foreign affairs columnist and Op-Ed page editor for The New York Times. Henry Grunwald is former Editor-in-Chief of Time magazine, and Jessica Mathews is a Post columnist. Critics of the CFR on both sides of the political spectrum voice strong opposition to the Council's agenda of expansion of multinational capitalism and world government -- what has become known as the New World Order. A report from the CFR such as "Making Intelligence Smarter" will therefore make plenty of waves. The fact that the report was composed in part by members of the working press who are also CFR members is a brazen conflict of interest, in light of the CFR's history. Will there be a shift in CIA/media operations towards global economic intelligence and propaganda? Only time will tell as the debate rages on. But if history serves as any sort of lesson, we could be standing on the threshold of a new flap of covert media manipulation. Sources "The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered it Up," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.55-67. "CIA in America," CounterSpy, Spring 1980, p. 42-43. "Washington Post -- Speaking for Whom?" CounterSpy, May-July 1981, p. 13-19. Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: the CIA in a Democratic Society, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 182-311. "'Loophole Revealed in Prohibition on CIA Use of Journalistic Cover," New York Times, February 16, 1996, p. A24. "Making Intelligence Smarter," report of a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1996. "Disinformation and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Spring-Summer 1983, p. 3-12. "The CIA's use of the press: a 'mighty Wurlitzer,'" Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1974, p. 9-18. http://www.911-strike.com/CIAinmedia.htm O'Reilly's Information Tech CIA Connection ::: Download Presentation In-Q-Tel, Inc. is a private, venture capital firm chartered by http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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the CIA. In-Q-Tel strives to extend the Agency's access to new IT companies, solutions, and approaches to address their priority problems. In-Q-Tel invests in technologies that addresses critical CIA needs, and that can also become commercially viable. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2002/view/e_sess/2282 The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. The Alex Constantine Article Tales from the Crypt,The Depraved Spies, and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD 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 politicallymotivated 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 former Village 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 gobetween 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 Blücher, 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?). http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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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 Düsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in 1982, von Blücher 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 mobcontrolled 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 lowprice 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.
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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. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." -- President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 Massive Media: Facts and Figures http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/fcc.html The world of the mass media is shrinking. How a handful of companies came to exercise such control over the media is one of the astonishing stories of our time. But there are real consequences to what's happening that affect democracy and consumers. Merging Media Approximate number of newspapers in North America: 1800 Approximate number of magazines in North America: 11,000 Approximate number of radio stations in North America: 11,000 Approximate number of television stations in North America: 2000 Approximate number of book publishers in North America: 3000 Number of companies owning a controlling interest in the media listed above in 1984: 50 Number of companies owning a controlling interest in the media listed above in 1987: 26 Number of companies owning a controlling interest in the media listed above in 1996: 10 The Massing of the Media # THE LAW: Many media watchers point to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as crucial to the growth of media giants. The Act lowered some long-standing limits on the number of media outlets that any one company could own in any single market. For television there's currently a cap limiting any one company from reaching more than 35 percent of the national audience. The Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) website has a complete listing of public hearings on this issue and a facility for filing comments online. TELEVISION: The U.S. seems awash with TV choices. Between cable, dish and digital channels, choices number in the hundreds. A recent study by THE ECONOMIST found that though the market continues to grow, most people routinely watch only 15 channels. The top ten cable channels and the five networks still make up 90% of the watching audience. And what are they watching? American cable fare breaks down as follows: Entertainment — 36.6% Children's programming — 21.1% News — 14.1% Nature/Education — 11.1% Women — 7.0% Music — 5.4% Sport — 4.7% NEWS: A few years ago, newspeople were lamenting the results of a study by Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy which showed a marked decrease in international news coverage from 45% in the 1970s to just 14% in 1995. In the wake of September 11, some news organizations were revitalized. Overseas bureaus were saved from closure and hard news seemed important again — but the companies lost money. Just this week, CNN announced its biggest prime-time audience of 2002 for...the arrest of Robert Blake. Media analysis Andrew Tyndall watches the news every night and publishes the results in the Tyndall Report. Here's a round-up of the top stories on the three big networks for selected weeks past from the Tyndall Report: July 19-31, 2001 (av. number of minutes): - Disappearance of Chandra Levy (24 minutes) - Human embryo stem cell research (14 minutes) - Shark attacks (14 minutes) April 8-12, 2002 - Enron bankruptcy (12 minutes) - Anti-U.S. sentiment in Islamic world (10 minutes) - Catholic pedophile priests (10 minutes)
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October 14-18, 2002 - DC sniper (76 minutes) - Iraq: Saddam Hussein (28 minutes) - Bali bombings (19 minutes) Andrew Tyndall also recently completed an evaluation of three major cable news networks for THE NEWSHOUR WITH JIM LEHRER. Although he found that the three had different presentations and viewpoints — the news they covered was similar in content (and very male-dominated). Read the whole report at Cable News Wars. BOOKS: Big media holds sway over more than the airwaves, many conglomerates have interest in major publishing houses as well. - TimeWarner -- Warner Books/Little Brown/Time-Life - Viacom -- Simon and Schuster/Pocket Books, etc. - Bertelsmann is the largest book publisher in the United States - Walt Disney - Hyperion/Talk Miramax Books - Vivendi International - Houghton Mifflin Links and add'l info: http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/fcc.html
Telecommunications Act of 1996 The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in almost 62 years. The goal of this new law is to let anyone enter any communications business -- to let any communications business compete in any market against any other. http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html Milestones in the History of Media and Politics Robert McChesney comments, "And the founding fathers...their legacy here is very rich. They understood that setting up a diverse, well funded media system with a broad range of viewpoints was the essence of building of the oxygen for democracy. And it took conscious policies. It didn't happen naturally — you had to work at it." What events have shaped the media's role in reporting politics since the beginning of American history? And how has the press developed in the years since the Bill of Rights outlined its freedoms? NOW's history of media and politics takes us to the early recorded instances of journalism for some background. In Renaissance Europe, newsletters containing information about everything from wars and economic conditions to social customs were handwritten and circulated among merchants. By the late 1400's, the first printed forerunners of the newspaper appeared in Germany as pamphlets or broadsides, often highly sensationalized in content. In the English-speaking world, the first successfully published title was THE WEEKLY NEWES. View the front page of CORANT OR WEEKLY NEWES, FROM ITALY, GERMANY, HUNGARIA, POLONIA, BOHEMIA, FRANCE, AND THE LOW-COUNTRIES published in London on October 11, 1621. In the 1640's and 50's, it was followed by a multitude of different titles in the similar newsbook format. Another prominent early paper (today the oldest continually published paper in the world) was the LONDON GAZETTE. See the GAZETTE coverage of the Great Fire of London. Publication of information about contemporary affairs began in North America in the early 18th century, but they did not yet resemble the newspapers of today. In fact, at first, the notion that "news" should provide timely accounts of recent events was not self-evident. Read about some of the milestones in America's history of media and politics: More: http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/mediahistory.html
FCC and Media Deregulation sites: Below are sites which contain more information about the issue of media deregulation and ways to take action on either side of the issue. The FCC site provides an area to make views on deregulation known, and provides contact information for the agency. Center for Digital Democracy The Web site of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving media diversity, provides information regarding the issue of media concentration. The Center highlights the 1945 Supreme Court decision (Associated Press v. United States) which maintains that mergers that narrow the dissemination of information are unconstitutional. Other features include press headlines, articles, and resource links. Colombia Journalism Review: Who Owns What? "Who Owns What?" by the Colombia Journalism Review (CJR) features a list of media conglomerates and what they own. The page also provides a selected list of http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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articles from the CJR archive on media concentration. Consumer Federation of America The Consumer Federation of America provides press releases, studies, brochures, and testimony to educate the American public about telecommunications issues and to advocate for pro-consumer policies. Consumers Union: Nonprofit Publisher of Consumer Reports The Consumers Union Web page, devoted to telephonetelecommunications regulation, provides a long list of articles, studies, and research describing how the deregulation of the telecommunications industry in 1996 has hurt consumers. Economic and Political Consequences of the 1996 Telecommunications Act Thomas Hazlett of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the 1996 Telecommunications Act resulted both in benefits to consumers and in "megamergers" that have benefited stockholders and market function. He contends that increased competition in the market had an effect on the political process, where the Telecommunications industry outspent all other industries in political contributions. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) The Federal Communication Commission is an independent government organization accountable to Congress. The FCC regulates "interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable" within U.S. jurisdiction. The FCC Web site features a special section on media ownership which includes information on the Broadcast-Newspaper Cross-Ownership Rule and the Local Radio Ownership Rule in the form of announcements, press releases, and policy studies. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 This Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Web page is devoted to the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996, which promoted deregulation of the telecommunication industry (cable, long distance telephone service, local telephone service, and broadband) to create a competitive communications market and deliver better services and prices to consumers. The Web site features the complete text of the legislation and provides relevant FCC materials related to the implementation and guidelines of the Act. FRONTLINE: The Merchants of Cool Media Giants On PBS.org, the FRONTLINE Web site features a diagram of the seven largest media conglomerates and their numerous holdings. This information is provided within a larger context, asking how media mega-mergers and the products they sell affect children's psychological development. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/giants/ What's Wrong With This Picture? Crispin Miller of THE NATION magazine describes and analyzes the media cartel that has integrated all cultural industries into a few large corporations. Miller fears that American culture will become more homogenous with less dissent and fewer independent voices.. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020107&s=miller FCC and Media Deregulation sites: http://www.pbs.org/now/resources/fcc.html And having justified Bush/Cheney's coup, the media continue to betray American democracy. Media devoted to the public interest would investigate the poor performance by the CIA, the FBI, the FAA and the CDC, so that those agencies might be improved for our protection--but the news teams (just like Congress) haven't bothered to look into it. So, too, in the public interest, should the media report on all the current threats to our security-including those far-rightists targeting abortion clinics and, apparently, conducting bioterrorism; but the telejournalists are unconcerned (just like John Ashcroft). So should the media highlight, not play down, this government's attack on civil liberties--the mass detentions, secret evidence, increased surveillance, suspension of attorney-client privilege, the encouragements to spy, the warnings not to disagree, the censored images, sequestered public papers, unexpected visits from the Secret Service and so on. And so should the media not parrot what the Pentagon says about the current war, because such prettified accounts make us complacent and preserve us in our fatal ignorance of what people really think of us--and why--beyond our borders. And there's much more--about the stunning exploitation of the tragedy, especially by the Republicans; about the links between the Bush and the bin Laden families; about the ongoing shenanigans in Florida--that the media would let the people know, if they were not (like Michael Powell) indifferent to the public interest. In short, the news divisions of the media cartel appear to work against the public interest--and for their parent companies, their advertisers and the Bush Administration. The situation is completely un-American. It is the purpose of the press to help us run the state, and not the other way around. As citizens of a democracy, we have the right and obligation to be well aware of what is happening, both in "the homeland" and the wider world. Without such knowledge we cannot be both secure and free. We therefore must take steps to liberate the media from oligopoly, so as to make the government our own. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml? i=20020107&c=2&s=miller Media Access Project is a non-profit, public interest law firm which promotes the http://www.magickriver.net/mockingbird.htm
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public's First Amendment right to hear and be heard on the electronic media of today and tomorrow. http://www.mediaaccess.org/ ACT NOW.... TOP ISSUES: http://www.mediaaccess.org/programs/
"If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it." -- Anton Chekov "Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it." -- Robert F. Kennedy "A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war." -- Ayn Rand "What distinguishes the New Right from other American reactionary movements and what it shares with the early phase of German fascism, is its incorporation of conservative impulses into a system of representation consisting largely of media techniques and media images." — Philip Bishop: The New Right and the Media "I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." -Major General Smedley Butler, 1933 "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell MetaMagic MediaMinistry @ Abracadabra Communications onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">http://metamagic.org Hidden Elitist Conspiracies? Visit BeamShip MUTANEX http://mutanex.com News of the Strange & Supernatural Mark Fiore's FlashToon ::: "Preemptive Diplomacy" http://metamagic.org/strange
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911review.org Operation Mockingbird International Advocates For Health Freedom. Operation Mockingbird The [WWW] [WWW] Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA. March 24, 2000. "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD By Alex Constantine. [WWW]
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
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Coordination. Philip Graham, - a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
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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 former Village 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 f__ind 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.
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"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 Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml 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 Blcher, 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 Dsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Dsseldorf in 1982, von Blcher 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
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that Nixon's cabinet was chosen, and the state's social and contributor registers MDT Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM
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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.
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"Black radio" was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The Invisible Government to describe the agency's intertwining interests inApr the of MDT 26,emergence 2015 05:57:36AM
http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml "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. How the Washington Post Censors the News A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood,
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Dear Mr. Harwood, http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml Your Ad Here Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability -- the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA - Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan / Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United
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States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The Apr purpose this deal MDT 26, 2015of05:57:36AM
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States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state), was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [for World War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18).
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U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
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people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33).
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Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S.MDT Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM
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Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between Mc Donnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44).
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Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary ofApr State Henry 26, 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
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Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50). Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential Page 10 of 27
election (*58).
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election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Your Ad Here Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode -- depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil Mc Combs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Page 11 of 27
Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief05:57:36AM L. Apr 26, 2015 MDT
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Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by Mc George Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) -- facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer Page 12 of 27
and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
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and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA.
Web Site: Home Page Search About Donate 911Review.Com Top Topics: FrontPage Conspiracy Of Silence Political Art Anthrax Attacks Inside Job Leahy Vs Ashcroft 200406 McMedia Patriot Act Building 7 Collapse Guardian Muslims Suspend Physics Latest Headlines OngoingCoverup Air Force Stand down Coverup By White House Flight 77 BlackBoxes Flights In His Own Words InsiderTrading OpenAndFairTrials Page 13 of 27
Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs --a05:57:36AM MDT Apr 26, 2015
http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml This fear is truly
remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the OpenAndFairTrials Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs --a Pentagon Attack conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But Cctv Video where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends Prior Knowledge that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Osama Bin Asset Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this BinLaden dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually Bin Laden believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner Confession assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of Cia Visas For Mc Carthyism" (*87). Patsies So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who Experienced investigate conspiracies? Skeptics Hijackers Alive The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need AndWell Hijackers Patsies something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely Pentagon Attack explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). Flight77 Flight 77 Sites Pentagon Attack And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other Damage Pentagon Attack words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Debris Pentagon Attack Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Fire Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) Pentagon Attack recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to Legend mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss Pentagon Mascal these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs Pentagon Plane members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by Rotor the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded Pentagon Strike his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column -- ending it with:"We are the new Flight 77 Patsies journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political Flight77 conformity. But conspirators we ain't". Witnesses Killtown Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the PentagonAttackHole December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Pentagon Attack Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the Videos difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated Pentagon Attack the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as Witnesses Blast "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Sept 11 WebSites Grable,Rosalee Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a TrustedNewsSites matter of random coincidence?
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And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran,Apr (*94) a Post 26, 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
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efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth -- revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98). Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively:
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TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel --like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And maybe a few others. Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a)..
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2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't WantMDT Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM
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2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 2. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 3. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary Mc Grory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra -- The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 4. 7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2.
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8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, Apr 26, 1989. 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
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8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 5. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 6. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into ' OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 7. See note 5a, p.180-1. 13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave Mc Curdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank Mc Closkey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob Mc Ewen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. -- Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 8. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, Page 18 of 27
1989.
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1989. 9. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 10. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard-- The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 11. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 12. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 13. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend -- Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 14. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. 24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 15. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 16. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus -- Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 17. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. Page 19 of 27
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18. "BCCI -- NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 19. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 20. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. 21. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 22. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 23. See note 33, p.136-7. 24. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 25. See note 33, p.164-171. 26. See note 33, p.172-180. 27. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 28. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 29. See note 33, p.217. 30. See note 33, p.235. 31. See note 33, p.277-288. 32. See note 33, p.323. 33. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 34. William Blum, The CIA -- A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 35. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. 48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1.
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36. Ralph W. Mc Gehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
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W. Mc Gehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 37. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 38. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 39. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. 40. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 41. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 42. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 43. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. 44. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 45. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49.
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62b. See note 47b, p.63-76.
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62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 46. David E. Scheim, Contract on America -- The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 47. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories -- When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned --Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't -- In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil Mc Combs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire --In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. 65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. Page 22 of 27
65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington December AprPost, 26, 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
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65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! --Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts -- Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories --Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie --America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 48. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken -- Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 49. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247.
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67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy -- The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml 67b. Peter
Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy -- The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. 67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. Your Ad Here 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 50. See note 65b. 51. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 52. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 53. See note 65c. 54. See note 65i. 55. See note 67e, p.438-450. 56. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day -'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission -Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 57. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 58. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship -- Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983.
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79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, MDT Apr 26, 2015 05:57:36AM
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79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 59. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men -- A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 60. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 61. See note 79d, p.119-132. 62. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media -- How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's two- sentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 63. See note 79d, p.131. 64. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 65. "conspire", 4Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 66. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. 67. See note 65y. 68. See note 65n. 69. See note 65d. 70. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Page 25 of 27
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70. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 71. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 72. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman Mc Carthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist Mc Carthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 73. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court -- Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 74. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 75. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 76. See note 86. 77. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Page 26 of 27
Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains Apr 26,that 2015 05:57:36AM MDT
77. http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 78. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977. A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham's attempt to suppress the Davis book,"Katherine The Great,", which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal's, "Power and Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story." For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is "All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story," by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye. An additional good short reference is "The CIA's Greatest Hits" by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein's classic "The CIA and the Media" which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, Still another recent example of the CIA's control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton's & Roger Morris' story,"The Crimes Of Mena" by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA's involvement in drug trafficing, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed without explanation. [WWW]
Who Controls the Media?
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Operation Mockingbird - The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The rense.com CIA "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself. 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
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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 f__ind 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 tha__t "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 Blcher, 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 Page at 2 ofthe 24
Hotel Plaza to deliver German marks worth $80 million. The loot financed the Oct birth the04:52:05AM National MDT 10,of 2016
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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 Dsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Dsseldorf in 1982, von Blcher 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. Page 3 of 24
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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. Page 4 of 24
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How the Washington Post Censors the News [Note: Look for the paragraph indicated by asterisks] How the Washington Post Censors the News A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes ________________ April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood, Ombudsman The Washington Post 1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071 Dear Mr. Harwood, Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability -- the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!! It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS". Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra. Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2). But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5). Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how Republicans Page 5the of 24
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the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter. Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11). Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15). Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies: In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [fo rWorld War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18). U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19). Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21). Page 6 of 24
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"The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22). The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23). If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country. Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24). Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26). rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27). Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28). Or Watergate. Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32). Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33). Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34). Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, and covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35). Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce Page 7 of 24
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enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36). Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37). Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38). Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39). Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40). Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41). Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42). Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43). Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44). Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46). Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47). Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49). Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50). Page 8 Or of 24the
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Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51). Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52). Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53). Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54). Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55). Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56). Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57). Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58). Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59). Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60). Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback (*61). Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government. Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode -- depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security. Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the
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assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam. The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65). Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments. An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71). Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction". When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) -- facts that Lardner avoided. The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest: The Page 10 Warren of 24
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The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories ...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. ...Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. ...The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77). In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA. Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying ...I never produced CIA material ...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80). And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work. ************************** Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83). ****************** Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85). Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified that our elite and our high-level public officials Page 11 of 24
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officials may be exposed as conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs -- a conspiracy "to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of McCarthyism" (*87). So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who investigate conspiracies? The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence ...is always the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious circumstances ..." (*90). And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory" is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides, conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a safer bet. Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy". Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers; they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his off-the-cuff comment into an entire column -- ending it with:"We are the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't". Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A Reporter Looks Back in Anger -- Why the Media Cover Up Corporate Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office" (*93). Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors is a matter of random coincidence? And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by editors without influence from fellow editors or from management? Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings" in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it: these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining guests at a soup kitchen. Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire photo machines determine at a single Page 12 of 24
decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that Oct these gatekeepers 10, 2016 04:52:05AM MDT
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single decision what millions will see and hear. ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim? Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth -- revealing little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the Bush Administration (*98). Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly? On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively: TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN WITH BUSH TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from that of any other cartel -- like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101). The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading: Page 13 of 24
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
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AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post "conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe", and that experienced reporters don't have to ask. What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news. Sincerely, Julian C. Holmes Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news media, And - maybe a few others. _______________________ Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992: 1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post, September 11, 1988, p.C1 2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to Robert Gates. 2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May 26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a).. 2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note 2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a).. 3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy, etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986. 3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986. 3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April 5, 1990. 4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181. 5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling", Washington Page 14 of 24
Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07.
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Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07. 5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington Post, July 24,1987, p.A3. 5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman Rangel's Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7. 6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988. 6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs? Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22. 6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra -- The Coverup Continues", The Progressive, November 1988, p.24. 6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988. 7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October ... Then It's Time for an Iranian Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1. 7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2. 8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989. 8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991. 9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage", Playboy, October 1988, p.73. 9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage", FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991. 10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post, June 14,1991,p.A4. 10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, 10016. 11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into 'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11. 11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7. 11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3. 12. See note 5a, p.180-1. Page 15 of 24
13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1.
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13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1. 13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No. 100-433, November 1987, p.139-141. 14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates, Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob McEwen; January 26, 1989. 14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in U.S. -- Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990. 14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard News Service,April 25, 1991. 15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February 6, 1989. 16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989. 17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard-- The U.S. Role in the New World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121. 18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate, 77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, Macmillan, 1978, p.93. 19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged", Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6. 20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend -- Price Tag Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1992, p.1K. 21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992, p.15. 22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.E947-9. 22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post, March 10, 1992. 23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014. 23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285. 23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991; Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285. Page 16 of 24
24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Oct 10, 2016 04:52:05AM MDT
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24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4. 24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25. 25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991 Letter to"Friends", p.1. 26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus -- Luis Vasquez-Ajmac Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November 18, 1991, p.Bus.8. 27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post, September 3,1991, p.A19. 28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St. Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991. 29. "BCCI -- NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own independent investigation of BCCI. 30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst; from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5. 31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9. 32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10. 33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco: Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227. 34. See note 33, p.136-7. 35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33, p.157. 36. See note 33, p.164-171. 37. See note 33, p.172-180. 38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House, 1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii. 39. See note 33, p.217. 40. See note 33, p.235. 41. See note 33, p.277-288. 42. See note 33, p.323. Page 17 of 24
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43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund Newsletter, March1992, p.1. 44. William Blum, The CIA -- A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986,p.232-243. 45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978. 45b. See note 44, p.284-291. 46. See note 17, p.18. 47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163. 47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992, p.145-7. 48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam Books, 1977,p.521. 48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission, December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521. 49a. See note 44, p.67-76. 49b. See note 48a, p.530-1. 50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983,p.60. 51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4, 1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of 64 to 35. 52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6. 53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35. 54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24, 1992, p.35. 55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24. 56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission", Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12. 56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus, Georgia 31903. 57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992. 58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian, January 29,1992, p.18. 59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against Police", Boston Globe, July Page 18 of 24
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28, 1991, p.1. 59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3. 59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20. 59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1. 59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post, March 19, 1991, p.A1. 59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington Post, April 12,1991, p.A1. 59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post, February 8, 1992,p.A8. 60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1. 61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1. 62a. See notes 48 and 49. 62b. See note 47b, p.63-76. 62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742. 62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post, June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. 63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America -- The Mafia Murder of President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988, p.viii. 64. See note 63, p.28. 65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26, 1991, p.B3. 65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland", Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1. 65c. George Lardner, "...Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June 2, 1991,p.D3. 65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories -- When Do We Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19. 65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991, p.C3. 65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned -- Warren Commission Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Page 19 of 24
Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14.
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Lie'", Washington Post, December 16, 1991, p.D14. 65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21. 65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.D1. 65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't -- In 'JFK', Stone Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2. 65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post, December 20,1991, p.55. 65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire -- In Defending His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1. 65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post, December 26, 1991,p.A23. 65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend, December 27, 1991. 65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December 27, 1991, p.A21. 65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post, December 29,1991, p.C7. 65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! -- Why Did Oliver Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2. 65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts -- Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone", Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1. 65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1. 65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington Post, January 10,1992, p.A19. 65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post, January 14, 1992,p.E1. 65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories -- Good on Film, But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.G1. 65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie -- America's Resort to Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1. 65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine, January 19, 1992, p.5. 65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post, January 21,1992, p.A17. 65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken -- Conspiracy Theorists Are Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5. 65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5. 65A. Page 20 ofList 24
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65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12 66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i. 67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers, Volume V,p.211-247. 67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy -- The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 215-224. 67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p.402-416. 67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4. 67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992. 67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9, 1992, p.290. 68a. See note 65b. 68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3. 69. See note 65b. 70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner Books, 1988, 315/318. 71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3. 72. See note 65c. 73. See note 65i. 74. See note 67e, p.438-450. 75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8. 76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe", Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1. 76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day -- 'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September 20, 1975, p.A1. 76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission -- Dulles Proposed that the Page 21 of 24
Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. Oct 10, 2016 04:52:05AM MDT
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Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star, September 21, 1975,p.A1. 77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37. 78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2. 79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship -- Killing 'Katharine The Great'", The Nation, November 12, 1983. 79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. Davis says, "...corporate documents that became available during my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman, William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great] had been "processed and converted into waste paper"". 79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men -- A Suppressed Book About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again" National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60. 79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. "...publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p.. 80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See note 79d, p.304. 81. See note 79d, p.119-132. 82. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media -- How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up", Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.63. 83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this policy is still in effect. 83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists." 83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988. Harwood's two- sentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez." 84. See note 79d, p.131. 85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1. 86. "conspire", 4Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition Unabridged, 1987. 87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1. Page 22 of 24
88. See note 65y.
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88. See note 65y. 89. See note 65n. 90. See note 65d. 91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992. Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.C6. 93. p. 29-32. 94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials; "Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown 105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline. 94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?", Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy tells how television and party officials have kept presidential candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout of Agran is not discussed. 94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992. 94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia Journalism Review,March/April, 1992. 95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7. 96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added] 96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC 1990).. 96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court -- Nominee 'Unfit to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times, August 26, 1991. 96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, October 15, 1991. 97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991, p.A1. 98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day. 99. See note 86. 100. Page 23 ofThomas 24
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100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'", Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that "representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict, pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be offered by key House members". 101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977. NOTES A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham's attempt to suppress the Davis book,"Katherine The Great,", which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal's, "Power and Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story." For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is "All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story," by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye. An additional good short reference is "The CIA's Greatest Hits" by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein's classic "The CIA and the Media" which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, 1977. Still another recent example of the CIA's control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton's & Roger Morris' story,"THE CRIMES OF MENA" by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA's involvement in drug trafficing, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed withouty explanation.
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Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media by Daniel Brandt and Steve Badrich From NameBase NewsLine, No. 16, January-March 1997
Like some Russian high official come to treat with Chechen rebels, CIA Director John Deutch arrived in force -- by heavily-armed motorcade, and with helicopter cover. SWAT teams swarmed over the building that was Deutch's destination. But on November 15, 1996, Deutch's destination was in fact only the auditorium of Locke High School in the beleaguered South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles: for a U.S. public servant, not officially enemy territory at all. Still, the citizens who showed up to hear and question Deutch were searched with a metal detector in return for the privilege. And privilege it was. The post-Cold-War world had become so threatening to the CIA that Deutch was taking the unprecedented step of showing up in public -- of walking, in fact, directly into a popular firestorm. That evening, Deutch emphatically claimed that the CIA had no involvement whatsoever with the crack-cocaine epidemic that is battering South Central. It was a message Deutch's audience wasn't buying. This event and its aftermath are well worth reflecting upon. Unfortunately, the defense of Deutch and his agency by major U.S. media has proved far less illuminating than the narrow and ahistorical way these same media have defined and framed the relevant issues. The ability of well-paid media people to vaporize the known history of the CIA, to turn this history into a non-issue, is scary -scarier, almost, than the long, lamentable, but extremely well-documented story of CIA involvement with drug traffickers on four continents. This essay will attempt to say something, yet again, both about the major media and about some of the many mind-bending episodes, already on the public record, of CIA-drug-trafficker complicity. The CIA's latest trials on this issue began in August 1996 with the now-notorious series on crack cocaine in the San Jose Mercury News. In this series, reporter Gary Webb made the case that the CIA, through the actions of several drug-dealing Nicaraguan contras it had funded, was involved in the introduction of crack into Los Angeles during the 1980s. Parallel stories have appeared in provincial papers before, and been ignored. But San Jose isn't in Silicon Valley for nothing; the Mercury News boosted Webb's stories with its state-of-the-art website, and a popular firestorm ensued. Soon Maxine Waters of the Congressional Black Caucus was calling for an investigation, and the Senate Intelligence Committee had scheduled hearings. Belatedly, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times all recognized that, this time around, they couldn't ignore the story. But instead of investigating the CIA, they investigated their fellow journalists at the Mercury News. Quoting each other's stories to strengthen their common case, editorialists, reporters, and columnists from all three papers attacked Webb's http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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reporting -- or what they claimed Webb had reported -- as well as his ethics, his talk-show appearances, his book proposal, his movie deal, his editors, and even a graphic on his newspaper's website. Gary Webb, after all, is neither a Washingtonian nor a New Yorker. There was nothing casual or accidental about this bashing. The L.A. Times had 25 reporters on the story. The Post refused to print a reasoned letter from Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos defending the series, even after Ceppos provided a requested revision. Perhaps the low point of this campaign was a story by Tim Golden of the New York Times, which explained that African-Americans are more susceptible than their fellow citizens to conspiracy theories and paranoia. But it's not necessarily paranoid to note what crack has done to our cities, or that the U.S. prison population has tripled over the past 14 years, or that California now spends more on prisons than it does on colleges and universities. And as the Mercury News noted: in 1993, snorters of powdered cocaine drew an average sentence of three months, whereas crack smokers got an average of three years. And 83 percent of those sent to prison for crack trafficking were African-American. If present trends were to continue for another 14 years, a majority of African-American males between the ages of 18 and 40 would be locked up. Deutch's audience at Locke High, furthermore, had a more appropriate response than the Washington Post did to Deutch's promise that the CIA would investigate itself: hoots and howls. After all, the last internal CIA report on contras and drugs, completed in 1988, is still secret. "I don't know why [Rep. Julian] Dixon is saluting Deutch's courage for coming here today," someone from the audience complained at the floor microphone, "when everybody knows this building's got hundreds of pigs in it. There's pigs behind those curtains, there's pigs on top of the roof. We're not going to get no justice here today -- we're going to need a revolution." And it's the major media, rather than the folks who turned out at Locke High, that are guilty of what amounts to suppression of evidence on this issue. Consider media treatment of Jack Blum, former special counsel to John Kerry's Senate subcommittee that investigated the CIA-contra-drug connection. If senators will listen to anyone who can speak authoritatively on this issue, it's Blum. On October 23, 1996, Blum told the Senate Intelligence Committee that although the CIA had not itself sold crack in the inner city, it had "ignored the drug problem and subverted law enforcement to prevent embarrassment and to reward our allies in the contra war.... A careful review of covert operations in the Caribbean and South and Central America shows a forty-year connection between crime and covert operations that has repeatedly blown back on the United States.... I would hope that this inquiry goes beyond the narrow questions posed in the San Jose Mercury News story." Blum's statement reviewed the same history of CIA complicity with drug traffickers that will be touched on in this essay: CIA ties to the Mafia during World War II; its role in Burma in the 1950s; in Laos in the 1960s; in Argentina and Bolivia in the 1970s; and in Central America and Afghanistan in the 1980s. But Blum's 3,700 words of historical perspective raised the specter of exactly the kind of inquiry that the major media don't want. ABC's Peter Jennings crunched Blum's reflections down to a single sound bite, perversely out of context, in which Blum absolved the CIA of directly selling drugs in Los Angeles. The two sentences on CNN's U.S. News Story Page on their website were equally shameless: "Jack Blum, a former Senate investigator who looked into the matter during the 1980s, defended the CIA. 'No members of the staff of the CIA ... (were) in the cocaine business,' he said." In fairness we may note that the media were only following the government's lead on this issue. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz lacks subpoena power and must produce a declassified report; for additional powers, he must petition Congress. But Congressional "oversight" over the CIA is unfortunately just that. The House Intelligence Committee is now chaired by Porter Goss (R-FL), a former CIA operations officer who still hangs out with Agency friends. Its Senate counterpart is under Arlen Specter (R-PA), whose major contribution to investigative history to date is the Warren Commission's "magic bullet" theory. http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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Put simply, neither the major media nor Congress has the will, perhaps not even the power, to pursue the real history of CIA activity. Maxine Waters (D-CA) fears that the investigations now in train will fade away unless public pressure is maintained. To this end, Waters plans teach-ins on California campuses this spring. A fourth contra-crack investigation is being conducted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich, a former narcotics prosecutor. But even though Bromwich's intentions seem good, he can subpoena only Justice Department documents, and cannot compel witnesses to testify. Jack Blum is surely right to want to pursue all CIA-drugs investigations within the framework of the larger history of the CIA -- even though one must surely question Blum's assumption that established agencies are capable of doing this. Since the 1960s, evidence of corruption and official lies has periodically made it onto the public record, but the worse the news, the more intense official resistance has become. What follows, nevertheless, is a quick sketch of what all such investigators -- and the public -- ought to have firmly in mind. A variety of sources have been assembled here into a rough chronological narrative. But the scope of this narrative is so great that only major chapters in the CIA's long association with drugs can be mentioned. Still, as a big picture, it's better than nothing -- which is what official sources and investigations, and well-heeled publishers and producers, threaten to give us. Back in 1936, Lucky Luciano, the boss of Mafia drug and prostitution rackets in New York City, was finally convicted as a result of Thomas Dewey's prosecution, and sentenced to thirty to fifty years. But in 1942 the Office of Naval Intelligence asked Meyer Lansky to seek Luciano's assistance in getting New York waterfront workers to watch out for enemy agents and activity. Soon Luciano's friends in Sicily, who had been severely repressed by Mussolini, were helping with the American invasion there. In 1946 the ONI appealed to Luciano's parole board. He was released from prison and deported to Italy -- where he built up a heroin syndicate. The immediate postwar problem in places like Italy and France, from the point of view of both the CIA and entrenched interests such as the Mafia, was that many Communists had been anti-fascist Resistance fighters, and as such were attractive to voters. The Marshall Plan aimed not merely to rebuild a war-torn Europe; it aimed to rebuild Europe in such a way that no Communists could ever win an election. To this end, the CIA played a major role in administering Marshall Plan aid. In Italy the CIA spent money to deny the 1948 elections to the Communists. By 1950 the Mafia again controlled Sicily. The CIA was also paying the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles to undermine Communist influence with striking workers. These Mafia syndicates were sufficiently well-protected that in 1951 they opened their first heroin lab. By 1965 there were two dozen labs in Marseilles, which together exported nearly five tons of heroin to the U.S. during that year.[1] Heroin trafficking shifted in the 1960s and 1970s from the Turkey-Marseilles connection to the Asian connection. For decades until the 1950s, the opium trade was sanctioned by colonial administrations in Asia. By the early 1960s, the mountain areas of Southeast Asia -- the Golden Triangle region -- produced most of the world's opium. Northeastern Burma was particularly productive. In the case of Burma, production before 1945 was insignificant -- as a province of India under the British, most of the opium traded in Burma was produced in India. But in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Forces retreated from Mao's army to the mountains of northeast Burma. The CIA helped maintain these troops, and sponsored two invasions of China. During their stay in Burma, the Nationalist Chinese exacted opium quotas from Burma's peasants; failure to pay was punished by the cutting off of fingers, hands, and feet. By the time the Nationalists fled in 1961, Burma had gone from producing about seven tons of opium per year to producing as much as a thousand tons, or about sixty percent of the world's production.[2] http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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In French-occupied Indochina, meanwhile, the Corsican syndicates were operating the opium trade out of Saigon under the protection of French military intelligence. When France withdrew in 1955, the U.S. inherited France's colonial politics and infrastructure. The U.S. worked with the same peoples -- the Hmong in Laos -- that the French had used. And again, the American Mafia was involved through their Corsican contacts. From Tampa, Florida, Santo Trafficante ran the Marseilles connection in Cuba during the 1950s. In 1968 he visited Saigon to meet with Corsican syndicate leaders. After 1970, Asian heroin began showing up in the U.S. After the Cuban revolution, Trafficante's Mafia foot soldiers were mainly Cuban exiles.[3] In a 1982 interview, former CIA commando leader Grayston Lynch described what had once been the largest CIA station in the world, located south of Miami from 1961-1964. This station issued orders to 400 case officers and 2,000 exiles, dispersed in "safe houses" from Miami to Tampa. Lynch concedes that after the CIA cut off support, many of these exiles, trained in covert operations and smuggling, turned to narcotics trafficking.[4] Given that the CIA had worked with Trafficante to assassinate Castro in 1961,[5] the agency lacked sufficient ethical intelligence to worry that these Trafficanteassociated exiles might pose a criminal problem. They were considered merely a "disposal problem," an institutional nuisance. At the time all of these events were unfolding, they were secret history, unavailable in books and newspapers. Then one day in 1970, the poet Allen Ginsberg stumbled onto the CIA-heroin connection while sorting his files of clippings. He noticed that when sorted chronologically, U.S. advances into the opium-producing areas of the Golden Triangle were followed, a few months later, by clippings that reported a rise in heroin overdose deaths in American cities. The alternative press fleshed out Ginsberg's insight, and the May 1971 Ramparts magazine featured a cover story on South Vietnam's "Marshal Ky: The Biggest Pusher in the World." The major media ignored everything until Sen. Ernest Gruening, a maverick from Alaska, opened hearings. At that point the Washington Post and NBC News "discovered" this story, but soon buried it. Only the alternative press kept it alive.[6] South Vietnam was completely corrupted by a heroin trade whose immediate origin was in Laos. The Hmong culture in Laos provided 30,000 men for the CIA's secret Laotian army under General Vang Pao. But in the process, opium production took over Hmong culture; the Hmong grew only enough rice for subsistence. To support the Hmong economy, the CIA's Air America transported raw opium out of the Laotian hills to the labs. At this point the CIA begged off, and let the syndicates and South Vietnamese officials take care of distribution. Double UOGlobe no.4 heroin, produced at a Laotian lab owned by Gen. Ouane Rattikone, became particularly famous. By mid-1971, Army medical officers estimated that fifteen percent of American GIs were addicted. Veterans of Vietnam and Laos with intelligence connections, men such as Theodore Shackley (former chief of the Miami station), his deputy Thomas Clines, Richard Secord, Oliver North, and Felix Rodriguez, later became familiar names during the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. More obscure was one Michael Hand, who had been a CIA contract agent in Laos. In 1973, Hand and his partner Frank Nugan established the Nugan Hand Bank in Sydney. A slew of top-level retirees from the CIA and U.S. military intelligence were associated with this bank; William Colby served as its attorney. Nugan Hand collapsed spectacularly in 1980. After three major investigations, Australian officials concluded that the bank had been primarily involved in laundering money for arms and drug traffickers.[7] Apparently the CIA's infamous "disposal problem" -- what to do with those nasty, well-trained former assets -- extends to its top-level former executives and administrators. Then there is the horrible tale of Afghanistan. Heroin there was also a well-kept secret, at least until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Then the Washington Post was free to "discover" that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the CIA's favorite guerrilla leader, had commanders under him who worked with Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency to run heroin labs in southwest Pakistan. "Since the http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.... In 1989, Afghanistan was second only to Burma as a producer of opium, growing 650 tons, nearly all of which was intended for heroin manufacturing, a State Department report said."[8] When Allen Ginsberg was sorting his clippings about heroin, his discovery of a correlation with CIA activity in the Golden Triangle must have seemed dismaying enough, almost unbelievable. Fortunately for Ginsberg, a proponent of LSD, he had no evidence that the CIA may have also been behind the expansion of LSD distribution within the counterculture. But such evidence later came to light. Ginsberg, like most of the counterculture, saw LSD as a liberating experience. The drug was nonaddictive, although it could be dangerous in the case of an overdose. A safe dosage, however, was entirely an individual phenomenon, and could not even be objectively established. And it soon became clear that LSD dramatically amplified tendencies that were already present in the individual and the immediate environment. The exact dosage that might have seemed liberating in 1967 might have been debilitating when ingested by the same individual in 1969, a banner year for agents provocateurs and bad vibes. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission reported that the CIA had been testing LSD since the 1950s -only to discover that the drug's effects were too unpredictable to make it a reliable tool for mind control. Still, given what the CIA knew about LSD at this early date, it doesn't seem inconceivable that the CIA may have hoped that greater availability of the powerful drug would undermine the political effectiveness of the student movement and counterculture. Evidence of the possible strategic use of LSD emerged in 1979, when Italian magistrate Giorgio Floridia issued a report on the case of Ronald Stark, who had been arrested in Bologna for drug trafficking in 1975. The magistrate ordered Stark's release on the grounds that he had been working for U.S. intelligence since 1960. From 1969-1974, Stark was a major producer of LSD, with factories first in Paris, then in Belgium and California, and a pipeline into the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the world's largest distributor. Floridia cited Stark's frequent prison visits from Wendy M. Hansen at the U.S. consulate in Florence, "Dear Ron" letters from Charles C. Adams at the U.S. embassy in London, addressed to Stark's LSD lab in Brussels (these were seized by Italian police after his arrest), and his links with Philip B. Taylor III at the U.S. consulate in Rome. (Taylor is now in Sao Paulo, Brazil.) According to Floridia, Stark had done secret work for the Defense Department from 1960 to 1962, and had received "periodic payments to him from Fort Lee, known to be the site of a CIA office." On his release, Stark was ordered to report in to Italian police twice a week. But within days, Stark had left the country. Bologna police believe that Stark was secretly flown from a NATO air base in Pisa or Vicenza. In 1984 an Italian parliamentary commission issued a report on domestic terrorism that included a section on Ronald Stark. They concluded that Stark was an adventurer who was used by the CIA, but were unable to determine when the association began. In 1982, Stark was arrested in Holland. Charges were dropped the following year, and Stark was deported to a San Francisco jail, where pending federal charges were dropped by the Justice Department. When Italy requested extradition in 1984, U.S. officials sent a death certificate indicating that Stark had died of a heart attack. Way back in 1969, Stark first approached the Brotherhood, wowing them with a kilogram of pure LSD (more than they had ever seen), and claiming that he had a new, efficient production method. Stark's lab in France was already a going concern, and the Brotherhood agreed to distribute his product. When Stark shut down this lab in 1971 and opened a better one in Brussels, he boasted that he had done so because of a timely tip from the CIA. In all, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD, enough for 50 million doses. Most of it was sold in the U.S. There's no proof that Stark was http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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anything more than an adventurer and an opportunist. But Carl Oglesby, former national president of Students for a Democratic Society, sums up the Stark phenomenon as follows: What we have to contemplate nevertheless is the possibility that the great American acid trip, no matter how distinctive of the rebellion of the 1960s it came to appear, was in fact the result of a despicable government conspiracy.... If U.S. intelligence bodies collaborated in an effort to drug an entire generation of Americans, then the reason they did so was to disorient it, sedate it and de-politicize it.[9] Currently it's cocaine in the form of crack that's a major problem in the inner cities of America. Coca leaf is grown on the high Andean plateaus of Bolivia and Peru, and until 1980 it was generally refined in Colombia. After the Bolivian "cocaine coup," refinement of coca paste into cocaine became more of a local affair, while Peru and Paraguay also increased their production. New smuggling routes were established, and new strains of coca were bred that could thrive in the lowlands of the Amazon basin. Cocaine soon glutted the market. Prices dropped dramatically during the first half of the 1980s, which saw the appearance of crack -- a condensed, rock-like substance that can be produced by cooking cocaine with water and baking soda on a kitchen stove. Crack is smoked rather than snorted, a process which absorbs more of the drug into the body with less effort. The 1980 cocaine coup in Bolivia was arranged by the Argentine military, which in 1976 seized power in Argentina and proceeded to "disappear" about 11,000 of the country's own citizens. Michael Levine, who was the DEA's country attache to Argentina and Uruguay in 1980, discovered that the high-level Argentine military officers he was trying to bust for trafficking were wellconnected in Bolivia, and that the entire bunch were protected by the CIA. Some of the bloodiest coup-makers in Bolivia were recruited by Klaus Barbie, a fugitive Nazi war criminal and long-time CIA asset.[10] Confirmation of the CIA's role came from testimony taken by the Kerry subcommittee in a closed hearing on July 23, 1987. Leandro Sanchez Reisse was assigned by the Argentine military to set up a money laundering front in Florida in 1977. He said that these fronts ran operations for and with the CIA, including weapons shipments to Argentine personnel in Central America. In 1980, funds from a major Bolivian trafficker were funneled to the Argentine military, which then sent ambulances loaded with weapons to Bolivia. These were used in the 1980 coup engineered by Luis Arce Gomez and Luis Garcia Meza, both of whom were connected to traffickers.[11] The CIA, claiming that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were sending arms to guerrillas in El Salvador, paid Argentina to provide military training to contras in Central America. This arrangement ended in 1982, when the military government in Argentina lost power after the Falklands debacle. Within several years, however, the contra war developed into a major CIA operation involving Cuban exiles from Miami; former Nicaraguan guardsmen who fled during the 1979 revolution and regrouped in Honduras; and assorted CIA adventurers with drug- and arms-trafficking connections. Celerino Castillo fought in Vietnam from 1971-1972, where he saw the effects of drugs on U.S. troops. By 1975 he was a Texas cop, later a detective working drug cases. In 1980, Castillo joined the DEA and worked the streets of New York. He worked in Peru in 1984-1985, and Guatemala from 1985-1990. While stationed in Guatemala, Castillo was the DEA agent in charge of anti-drug operations in El Salvador from 1985-1987. During this period, he discovered that Oliver North's contras were running cocaine from El Salvador's Ilopango airport. Castillo did his best to bust them, but soon learned that the traffickers were protected by the CIA. "By the end of 1988," he writes, "I realized how hopelessly tangled DEA, the CIA, and every other U.S. entity in Central America had become with the criminals. The connections boggled my mind." [12] Feeling his life was in danger, Castillo got out in a hurry in 1990. The DEA, meanwhile, was increasing the pressure with an internal investigation of Castillo. His career was over and he http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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resigned. Lawrence Walsh's office extensively debriefed Castillo, but when Walsh released his massive report in 1993, the narcotics connection was nowhere to be found. The combined House and Senate Iran-contra hearings in 1987 also ignored the drug issue. Instead, investigators granted immunity to Oliver North. John Kerry's subcommittee, the "Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations," began its investigations in 1987, held hearings in 1988 and 1989, and issued a 144page report on April 13, 1989.[13] At one point, the subcommittee took testimony from the head of the Honduran DEA office, who described how it was closed down in June 1983, at a time when the CIA station was doubling in size. Honduras was a major transit station for cocaine, thanks to their corrupt military. It was clear to the CIA and Pentagon that the contra effort required the support of Honduras, and that the price for this support was to overlook the cocaine traffic. "I watched the CIA protect drug traffickers throughout my career as a DEA agent," says Michael Levine. "I have put thousands of Americans away for tens of thousands of years for conspiracy with less evidence than is available against Ollie North and CIA people."[14] Tom Cash, a former top DEA official in Miami, agrees: "When you have those types of political upheavals and foreign policy considerations of the President to start with, and at the same time have a drug prosecution to contend with, drugs are going to be second. It is something we grappled with on a daily basis."[15] One could, arguably, defend the mainstream press for refusing to follow up on stories as improbable, and characters as fringey, as some of those we've considered here: an iconoclast poet like Ginsberg, a shapeshifter like Stark, a low-level Serpico like Castillo. But the real indictment of the major media on the CIA-drugs question is their inability to follow up on obvious leads occurring in major stories taking place under floodlights in their own backyard. Consider the case of Oliver North, known associate of drug traffickers. Oliver North's conviction for three felonies (lying, cheating, and stealing) was reversed in 1990 because his case was muddied by the Congressional grant of immunity. This meant that he could run for office, and in 1994 he was nearly elected to the U.S. Senate. North's infamous notebooks, however, may yet return to haunt him. Ten months after the Kerry subcommittee subpoenaed these notebooks, they still lacked clean, unexpurgated copies. Nevertheless, these notebooks contain dozens of references to contra drug trafficking. In an e-mail message about General Jose Bueso Rosa from Honduras, who was involved in a conspiracy to import 345 kilos of cocaine into Florida, North noted that U.S. officials would "cabal quietly to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence." Even after Panama's Manuel Noriega was exposed in the U.S. press as a drug runner, North met with him because Noriega wanted help to "clean up his image." In exchange, Noriega offered North some helpful anti-Sandinista sabotage. Or consider the decision by the Post and other major media to throw away a truly sensational story: the official declaration by Costa Rica, Central America's one shining light of democracy, that it considered a number of major U.S. officials to be drug traffickers, and as such was barring them from entering the country. The list here is nothing short of amazing: Oliver North himself, retired air-force major general Richard Secord, Reagan's former national security advisor John Poindexter, former U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs, and former CIA station chief Joseph Fernandez. On July 22, 1989, the Associated Press ran this story, but they were virtually alone; some major media buried this story, and the rest resolutely ignored it. When asked why, Post reporter Walter Pincus gave a revealing response: "Just because a congressional commission in Costa Rica says something, doesn't mean it's true."[16] (Before he joined the Post in the 1960s, Pincus traveled abroad on a CIA subsidy to spy on student leaders from other countries.[17] Unsurprisingly, Pincus was out in front of the pack of reporters that attacked the recent Mercury News story.) http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media
When the major media turn aside from stories so sensational, and so easy to pursue, it's unlikely to be an accident. And given that stories so high-profile go nowhere, it's not surprising that the same thing happens to countless lower-profile stories that lack immediately-recognizable American names. Space prevents giving even a "bullet" version of many stories that could be adduced here, but consider the following items, at least: Medellin trafficker Carlos Lehder testified at Noriega's 1991 trial that the Medellin cartel gave $10 million to the contras. FBI informant Wanda Palacio told the Kerry subcommittee that she saw cocaine being loaded onto pilot Wallace Sawyer's plane in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1985. (Sawyer and his Southern Air Transport L382, carrying guns this time, were shot down over Nicaragua one year later. The flight logs from the plane, recovered by the Sandinistas, substantiated Palacio's story.) George Morales, a major cocaine trafficker, offered planes and cash to the contras; when contra leader Adolfo Chamorro checked with the CIA, they said Morales was fine and to go ahead with the deal. Ramon Milian Rodriguez, the chief accountant for the Medellin cartel, testified to the Kerry subcommittee that he transferred money to the contras and laundered more than $3 million for the CIA, even after his indictment on drug charges in 1983. In what was known as the Frogman Case, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, Joseph Russoniello, returned $36,000 to an arrested cocaine dealer after contra leaders stipulated that the money was earmarked for weapons. The Justice Department foiled Kerry's attempts to investigate this. (Russoniello, by the way, is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.) Recently a Venezuelan, Gen. Ramon Guillen Davila, was indicted in Miami for smuggling tons of cocaine. This is the only instance in which the CIA has acknowledged responsibility for drugs being imported into the U.S. One CIA officer resigned and another was recalled to Washington, but no CIA officials have been charged. Or consider the blatant attempt by the Washington Post and its corporate sibling Newsweek to bury the inconvenient results of Congressional investigations into CIA complicity with drug traffickers, and then smear the investigators. On July 22, 1987, the Post ran an article whose headline seemed perfectly clear: "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling." But Charles Rangel (D-NY), chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, wrote to the Post and complained, "Your headline says we drew one conclusion, while in fact we reached quite a different one." Rangel's letter ended up buried in the Congressional Record (August 6, 1987), because the Post refused to publish it. Two years later, when the Kerry subcommittee report was released, the Post buried it on a back page, and devoted most of the short article to Republican criticisms of Kerry. Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff." When our major media behave more irresponsibly than Congress, and frequently only a few members of Congress deserve our support, it's easy to see that we have a problem. The 1980s were a repeat performance of the 1970s, when the stakes were larger. At that time it was a question of organized assassinations and secret wars of aggression. Both Congress and the media were interested, at least initially. But our media establishment took one look into the abyss and decided that investigative journalism was not so profitable after all. Without the support of the media, Congress quickly lost interest.[18] Is it even necessary to write a conclusion to this tragic but also farcical story? Confronting his outraged fellow citizens in South Central, CIA Director John Deutch thought he was offering a reasonable extenuation when he remarked at one point: "Our case officers deal with bad people, very bad people." But a moment's thought reveals the utter vacuity of this remark. The Cold War is over. http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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For the young, even its memory is fading away. What should fade away now are the rationalizations that once led men like Deutch to justify cutting deals with tinhorn dictators and smack dealers. Unfortunately, as Deutch's audience knew, the evil these men did lives after them -- on the streets of South Central, and all over our unhappy global village. It's still going on. Why can't our press report it? 1. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Brooklyn NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), pp. 29-63. This book is an expanded edition of Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 2. David Barsamian, "The Politics of Drugs: An Interview with Alfred McCoy," Z Magazine, January 1991, pp. 64-74. 3. Henrik Krueger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 142-43. 4. Gary Moore, "The exiles who turned to drugs," St. Petersburg Times, 30 May 1982, pp. 1-A, 14A. 5. Central Intelligence Agency, Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 25 April 1967, pp. 1920, 25-31. 6. Chip Berlet, "How the Muckrakers Saved America," Alternative Media, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1979), pp. 5-7. 7. Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), 424 pages; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, pp. 461-78. 8. James Rupert and Steve Coll, "U.S. Declines to Probe Afghan Drug Trade," Washington Post, 13 May 1990, pp. A1, A29. 9. Carl Oglesby, "The Acid Test and How It Failed," The National Reporter, Fall 1988, p. 10. The information on Ronald Stark comes from three sources: Jonathan Marshall, "The Strange Career of Ronald Hadley Stark," Intelligence/Parapolitics, November 1984, pp. 15-18; Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), pp. 248-51, 279-82, 286-87; Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable and Company, 1991), pp. 308-16. 10. Michael Levine, The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), 472 pages. 11. David Corn, "The CIA and the Cocaine Coup," The Nation, 7 October 1991, p. 404-6. 12. Celerino Castillo III and Dave Harmon, Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press -- Sundial, 1994), p. 208. 13. The most comprehensive discussion of the details in this report can be found in Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 279 pages. 14. Geraldo Rivera Show, CNBC-TV, 9 October 1996, with guests Jack Blum, Michael Levine, and Maxine Waters. 15. Warren Richey, "CIA Under Pressure to Divulge Info on Contras," Christian Science Monitor, 20 September 1996, p. 3. http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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16. "Censored News: Oliver North & Co. Banned from Costa Rica," Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Extra!, October/November 1989, pp. 1, 5. See FAIR's website < http://www.fair.org/fair > for more about major media and the CIA-cocaine story. 17. Walter Pincus, "How I Traveled Abroad On CIA Subsidy," San Jose Mercury, 18 February 1967, p. 14. 18. Kathryn S. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 255 pages. For references to more information on this topic, search for the proper names found in this essay by using NameBase from our home page, a cumulative name index of 600 investigative books, plus 23 years of assorted clippings. NameBase book reviews
http://www.namebase.net/news16.html
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http://www.thepeopleshistory.net/2014/07/operation-mockingbird-cia-and-propaganda.html
Operation Mockingbird: The CIA and Propaganda
thepeopleshistory.net
"About a third of the whole CIA budget went to media propaganda operations... We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year just for that.....close to a billion dollars are being spent every year by the United States on secret propaganda." Testimony of William Schapp to Congress1 In 1948, the United States began the Marshall Plan, an initiative to help the devastated Europe recover from the War. The CIA decided to siphon funds to create the Office of Policy Coordination, which would become the covert action branch of the Agency.2 It was under this program that Operation Mockingbird, a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at promoting the views of the CIA within the media, began. From the onset, Operation Mockingbird was one of the most sensitive of the CIA's operations, with recruitment of journalists and training of intelligence officers for propaganda purposes usually undertaken by Director Allen Dulles himself or his direct peers.3 It is a false belief that the CIA 'infiltrated' unwitting media institutions. The recruitment of journalists was frequently done with complicity from top management and ownership. Former CIA Director William Colby claimed during the Church Committee investigative hearings, "Lets go to the managements. They were witting." Among the organizations that would lend their help to the propaganda efforts was the New York Times, Newsweek, Associated Press, and the Miami Herald. Providing cover to CIA agents was a part of the New York Timespolicy, set by their late publisher, Arthur Hays Salzberger.4
The investigative committee of Frank Church, officially titled “Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities”, uncovered a lot of evidence concerning Operation Mockingbird and came to the conclusion that:
"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 opinionthrough 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."5 Carl Bernstein, the reporter famous for his excellent investigation into the Watergate scandal, wrote that:
“(Joseph) Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five 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 Page 1 of 4with
the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, Feb 21, 2016 05:51:48AM MST
http://www.thepeopleshistory.net/2014/07/operation-mockingbird-cia-and-propaganda.html
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.”6
While a majority of Mockingbird operations were overseas, the goal was to have important, hard-hitting stories to be circulated in the American press. Relationships with major United States media institutions certainly helped with this goal. Bernstein lists The New York Times, CBS and Time inc. as the most productive relationships the agency cultivated. They also created front organizations overseas who publicly maintained an appearance of free press but privately were operated by the agency. An example of this is the Rome Daily American, which was 40% owned by the CIA for three decades.7
Another strategy was developing relationships with major media owners who were known to harbor right-wing views, such as William Paley of CBS, and then passing on information of journalists, actors and screenwriters who harbored left-wing views. Information was also passed on to friendly congressmen such as Joseph McCarthy. These men and women would then be blacklisted from the industry. Lee J. Cobb was one such actor who was blacklisted, and recalled his experience:
“When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit - being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HCUA (House UnAmerican Activities Committee) did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again.”8
The CIA went as far as to write scripts for Hollywood. One interesting example is the funding of the movie version of Animal Farm in 1954, a book written just less than a decade earlier by George Orwell which enjoyed large commercial success. The problem for the CIA was that Orwell was a socialist, and his book attacked both capitalism and communism. To avoid this conflict, the CIA changed the ending of the Hollywood version to portray capitalism in a more positive light.9
Domestic Page 2 of 4
surveillance was also used on journalists who had published classified material. one05:51:48AM example,MST Feb 21,In2016
http://www.thepeopleshistory.net/2014/07/operation-mockingbird-cia-and-propaganda.html
Domestic surveillance was also used on journalists who had published classified material. In one example, a physical surveillance post was set up at a Hilton Hotel in view of the office of Washington Post writer Michael Getler.10 The operation defied the CIA's charter, which specifically prohibits domestic spying. The operation was directed towards numerous members of the Washington press corp, and was signed off by John F. Kennedy himself, in coordination with CIA director John McCone.11
One CIA document states: “Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. Influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publicans or booksellers... Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability”. The Church Committee concluded that over 1000 books were published under this directive.12
Some investigative journalists have claimed that Operation Mockingbird did not end in 1976 as the CIA claims. For example, in 1998, researcher Steve Kangas claimed that conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who ran 'Forum World Features', a foreign news organization, was a CIA asset and used the organization to disseminate propaganda for circulation in the United States.13 Kangas ended up dead with a bullet hole in his head, in the office of Richard Scaife. It was ruled a suicide, although there were discrepancies in the police report and the autopsy.14
The Church Committee's conclusion accurately reflects the problems associated with Operation Mockingbird:
“In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.”15
While it is deplorable for citizens of countries to be subjected to a state-owned media, at least they can be aware of the biases and filter information accordingly. We have been taught the lie from birth that the U.S. press is free from government meddling. In a situation where the manipulation is completely covert, the American public has been left unaware of the propaganda they have been ingesting for decades.
Food for Thought:
1. Why were the owners and management of large media institutions so willing to Page 3 of 4
participate in a program that violated their journalistic integrity?
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http://www.thepeopleshistory.net/2014/07/operation-mockingbird-cia-and-propaganda.html
participate in a program that violated their journalistic integrity? 2. Has the increasingly consolidated media industry made it easier for news to be manipulated to fit 'the agenda' discussed in the One Party State? 3. Have MK-ULTRA entrapment or mind control techniques ever been used to target the press? 1Testimony available here. 2Sallie Pasani “The CIA and the Marshall Plan,” excerpt available here. 5Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976. 9John Simkin, “Operation Mockingbird.” 10New York Times, “Project Mockingbird: Spying on Reporters,” June 26, 2007 12Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976. 13Steve Kangas, “A Timeline of CIA Atrocities.” 14John Simkin, “Steve Kangas.” 15 Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976.
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Operation Mockingbird From SourceWatch
Allegations worthy of consideration ... From an undated analysis by Mary Louise posted at PrisonPlanet.com (http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html): "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)." From an undated piece by Steve Kangas titled "The Origins of the Overclass" (http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/Loverclass.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 anticommunist, procapitalist propaganda when needed."
9/11 Experiments: The Force Behind the Motion Propaganda Can’t Melt Steel Beams Air Defense Exercise a Month Before 9/11 Was Based Around Osama Bin Laden Carrying Out an Aerial Attack on Washington
"Perhaps no newspaper is more important to the CIA than the Washington Post, one of the nation's most rightwing 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, 9/11 Blogger receives no Allen Dulles, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Helms. He inherited the Post by marrying foundational or corporate Katherine Graham, whose father owned it." money other than from the ads on the left. We rely on "Sig Mickelson was a CIA asset the entire time he was president of CBS News from your individual support. 1954 to 1961. Later he went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda." Onetime: "The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies. It owned 40 percent $ 20.00 Donate of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse, the CIA has bought many domestic media companies. A prime Monthly: example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William J. Casey (who would later become Ronald Reagan's CIA director). Another founder was Lowell $ 5.00 Donate Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so bitcoin powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC." Username: * http://911blogger.com/node/3529
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Operation Mockingbird - CIA owns the Media | 911Blogger.com
"For those who believe in 'separation of press and state,' the very idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with the agency."
Password: *
There are several copies online of "The Alex Constantine Article; Tales from the Crypt The Log in Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD" Create new account [1] (http://www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html) Request new password [2] (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html) "[In the late 40's] 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 codenamed Operation MOCKINGBIRD." "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."
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"Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham 'believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA'. This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD." There are many citations attached to "A Letter to the Washington Post" (http://home.gwi.net/~troberts/Julian/WashPostLetter.html) by Julian C. Holmes dated April 25, 1992. From "Subverting the Media" (http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm) by David Guyatt: "In an October 1977, article published by Rolling Stone magazine, Carl Bernstein reported that more than 400 American journalists worked for the CIA. Bernstein went on to reveal that this cozy arrangement had covered the preceding 25 years. Sources told Bernstein that the New York Times, America's most respected newspaper at the time, was one of the CIA's closest media collaborators. Seeking to spread the blame, the New York Times published an article in December 1977, revealing that 'more than eight hundred news and public information organisations and individuals,' had participated in the CIA's covert subversion of the media. "As these stories hit the news, Senate investigators began to probe the CIA sponsored manipulation of the media the 'Fourth Estate' that supposedly was dedicated to acting as a check and balance on the excesses of the executive. This investigation was, however, curtailed at the insistence of Central Intelligence Agency Directors, William Colby and George H.W. Bush who would later be elected US President. The information gathered by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church, was 'deliberately buried' Bernstein reported. "Slowly, the role of Mockingbird in muzzling and manipulating the press began to be revealed. In 1974, two former CIA agents, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, published a sensational book entitled "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" (ISBN 0440203368). The book caused uproar for the many revelations it contained." From "Myth of Liberal Media", posted at Democratic Underground (includes citation links) (http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID45/1908.html), http://911blogger.com/node/3529
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United Airlines Held an Exercise So Realistic That Its Personnel Had to Be Reassured That the 9/11 2/7
10/10/2016
Operation Mockingbird - CIA owns the Media | 911Blogger.com
Democracy Unbound (scroll down) (http://www.democracyunbound.com/triplecrown.html), and at http://web.archive.org/web/20011217025849/www.geocities.com/alanjpakula/triplecrown.html (access via the Wayback Machine): "After this embarrassment, it was necessary for the Right to use its own private network to replace Mockingbird. As a result, there is now the Cato Institute, with Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch (Fox, NY Post, TV Guide) on the Board with ATT/TCI's Malone [10] . Another big contributor to Cato is Viacom, which recently acquired CBS. Consequently, CBS/Viacom is now headed by Sumner M. Redstone, who is yet another powerful right wing figure with a WWII intelligence background [11] and apparent ties to OSS/CIA figures [12] . Cato serves the purpose of infusing the Media with Right Wing Propaganda, along with such organizations as Accuracy in Media (AIM), the Independent Women's Forum, the Western Journalism Center and of course the Heritage Foundation (See Main Page for Details). "The difference between the days of Operation Mockingbird and the present situation is that, instead of actually placing network executives, publishers, editors, reporters and pundits on the CIA payroll, their contemporary counterparts are now members of the Right Wing Think Tanks*. In addition to Cato's Murdoch, some high profile examples are MSNBC's Laura Ingraham (a notorious 'Scaifette' from the Independent Women's Forum [13] ) and ABC's John Stossel [14] . CNN's Kate O'Beirne is a Heritage fellow (and previous VP) who is a regular columnist for the National Review. Also, old Bonesman/CIA hand William F. Buckley, Jr. is the Editor of the archconservative Review. The National Review's President and Chairman is none other than Thomas Rhodes, who was recently a Heritage Board member. Other right wing journals financed by these sugardaddies (and mommies) include the American Spectator, Human Events and Murdoch's Weekly Standard." From Glen Yeadon's "From the streets of Little Beirut" (http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/books.html) (2/28/03): "CIA censorship and mediapropagandizing was supposed to have stopped in the mid 1970s after the Church Committee investigated the CIA's Project Mockingbird. At the time, every major media outlet was infected with Mockingbird. Coexisting with Project Mockingbird was a FBI operation named COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was successful in destroying not only leftist groups but also more importantly the press of the left. Ramparts Magazine was a major target eliminated by COINTELPRO. In one short decade, the alternative press had been wiped out." [edit]
SourceWatch Resources Herbert Allen The CIA and journalism [edit]
External Links Greg Bishop, "The Covert News Network," (http://www.antiqillum.com/glor/glor_007/covert_news.pdf) antiqillum.com, no date. Robert Lederer, "Apology to the Media," (http://www.iahf.com/20000916.html) iahf.com, September 16, 2000. Geoff Metcalf, "To Kill or Feed a Mockingbird," (http://www.newswithviews.com/metcalf/metcalf8.htm) News with Views, July 29, 2002. Cheryl Seal, "'Listen to the Mockingbird': Deconstructing the CIAStyle Disinformation 'Song' of the Washington http://911blogger.com/node/3529
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Operation Mockingbird - CIA owns the Media | 911Blogger.com
Post," (http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4244/index.php) Baltimore Independent Media, June 18, 2003. Michael Hasty, "Secret admirers: The Bushes and the Washington Post" (Part 1) (http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/020504Hasty/020504hasty.html), Online Journal, February 5, 2004. Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_Mockingbird" MediaWiki GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 This page was last modified 16:34, 26 Jan 2005. This page has been accessed 7634 times. Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2. About SourceWatch Disclaimers SourceWatch is an encyclopedia of people, issues and groups shaping the public agenda.It is a project of the Center for Media & Democracy; email bob AT sourcewatch.org Antispam note: To avoid attracting spam email robots, email addresses on the SourceWatch are written with AT in place of the usual symbol, and we have removed "mail to" links. Replace AT with the correct symbol to get a valid address. We regret the inconvenience this entails. Lobby your government for more effective antispam regulations. Login or register to post comments
About 9/11 Episode 3 Erik Larson William Binney– former NSA Technical Director signs AE911Truth petition CSPAN Washington Journal: Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth CIA Director George Tenet Facilitated 9/11 Thomas Kean & Lee Hamilton Call For The Release Of The 28 Redacted Pages NY1 coverage of the High Rise Safety Initiative Counter Intelligence The Interview
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Operation Mockingbird - CIA owns the Media | 911Blogger.com
War Crimes and 9/11: Why Dick and Don Are Suspects Donald Rumsfeld and the Demolition of WTC 7 The “Strategy of Tension” in the Cold War Period The CIA in Kuwait: Parallels to a 9/11 Suspect The Holocaust, Mind Control, and 9/11 The 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry and 28 Missing Pages Victims’ families demand release of 28 pages http://911blogger.com/node/3529
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from 9/11 report WeAreChange takes the mic after Super Bowl XLVIII to address the nation on 9/11 Getting Real About Richard Clarke Targeting the President: Evidence of U.S. Government Training Exercises on 9/11 ReThink911 Fall 2013 Campaign Recap | WTC 7 Freefall Collapse Video Goes Worldwide How to Debunk WTC Thermite New Book Reveals 9/11 Suspects http://911blogger.com/node/3529
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Saudi Arabia 9/11 Connection With Senator Bob Graham Meet Lee Harvey Oswald, Sheep Dipped Patsy Published on Nov 15, 2013 Jet Fuel Caused the Incendiary Explosions in The WTC Lobby? NIST Replies to WTC7 Stiffeners Inquiry more
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Operation Mockingbird - Factbites
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Operation Mockingbird
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Topic: Operation Mockingbird Operation Mockingbird Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. 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. Operation Mockingbird continued to flourish with CIA agents boasting at having “important assets” inside every major news outlet in the country.” The list included such luminaries of the US media as Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, of the New York Times and C.D. Jackson of Fortune Magazine, according to Constantine. www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk /JFKmockingbird.htm (13173 words) Operation Mockingbird Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Operation Mockingbird is a Central Intelligence Agency operation to influence domestic and foreign media, whose activities were made public during the Church Committee investigation in 1975 (published 1976). Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala during Operation PBSUCCESS. Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Frank Church investigations (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/MOCKINGBIRD (2486 words)
Related Topics Allen Welsh Dulles Allen Dulles Operation Ajax Richard Helms Plausible deniability Operation Northwoods House Select Committee on Assassinations John McCone Fritz Kolbe Mohammed Mossadegh John Foster Dulles Bay of Pigs Invasion Populist Director of Central Intelligence Warren Commission
Talk:Operation Mockingbird SourceWatch For example it is claimed that Philip Graham was central to the operation and much is made of his role as an innteligence officer in WWII. Yes, there are plenty of websites referring to Operation Mockingbird but none go back to credible primary sources; instead, they either refer to each other or make sweeping unreferenced claims that don't deserve to be repeated here. "The difference between the days of Operation Mockingbird and the present situation is that, instead of actually placing network executives, publishers, editors, reporters and pundits on the CIA payroll, their contemporary counterparts are now members of the Right Wing Think Tanks*. www.sourcewatch.org /index.php?title=Talk:Operation_Mockingbird (1903 words)
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Democratic Underground Forums "CIA Operation Mockingbird" 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. 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. Operation Mockingbird was instigated the CIA's Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles and Richard Helms. www.democraticunderground.com /duforum/DCForumID12/295.html (2486 words) Deep Throat was part of Operation Mockingbird. ... (Site not responding. Last check: ) Operation Mockingbird was also used to ensure the right sort of coverage in the American media. However, despite the help given by Philip Graham and other members of Operation Mockingbird, by the summer of 1960 it was clear that LBJ was not going to get the nomination. JFK would be given the full support of Operation Mockingbird as long as he took LBJ as his runningmate. www.apfn.net /messageboard/060705/discussion.cgi.55.html (2311 words) Operation Mockingbird | The Agonist Operation Mockingbird is a Central Intelligence Agency operation to influence domestic and foreign media, whose activities were made public during the Church Committee investigation in 1975 (published 1976). According to Carl Bernstein, over 400 reporters and editors were working for the CIA as part of Operation Mockingbird. Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Frank Church investigations (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975. agonist.org /chickadee/20070413/operation_mockingbird (1198 words) Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation 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. 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. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multinational corporate/government megaphone. www.prisonplanet.com /analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html (1773 words)
THE CIA CONTROLS THE MEDIA | CIA SECRET PROJECT "OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD & CATO In contrast to newspaper publishing the operations of a defendant broadcater have been subject to elaborate governmental control extending to virtually all aspects of the broadcast industry. The CIA secret project 'Operation Mockingbird' media control and/or manipulation concerns all fifty (50) states and every United States citizen in violation of the First AmendmentRight to a Free Press. The act states that the FCC should assess the "character...of the applicant to operate the station,"
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and ensure that the "public interest...would be served by the granting" of a license. www.freewebs.com /medialawsuit (12893 words) OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD Perhaps the most notorious was Operation Jennifer, an allegedly failed attempt to recover nuclear codes from a sunken Soviet submarine. And although members concluded that "from the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive covert program of all," and "a much larger part of the operational system than had been indicated," this was hardly part of the official findings when they were made public. Many of the newspeople who operated with the CIA in the past were or are CFR members. www.apfn.org /apfn/ciamedia.htm (16040 words) Friends of Liberty Pipeline News disagrees w/ Fahey on Bob Novak/Operation MOCKINGBIRD Ted had a loose tongue, was going senile (not a jab at the dear man: he died of Alzheimer's) when I knew him, and he told me quite a lot of things; was still 85% "there" when I knew him, but people could tell he was experiencing the symptoms of onsetAlzheimer's. Well I was referring only to Buckley and the OSS, the mockingbird stuff is where the conspiracy buff skeptic kicks in. I admire Rove for his ability and I am very disappointed in the missteps that the Bush admin has made since November, Tancredo is one of the few members of the House who is worth his salary, Ron Paul and the libertarians have it wrong on many important issues including the war on terror imho. sianews.com /modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2553 (938 words) UK Gay News Operation ‘Mockingbird’: County Rallies to Aid Dying Lesbian Operation ‘Mockingbird’: County Rallies to Aid Dying Lesbian Today, people across the world are standing with Laurel Hester, a dying lesbian New Jersey police officer, by sending copies of the classic book To Kill a Mockingbird to the officials in Ocean County, who are refusing to grant pension benefits to Hester and her partner Stacie Andree. According to Jensen, sending copies of the book seemed the perfect way to express disapproval over the actions of Ocean County’s “freeholders,” the Republican officials, who have so far refused to grant Hester, and all lesbian and gay couples, domestic partnership benefits. www.ukgaynews.org.uk /Archive/2006jan/0901.htm (1176 words) CIA Disinformation in Action, Operation Mockingbird and the Washington Post Nestled within the over 100 footnotes and the not quite as many individual examples of supression and distrotions of truth, and even fabrications of 'truth', is a rootmost clue to the real problem a problem which reader should take care not to miss grasping... The significance is amplified when it is understood that Mockingbird was not simply the sell out of a newspaper. In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16). educateyourself.org /cn/ciadisinfoinaction28mar05.shtml (7516 words) Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media A careful review of covert operations in the Caribbean and South and Central America shows a fortyyear connection between crime and covert operations that has repeatedly blown back on the http://www.factbites.com/topics/Operation-Mockingbird
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United States.... Lynch concedes that after the CIA cut off support, many of these exiles, trained in covert operations and smuggling, turned to narcotics trafficking.[4] Given that the CIA had worked with Trafficante to assassinate Castro in 1961,[5] the agency lacked sufficient ethical intelligence to worry that these Trafficanteassociated exiles might pose a criminal problem. Within several years, however, the contra war developed into a major CIA operation involving Cuban exiles from Miami; former Nicaraguan guardsmen who fled during the 1979 revolution and regrouped in Honduras; and assorted CIA adventurers with drug and armstrafficking connections. www.namebase.org /news16.html (5273 words)
[No title] Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to f__ind 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. The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17). ...there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95). www.psychicspy.com /ciamed.txt (9192 words) (DV) Fitrakis: Mark Hyman Stepford Spook and the New Operation Mockingbird Hyman is the Vice President for Corporate Relations for Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns and operates programs or provides sales services affiliated with the top six TV networks in the country: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, UPN and Warner Brothers. During the heyday of the Cold War, the CIA allegedly instituted the notorious Operation Mockingbird to make sure the American mass media sang patriotic hymns in unison. Just like the coup in Florida in the 2000 election, the CIA’s timetested tactics throughout the world are now being overly practiced on the U.S. population. www.dissidentvoice.org /Oct04/Fitrakis1012.htm (802 words) mockingbird Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust." We should note that the CIA gets away with this because it is not accountable to democratic government. He was a key figure in Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists and spies to the U.S. Many were war criminals whose atrocities were excused in their service to the CIA. At a minimum, the Task Force recommended that a fresh look be taken at limits on the use of nonofficial 'covers' for hiding and protecting those involved in clandestine activities." Though the task force doesn't explicitly address the use of the press as cover, the implication is obvious. www.magickriver.net /mockingbird.htm (19135 words) [No title] (Site not responding. Last check: ) In writing of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird, Alex Constantine details the inception and implementation of intelligence infiltration into media. I’ve studied and interviewed enough to know that not only are intelligence operatives placed inside newsrooms; not only is the Federal Government generating fake newscasts with impunity; and, not http://www.factbites.com/topics/Operation-Mockingbird
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only do I believe many of the newscasters (O’Reilly, Matthews, Hannity, etc.) are in on it; but, the scheme truly is obviously simple. Under the auspices of “fighting Communism,” (that supreme 20th Century banker’s scheme), globalist operatives created Mockingbird. philadelphians.50megs.com /opmock.html (1313 words)
QTMagazine.com Operation Mockingbird: Supporters Rally to Aid of Dying Lesbian In the classic novel To Kill a ... (Site not responding. Last check: ) Today, people across North America are standing with Laurel Hester, a dying New Jersey police officer, by sending copies of the classic book To Kill a Mockingbird to the officials in Ocean County, who are refusing to grant pension benefits to Hester and her partner. The protest is the brainchild of Michael Jensen, a writer of the political blog, The Big Gay Picture (www.biggaypicture.com). Hester had not spoken to the press about her life or her fight with the county until doing the interview with Jensen. www.qtmagazine.com /article.cfm?section=9&id=8096 (597 words)
Washington Post's role in Operation Mockingbird (Site not responding. Last check: ) The chief puppeteer of the Mockingbird network Allen Dulles, a corporazi working for both German and American corporations. Independent journalist Alex Constantine writes, "Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. A fairytale about how Bremer is wellrespected and wellliked by the Iraqi leaders and how he is in complete control of the country. www.apfn.net /MESSAGEBOARD/112205/discussion.cgi.39.html (1613 words) MOCKINGBIRD The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to f__ind 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. Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD's Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis. www.whatreallyhappened.com /RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html (8351 words)
Operation Mockingbird The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA (Site not responding. Last check: ) Operation Mockingbird The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). www.rense.com /politics6/mockingbird.htm (9439 words)
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CIA "OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD' | CIA SECRET PROJECT OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD IS VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO A ... Anything less renders any discussion meaningless and unworthy in their opinion, and anyone who disagrees is obviously stupid and they generally put it in exactly those terms. Twist or amplify any fact which could be taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal agenda or other bias. They tend to operate in selfcongratulatory and complementary packs or teams. www.freewebs.com /operationmockingbird (8059 words) Creepy Mockingbird Propaganda Tactics (Site not responding. Last check: ) (Conspiracy Nation, 10/26/05) Operation Mockingbird was (is) a CIA operation which influenced (influences) mass media "news." It was discovered in 1975 by the Church Committee investigation. The Operation Mockingbird played a role in the toppling of the Nixon presidency in 1974, a "Silent Coup." At the time, Americans were hoodwinked into believing a "heroic press," and especially the Washington Post, had saved the nation. www.shout.net /~bigred/Mockingbird.html (535 words) ROCKFISH Seafood Grill Restaurant Locations: DFW Metroplex With a sleek finish and urban edge, this Rockfish is in the trendy Mockingbird Station retail development. FROM CENTRAL EXPRESSWAY: Take the Mockingbird Lane exit and turn east on Mockingbird. ROCKFISH will be on your left in Mockingbird Station. www.rockfishseafood.com /dfwmetroplex.htm (444 words) The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA Subject: Operation Mockingbird The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA: Control of the Masses from Tit to Tomb (Or Why You Never Learned of the Codex Vitamin Issue in the Mainstream Media) IAHF List: People ask me all the time why they never see any reports in the mainstream media about the Codex vitamin issue or other health freedom issues unless they are articles attacking vitamins and alternative medicine. Most consumers of the corporate media were and are unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. www.iahf.com /usa/20000916a.html (9778 words) Who controls the Media? Operation Mockingbird Gold & Silver Forum General Discussion Any subject may be discussed here that does not fit into the other forums. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commitis a the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Operation Mockingbird, created with the purpose of total control of the mass media, buying newspapers, magazines, tv channels and infiltrating Hollywood to influence and control public opinion. goldismoney.info /forums/showthread.php?t=9978 (2921 words) http://www.factbites.com/topics/Operation-Mockingbird
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[No title] CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled www.perspectives.com /forums/forum71/33874.html (2599 words) Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)
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THE MIGHTY WURLITZER PLAYS ON by Gary Webb Chapter 14 from In the Buzzsaw edited by Kristina Borjesson
THE MIGHTY WURLITZER PLAYS ON by Gary Webb Chapter 14 from In the Buzzsaw edited by Kristina Borjesson Webb was an investigative reporter for nineteen years focusing on government and private sector corruption and winning more than thirty journalism awards. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting for a series of stories on Northern California's 1989 earthquake. He also received the 1997 Media Hero Award from the 2nd Annual Media & Democracy Congress, and in 1996 was named Journalist of the Year by the Bay Area Society of Professional Journalists. In 1994, Webb won the H. L. Mencken Award given by the Free Press Association for a series in the San Jose Mercury News on abuses in the state of California's drug asset forfeiture program. And in 1980, Webb won an Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Award for a series that he coauthored at the Kentucky Post on organized crime in the coal industry. Prior to 1988, Webb worked as a statehouse correspondent for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News where the "Dark Alliance" series broke in 1996. Months later, Webb was effectively forced out of his job after the San Jose Mercury News retracted their support for his story. He is now a consultant to the California State Legislature's Joint Audit Committee. If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me. I'd been working at daily papers for seventeen years at that point, doing no-holds barred investigative reporting for the bulk of that time. As far as I could tell, the beneficial powers the press theoretically exercised in our society weren't theoretical in the least. They worked. I wrote stories that accused people and institutions of illegal and unethical activities. The papers I worked for printed them, often unflinchingly, and many times gleefully. After these stories appeared, matters would improve. Crooked politicians got voted from office or were forcibly removed. Corrupt firms were exposed and fined. Sweetheart deals were rescinded, grand juries were impaneled, indictments came down, grafters were bundled off to the big house. Taxpayers saved money. The public interest was served. It all happened exactly as my journalism-school professors had promised. And my expectations were pretty high. I went to journalism school while Watergate was unfolding, a time when people as distantly connected to newspapering as college professors were puffing out their chests and singing hymns to investigative reporting. Bottom line: If there was ever a true believer, I was one. My first editor mockingly called me "Woodstein," after a pair of Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story. More than once I was accused of neglecting my daily reporting duties because I was off "running around with your trench coat flapping in the breeze." But in the end, all the sub rosa trench coat-flapping paid off. The newspaper published a seventeen-part series on organized crime in the American coal industry and won its first national journalism award in half a century. From then on, my editors at that the subsequent newspapers allowed me to work almost exclusively as an investigative reporter. I had a grand total of one story spiked during my entire reporting career. That's it. One. (And in retrospect it wasn't a very important story either.) Moreover, I had a complete freedom to pick my own shots, a freedom my editors wholeheartedly encouraged since it relieved them of the burden of coming up with story ideas. I wrote my stories the way I wanted to write them, without anyone looking over my shoulder or steering me in a certain direction. After the lawyers and editors went over them and satisfied themselves that we had enough facts behind us to stay out of trouble, they printed them, usually on the front page of the Sunday edition, when we had our widest readership. In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal http://whale.to/b/mighty__wurlitzer.html
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if I kept looking under rocks. I didn't get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as far as I could tell. It encouraged enterprise. It rewarded muckraking. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress. In 1996, I wrote a series of stories, entitled Dark Alliance, that began this way: For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods Street Gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found. This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America -- and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons. It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S. backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting "gangstas" of Compton and South Central Los Angeles. The three-day series was, at its heart, a short historical account of the rise and fall of a drug ring and its impact on black Los Angeles. It attempted to explain how shadowy intelligence agencies, shady drugs and arms dealers, a political scandal, and a long-simmering Latin American civil was had crossed paths in South Central Los Angeles, leaving behind a legacy of crack use. Most important, it challenged the widely held belief that crack use began in African American neighborhoods not for any tangible reason but mainly because of the kind of people who lived in them. Nobody was forcing them to smoke crack, the argument went, so they only have themselves to blame. They should just say no. That argument never seemed to make much sense to me because drugs don't just appear magically on street corners in black neighborhoods. Even the most rabid hustler in the ghetto can't sell what he doesn't have. If anyone was responsible for the drug problems in a specific area. I thought, it was the people who were bringing the drugs in. And so Dark Alliance was about them -- the three cocaine traffickers who supplied the South Central market with literally tons of pure cocaine from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. What made the series so controversial is that two of the traffickers I named were intimately involved with a Nicaraguan paramilitary group known as the Contras, a collection of ex-military men, Cuban exiles, and mercenaries that the CIA was using to destabilize the socialist government of Nicaragua. The series documented direct contact between the drug traffickers who were bringing the cocaine into South Central and the two Nicaraguan CIA agents who were administering the Contra project in Central America. The evidence included sworn testimony from one of the traffickers -- now a valued government informant -- that one of the CIA agents huddled in the kitchen of a house in San Francisco with one of the traffickers and had interviewed the photographer, who confirmed its authenticity. Pretty convincing stuff, we thought. Over the course of three days, Dark Alliance advanced five main arguments: First, that the CIA-created Contras had been selling cocaine to finance their activities. This was something the CIA and the major media had http://whale.to/b/mighty__wurlitzer.html
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THE MIGHTY WURLITZER PLAYS ON by Gary Webb Chapter 14 from In the Buzzsaw edited by Kristina Borjesson
dismissed or denied since the mid-1980s, when a few reporters first began writing about Contra drug dealing. Second, that the Contras had sold cocaine in the ghettos of Los Angeles and that their main customer was L.A.'s biggest crack dealer. Third, that elements of the U.S. government knew about this drug ring's activities at the time and did little if anything to stop it. Fourth, that because of the time period and the areas in which it operated, this drug ring played a critical role in fueling and supplying the first mass crack cocaine market in the United States. And fifth, that the profits earned from this crack market allowed the Los Angeles-based Crips and bloods to expand into other cities and spread crack use to other black urban areas, turning a bad local problem into a bad national problem. This led to panicky federal drug laws that were locking up thousands of small-time, black crack dealers for years but never denting the crack trade. It wasn't so much a conspiracy that I had outlined as it was a chain-reaction--bad ideas compounded by stupid political decisions and rotten historical timing. Obviously this wasn't the kind of story that a reporter digs up in an afternoon. A Nicaraguan journalist and I had been working on it exclusively for more than a year before it was published. And despite the topic of the story, it had been tedious work. Spanish-language undercover tapes, court records, and newspaper articles were laboriously translated. Interviews had to be arranged in foreign prisons. Documents had to be pried from unwilling federal agencies, or specially declassified by the National Archives. Ex-drug dealers and ex-cops had to be tracked down and persuaded to talk on the record. Chronologies were pieced together from heavily censored government documents and old newspaper stories found scattered in archives from Managua to Miami. In December 1995, I wrote a lengthy memo to my editors, advising them of what my Nicaraguan colleague and I had found, what I thought the stories would say, and what still needed to be done to wrap them up. It also to help my editor explain our findings to her bosses, who had not yet signed off on the story, and most of whom had no idea I'd been working on it. **Two months ago, in an unheard-of response to a Congressional vote, black prison inmates across the country staged simultaneous revolts to protest Congress' refusal to make sentences for crack cocaine the same as for powder cocaine. Both before and after the prison riots, some black leaders were openly suggesting that crack was part of a broad d government conspiracy that has imprisoned or killed an entire generation of young black men. Imagine if they were right. What if the US government was, in fact, involved in dumping cocaine into California -- selling it to black gangs in South Central Los Angeles, for instance -- sparking the most destructive drug epidemic in American history? That's what this series is about. With the help of recently declassified documents, FBI reports, DEA undercover tapes, secret grand jury transcripts and archival records from both here and abroad, as well as interviews with some of the key participants, we will show how a CIA-linked drug and stolen car network -- based in, of all places, the Peninsula -- provided weapons and tons of high-grade, dirt cheap cocaine to the very person who spread crack through LA and from there into the hinterlands. A bizarre -- almost fatherly -- bond between an elusive CIA operative and an illiterate but brilliant car thief from LA's ghettos touched off a social phenomenon -- crack and gang-power -- that changed our lives in ways that are still to be felt. That day these two men met was literally ground zero for California's crack explosion, and the myriad of calamities that have flowed from it (AIDS, homelessness, etc.) This is also the story of how an ill-planned and oftentimes irrational foreign policy adventure -- the CIA's "secret" was in Nicaragua from 1980 to 1986 -- boomeranged back to the streets of America, in the long run doing far more damage to us than to our supposed "enemies" in Central America. For, as this series will show, the dumping of cocaine on LA's street gangs was the "back-end" of a covert effort to http://whale.to/b/mighty__wurlitzer.html
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THE MIGHTY WURLITZER PLAYS ON by Gary Webb Chapter 14 from In the Buzzsaw edited by Kristina Borjesson
arm and equip the CIA's ragtag army of anti-Communist "Contra" guerrillas. While this has long been solid -- if largely ignores -- evidence of a CIA-Contra-cocaine connection, no one has ever asked the question: "Where did all the cocaine go once it got here?" Now we know. Moreover, we have compelling evidence that the kingpins of this Bay Area cocaine ring -- men connected to the assassinated Nicaraguan dictated dictator Anastasio Somoza and his murderous National Guard -- enjoyed a unique relationship with the U.S. government that has continued to this day. *In a meeting to discuss the memo, I recounted to my editors the sorry history of how the Contra-cocaine story had been ridiculed and marginalized by the Washington press corps in the 1980s, and that we could expect similar reactions to this series. If they didn't want to pursue this, now was the time to pull back, before I flew down to Central America and started poking around finding drug dealers to interview. But if we did, we needed to go full-bore on it, and devote the time and space to tell it right. My editors agreed. My story memo made the rounds of the other editors' offices and, as far as I know, no one objected. I was sent to Nicaragua to do additional reporting, and the design team at Mercury Center -- the newspaper's online edition -- began mapping our a Web page. At the end of my memo, I'd suggested to my editors that we use the Internet to help us demonstrate the story's soundness and credibility which, based on past stories critical of the CIA, was sure to come under attack by both the government and the press. **I have proposed to Bob Ryan [director of Mercury Center] that we do a special Merc Center/World Wide Web version of this series. The technology is extant to allow readers to download the series' supporting documentation through links to the actual text. For example, when we are quoting grand jury testimony, a click of the mouse would allow the reader to see and/or download the actual grand jury transcript. Since this whole subject has such a high unbelievability factor built into it, providing our backup documentation to our readers -- and the rest of the world over the Internet -- would allow them to judge the evidence for themselves. It will also make it all the more difficult to dismiss our findings as the fantasies of a few drug dealers. To my knowledge, this has never been attempted before. It would be a great way to showcase Merc Center and, at the same time use computer technology to set new standards for investigative reporting. * The editors jumped at the idea. From our perch as the newspaper of Silicon Valley, we could see the future the World Wide Web offered. Newspapers were scrambling to figure out a way to make the transition to cyberspace. The Mercury's editors were among the first to do it right, and were looking for new barriers to break. A special Internet version of Dark Alliance was created as a high-profile way of advertising the Mercury's Web presence and bringing visitors into the site. Plus, the newspaper could boast (and later did) that it had published the first interactive online expose in the history of American journalism. I remember being almost giddy as I sat with Merc Center's editors and graphics designers, picking through the pile of once-classified information we were going to unleash on the world. We had photos, undercover tape recordings, and federal grand jury testimony. In addition, we had interviews with guerrilla leaders, tape-recorded Supreme Court files, Congressional records, and long-secret documents unearthed during the Iran-Contra investigation. For the first time, any reader with a computer and a sound card could see what we'd found -- could actually read it for themselves -- and listen in while the story's participants plotted, scheme, and confessed. And they could do it from anywhere in the world, even if they had no idea where San Jose, California, was. After four months of writing, rewriting, editing, and reediting, my editors pronounced themselves satisfied and signed off. The first installment of Dark Alliance appeared simultaneously on the streets and on the Web on August 18, 1996. http://whale.to/b/mighty__wurlitzer.html
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The initial public reaction was dead silence. No one jumped up to deny any of it. Nor did the news media rush to share our discoveries with others. The stories just sat there, as if no one seemed to know what to make of them. Admittedly, Dark Alliance was an unusual story to have appeared in a mainstream daily newspaper, no just for what it said, but for what it was. It wasn't a news story per se; nearly everything I wrote about had happened a dozen years earlier. Because my editors and I had sometimes vehemently disagreed about the scope and nature of the stories during the writing and editing process, the result was a series of compromises, an odd mixture of history lesson, news feature, analysis, and expose. It was not an uplifting story; it was a sickening one. The bad guys had triumphed and fled the scene unscathed, as often happens in life. And there was very little anyone could do about it now, ten years after the fact. So, I wasn't really surprised that my journalistic colleagues weren't pounding down the follow-up trail. Hell, I thought it was a strange story myself. Had it been published even a year of two earlier, it likely would have vanished without a trace at that point. Customarily, if the rest of the nation's editors decide to ignore a particular story, it quickly withers and dies, like a light-starved plant. With the exception of newspapers in Seattle, some small cities in Northern California, and Albuquerque, Dark Alliance got the silent treatment big time. No one would touch it. But no one had counted on the enormous popularity of the Web site. Almost from the moment the series appeared, the Web page was deluged with visitors from all over the world. Students in Denmark were standing in line at their college's computer waiting to read it. E-mails came in from Croatia, Japan, Colombia, Harlem, and Kansas City, dozens of them, day after day. One day we had more than 1.3 million hits. (The site eventually won several awards from computer journalism magazines.) Once Dark Alliance became the talk of the Internet (in large part because of the technical wizardry and sharp graphics of the Web page), talk radio adopted the story and ran with it. For the next two months, I did more than one hundred radio interviews, in which I was asked to sum up what the three-day long series said in its many thousands of words. Well, I would reply, it said a lot of things. Take your pick. Usually, the questions focused on the CIA's role, and whether I was suggesting a giant CIA conspiracy. We didn't know the CIA's exact role yet, I would say, but we have documents and court testimony showing CIA agents were meeting with these drug traffickers to discuss drug sales and weapons trafficking. An so, figure it out. Did the CIA know or not? The response would come back --So you're saying that the CIA "targeted" black neighborhoods for crack sales? Where's your evidence of that? And it would go on and one. There were other distractions as well. Film agents and book agents began calling. One afternoon Paramount Studios whisked me down to have lunch with two of the studio's biggest producers, the men who brought Tom Clancy's CIA novels to the screen, to talk about "film possibilities" for the still-unfolding story. This was about the time I realized the wind speed of the shit storm I had kicked up. The rumbles the series was causing from black communities was unnerving a lot of people. College students were holding protest rallies in Washington, D.C., to demand an official investigation. Residents of South Central marched on city hall and held candlelight vigils. The Los Angeles City Council soon joined the chorus, as did both of California's U.S. senators, the Oakland city council, the major of Denver, the Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP, and at least a half dozen congressional members, mostly African American women whose districts included crack-ridden inner cities. Black civil rights activists were arrested outside the CIA after sealing off the agency's entrance with yellow crime scene tape. The story was developing a political momentum all of its own, and it was happening despite a virtual news blackout from the major media. Some Washington journalists were alarmed. Where is the rebuttal? Why hasn't the media risen in revolt against this story?" CNN's Reliable Sources, Kalb expressed frustration that the story was continuing to get out despite the best efforts of the press to ignore it. "It isn't a story that simply got lost" Kalb complained, during the show, http://whale.to/b/mighty__wurlitzer.html
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"It, in fact, has resonated and echoed and echoed and the question is, Where is the media knocking it down?" It was an interesting comment because it foretold the way the mainstream press finally did respond to Dark Alliance. A revolt by the biggest newspapers in the country, something columnist Alexander Cockburn would later describe in his book White Out as "one of the most venomous and factually insane assaults...in living memory." I remember arguing with a producer at an CNN news show shortly before I was to go on the air that I didn't want him asking me to explain "my allegations" because these stories weren't my allegations. I was a journalist reporting events that had actually occurred. You could document them, and we had. "Well, you got understand my position," he mumbled. "The trafficking, CNN's position is that these events may not have napped?" I snapped, "What the fuck is that? When did we give the CIA the power to define reality?" After nearly a month of silence, the CIA responded. It admitted nothing. It was confident that its agents weren't dealing drugs. But to dispel all the rumors and unkind suggestions my series had raised, the agency would have its inspector general take a look into the matter. The black community greeted this pronouncement with unconcealed contempt. "You think you can come down here and tell us that you're going to investigate yourselves, and expect us to believe something is actually gone happen?" one woman yelled at CIA director John Dutch, who appeared in Compote, California, in November 1996 to personally promise the city a thorough investigation. "How stupid do you think we are?" The conservative press and right-wing political organizations were equally hostile to the idea of a CIA crack investigation, but for different reasons. It meant the story was gaining legitimacy, and might lead to places that supporters of the Regain and Bush administrations would rather not see it go. John Dutch was blasted on the front page of the Washington Times (which had also helped finance the Contras, hosting fundraisers and speaking engagements for Contra leaders while supporting their cause editorially) as a dangerous liberal who was undermining morale at the CIA by even suggesting there might be truth to the stories. Ultimately, it was public pressure that forced the national newspapers into the fray. Protests were held outside the building by media watchdogs and citizens groups, who wondered how the Los Angeles Times building by media watchdogs and citizens groups, who wondered how the Times could continue to ignore a story that had such an impact on the city's black neighborhoods. In Washington, black media outlets were ridiculing the Post for its silence, considering the importance the story held for most of Washington's citizens. When the newspapers of record spoke, they spoke in unison. Between October and November, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times published lengthy stories about the CIA drug issue, but spent precious little time exploring the CIA's activities. Instead, my reporting and I became the focus of their scrutiny. After looking into the issue for several weeks, the official conclusion reached by all three papers: Much ado about nothing. No story here. Nothing worth pursuing. The series was "flawed," they contended. How? Well, there was no evidence the CIA knew anything about it, according to unnamed CIA officials the newspapers spoke to. The drug traffickers we identified as Contras didn't have "official" positions with the organization and didn't really give them all that much drug money. This was according to another CIA agent, Adolfo Calero, the former head of the Contras, an the man whose picture we had just published on the Internet, huddled in a kitchen with one of the Contra drug traffickers. Calero's apparent involvement with the drug operation was never mentioned by any of the papers; his decades-long relationship with the CIA was never mentioned either. Additionally, it was argues, this quasi-Contra drug ring was small potatoes. One of the Contra traffickers had only sold five tons of cocaine during his entire career, the Washington Post sniffed, badly misquoting a DEA report we'd posted on the Web site. According to the Post's analysis, written by a former CIA informant, Walter Pincus, who was then covering the CIA for the Post, this drug ring couldn't have made a difference in the crack market because five tons wasn't nearly enough to go around. Eventually, those assertions would be refuted by http://whale.to/b/mighty__wurlitzer.html
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internal records released by both the CIA and the Justice Department, but at the time they were classified. "I'm disappointed in the 'what's the big deal' tone running through the Post's critique," Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos complained to the Post in a letter it refused to publish. "If the CIA knew about these illegal activities being conducted by its associates, federal law and basic morality required that it notify domestic authorities. It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of story that a newspaper should shine a light on." Ceppos posted a memo on the newsroom bulletin board, stating that the Mercury News would continue "to strongly support the conclusions the series drew and will until someone proves them wrong." It was remarkable, Ceppos wrote, that the four Post reporters assigned to debunk the series "could not find a single significant factual error." Privately, though, my editors were getting nervous. Never before had the three biggest papers devoted such energy to kicking the hell out of a story by another newspaper. It simply wasn't done, and it worried them. They began a series of maneuvers designed to deflect or at least stem the criticism from the national media. Five thousand reprints of the series were burned because the CIA logo was used as an illustration. My follow-up stories were required to contain a boilerplate disclaimer that said we were not accusing the CIA of direct knowledge, even though the facts strongly suggested CIA complicity. But those stunts merely fueled the controversy, making it appear as if we were backing away from the story without admitting it. Ironically, the evidence we were continuing to gather was making the story even stronger. Long-missing police records surfaced. Cops who had tried to investigate the Contra drug ring and were rebuffed came forward. We tracked down one of the Contras who personally delivered drug money to CIA agents, and he identified them by name, on the record. He also confirmed that the amounts he'd carried to Miami and Costa Rica were in the millions. More records were declassified from the Iran-Contra files, showing that contemporaneous knowledge of this drug operation reached to the top levels of the CIA's covert operations division, as well as into the DEA and the FBI. But the attacks from the other newspapers had taken the wind out of my editors' sails. Despite the advances we were making on the story, the criticism continued. We were being "irresponsible" by printing stories suggesting CIA complicity without any admissions or printing stories suggesting CIA complicity without any admissions of "a smoking gun." The series was now described frequently as "discredited," even though nothing had surfaced showing that any of the facts were incorrect. At my editor's request, I wrote another series following up on the first three parts: a package of four stories to run over two days. They never began to edit them. Instead, I found myself involved in hours-long conversations with editors that bordered on the surreal. "How do we know for sure that these drug dealers were the first big ring to start selling crack in South Central?" editor Jonathan Krim pressed me during one such confab. "Isn't it possible there might have been others before them?" "There might have been a lot of things, Jon, but we're only supposed to deal in what we know," I replied. "The crack dealers I interviewed said they were the first. Cops is South Central said they were the first. and that they controlled the entire market. They wrote it in reports that we have. I haven't found anything saying otherwise, not one single name, and neither did the New York Times, the Washington Post or the L.A. Times. So what's the issue here?" "But how can we say for sure they were the first?" Krim persisted. "Isn't it possible there might have been someone else and they never got caught and no one ever knew about them? In that case, your story would be wrong." I had to take a deep breath to keep from shouting. "If you're asking me whether I accounted for people who might never have existed, the answer is no," I said. "I only considered people with names and faces. I didn't take phantom drug dealers into account." http://whale.to/b/mighty__wurlitzer.html
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A few months later, the Mercury News officially backed away from Dark Alliance, publishing a long column by Jerry Ceppos apologizing for "shortcomings" in the series. While insisting that the paper stood behind its "core findings," we didn't have proof that top CIA officials knew about this, and we didn't have proof that millions of dollars flowed from this drug ring, Ceppos declared, even though we did and weren't printing it. There were gray areas that should have been fleshed out more. Some of the language used could have led to misimpressions. And we "oversimplified" that outbreak of crack in South Central. The New York Times hailed Ceppos for setting a brave new standard for dealing with "egregious errors" and splashed his apology on their front page, the first time the series had ever been mentioned there. I quit the Mercury News not too long after that. When the CIA and Justice Department finished their internal investigations two years later, the classified documents that were released showed just how badly I had fucked up. The CIA's knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I'd ever imagined. The drug ring was even bigger than I had portrayed. The involvement between the CIA agents running the Contras and the drug traffickers was closer than I had written. And agents and officials of the DEA had protected the traffickers from arrest, something I'd not been allowed to print. The CIA also admitted having direct involvement with about four dozen other drug traffickers or their companies, and that this too had been known and effectively condoned by the CIA's top brass. In fact, at the start of the Contra war, the CIA and Justice Department had worked out an unusual agreement that permitted the CIA not to have to report allegations of drug trafficking by its agents to the Justice Department. It was a curious loophole in the law, to say the least. Despite those rather stunning admissions, the internal investigations were portrayed in the press as having uncovered no evidence of CIA involvement in drug trafficking and no evidence of a conspiracy to send crack to black neighborhoods, which was hardly surprising since I had never said there was. What I had written -- that individual CIA agents working within the Contras were deeply involved with this drug ring -- was either ignored or excised from the CIA's final reports. For instance, the agency's decade-long employment of two Contra commanders --Colonel Enrique Bermudez and Adolfo Calero--was never mentioned in the declassified CIA reports, leaving the false impression that they had no CIA connection. This was a critical omission, since Bermudez and Calero were identified in my series as the CIA agents who had directly involved with the Contra Drug pipeline. Even though their relationship with the agency was a matter of public record, none of the press reports I saw celebrating the CIA's self-absolution bothered to address this gaping hole in the official story. The CIA had investigated itself and cleared itself, and the press was happy to let things stay that way. No independent investigation was done. The funny thing was, despite all the furor, the facts of the story never changed, except to become more damning. But the perception of them did, and in this case, that is really all that mattered. Once a story became "discredited," the rest of the media shied away from it. Dark Alliance was consigned to the dustbin of history, viewed as an Internet conspiracy theory that had been thoroughly disproved by more responsible news organizations. Why did it occur? Primarily because the series presented dangerous ideas. It suggested that crimes of state had been committed. If the story was true, it meant the federal government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack that coursed through black neighborhoods in the 1980s. And that is something no government can ever admit to, particularly one that is busily promoting a multibillion-dollar-a-year War on Drugs. But what of the press? Why did our free and independent media participate with the government's disinformation campaign? It had probably as many reasons as the CIA The Contra-drug story was something the top papers had dismissed as sheer fantasy only a few years earlier. They had not only been wrong, they had been terribly wrong, and their attitude had actively impeded efforts by citizens groups, journalists, and congressional investigators to bring the issue to national attention, at a time when its disclosure may have done some good. Many of the same reporters who declined to write about Contra drug trafficking in the 1980s -- or http://whale.to/b/mighty__wurlitzer.html
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wrote dismissively about it -- were trotted out once again to do damage control. Second, the San Jose Mercury News was not a member of the club that sets the national news agenda, the elite group of big newspapers that decides the important issues of the day, such as big newspapers that decides the important issues of the day, such as which stories get reported and which get ignored. Small regional newspapers aren't invited. But the Merc had broken the rules and used the Internet to get in by the back door, leaving the big papers momentarily superfluous and embarrassed, and it forced them to readdress an issue they'd much rather have forgotten. By turning on the Mercury News, the big boys were reminding the rest of the flock who really runs the newspaper business, Internet or no Internet, and the extends to which they will go to protect that power, even if it meant rearranging reality to suit them. Finally, as I discovered while researching the book I eventually wrote about this story, the national news organizations have had a long, disappointing history of playing footsie with the CIA, printing unsubstantiated agency leaks, giving agents journalistic cover, and downplaying or attacking stories and ideas damaging to the agency. I can only speculate as to why this occurs, but I am not naive enough to believe it is mere coincidence. The scary thing about this collusion between the press and the powerful is that it works so well. In this case, the government's denials and promises to pursue the truth didn't work. The public didn't accept them, for obvious reasons, an the clamor for an independent investigation continued to grow. But after the government's supposed watchdogs weighed in, public opinion became divided and confused, the movement to force congressional hearings lost steam and, once enough people came to believe the stories were false or exaggerated, the issue could safely be put back at the bottom of the dead-story pile, hopefully never to rise again. Do we have a free press today? Sure we do. It's free to report all the sex scandals it wants, all the stock market news we can handle, every new health fad that comes down the pike, and every celebrity marriage or divorce that happens. But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff -- stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking -- that's where we begin to see the limits of our freedoms. In today's media environment, sadly, such stories are not even open for discussion. Back in 1938, when fascism was sweeping Europe, legendary investigative reporter George Seldes observed (in his book, The Lords of the Press) that "it is possible to fool all the people all the time -- when government and press cooperate." Unfortunately, we have reached that point. Gary Webb ©1995 - 2004
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Operation Mockingbird (CIA/FBI control of the media--The Mighty Wurlitzer) Media Operations
Greek Chorus CD Jackson The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD by Alex Constantine CIA Disinformation in Action: Operation Mockingbird and the Washington Post [2008] SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird By Alex Constantine The Operation Mockingbird I've written about was a state propaganda program and it was, I've learned from Joe Trento's Secret History of the CIA, assembled by Allen Dulles in 1946, a year before the Agency was created by the National Security Act. Dulles considered the cold war propaganda machine so essential that it was his very first priority - for mind control purposes, as I've explained. Trento doesn't mention Mockingbird by name, but he does identify the media execs drawn by Dulles into the program, and they are already known. Mockingbird was an off-the shelf operation, not an official Agency function. It's doubtful that FOIA could recover much paperwork that makes reference to the CIA's media operations, because in my experience, there always seems to be less documentation on file and accessible than there are covert operations, and sometimes nothing in the files gives a hint of an ongoing operation. For off-the-shelf programs structured around funding cut-outs and operational fronts, chances are all files are shredded before they can be accessed, because these are off the books - and highly illicit, eg. Iran-contra. "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." - CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991) [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King [1992] How the Washington Post Censors the News. A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
Examples re Internet: AboveTopSecret.com Godlike Productions Jeff Rense Art Bell NESARA ZetaTalk [2004] THE MIGHTY WURLITZER PLAYS ON by Gary Webb Chapter 14 from In the Buzzsaw
External Operation Mockingbird
See: CHAOS COINTELPRO The Greek Chorus CD Jackson Book The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by H Wilford Church Committee
Quotes FBI A major FBI division that was called the crime reporting division was theoretically supposed to keep track of how federal crimes were being reported. Why that was their business, I don't know. But that's what its theory was. But in fact what it was doing was a whole division set up to keep track of journalists and reporters and magazines and newspapers to decide who could be counted on to write stories that the FBI wanted written, who http://whale.to/b/mockingbird.html
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would slant stories the way they wanted it. [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King the FBI has made relations with the media a key area. Not so much infiltrating employees as the CIA did, but cultivating very, very deep connections throughout the American media. They had the entire division of the FBI - the crime reporting division was dealing solely with developing friendly journalists, developing ways in which you could get what you wanted to appear in the papers to be there and what you didn't want not to be there on a level that was -- nobody realized until these -- these reports came out. The crime reporting division was keeping track of virtually every journalist in America that wrote anything that had to do with the FBI. And whether everything was being classified as friendly or unfriendly, it -- of course, it was somewhat complicated because it generally meant: Did J. Edgar Hoover like what they wrote or not like what they wrote? And practically -- the opinion of nobody else at the FBI mattered while Hoover was alive. But he kept charts on every significant journalist as to who was helpful. And when you look through the reports and the documents that have come out, you will see statements by Hoover and his immediate subordinates get this information to friendly journalists. Get this to our friend at U.S. News and World Report. Get this to some friendly reporters in Memphis. And you just see all that sort of stuff. Interestingly though, this information -- it never mattered whether the information was true or false. That was not what it was about. You find FBI planting information that's true, you find them planting information that's false. The critical thing was if they had the friend at that media place, that friend was going to run what they wanted without investigating it. [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King Once Dr. King made that statement, the CIA in particular considered him and his movement fair game. Even to the extent that their operations were limited to foreign policy, the -- again, because of the congressional investigations, we know that the CIA, which people thought did not operate domestically within the U.S., had a huge domestic program called Operation Chaos which was designed to counter opposition to the Vietnam War. [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King As we know, silence can be deafening. Disinformation is not only getting certain things to appear in print, it's also getting certain things not to appear in print. I mean, the first -- the first thing I would say as a way of explanation is the incredibly powerful effect of disinformation over a long period of time that I mentioned before. For 30 years the official line has been that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King and he did it all by himself. That's 30 years, not -- nothing like the short period when the line was that the Cubans raped the Angolan women. But for 30 years it's James Earl Ray killed Dr. King, did it all by himself. And when that is imprinted in the minds of the general public for 30 years, if somebody stood up and confessed and said: I did it. Ray didn't do it, I did it. Here's a movie. Here's a video showing me do it. 99 percent of the people wouldn't believe him because it just -- it just wouldn't click in the mind. It would just go right to -it couldn't be. It's just a powerful psychological effect over 30 years of disinformation that's been imprinted on the brains of the -- the public. Something to the country couldn't -- couldn't be. .....I'm not a doctor. But what I understood is that these -- the brain's patterns of thinking are a physical aspect of the human brain. That's how we develop patterns of thought, how we develop associations. And then, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer we talked about is still there, it's still playing its tune. And even though you might think 30 years is a long time, that almost everybody who might get in trouble is probably dead by now, that's -- that's how it works. People obtain influence, people make vast sums of money through this propaganda. Those people pass that influence on to others, they pass the money down the line, and all of that can be at risk for a very, very long time. There are documents from the investigation of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that are still classified. Don't ask me why, but they were originally sealed for 100 years. And then in 1965 President Linden Johnson said, well, it's so close to the Kennedy assassination, if people read the Lincoln documents, it might make them think funny things about Kennedy, so he classified them for another 50 years. So now the grand children of anybody around Lincoln was around are long dead, and these documents are still -- still classified. And we're talking today about a case that's 100 years more immediate than Lincoln. And the establishment is still the http://whale.to/b/mockingbird.html
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establishment. [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
CIA About a third of the whole CIA budget went to media propaganda operations. ...We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year just for that.....close to a billion dollars are being spent every year by the United States on secret propaganda. The FBI is much harder to -- to get figures for because they don't generally admit to conducting media operations. And unless and until something gets exposed and they have to admit that particular operation, they -- they deny to an extent where it's really hard to try and estimate how much money is being used by the FBI and by the military intelligence agencies. But it's sort of clear that hundreds of millions of dollars a year are being spent by various aspects of the government on deliberately creating and spreading lies. [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King But when the Church Committee reported on the CIA media operations, for example, beyond friends in the press, beyond having people who were just generally -- thought along similar lines, it turned out that they had thousands of journalists in their employ. Not merely friendly, not merely agents, not merely someone you could pass a story to, but people who might have appeared to the outside world to be a reporter for CBS was in fact a CIA employee getting a salary from the CIA. [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King And that was repeated thousands of times all around the world. They also owned outright, the CIA -- about that time 250 or more media organizations. That's wire services, newspapers, magazines, radio, TV stations -- all around the world that they owned outright. The actual shareholder of the company turned out to be some CIA front. The Church Committee, unfortunately, did not name very many of these organizations because those that got named, of course, had to close down immediately. But it was learned that -- even things like the Rome Daily American, which was a major English language newspaper in Rome, for 20 or 30 years had been owned by the CIA. This was published and, of course, the paper closed the next day. But most people didn't realize the extent of the intelligence media organization. It's fairly incredible. They sort of brag about it. When you read the books about the history of the CIA, one of the heroes was the first man in charge of media operations, a man named Frank Wisner. And they referred to his organization as the Mighty Wurlitzer. And there's this image of this guy sitting at one of those giant organs, you know, with seventeen keyboards and you're playing this -- sort of like The Phantom of the Opera in that scene, and there was the guy running the CIA media operations all around the world. And he really was because every single city of any size on earth, he had some employee who was -- supposedly worked for a newspaper or a magazine or a radio station or a wire service, and they could get stories anywhere. [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jim said he looked and he saw this guy at a nearby desk sit down and type -- this is a CIA officer, an employee of the U.S. Government -- type an editorial and then wave goodbye to everybody, left the office. The next morning that appeared as the editorial -- the lead editorial in the largest newspaper in Japan. Now, that level -- they didn't go to a friendly publisher and say, gee, we would sort of like it if you could maybe do something a little bit favorable to this issue. They wrote the editorial, they handed it to the guy. And the next day in Japanese it appears in the paper. [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King And they thought it was so great to kill Americans that they were putting it on their postage stamps. The only thing that was later learned is that these were not North Vietnamese stamps. They were CIA forgeries. Had never been real stamps. And the CIA was able to have them appear on the cover of Life magazine as if they were the real thing. [1999] Testimony of Mr. William Schaap on the role of the U.S. Government in the assassination of Martin Luther King
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Operation Mockingbird The CIA's Operation Mockingbird Manipulated Media "Operation Mockingbird [was] a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at promoting the views of the CIA within the media. 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." ~~ From Lifting the Veil Chapter VII on Operation Mockingbird Dear friends, Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program that made a mockery of free press in the US. The existence of this program which spread CIA propaganda through the media was flatly denied until it was uncovered in Senate hearings in the mid1970s. The CIA's claims that it shut the program down in 1976 are undoubtedly a further deception. They simply shifted the operation to other parts of the agency as they had been caught redhanded. Before the US Senate Church Committee revelations, the media and CIA colluded overtly in their media propaganda campaigns, as you will read below. As the public was quite incensed with these revelations, afterwards the collusion became covert and much more sophisticated. Nowadays media executives or journalists are very careful keep their CIA connections secret, yet there is plenty of evidence the techniques developed and used under Operation Mockingbird continue to be common practice. Below the following essay on Operation Mockingbird are a wealth of footnotes with links to verify and explore further the information presented. This essay is taken from chapter seven of the incredibly well researched and revealing online book Lifting the Veil, available in its entirety on this webpage. If you want to be well informed of all that is going on behind the scenes in our world, don't miss this masterful exposé. And check out our "What you can do" section at the end of this article to take action and make a difference. With best wishes for a transformed world, Fred Burks for PEERS and WantToKnow.info Former White House interpreter and whistleblower
Operation Mockingbird "About a third of the whole CIA budget went to media propaganda operations... We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year just for that... close to a billion dollars are being spent every year by the United States on secret propaganda." – Testimony of William Schapp to Congress252 In 1948, the United States began the Marshall Plan, an initiative to help the devastated Europe recover from the War. The CIA decided to siphon funds to create the Office of Policy Coordination, which would become the covert action branch of the Agency.253 It was under this program that Operation Mockingbird, a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at promoting the views of the CIA within the media, began. From the onset, Operation Mockingbird was one of the most sensitive of the CIA's operations, with recruitment of journalists and training of intelligence officers for propaganda purposes usually undertaken by Director Allen Dulles himself or his direct peers.254 http://www.wanttoknow.info/mass_media/operation-mockingbird
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It is a false belief that the CIA 'infiltrated' unwitting media institutions. The recruitment of journalists was frequently done with complicity from top management and ownership. Former CIA Director William Colby claimed during the Church Committee investigative hearings, "Lets go to the managements. They were witting." Among the organizations that would lend their help to the propaganda efforts was the New York Times, Newsweek, Associated Press, and the Miami Herald. Providing cover to CIA agents was a part of the New York Times policy, set by their late publisher, Arthur Hays Salzberger.255 The investigative committee of Frank Church, officially titled “Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities”, uncovered a lot of evidence concerning Operation Mockingbird and came to the conclusion that: "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."256 Carl Bernstein, the reporter famous for his excellent investigation into the Watergate scandal, wrote that: “(Joseph) Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty five 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 derringdo of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, fulltime 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.”257 While a majority of Mockingbird operations were overseas, the goal was to have important, hardhitting stories to be circulated in the American press. Relationships with major United States media institutions certainly helped with this goal. Bernstein lists The New York Times, CBS and Time inc. as the most productive relationships the agency cultivated. They also created front organizations overseas who publicly maintained an appearance of free press but privately were operated by the agency. An example of this is the Rome Daily American, which was 40% owned by the CIA for three decades.258
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Another strategy was developing relationships with major media owners who were known to harbor rightwing views, such as William Paley of CBS, and then passing on information of journalists, actors and screenwriters who harbored leftwing views. Information was also passed on to friendly congressmen such as Joseph McCarthy. These men and women would then be blacklisted from the industry. Lee J. Cobb was one such actor who was blacklisted, and recalled his experience: “When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit – being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HCUA (House UnAmerican Activities Committee) did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again.”259 The CIA went as far as to write scripts for Hollywood. One interesting example is the funding of the movie version of Animal Farm in 1954, a book written just less than a decade earlier by George Orwell which enjoyed large commercial success. The problem for the CIA was that Orwell was a socialist, and his book attacked both capitalism and communism. To avoid this conflict, the CIA changed the ending of the Hollywood version to portray capitalism in a more positive light.260 Domestic surveillance was also used on journalists who had published classified material. In one example, a physical surveillance post was set up at a Hilton Hotel in view of the office of Washington Post writer Michael Getler.261 The operation defied the CIA's charter, which specifically prohibits domestic spying. The operation was directed towards numerous members of the Washington press corp, and was signed off by John F. Kennedy himself, in coordination with CIA director John McCone.262 One CIA document states: “Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. Influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publicans or booksellers... Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability”. The Church Committee concluded that over 1000 books were published under this directive.263 Some investigative journalists have claimed that Operation Mockingbird did not end in 1976 as the CIA claims. For example, in 1998, researcher Steve Kangas claimed that conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who ran 'Forum World Features', a foreign news organization, was a CIA asset and used the organization to disseminate propaganda for circulation in the United States.264 Kangas ended up dead with a bullet hole in his head, in the office of Richard Scaife. It was ruled a suicide, although there were discrepancies in the police report and the autopsy.265 The Church Committee's conclusion accurately reflects the problems associated with Operation Mockingbird:
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“In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.”266 While it is deplorable for citizens of countries to be subjected to a stateowned media, at least they can be aware of the biases and filter information accordingly. We have been taught a lie from birth that the U.S. press is free from government meddling. In a situation where the manipulation is completely covert, the American public has been left unaware of the propaganda they have been ingesting for decades. –––––––––––––––––– 252 Testimony available here. 253 Sallie Pasani “The CIA and the Marshall Plan,” excerpt available here. 254 Rolling Stone Magazine, “The CIA and the Media,” October 20, 1977 255 Ibid. 256 Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976. 257 Rolling Stone Magazine, “The CIA and the Media,” October 20, 1977 258 Wikipedia article on the Rome Daily American 259 Wikipedia article on Lee J. Cobb 260 John Simkin, “Operation Mockingbird.” 261 New York Times, “Project Mockingbird: Spying on Reporters,” June 26, 2007 262 Ibid. 263 Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976. 264 Steve Kangas, “A Timeline of CIA Atrocities.” 265 John Simkin, “Steve Kangas.” 266 Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976.
* * * * Food for Thought: 1. Why were the owners and management of large media institutions so willing to participate in a program that violated their journalistic integrity? 2. Has the increasingly consolidated media industry made it easier for news to be manipulated to fit 'the agenda' discussed in the One Party State? 3. Have MKULTRA entrapment or mind control techniques ever been used to target the press? http://www.wanttoknow.info/mass_media/operation-mockingbird
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What you can do: Contact your media and political representatives to inform them of this vital information on Operation Mockingbird and media propaganda. Urge them to study and bring publicity to this important topic. Invite them to read this article and explore the links included. Explore our excellent Mass Media Information Center filled with reliable resources on media manipulation, including links to key revealing videos, essays, news articles, and much more. Read the riveting personal stories of awardwinning journalists describing how major stories which should have made front page news were shut down and buried, likely by hidden operatives like that of Operation Mockingbird. For a powerful online lesson on media deception, public perception, and how we can transform our world using the power of the Internet, see this Insight Course lesson. Spread this news on Operation Mockingbird to your friends and colleagues, and bookmark this article on key social networking websites using the "Share" icon on this page, so that we can fill the role at which the major media is sadly failing. Together, we can make a difference.
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Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation By Mary Louise 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 codenamed 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, ScrippsHoward, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligencegathering to serving as go betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of oncall 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 we 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 IranContra 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 http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html
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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 superpowerful transnational media corporations (mostly US based), working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda. 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, KnightRidder, 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 socalled conservative and liberal positions). "Who Controls the Media? The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird", "The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization", and "Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America" by Alex Constantine are an excellent source of information on this topic: www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html and www.alexconstantine.50megs.com. David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting the Media" at www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm. Then there are two articles called "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" and "The Origins of the Overclass" by Steve Kangas that are very informative although from a more liberal perspective. Steve will not be writing anymore articles as he is no longer with us, having unfortunately met his untimely death that was 'apparently' from a selfinflicted gunshot wound. If you read about him on his web page that is still available, you will see that he did not seem like a person who was suffering from deep depression. In his memory, please take the time to read what he wrote at www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, and www.korpios.org/resurgent/index.html. CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both owned by TimeWarner) ran a story about a secret mission called Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN site at www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html. Journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the stories on Watergate (late 70's) in the Washington Post, having gained access to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program of using journalists at home and abroad, in deliberate propaganda campaigns. It was later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House and knew many insiders including General Alexander Haig. A highlevel source told Bernstein, "One journalist is worth twenty agents." CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham, in a 1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. 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." Maybe that's another reason why folks get the impression that a suspicious agenda lurks behind the headlines. "25 Ways to Suppress Truth: Rules of Disinformation" and "8 Traits of the Disinformationalist" at www.proparanoid.com/truth.htm, sums it up very well. Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, mainly in SouthEast Asia where he witnessed bombing and napalming of villages, which caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He has written about Vietnam's Phoenix Program www.vwip.org/articles/m/McGeheeRalph_VietnamsPhoenixProgram.htm and after a long battle with CIA censors, he published the book "Deadly Deceits" in 1983. Ralph has been harassed by the CIA and FBI, involving bodily injury, and his CIABASE website was shut down on Spring of 2000. He copied some reports that can be found at http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase_report_1.htm (and 2.htm), http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm, and www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Deadly_Deceits.html. He concluded that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency but rather the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisors, of which disinformation is a large part of its responsibility and the American people are the primary target of its lies. One of the primary reasons John F. Kennedy was assassinated had to do with the fact he dared to interfere in the framework of power. Kennedy was intent on exercising his ELECTED powers and not allowing them to be usurped by powercrazed individuals in the intelligence community, threatening to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." There were four things that filled the CIA with rage and sealed his fate; JFK fired Allen Dulles, was in the process of founding a panel to investigate the CIA's numerous crimes, put a damper on the breadth and scope of the CIA, and limited their ability to act under National Security Memoranda 55. There is such an overwhelming amount of information pertaining to the CIA that it is impossible to cover it all in one book, much less an article. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA.....the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html
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the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multinational corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations. The CIA is the epitome of organized crime run amuck!
E-MAIL THIS LINK Enter recipient's e-mail: If you would like to send a message to Mary, contact [email protected] and it will be passed on. Permission to reprint this article is granted providing the original author is cited and a link to PRISON PLANET.com is Send this URL included. The views expressed in this article may not necessarily be those of Alex Jones or Paul Joseph Watson. PRISON PLANET.com INFOWARS.com
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thepeopleshistory.net
http://www.thepeopleshistory.net/2014/07/operationmockingbirdciaandpropaganda.html
Operation Mockingbird: The CIA and Propaganda
"About a third of the whole CIA budget went to media propaganda operations... We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year just for that.....close to a billion dollars are being spent every year by the United States on secret propaganda." Testimony of William Schapp to Congress1
In 1948, the United States began the Marshall Plan, an initiative to help the devastated Europe recover from the War. The CIA decided to siphon funds to create the Office of Policy Coordination, which would become the covert action branch of the Agency.2 It was under this program that Operation Mockingbird, a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at promoting the views of the CIA within the media, began. From the onset, Operation Mockingbird was one of the most sensitive of the CIA's operations, with recruitment of journalists and training of intelligence officers for propaganda purposes usually undertaken by Director Allen Dulles himself or his direct peers.3
It is a false belief that the CIA 'infiltrated' unwitting media institutions. The recruitment of journalists was frequently done with complicity from top management and ownership. Former CIA Director William Colby claimed during the Church Committee investigative hearings, "Lets go to the managements. They were witting." Among the organizations that would lend their help to the propaganda efforts was the New York Times, Newsweek, Associated Press, and the Miami Herald. Providing cover to CIA agents was a part of the New York Times policy, set by their late publisher, Arthur Hays Salzberger.4 The investigative committee of Frank Church, officially titled “Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities”, uncovered a lot of evidence concerning Operation Mockingbird and came to the conclusion that:
"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."5
Carl Bernstein, the reporter famous for his excellent investigation into the Watergate scandal, wrote that:
“(Joseph) Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twentyfive 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 derringdo of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, fulltime 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.”6
While a majority of Mockingbird operations were overseas, the goal was to have important, hardhitting stories to be circulated in the American press. Relationships with major United States media institutions certainly helped with this goal. Bernstein lists The New York Times, CBS and Time inc. as the most productive relationships the agency cultivated. They also created front organizations overseas who publicly maintained an appearance of free press but privately were operated by the agency. An example of this is the Rome Daily American, which was 40% owned by the CIA for three decades.7 Another strategy was developing relationships with major media owners who were known to harbor right wing views, such as William Paley of CBS, and then passing on information of journalists, actors and screenwriters who harbored leftwing views. Information was also passed on to friendly congressmen such as Joseph McCarthy. These men and women would then be blacklisted from the industry. Lee J. Cobb was one such actor who was blacklisted, and recalled his experience:
“When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HCUA (House UnAmerican Activities Committee) did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again.”8
The CIA went as far as to write scripts for Hollywood. One interesting example is the funding of the movie version of Animal Farm in 1954, a book written just less than a decade earlier by George Orwell which enjoyed large commercial success. The problem for the CIA was that Orwell was a socialist, and his book attacked both capitalism and communism. To avoid this conflict, the CIA changed the ending of the Hollywood version to portray capitalism in a more positive light.9
Domestic surveillance was also used on journalists who had published classified material. In one example, a physical surveillance post was set up at a Hilton Hotel in view of the office of Washington Post writer Michael Getler.10 The operation defied the CIA's charter, which specifically prohibits domestic spying. The operation was directed towards numerous members of the Washington press corp, and was signed off by John F. Kennedy himself, in coordination with CIA director John McCone.11
One CIA document states: “Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. Influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publicans or booksellers... Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability”. The Church Committee concluded that over 1000 books were published under this directive.12 Some investigative journalists have claimed that Operation Mockingbird did not end in 1976 as the CIA claims. For example, in 1998, researcher Steve Kangas claimed that conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who ran 'Forum World Features', a foreign news organization, was a CIA asset and used the organization to disseminate propaganda for circulation in the United States.13 Kangas ended up dead with a bullet hole in his head, in the office of Richard Scaife. It was ruled a suicide, although there were discrepancies in the police report and the autopsy.14 The Church Committee's conclusion accurately reflects the problems associated with Operation Mockingbird:
“In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.”15
While it is deplorable for citizens of countries to be subjected to a stateowned media, at least they can be aware of the biases and filter information accordingly. We have been taught the lie from birth that the U.S. press is free from government meddling. In a situation where the manipulation is completely covert, the American public has been left unaware of the propaganda they have been ingesting for decades.
Food for Thought:
1.
Why were the owners and management of large media institutions so willing to participate in a program that violated their journalistic integrity?
2.
Has the increasingly consolidated media industry made it easier for news to be manipulated to fit 'the agenda' discussed in the One Party State?
3.
Have MKULTRA entrapment or mind control techniques ever been used to target the press?
1Testimony available here. 2Sallie Pasani “The CIA and the Marshall Plan,” excerpt available here. 3Rolling Stone Magazine, “The CIA and the Media,” October 20, 1977 4Ibid. 5Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976.
6Rolling Stone Magazine, “The CIA and the Media,” October 20, 1977 7Wikipedia article on the Rome Daily American 8Wikipedia article on Lee J. Cobb 9John Simkin, “Operation Mockingbird.” 10New York Times, “Project Mockingbird: Spying on Reporters,” June 26, 2007 11Ibid. 12Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976. 13Steve Kangas, “A Timeline of CIA Atrocities.” 14John Simkin, “Steve Kangas.” 15 Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976.
Operation Mockingbird Operation Mockingbird was 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 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.
After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the CIA. By this time, Operation Mockingbird had a 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).[6]
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, and published its 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 her Washington Post The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded Empire. 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 1 History of the Hollywood production of Animal Farm, the animated allegory based on the book written by George OrIn 1948, Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Of- well.[7] fice of Special Projects (OSP). Soon afterwards OSP was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subbecame the covert action branch of the Central Intelli- version of the Free Press by the CIA, first chapter of Virtual gence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organiza- Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America, tion that concentrated on "propaganda, economic war- p. 42), in the 1950s, “some 3,000 salaried and contract fare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti- CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subver- efforts”. Wisner was able to constrain newspapers from sion against hostile states, including assistance to under- reporting about certain events, including the CIA plots to Ajax) ground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti- overthrow the governments of Iran (see: Operation [8] and Guatemala (see: Operation PBSUCCESS). Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”[1] Later that year Wisner established Mocking- Thomas Braden, head of the International Organizations bird, a program to influence foreign media. Wisner re- Division (IOD), played an important role in Operation cruited Philip Graham from The Washington Post to run Mockingbird. Many years later he revealed his role in the project within the industry. According to Deborah these events: Davis in Katharine the Great; “By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times, “If the director of CIA wanted to extend a Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.”[2] present, say, to someone in Europe—a Labour 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.[3] According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird’s “principal operative.”[4]
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 1
2
1 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.”[9]
1.1
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 counterespionage, 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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12]
HISTORY
1.2 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.[14] 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 in 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 1952 presidential campaign pledge 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 may 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.”[15]
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 [15] With the network in authority in the CIA threatened, Wis- the other office.” ner was directed to unleash Mockingbird on McCarthy. After Richard M. Bissell, Jr. lost his post as Deputy DiDrew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lipp- rector for Plans in 1962, Tracy Barnes took over the runmann and Ed Murrow all engaged in intensely negative ning of Mockingbird. According to Evan Thomas in his coverage of McCarthy. According to Jack Anderson, book, The Very Best Men (1995), Barnes planted editorihis political reputation was permanently damaged by the als about political candidates who were regarded as propress coverage orchestrated by Wisner.[13] CIA.
1.4
1.3
Church Committee investigations
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 (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.[1] 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.
3 approving Medicare.”[18] Meyer’s role in Operation Mockingbird was further revealed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. The book was highly critical of the CIA’s dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia, especially in its critique toward how the agency subverted French control of the opium trade. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer’s when he was a liberal activist after the war.[19]
1.4 Church Committee investigations
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. AccordIn June 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head ing to the Congress report published in 1976: of the Directorate for Plans. He took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966, FitzGerald learned that “The CIA currently maintains a network of Ramparts, another CIA backed left-wing publication, had several hundred foreign individuals around the discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and National Student Association and was considering pubat times attempt to influence opinion through lishing an account.[16] When the magazine advised the the use of covert propaganda. These individuCIA it had “lost control of the information,” and would als provide the CIA with direct access to a large likely be forced to publicize, FitzGerald ordered a plan to number of newspapers and periodicals, scores either neutralize the campaign and/or wind-down Mockof press services and news agencies, radio and ingbird. television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.” 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 Church argued that misinforming the world cost Ameritricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people can taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.[20] running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had In February 1976, George H. W. Bush, the recently apawful things in mind, some of which we carried off.”[17] pointed Director of the CIA, announced a new policy: Ramparts publishing the account in March 1967. The “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and the paid or contract relationship with any full-time or partCIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news Student Association, Stern exposed the wide system of service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television netanti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and work or station.” He added that the CIA would conSouth America. It named Cord Meyer as a key figure tinue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of in this campaign, which included the funding of the lit- journalists.[21] erary journal Encounter.[9] Applewhite managed to control some of the account by steering references away from leftist organizations and toward most of the few conser- 1.5 “Family Jewels” report vative organizations backed by the CIA. Those organizations named in the article were not ones that could not be According to the "Family Jewels" report, released by the linked to Ramparts, itself a CIA proprietary organization. National Security Archive on June 26, 2007, during the period from March 12, 1963 and June 15, 1963, the CIA In May 1967, Thomas Braden published “I'm Glad the installed telephone taps on two Washington-based news CIA is 'Immoral'", in the Saturday Evening Post. He dereporters. fended 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, 2 See also the idea that Congress would have approved many of our • Judith Miller projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's
4
5 • Propaganda in the United States • Radio Liberty • James Risen • Robertson Panel • White propaganda • Special Activities Division
3
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 (2008). The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02681-0.
EXTERNAL LINKS
[13] Jack Anderson (1979). Confessions of a Muckraker. pp. 208–236. [14] Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. p. 117. [15] Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. pp. 148–150. [16] Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. pp. 86–89. [17] Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. p. 330. [18] Thomas Braden (20 May 1967). “I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'". Saturday Evening Post. [19] Nina Burleigh (1998). A Very Private Woman. p. 105. [20] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976. pp. 191–201. [21] Mary Louise (2003). Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation.
5 External links 4
References
[1] David Wise and Thomas Ross (1964). Invisible Government. [2] Deborah Davis (1979). Katharine the Great. pp. 137– 138. [3] Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. pp. 42–59. [4] Deborah Davis (1979). Katharine the Great. p. 226. [5] Carl Bernstein, CIA and the Media, People, 1977 [6] Carl Bernstein (20 October 1977). “CIA and the Media”. Rolling Stone Magazine. [7] Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. p. 33. [8] Alex Constantine (1997). Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America. Feral House. ISBN 9780922915453. [9] Thomas Braden, interview included in the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA. 1975. [10] John Ranelagh (1986). The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. pp. 198–202. [11] Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. pp. 98–106. [12] Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. pp. 60–84.
• Carl Bernstein’s 1977 article for Rolling Stone “The CIA and the Media” • CIA “Family Jewels” Report Coordinates: 38°57′06″N 77°08′48″W / 38.95167°N 77.14667°W
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Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses
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http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol05.htm
Operation Mockingbird - CIA Media Manipulation
bibliotecapleyades.net
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. 1 of 8 Page
Oct 13, 2015 07:15:51AM MDT
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol05.htm
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 we 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. Page 2 of 8
Oct 13, 2015 07:15:51AM MDT
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol05.htm
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 Buchanan 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. The first tier of the nine giant firms that dominate the world are Page 3 of 8
Oct 13, 2015 07:15:51AM MDT
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol05.htm
1. Time Warner/AOL, 2. Disney/ABC, 3. Bertelsmann, 4. Viacom/CBS, 5. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation/Fox, 6. General Electric/NBC, 7. Sony, 8. Universal/Seagram, 9. 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 Page 4 of 8
www.fair.org/extra/9711/gmg.html
Oct 13, 2015 07:15:51AM MDT
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol05.htm
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). Who Controls the Media? The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America ...by Alex Constantine are an excellent source of information on this topic. David Guyatt has written books and many articles including one entitled "Subverting The Media". Then there are two articles called "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" and "The Origins of the Overclass" by Steve Kangas that are very informative although from a more liberal perspective. Steve will not be writing anymore articles as he is no longer with us, having unfortunately met his untimely death that was 'apparently' from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. If you read about him on his web page that is still available, you will see that he did not seem like a person who was suffering from deep depression. In his memory, please take the time to read what he wrote at, www korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html www.korpios.org/resurgent/index.html CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both owned by Time-Warner) ran a story about a secret mission called Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of stored Page 5 of 8 similar
weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. Oct 13, 2015 07:15:51AM MDT
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol05.htm
stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN site at www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html. Journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the stories on Watergate (late 70's) in the Washington Post, having gained access to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program of using journalists at home and abroad, in deliberate propaganda campaigns. It was later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House and knew many insiders including General Alexander Haig. A high-level source told Bernstein, "One journalist is worth twenty agents." CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham, in a 1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. 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." Maybe that's another reason why folks get the impression that a suspicious agenda lurks behind the headlines. "25 Ways to Suppress Truth: Rules of Disinformation" and "8 Traits of the Disinformationalist" at www proparanoid.com/truth.htm, sums it up very well. Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, mainly in South-East Asia where he witnessed bombing and napalming of villages, which caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He has written about Vietnam's Phoenix Program www.vwip.org/articles/m/McGeheeRalph_VietnamsPhoenixProgram.htm and after a long battle with CIA censors, he published the book "Deadly Deceits" in 1983. 6 of 8 Page
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Ralph has been harassed by the CIA and FBI, involving bodily injury, and his CIABASE website was shut down on Spring of 2000. He copied some reports that can be found at, http //serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase_report_1.htm (and 2.htm) http //serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Deadly_Deceits.html He concluded that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency but rather the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisors, of which disinformation is a large part of its responsibility and the American people are the primary target of its lies. One of the primary reasons John F. Kennedy was assassinated had to do with the fact he dared to interfere in the framework of power. Kennedy was intent on exercising his ELECTED powers and not allowing them to be usurped by power-crazed individuals in the intelligence community, threatening to, "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." There were four things that filled the CIA with rage and sealed his fate. JFK fired Allen Dulles, was in the process of founding a panel to investigate the CIA's numerous crimes, put a damper on the breadth and scope of the CIA, and limited their ability to act under National Security Memoranda 55. There is such an overwhelming amount of information pertaining to the CIA that it is impossible to cover it all in one book, much less an article. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA... the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone. 7 of 8 Page
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They are up to their eyeballs in dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just keep on using their tricks of, propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, demolition and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated assassinations. The CIA is the epitome of organized crime run amuck...!
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http://www.markdice.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=113%20%3Cimg%20src=
Operation Mockingbird - Government Control of Mainstream Media
markdice.com
Intelligent people have varying degrees of suspicion that the US government is in bed with the American mainstream media, and anyone who monitors the news media with discerning eyes can quite easily identify specific stories and strategies that are being used to persuade and intimidate the population. For those who want “evidence” of such manipulation, one needs to look no further than the findings of a Senate Select Committee in 1975, which confirms and details this, has occurred for decades on a scale larger than most people could imagine. Operation Mockingbird, as it was called, was exposed in 1975 during the Church Committee investigation, which then published its findings the following year. The full name of the committee which investigated and uncovered such activities was called, “The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities” which was chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID). Through this investigation it became clear that such a program was developed in the 1950s for the purpose of persuading American and foreign media, as well as to use the media as gate-keepers to prevent certain information from being published and reaching the masses. In 1948 an espionage and counter-intelligence branch within the CIA was created for the purpose of “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 Operation Mockingbird was established to influence the domestic and foreign media. Philip Graham, the owner of The Washington Post, was first recruited to run the project within the industry and develop a network of assets. After 1953, the network had influence over twenty-five newspapers and wire agencies and was overseen by Allen Dulles, who was director of the CIA. The Mockingbird program also involved major television broadcasters, including William Paley, the CEO of CBS broadcasting. (Excerpt from The New World Order: Facts & Fiction by Mark Dice - Available on Amazon.com, Kindle and Nook.) Thomas Braden, who was the head of the International Organizations Division (IOD), which was a division of the CIA dealing with human intelligence services, played a substantial role in Operation Mockingbird and would later reveal, “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 multinational.” According to the Congressional report published in 1976, “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred 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.” The committee also concluded that the cost of the program was approximately $265 million a year, which when adjusted for inflation as of 2010 means that in today’s dollars the program costs an astounding one billion Page 1 of 2dollars
a year.
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billion dollars a year. A year after the Church Committee released its findings on Operation Mockingbird, Rolling Stone magazine published an article on the program and named various prominent journalists who they alleged to be involved with it. Some of these included Ben Bradlee, who wrote for Newsweek, Stewart Alsop, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), and others. In 2007 a large amount of documents known as the “Family Jewels” were declassified and released by the National Security Archive, which also revealed that the CIA had routinely wiretapped Washington-based news reporters. These individuals were most likely seen as a threat to the establishment and were not playing along with the propaganda and gate-keeping efforts within the media establishment. As with nearly every other case of rampant institutional corruption in government agencies, the CIA claims to have ended the program—another claim that is laughable. (Excerpt from The New World Order: Facts & Fiction by Mark Dice - Available on Amazon.com, Kindle and Nook.)
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Nov 14, 2015 09:44:42AM MST
http://www.thetruthhunter.com/operation-mockingbird-how-the-cia-controls-the-mainstream-media/
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Controls The Mainstream Media August 4, 2015
thetruthhunter.com
Many times I have asserted in these pages that the Mainstream Media is engaged in propaganda to sway the minds of the nation to support the causes of their business or political overlords. Many people have written that off as a “crazy conspiracy theory”. However, there is proof that the CIA has had a long running program called Operation Mockingbird, whose main purpose is to attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. They accomplish this goal by having paid CIA employees working CIA-controls-the-mainstream-media undercover (and sometimes openly) for different news and media organizations around the world. How The Mainstream Media Pushes Propaganda In 1948, the CIA appointed Frank Wisner the director of the Office of Special Projects. Later renamed the Office of Policy Coordination, the group became the CIA’s covert action branch. The group 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”. Under the OPC, Operation Mockingbird was created to promote the CIA’s views and push propaganda. Operation Mockingbird achieved this by recruiting leading American journalists, and funding some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. By the early 1950s, the CIA ‘owned’ respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other mainstream media outlets. Within 2000px-CIA.svg a few years, Operation Mockingbird had major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. By the late 1950’s some reports claim that Operation Mockingbird had 3,000 salaried, and contract workers embedded in the mainstream media. By the mid 1960’s, some independent journalists became aware of the CIA’s subversion of the freedom of the press and began publishing exposes about Operation Mockingbird. Random House published Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross in 1964. The book exposed the role of the CIA in foreign policy. Rumors are that The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government, but this idea was rejected when Random House responded by saying that if this happened, they would simply print a second edition. Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities in 1975 (also known as the Senator Frank Church investigations). Senator Church was able to identify over 50 mainstream media journalists who were employed directly by the CIA. Church pointed out that this was probably only the tip of the iceberg because the CIA refused to “provide the names of its media agents or the names of media organizations with which they are connected”. According to a report released by Congress in the wake Page 1 of 3of
the Church investigations in 1976, “The CIA currently maintains a network ofSep several hundred 04, 2016 02:58:18PM MDT
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wake of the Church investigations 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.” By some accounts, over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967. Senator Frank Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year. In 1977, a Rolling Stone magazine article written by Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein Watergate fame) alleged that over 400 mainstream media journalists were in the employ of the CIA. He also claimed that one of the most important journalists contracted by Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, who wrote for over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists implicated by the Rolling Stone investigation to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA were Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), Herb Gold (The Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). In February 1976, the newly appointed Director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, 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. Has Operation Mockingbird Continued to this Day? This new policy made no statement about weather the CIA would continue to embed their agents within the entertainment industry, or push propaganda to unwitting journalists hungry for a scoop. In 1984, famed Television producer Chuck Barris (creator of The Newlywed Game, The Dating Game and The Gong Show) released a book titled “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (made into a movie in 2003). Chuck Barris claims in the book that while working in Hollywood, he was secretly a CIA spy. One must wonder if Barris was, in fact, an operative working under Operation Mockingbird. Most news agencies have pushed the idea that Barris’s story is an elaborate fabrication. Considering these journalists should have known about Operation Mockingbird, and Barris was at the height of his career while Operation Mockingbird was going strong, doesn’t it seem odd that they are so quick to write off his story as fabrication? It seems that these stories to discredit him may be a part of a continuing Operation Mockingbird. In 1998, Journalist Steve Kangas alleged that Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of Pittsburgh Tribune, and The American Spectator, was a CIA asset Was Chuck Barris a CIA Operative that ran “a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world.” In 1999 working under Operation Mockingbird? Kangas was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head in a bathroom adjacent to Scaife’s office. The death was ruled a suicide, but because of inconsistencies in the police, and coroners report, many are skeptical. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard
asked: Page 2 of 3
“Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, whileSep the04, autopsy reportedMDT 2016 02:58:18PM
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asked: “Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death?…) While watching the news these days, it seems obvious that major stories are continuously swept under the rug in favor of celebrity gossip. Racial strife is promoted were none exists, and stories that really aren’t important to anyone dominate the headlines while world changing events are buried on the backpage. Do you think the CIA is still in control of the Mainstream Media? Let us know in the comments below. Additional Information:
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Sep 04, 2016 02:58:18PM MDT
http://consciouslifenews.com/operation-mockingbird-exposed-congressional-hearing-proves-cia-controls-mainstream-media/1170056/
Operation Mockingbird Exposed: Congressional Hearing Proves consciouslifenews.com The CIA Controls Mainstream Media! Mark Dice shares information on the Congressional hearing that exposed the fact that the CIA controlled the media under a covert program named Operation Mockingbird. “About a third of the whole CIA budget went to media propaganda operations. …We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year just for that…..close to a billion dollars are being spent every year by the United States on secret propaganda.” – Testimony of William Schapp in 1999, referencing revelations from the Church Committee in 1975 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.” Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year. The primary documents for the Church Committee can be found here. In 1948, the CIA decided to siphon funds to create the Office of Policy Coordination, which would would become the covert action branch of the CIA. It was under this program that Operation Mockingbird, a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at promoting the views of the CIA within the media, began. The director of the CIA at the time was Allen Dulles. From the onset, Operation Mockingbird was one of the most sensitive of the CIA’s undertakings, with recruitment of journalists and training of intelligence officers for propaganda purposes usually undertaken by Dulles himself, or his direct peers. It is a false belief that the CIA ‘infiltrated’ journalism organizations. The recruitment of journalists was usually done with complicity from top management and ownership of news institutions. William Colby, famous CIA operative, claimed during the Church committee, “Lets go to the managements. They were witting.” Among the organizations that would lend their help to the propaganda efforts was the New York Times, Newsweek, Associated Press, and the Miami Herald. All in all, 25 major publications would provide cover for CIA operatives, with 400 operatives being a low estimate to the number of people employed by the operation. Journalists would plant fabricated stories, and cover international events with a purpose of casting the CIA’s agenda in a positive light. The CIA would also set up international ‘front organizations’ that would produce propaganda without being publicly tied to the agency. An example of this is the Rome Daily American, which was 40% owned by the CIA for three decades. There is no certainty about how long Mockingbird lasted, or if it is still in effect today, perhaps under a different name. Much of what we know of the first 25 years of the program came from revelations of the Church Page 1 of 2
Committee in 1975. The operations of Mockingbird were secretive before the Nov exposure the MST 14, 2015from 09:19:28AM
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Church Committee in 1975. The operations of Mockingbird were secretive before the exposure from the committee and became even more so afterwords. Unfortunately, it is still possible to see frequent evidence of CIA in the media in modern times. We are left to connect the dots ourselves. Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC in 2003 for opposing the Iraq war, the only news anchor at the time to do so. More recently, Amber Lyon was fired from CNN for providing accurate reporting on Bahrain, a US puppet state, which was abusing its citizens during Arab Spring. New York Times Openly Admits Mainstream Media Stories Are Scripted By the White House
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http://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2013/1978
Operation Mockingbird: New York Times confesses to role in subverting First Amendment
freepress.org
For the NSA to succeed in spying on Americans and violating the Constitution without mass demonstrations you must first understand how the security industrial complex compromised the mass media. In the Monday, July 14, 2013 New York Times, we get a rare glimpse into that historical tragedy fittingly on its obituary page. The death notice, “Austin Goodrich, 87, Spy Posing as Reporter,” detailed seldom seen facts about the legendary “Operation Mockingbird.” The aptly named “Mockingbird” was a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) campaign to create a mass media echo chamber during the Cold War. The Times' lead is telling: “In the 1950s and ‘60s, Austin Goodrich was far from the only journalist doubling as a secret agent for the United States.” Indeed. Alex Constantine, in his Mockingbird: The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA, estimates “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts.” The Times credits “…reports by Rolling Stone and the New York Times” for revealing the program. “The Times reported that at least 22 American news organizations, including CBS News and Time, Life and Newsweek magazines, as well as the Times itself, ‘had employed, though sometimes only a casual basis, American journalists who were also working for the CIA,” according to the New York Times. Carl Bernstein’s October 1977 article “CIA and the Media” provided an overview of the subversion of our constitutionally guaranteed free press. The 1979 book Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post by Deborah Davis first revealed Mockingbird’s name. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA played America by Hugh Wilford, published by Harvard University Press in 2008, provides an excellent summary. The end of Goodrich’s obituary is meant to be touching, but its irony is obvious. His daughter, Kristina Goodrich told the Times: “He really believed in the importance of the democratic way of life and the danger of any system that would lead to totalitarian control over people.” A man who secretly worked for a spy agency while subverting a free press and turning it toward government propaganda as a predecessor to our current mass spying by the NSA is portrayed as a hater of totalitarian control. Mockingbird emerged under the direction of Frank Wisner’s Office of Special Projects (OSP) in 1948. Later it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). In one of the earliest exposes of the CIA, the Invisible Government written by David Wise and Thomas Ross, they document that Wisner was directed to create “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.” Davis asserts that Wisner recruited Philip Graham, president of CEO of the Washington Post to coordinate the agency’s spy apparatus within journalistic circles. Graham died at age 48 of a reportedly self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1963. By 1953, Bernstein reports that the spy network subverting the American media was directly overseen by CIA Director Allen Dulles. The CIA allegedly had major influence in over 25 U.S. newspapers and wire services. The tactic was straightforward. False news reports or propaganda would be provided by CIA writers Page 1 of 2
to knowing and unknowing reporters who would simply repeat the falsehoods over again. MDT Oct 10,and 2016over 04:41:21AM
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writers to knowing and unknowing reporters who would simply repeat the falsehoods over and over again. Operation Mockingbird was used to help cover up the overthrow of the democratic Iranian government in 1953 (Operation Ajax) and to control the press during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. A primary function of Mockingbird was to cover up covert and usually illegal foreign operations including the 1954 overthrowing of the democratic government of President Arbenz in Guatamala. In 1955, President Eisenhower created the 5412 Committee to create oversight of the CIA’s covert activities. Director Dulles refused to submit many of the CIA’s black ops operations to the Committee’s review citing "plausible deniability." According to the Family Jewels report released by the National Security Archive, the CIA also engaged in the illegal wiretapping of Washington-based reporters. In 1976, Senator Frank Church’s investigation into the CIA exposed their corruption of the media. The Church Committee reported: “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.” So Austin Goodrich is dead, and portrayed as a patriotic American by the Times. What the paper of record fails to note is that he was part of a covert operation that corrupted the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that led to the easy destruction of the Fourth Amendment by the NSA currently. The consolidation of the multinational for-profit corporate media has created the new Mockingbird.
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10/10/2016
SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird - The Constantine Report 9,118 Articles
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SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird February 18th, 2008
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By Alex Constantine
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From: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?
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title=Talk:Operation_Mockingbird "I have deleted the content of the page for a couple of reasons: there are numerous websites, mostly conspiracy sites, that refer to Operation Mockingbird but none cite the primary source or the name or where it was first disclosed ... " The SourceWatch editor apparently neglected to look for the primary source, or he'd have found it easily enough. The first reporter to write about Operation Mockingbird - CIA control of the media - by name was Ms. Deborah Davis, in a biography of Washington Post editor Katharine Graham - a
John McCain Takes Tour of Border, Watches Woman Climb Right Over “Danged” Fence CIA Propagandist with Ties to Iran Contra & Boston Marathon Bomber Writes for The Huffington Post
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Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient - Katharine the Great (1987) - a book that was printed, bound ... and all copies subsequently DESTROYED by the publisher - at CIA request. The book has since been reprinted.
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I was the writer who brought it to the public's attention, in a chapter of Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America (1997; the cold war initiative was conceived by Allen Dulles as a mind control program) posted on the Net as a public service by myself, and widely distributed on the Net. No one has ever accused Deborah Davis of being anything less than credible, to my knowledge. The book is not of the "conspiracy" genre - but the information in the book about the CIA's grip on the media has been suppressed, the books burned, and Graham has an unjustified sterling reputation in the press, when in fact she was a CIA-fascist collaborator, like many others in the media-at-large.
LATEST COMMENTS
Her husband Phil Graham committed suicide.
http://www.constantinereport.com/sourcewatch-has-revised-the-history-of-the-cias-operation-mockingbird/
Robert Here's a little trick I learned. If you want the list to appear long just list the same person four times or three times or even twice.(check Peter Dibble but there are several others). One has to wonder why someone would hate republicans so much that they would dedicate two weeks of their life to expose Republicans when everyone knows sexual abuse is not a political thing. Newsflash, there are just as many Democrats to be listed, there is just no one stupid enough on the other side to waste so much time..
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10/10/2016
SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird - The Constantine Report
Before he shot himself, he spent his days downing impressive volumes of alcohol, burbling that the CIA was trying to kill him. Phillp Graham oversaw Operation Mockingbird. He was institutionalized in the end at Chestnut Lodge, a CIA mind control psychiatric facility. He was released on a Thanksgiving day to be with his family, and took that opportunity to blow his head off. Re: " ... none [of the websites] cite the primary source ... " If this hard-working editor - who harshly censors the work of others without bothering to look up citations - had referred to Katharine the Great, the source cited in my article, he would have found that Davis drew from FEDERAL DOCUMENTS and CORRESPONDENCE between the Agency and editors of the Post in her book on Ms. Graham and Mockingbird - and then he wouldn't feel compelled to revise history for silly reasons. Another justification SourceWatch gives for deleting any reference to Mockingbird is that information on the state propaganda program is found at "mostly conspiracy sites." For obvious reasons, the Washington Post and NY Times have no articles on CIA infiltration of the media to satisfy the editor at SourceWatch. The following "conspiracy sites," among others, have posted articles on Mockingbird ... The Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/cockburn Associated Content http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/377134/us_government_conspiracies_operation.html National Expositor http://nationalexpositor.com/News/215.html Answers.Com http://www.answers.com/topic/operation-mockingbird Media Daily News http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=53404 Americans for Legal Immigration http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-101682.html Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird Political Friendster http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=2746&name=Operation-Mockingbird UK Gay News http://www.ukgaynews.org.uk/Archive/2006jan/0901.htm Petition Online http://www.petitiononline.com/6725/petition.html And if one opens one's eyes and perceives, one can actually watch Mockingbird in operation - WHY THE HELL ELSE ARE WE IN IRAQ? Marginal, media-trained thinkers are constantly calling me names, casting aspersions on my character - in defense of a corrupt and insane establishment - and getting everything wrong in the process of trashing research that I know to be accurate. Also see: #
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http://www.constantinereport.com/sourcewatch-has-revised-the-history-of-the-cias-operation-mockingbird/
Matthew I am a victim who lives in Michigan, I have suffered profoundly for about 2 years now. These people have not stopped since they began, using a satellite with a remote neural monitor, and ELF signal. I have heard them and my own inner voice outside of my head, home and vehicle and being played through engines, fans, anything with a constant noise, sounding like an interment camp all day and night broadcasting with no one else hearing this as if they put a microphone in front of a speaker. I cannot even drown out the voices they just get louder depending on how loud my surroundings are. Their problems with me according to them range from being called a veterans affairs junkie, to being accused of ridiculous crimes like rape, and even jokes about having kids I was not aware of outside of my marriage. They say they get paid by someone but I do not really think so for what point there is not to this problem. They repeat themselves until you think with your third eye and then they say "its legit video evidence now"! They have tried to blackmail me with torture into committing suicide, murder, and trying to trick me into committing crimes like rape by telling me they will leave me alone if I do these things to have dirt on video record in order for them to leave or something like that. They also make horrible threats all day against my family. I do not think I know these people from the real world like some of you wrote that you were certain about who did this to you. These people have used different voices of people that iv known over the years and pretend to be people from my family and people I served in the military with in order to try and make people look stupid. These people NEVER LEAVE the satellite controls or take a break so keep that in mind when thinking about publishing old friends or neighbors names and addresses. these people appear to be either amphetamine addicts or mentally ill for how much time they spend doing nothing but. i have made several formal complaints to the FBI, and sheriff department only to be dismissed as being a mental health problem. Some important knowledge I have learned is that they are using stolen government satellite's, probably department of defense. In my case this group calling themselves the WOOT without my knowledge or consent at some point committed home invasion and kidnapping to implant items they use into my body, mainly what they call "dick lifts" and to my knowledge they are really thin strings with a snare on one end that holds onto a body part, and a small screw on the other end that gets either drilled in a bone or in between joints. the screw end gets manipulated by a magnetic laser on the satellite to tighten or loosen the string in order to alter your appearance, bodily function such as bowel movements, genital function, cause your eyes to see blurry or double, and teeth to break and even to alter to your brain activity. I recommend that you touch a magnet to your body to see if you feel metal pulling under your skin, or a loosening sensation. with most of the implanted devices and objects including electrodes that these criminals use on people cannot be manipulated by them unless it has magnetic properties. They also use the magnetic laser to place small metal pins into parts of your brain to cause your brain to move in such a manner when they hit it with the magnetic laser that it mimics a minor brain injury to that particular area of the brain causing you to stop thinking or forget things, particularly when you try to tell people about this problem especially law enforcement to make you look like your on drugs or crazy with no credibility. They call this "scoping out" and according to them they also use this technique to temporarily make people blind and deaf by wiggling a
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10/10/2016
SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird
[back] Mockingbird
Monday, February 18, 2008
SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird By Alex Constantine From: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Talk:Operation_Mockingbird "I have deleted the content of the page for a couple of reasons: there are numerous websites, mostly conspiracy sites, that refer to Operation Mockingbird but none cite the primary source or the name or where it was first disclosed ... " The SourceWatch editor apparently neglected to look for the primary source, or he'd have found it easily enough. The first reporter to write about Operation Mockingbird - CIA control of the media - by name was Ms. Deborah Davis, in a biography of Washington Post editor Katharine Graham - a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient - Katharine the Great (1987) - a book that was printed, bound ... and all copies subsequently DESTROYED by the publisher - at CIA request. The book has since been reprinted. I was the writer who brought it to the public's attention, in a chapter of Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America (1997; the cold war initiative was conceived by Allen Dulles as a mind control program) posted on the Net as a public service by myself, and widely distributed on the Net. No one has ever accused Deborah Davis of being anything less than credible, to my knowledge. The book is not of the "conspiracy" genre - but the information in the book about the CIA's grip on the media has been suppressed, the books burned, and Graham has an unjustified sterling reputation in the press, when in fact she was a CIA-fascist collaborator, like many others in the media-at-large. Her husband Phil Graham committed suicide. Before he shot himself, he spent his days downing impressive volumes of alcohol, burbling that the CIA was trying to kill him. Phillp Graham oversaw Operation Mockingbird. He was institutionalized in the end at Chestnut Lodge, a CIA mind control psychiatric facility. He was released on a Thanksgiving day to be with his family, and took that opportunity to blow his head off. Re: " ... none [of the websites] cite the primary source ... " If this hard-working editor - who harshly censors the work of others without bothering to look up citations - had referred to Katharine the Great, the source cited in my article, he would have found that Davis drew from FEDERAL DOCUMENTS and CORRESPONDENCE between the Agency and editors of the Post in her book on Ms. Graham and Mockingbird - and then he wouldn't feel compelled to revise history for silly reasons. Another justification SourceWatch gives for deleting any reference to Mockingbird is that information on the state propaganda program is found at "mostly conspiracy sites." For obvious reasons, the Washington http://whale.to/b/monday8.html
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10/10/2016
SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird
Post and NY Times have no articles on CIA infiltration of the media to satisfy the editor at SourceWatch. The following "conspiracy sites," among others, have posted articles on Mockingbird ... The Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/cockburn Associated Content http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/377134/us_government_conspiracies_operation.html National Expositor http://nationalexpositor.com/News/215.html Answers.Com http://www.answers.com/topic/operation-mockingbird Media Daily News http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=53404 Americans for Legal Immigration http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-101682.html Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird Political Friendster http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=2746&name=Operation-Mockingbird UK Gay News http://www.ukgaynews.org.uk/Archive/2006jan/0901.htm Petition Online http://www.petitiononline.com/6725/petition.html And if one opens one's eyes and perceives, one can actually watch Mockingbird in operation - WHY THE HELL ELSE ARE WE IN IRAQ? Marginal, media-trained thinkers are constantly calling me names, casting aspersions on my character - in defense of a corrupt and insane establishment - and getting everything wrong in the process of trashing research that I know to be accurate. Also see: "Wikipedia Burns My Books - and Me" Posted by Alex Constantine at 6:25 AM
2 comments: bjporter said... Here is Mockingbird on the CIA FOIA site: http://www.foia.cia.gov/search.asp http://whale.to/b/monday8.html
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10/10/2016
SourceWatch has Revised the History of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird
Type in "operation mockingbird" and click on the search result "Family Jewels". Go to page 5. It mentions "project Mockingbird" and wiretapping news people. Thanks for your work Alex February 19, 2008 9:40 AM
Alex Constantine said... bjporter: "'Family Jewels'. Go to page 5. It mentions 'project Mockingbird' and wiretapping news people. ... " That is a project Mockingbird, and there are books that make mention of it. The Operation Mockingbird I've written about was a state propaganda program and it was, I've learned from Joe Trento's Secret History of the CIA, assembled by Allen Dulles in 1946, a year before the Agency was created by the National Security Act. Dulles considered the cold war propaganda machine so essential that it was his very first priority - for mind control purposes, as I've explained. Trento doesn't mention Mockingbird by name, but he does identify the media execs drawn by Dulles into the program, and they are already known. Mockingbird was an off-the shelf operation, not an official Agency function. It's doubtful that FOIA could recover much paperwork that makes reference to the CIA's media operations, because in my experience, there always seems to be less documentation on file and accessible than there are covert operations, and sometimes nothing in the files gives a hint of an ongoing operation. For off-the-shelf programs structured around funding cut-outs and operational fronts, chances are all files are shredded before they can be accessed, because these are off the books - and highly illicit, eg. Iran-contra.
http://whale.to/b/monday8.html
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http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Fitrakis1012.htm
(DV) Fitrakis: Mark Hyman -- Stepford Spook and the New Operation dissidentvoice.org Mockingbird The first time I saw Mark Hyman on Columbus� Sinclair Television ABC affiliate, I told the listeners of my WVKO radio show that he looked like a Stepford CIA clone with a microchip buried in his ass. Hyman is the Vice President for Corporate Relations for Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns and operates programs or provides sales services affiliated with the top six TV networks in the country: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, UPN and Warner Brothers. Sinclair plans to air a CIA-agit-prop-style documentary called �Stolen Honor: Wounds that never heal,� highly critical of John Kerry�s anti-war activities, two weeks before the November 2 election. Sixty-three Sinclair affiliates including a dozen in the battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin plan to air the 42-minute long negative campaign ad for George W. Bush in the form of a documentary. The airing of the documentary to nearly a quarter of all TV markets in the U.S. represents tens of millions of dollars in in-kind campaign donations to the Bush coffers. It is one of the most blatant and illegal uses of the people�s airwaves in U.S. history and another signal that smiley-faced fascism is just around the corner. The Democratic National Committee and 18 U.S. Senators have already objected to this unprecedented broadcasting of a thinly-veiled Bush attack ad. What they also need to do is investigate the ties between Hyman and the CIA. We need a new Church Committee to uncover the practices of the CIA and their specific relationship with the Bush family. Hyman came to fame last April when he became the point man for attacking Ted Koppel and the ABC national television network for deciding to honor the soldiers killed in Iraq by reading their names on his Nightline show. The so-called Patriot Defenders Network rushed to Hyman�s aid when he emerged as Sinclair�s attack dog and refused to air Koppel�s show. It should come as no surprise that Hyman, according to sources at the Columbus ABC affiliate WSYX-TV, brags of his ongoing ties with the CIA. According to one highly-placed station executive, Sinclair Broadcasting touted Hyman�s connections to the CIA in promoting �The Point,� the Hyman-hosted daily commentaries that are so far to the Right they would embarrass Mussolini. Hyman�s profile on the Sinclair Broadcasting website documents his ties to both the U.S. military and the CIA. Hyman has served in both the Army and the Navy where he graduated from the U.S. Navy Academy in 1981. When he left active duty in 1989 he �became employed as a civilian in the Office of Naval Intelligence.� Hyman�s profile on the website brags that as �a Captain in the Naval Reserve, he has served in leadership positions in CIA�s National Warning Staff, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office and he is currently a Commanding Officer in the Naval Reserve Space and Network Warfare Program.� Hyman, not willing to hide his ties to the Company, notes that �the military organizations in which he has served have been awarded four CIA National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Commendations during his
service.� Page 1 of 2
Hyman�s current position puts him in a key position in promoting PresidentOctBush�s dream of MDT 10, 2016 04:46:55AM
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Fitrakis1012.htm
service.� Hyman�s current position puts him in a key position in promoting President Bush�s dream of Star Wars II embodied in one of the government�s most shocking documents, �Joint Vision for 2020� which commits our nation to �full spectrum dominance� of the Earth. During the heyday of the Cold War, the CIA allegedly instituted the notorious Operation Mockingbird to make sure the American mass media sang patriotic hymns in unison. The Company bribed journalists, planted stories, and wholly controlled TV, radio stations, newspapers and publishing houses. These are the real wounds that will never heal: the fact that a covert intelligence agency deliberately manipulated public opinion and compromised both the Fourth Estate and the First Amendment. What appears to be happening here is that the former CIA director and 41st President George Herbert Walker Bush is desperately using his connections and old school tactics to save his blundering son. Think of Hyman in terms of retro 1950s blatant Voice of America propaganda. Just like the coup in Florida in the 2000 election, the CIA�s time-tested tactics throughout the world are now being overly practiced on the U.S. population. That which they used to do secretly in Operation Mockingbird, they now do openly on Sinclair Broadcasting with Mark Hyman. That�s the real point. Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of The Free Press, where this article first appeared, a political science professor, attorney, and author of Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis (Columbus Alive, 2003), which includes his award-winning investigative reports covering CIA covert activities. Other Recent Articles by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman * Kerry, Nader and the Greens Need to Kill the Circular Firing Squad * Did Ashcroft "Behead" an Innocent Man in an Ohio Election-Terror Scam? * Again, Why George W. Bush Must be Tried as a War Criminal * Bush Wins Triple Trifecta as Worst President Ever * On Bush, Drugs and Hypocrisy * Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy * Why Bush Must be Captured and Tried Alongside Saddam Hussein * The Year Democracy Ended * Demonstration Democracy * Why Four Died in Ohio: Governor Rhodes and His Relationship With the FBI * The Rise of Authoritarianism And the Racist Drug War
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Oct 10, 2016 04:46:55AM MDT
http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm
By David Guyatt
deepblacklies.co.uk
*** Printer friendly here... SUBVERTING THE MEDIA In discussing the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Dan Rather, the well-loved anchorman for CBS Television, described the now famous Zapruder film that captured footage of the shot which killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie, taken by amateur cameraman, Abraham Zapruder, was quickly snapped-up by Life magazine for $250,000.00. Although Life published still frames of the movie, the 18 second film was kept under lock and key – not to be seen by Americans until 1975. But Rather’s remarks were misleading. He told his viewers that the film showed JFK falling forward – confirming the official view that Kennedy had been shot from behind. However, the film clearly showed Kennedy lurching violently backwards, evidence of a frontal shot. To add to the confusion, the Warren Commission report printed two frames of the film in reverse – again implying a rear shot - an accident the FBI typified as a “printing error.” Meanwhile, still pictures lifted from the Zapruder film were also published by Life magazine. Remarkably, they too were published in reverse order, thereby creating the impression that the President had been shot from behind by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. Until the film was shown to Americans in its entirity, no one was the wiser. Following the broadcast in 1975, a massive controversy followed giving rise to ongoing allegations of conspiracy. The Zapruder film clearly showed President Kennedy had also been shot from the front. The result immeasurably strengthened the charge - that had been bubbling in the background – that the President had been assassinated as a result of a well orchestrated conspiracy, and that this was covered-up to protect the guilty, who many now believe involved senior figures in the CIA and US military. Not least it was pointed out that Henry Luce, the founder of Life magazine was a close personal friend of Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA. Moreover, the individual who purchased the Zapruder film for Life magazine was C.J. Jackson, formerly a “psychological warfare” consultant to the President. Inevitably, these events were to lead to accusations that the media were culpable of the worst form of toadying and propaganda. This, in turn raised serious questions about the role and integrity of the mass media. Some years later, Washington Post reporter, Carl Bernstein – who came to fame with his colleague Bob Woodward, for their expose of the Nixon administration’s illegal re-election campaign activities, known as “Watergate” – dropped a media bombshell on an unsuspecting America. In an October 1977, article published by Rolling Stone magazine, Bernstein reported that more than 400 American journalists worked for the CIA. Bernstein went on to reveal that this cozy arrangement had covered the preceding 25 years. Sources told Bernstein that the New York Times, America’s most respected newspaper at the time, was one of the CIA’s closest media collaborators. Seeking to spread the blame, the New York Times published an article in December 1977, revealing that “more than eight hundred news and public information organisations and individuals,” had participated in the CIA’s covert subversion of the media. “One journalist is worth twenty agents,” a high-level source told Bernstein. Spies were trained as journalists Page 1 of 5
and then later infiltrated – often with the publishers consent - into the most Sep prestigious media MDT 04, 2016 02:58:45PM
http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm
journalists and then later infiltrated – often with the publishers consent - into the most prestigious media outlets in America, including the New York Times and Time Magazine. Likewise, numerous reputable journalists underwent training in various aspects of “spook-craft” by the CIA. This included techniques as varied as secret writing, surveillance and other spy crafts. The subversion operation was orchestrated by Frank Wisner, an old CIA hand who’s clandestine activities dated back to WW11. Wisner’s media manipulation programme became known as the “Wisner Wurlitzer,” and proved an effective technique for sending journalists overseas to spy for the CIA. Of the fifty plus overseas news proprietary’s owned by the CIA were The Rome Daily American, The Manilla Times and the Bangkok Post. Yet, according to some experts, there was another profound reason for the CIA’s close relations with the media. In his book, “Virtual Government,” author Alex Constantine goes to some lengths to explore the birth and spread of Operation Mockingbird. This, Constantine explains, was a CIA project designed to influence the major media for domestic propaganda purposes. One of the most important “assets” used by the CIA’s Frank Wisner was Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. A decade later both Wisner and Graham committed suicide – leading some to question the exact nature of their deaths. More recently doubts have been cast on Wisner’s suicide verdict by some observers who believed him to have been a Soviet agent. Meanwhile, however, Wisner had “implemented his plan and owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers…” according to Deborah Davis in her biography of Katharine Graham – wife of Philip Graham - and current publisher of the Washington Post. The operation was overseen by Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence. Operation Mockingbird continued to flourish with CIA agents boasting at having “important assets” inside every major news outlet in the country.” The list included such luminaries of the US media as Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, of the New York Times and C.D. Jackson of Fortune Magazine, according to Constantine. But there was another aspect to Mockingbird, Constantine reveals in an Internet essay. Citing historian C. Vann Woodward’s New York Times article of 1987, Ronald Reagan, later to become President of the US, was a FBI snitch earlier in his life. This dated back to the time when Reagan was President of the Actor’s Guild. Woodward says that Reagan “fed the names of suspect people in his organisation to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned an informer’s code number, T.10.” The purpose was to purge the film industry of “subversives.” As these stories hit the news, Senate investigators began to probe the CIA sponsored manipulation of the media – the “Fourth Estate” that supposedly was dedicated to acting as a check and balance on the excesses of the executive. This investigation was, however, curtailed at the insistence of Central Intelligence Agency Directors, William Colby and George Bush – who would later be elected US President. The information gathered by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church, was “deliberately buried” Bernstein reported. Despite this suppression of evidence, information leaked out that revealed the willing role of media executives to subvert their own industry. “Let’s not pick on some reporters,” CIA Director William Colby stated during an interview. “Let’s go to the managements. They were witting.” Bernstein concluded that “America’s leading publishers allowed themselves and their news services to become handmaidens to the intelligence services.” Of the household names that went along with this arrangement were: Columbia Broadcasting System, Copley News Service – which gave the CIA confidential information on antiwar and black protestors – ABC TV, NBC, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Newsweek, Time, Scripps-Howard, Hearst Newspapers and the Miami Herald. Bernstein additionally stated that the two most bullish media outlets to co-operate were the new York Times and CBS Television. The02:58:45PM New Page 2 of 5 Sep 04, 2016 MDT
http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm Time, Scripps-Howard, Hearst Newspapers
and the Miami Herald. Bernstein additionally stated that the two most bullish media outlets to co-operate were the new York Times and CBS Television. The New York Times even went so far as to submit stories to Allen Dulles and his replacement, John McCone, to vet and approve before publication. Slowly, the role of Mockingbird in muzzling and manipulating the press began to be revealed. In 1974, two former CIA agents, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, published a sensational book entitled “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.” The book caused uproar for the many revelations it contained. Included amongst them was the fact that the, until then, widely respected Encounter magazine was indirectly funded by the CIA. The vehicle used to covertly transfer funds to Encounter and many other publications, was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)– a CIA front. A decade earlier, in 1965, the CCF was renamed Forum World Features (FWF) and purchased by Kern House Enterprises, under the direction of John Hay Whitney, publisher of the International Herald Tribune and former US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The Chairman of Forum World Features was Brian Crozier, who resigned his position shortly before the explosive book went on sale. Crozier, a former “Economist” journalist, was a “contact” of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His employment to head up the CIA financed Forum World Features in 1965, caused a row with MI6 who felt the CIA had breached the secret agreement between the UK and USA by recruiting one of their own assets. Crozier’s media style was more discrete than Mockingbird. He preferred, when possible, to insert his pre-spun propaganda stories to unwitting members of the media, who would reprint them unaware of the bias they contained. In time, Crozier would go on to head up a shadowy anti subversive and dirty tricks group called the “61,” that sought to counter communist propaganda. Another group of which he was a member was the Pinay Cercle – a right wing Atlanticist group funded by the CIA - that claimed credit for getting Margaret Thatcher elected as British Prime Minister. Another propaganda operation, run from Lisburn barracks in Northern Ireland, and under nominal British Army control, participated in extensive media manipulation around the same time. Known as “Clockwork Orange” this involved the construction of propaganda material designed to discredit prominent members of the then Labour government as well as some in the Conservative shadow cabinet. Especially targeted was then Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Clockwork Orange relied heavily on forged documents that would be given to selected journalists for publication. Many of these forgeries sought to demonstrate secret communist ties – or east bloc intelligence affiliations – amongst high profile politicians. The aim was to destabilise Wilson and the Labour government by falsely showing them to be soft on communism or even pro communist. This operation clearly favoured a right wing Conservative administration under the leadership of Mrs. Thatcher. In the event, Wilson resigned, said to have been sickened by the numerous personal snipe attacks against him. During the time he was under siege, Wilson experienced numerous break ins at his office, as well as having his phone lines tapped -courtesy of unnamed officials in the security service, it is believed. By 1979 the Conservative party was returned to power. Yet, with the demise of the cold war the motive for media propaganda has collapsed. Or has it? James Lilly, former Director of Operations at the CIA later became Director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute – a think tank heavily staffed by former intelligence types. Lilly, in giving testimony to a Senate committee during 1996 observed: “Journalists, I think, you don’t recruit them. We can’t do that. They’ve told us not to do that. But you certainly sit down with your journalists, and I’ve done this and the Station Chief has done it, others have done it…” But even as the cold war rationale for subverting the media recedes into the distance, press manipulation
continues Page 3 of 5
anon. A classified CIA report surfaced in 1992, that revealed the Agency’sSep public affairs office MDT 04, 2016 02:58:45PM
http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm
continues anon. A classified CIA report surfaced in 1992, that revealed the Agency’s public affairs office “… has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation.” The report added that the benefits of these continued contacts had been fruitful to the CIA by turning “Intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories…” Basking in a glow of self satisfaction, the report continued “In many cases, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests.” But the last word goes to Noam Chomsky. A Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky has extensively investigated the role of today’s media. His analysis is un-nerving. The democratic postulate, Chomsky says, “is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth…” Despite this axiom, Chomsky finds that the media supports “established power” and is “responsive to the needs of government and major power groups.” He additionally argues that the media is a mechanism for pervasive “thought control” of elite interests and that ordinary citizens need to “undertake a course of intellectual self-defence to protect themselves from manipulation and control…” The covert role of the media has now apparently shifted its focus. One time expediter of the “cold war,” it now clamours for the extension of “corporate power.” Was the CIA behind Thatcher’s election? Brian Crozier’s protege was Robert Moss – a speech writer for Margaret Thatcher. It was Moss who wrote Thatcher’s now famous speech “The Sovietization of Britain” that resulted in her being nick-named the “Iron Lady.” It was Thatcher’s strident anti-communism and laissez faire free market economic policies that made her so attractive to powerful right wingers in the Conservative party, and ensured her election as Conservative leader. Moss, received much of his inspiration from Cord Meyer, Jr., the London CIA Station Chief -and long time expert in covert operations. Additional input to Moss came from the CIA’s Miles Copeland, formerly the head of the CIA’s “Gaming Room” in Langley, Virginia. The Gaming Room was used to simulate covert actions prior to them being acted out for real. Profile of Professor Noam Chomsky Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noam Chomsky is an internationally acclaimed, scholar, writer and political activist who has extensively scrutinised the thorny subject of media manipulation by elite and corporate interests. His books “Necessary Illusions – Thought Control in Democratic Societies,” and “Manufacturing Consent,” co-authored with Edward Herman, are considered classics on the subject. Chomsky argues that the role of money and elite interests continue to undermine a meaningful society. Professor Chomsky’s views will be expounded more fully in an exclusive interview to be published in a forthcoming issue of The X Factor. The CIA use of the media to undermine Chile In his expose of the CIA’s subversion of the media, reporter Carl Bernstein outlined how Chile’s socialist Prime Minister, Salvador Allende, was brought to ruin by a CIA sponsored media campaign. According to Bernstein, one of the Agency’s most valuable media “assets” was Hal Hendrix, the Miami News Latin American correspondent during the 1960’s. Hendrix, who was known as “The Spook” by his colleagues, was at the forefront of a CIA sponsoered anti Allende media campaign. Other reporters sympathetic to the CIA’s strategy, funnelled Agency funds to Allende’s political foes, as well as writing anti Allende propaganda for CIA controlled newspapers. The entire “get Allende” campaign was orchestrated by the Nixon White House which was under pressure from major US corporations like Coca Cola and IT&T to “keep Allende from taking power.” Journalists and corporate suppression of the news Page 4 of 5
Sep 04, 2016 02:58:45PM MDT
Journalists and corporate suppression of the http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm
news
Professor Noam Chomsky, and his co-author Edward Herman, in their book “Manufacturing Consent,” have gone to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate how media censorship operates. Self censorship, the authors maintain, largely results from a set of “filters” inculcated into the very heart of journalism, that Chomsky and Herman call the “Propaganda model.” The first of these “filters” the authors maintain, arises from corporate ownership primarily resulting in the mass media being beholden to “profit orientation.” The argument is that the largest media enterprises are now owned not just by one or two corporate entities, but by dozens of them – via cross-ownership. Consequently, a given media outlet is less likely to bite the hand that owns it. The authors go on to cite a number of additional filters that operate behind the scenes. These range from the power of advertisers through to the role played by powerful pressure groups – for example the military – who work hard to “shape” information in a favourable light. This is a clear example and one that defence correspondents are all too aware of. The Pentagon can be a great aid to a defence journalist providing inside information and other access. But this sort of co-operation and access is dependent on the angle or “spin” that will appear in the resulting story. In other words the article must meet with their approval. If, on the other hand, the story attacks the military, co-operation is quickly pulled. Other powerful pressure groups operate in a similar fashion. These include, for example, the arms, oil, pharmaceutical, farmers and brewing industries. Today, barely any story reaches the media that hasn’t been artfully packaged by Public Relations guru’s retained for their ability to slant stories in favour of their clients interests. Television news regularly air news items that use pre-shot footage supplied by corporate film wizards. In the past, the fag-smoking, booze-guzzling archetypal reporter trudged the streets tracking down a front-page story. Today, however, the media hound merely cuts and pastes the contents of a freebie, pre-spun “Press Pack” – directly to his computer Desk Top Publishing programme. In short, investigative journalism has been replaced by a clubby merry go round of money spinning splutter that regales the reader with carefully wrought stories fronting as news items. Rarely do the media cover seriously controversial subjects. During the heady days of the Scott enquiry, few stories appeared that looked at the financing of weapons to Iraq and Iran. A few journalists knew this was a major aspect of the arms to Iraq affair, but how many newspapers revealed which British banks had been up to their neck in weapons financing? Corporate money has massive clout and if you want to stay in business, as a journalist, you don’t rock the boat. By any measure this is self censorship. Ask most journalists and they will chuckle and say it is not. Sure, some stories are “spiked” – that is the nature of journalism. Spiked stories generally result from legal reasons and constraints, media professionals will tell you, but rarely result from direct action to suppress stories that the public should learn about. Occasionally, a newspaper proprietor may step in a kill a story for their own reasons. These just as often end-up in the pages of Private Eye, so little advantage ultimately accrues. At least that is the rationale. The entire content of this site is subject to international copyright .
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Unauthorised reproduction will be vigourously pursued to the full extent of the law.
Sep 04, 2016 02:58:45PM MDT
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Talk:Operation Mockingbird - SourceWatch
Talk:Operation Mockingbird From SourceWatch re http://web.archive.org/web/20011217025849/www.geocities.com/alanjpakula/triplecrown.html .... the Wayback Machine says that it is not operational today. However, the link is for www.geocities.com/alanjpakula ... Alan J. Pakula produced "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1962 and directed "All the President's Men" in 1976. [1] (http://awards.fennec.org/p/pakula_alan_j.html) Curious or not? Sure! also, http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&th=eac91af2ae474690&rnum=1 Just had one of those obvious "ah-ha" moments ..... think tanks and their "studies" are no more than legalized money laundering covert operations' vehicles. The more these "names" (people, agencies, organizations, etc.) crisscross, the more obvious it becomes. --- Am going to rewrite this page and delete what can't be verified -- Most of the allegations in what was here is unsubstantiated and can't be verified. A nexis search turns up nothing and a Google only conspiracy theory sites. For example it is claimed that Philip Graham was central to the operation and much is made of his role as an innteligence officer in WWII. In fact he was a major in intelligence an Air Force unit - hardly a high level role. And to claim that the Washington Post is one of the most right wing daily newspapers is off the wall. So, over the next few days I'm going to rewrite this and it is easier to start with a clean slate so have relocated what was on the article page to the talk page -- --Bob Burton 05:56, 10 Sep 2004 (EDT) The "rewrite" is now a new article at The CIA and journalism ---
Contents 1 Operation Mockingbird more... 2 Re cleanout 2.1 SourceWatch Resources 2.2 External Links
Operation Mockingbird more... "Operation Mockingbird 911review.org" (http://911review.org/Wiki/OperationMockingbird.shtml)
Re cleanout I have deleted the content of the page for a couple of reasons:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Talk:Operation_Mockingbird
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there are numerous websites, mostly conspiracy sites, that refer to Operation Mockingbird but none cite the primary source on the name or where it was first disclosed; the most common origins of the term as to a Carl Bernstein article in Rolling Stone; However, the extract of the Bernstein article that is online refers to the CIA using journalisms but it doesn't specifically mention Operation Mockingbird; where the Senate Select Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church is referred to there are no primary source citations; I have no doubt that the CIA used journalists but I can find no evidence that it was called Operation Mockingbird. In the absence of some credible source on the name Operation Mockingbird, there is no basis for a page by this title; Yes, there are plenty of websites referring to Operation Mockingbird but none go back to credible primary sources; instead, they either refer to each other or make sweeping unreferenced claims that don't deserve to be repeated here. The previous content of this page was largely derived from these sites; For this reason I created the page The CIA and journalism where the issue can be documented but without being tied to the name of what appears to be an unverified title; I relocated the Kristine Borjesson reference to the media trends page where it seems more appropriate; I checked my copy but it does not have any mention of Operation Mockingbird, so it is not appropriate to list it in the references. --Bob Burton 00:37, 9 Oct 2006 (EDT) Control of information is essential for autocratic rulers. It is well documented how the CIA became a central tool for this task: Overview by Mary Louise posted at PrisonPlanet.com (http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html) (2003-03-01): "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)." From an undated piece by Steve Kangas titled "The Origins of the Overclass" (http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/Loverclass.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." "Sig Mickelson was a CIA asset the entire time he was president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961. Later he went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda." "The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies. It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse, the CIA has http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Talk:Operation_Mockingbird
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bought many domestic media companies. A prime example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William J. Casey (who would later become Ronald Reagan's CIA director). Another founder was Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC." "For those who believe in 'separation of press and state,' the very idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with the agency." There are several copies online of "The Alex Constantine Article; Tales from the Crypt -- The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD" [2] (http://www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html) [3] (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html) "[In the late 40's] 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." "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." "Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham 'believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA'. This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD." There are many citations attached to "A Letter to the Washington Post" (http://home.gwi.net/~troberts/Julian/WashPostLetter.html) by Julian C. Holmes dated April 25, 1992. From "Subverting the Media" (http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm) by David Guyatt: "In an October 1977, article published by Rolling Stone magazine, Carl Bernstein reported that more than 400 American journalists worked for the CIA. Bernstein went on to reveal that this cozy arrangement had covered the preceding 25 years. Sources told Bernstein that the New York Times, America's most respected newspaper at the time, was one of the CIA's closest media collaborators. Seeking to spread the blame, the New York Times published an article in December 1977, revealing that 'more than eight hundred news and public information organisations and individuals,' had participated in the CIA's covert subversion of the media. "As these stories hit the news, Senate investigators began to probe the CIA sponsored manipulation of the media - the 'Fourth Estate' that supposedly was dedicated to acting as a check and balance on the excesses of the executive. This investigation was, however, curtailed at the insistence of Central Intelligence Agency Directors, William Colby and George H.W. Bush - who would later be elected US President. The information gathered by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church, was 'deliberately buried' Bernstein reported. "Slowly, the role of Mockingbird in muzzling and manipulating the press began to be revealed. In 1974, two former CIA agents, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, published a sensational book entitled "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" (ISBN 0440203368). The book caused uproar for the many revelations it contained." http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Talk:Operation_Mockingbird
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From "Myth of Liberal Media", posted at Democratic Underground (includes citation links) (http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID45/1908.html), Democracy Unbound (scroll down) (http://www.democracyunbound.com/triplecrown.html), and at http://web.archive.org/web/20011217025849/www.geocities.com/alanjpakula/triplecrown.html (access via the Wayback Machine): "After this embarrassment, it was necessary for the Right to use its own private network to replace Mockingbird. As a result, there is now the Cato Institute, with Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch (Fox, NY Post, TV Guide) on the Board with ATT/TCI's Malone [10] . Another big contributor to Cato is Viacom, which recently acquired CBS. Consequently, CBS/Viacom is now headed by Sumner M. Redstone, who is yet another powerful right wing figure with a WWII intelligence background [11] and apparent ties to OSS/CIA figures [12] . Cato serves the purpose of infusing the Media with Right Wing Propaganda, along with such organizations as Accuracy in Media (AIM), the Independent Women's Forum, the Western Journalism Center and -- of course -- the Heritage Foundation (See Main Page for Details). "The difference between the days of Operation Mockingbird and the present situation is that, instead of actually placing network executives, publishers, editors, reporters and pundits on the CIA payroll, their contemporary counterparts are now members of the Right Wing Think Tanks*. In addition to Cato's Murdoch, some high profile examples are MSNBC's Laura Ingraham (a notorious 'Scaifette' from the Independent Women's Forum [13] ) and ABC's John Stossel [14] . CNN's Kate O'Beirne is a Heritage fellow (and previous VP) who is a regular columnist for the National Review. Also, old Bonesman/CIA hand William F. Buckley, Jr. is the Editor of the arch-conservative Review. The National Review's President and Chairman is none other than Thomas Rhodes, who was recently a Heritage Board member. Other right wing journals financed by these sugar-daddies (and mommies) include the American Spectator, Human Events and Murdoch's Weekly Standard." From Glen Yeadon's "From the streets of Little Beirut" (http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/books.html) (2/28/03): "CIA censorship and media-propagandizing was supposed to have stopped in the mid-1970s after the Church Committee investigated the CIA's Project Mockingbird. At the time, every major media outlet was infected with Mockingbird. Coexisting with Project Mockingbird was a FBI operation named COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was successful in destroying not only leftist groups but also more importantly the press of the left. Ramparts Magazine was a major target eliminated by COINTELPRO. In one short decade, the alternative press had been wiped out."
SourceWatch Resources Herbert Allen The CIA and journalism
External Links Greg Bishop, "The Covert News Network," (http://www.antiqillum.com/glor/glor_007/covert_news.pdf) antiqillum.com, no date. Robert Lederer, "Apology to the Media," (http://www.iahf.com/20000916.html) iahf.com, September 16, 2000. Geoff Metcalf, "To Kill or Feed a Mockingbird," (http://www.newswithviews.com/metcalf/metcalf8.htm) News with Views, July 29, 2002. Cheryl Seal, "'Listen to the Mockingbird': Deconstructing the CIA-Style Disinformation 'Song' of the Washington Post," (http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/4244/index.php) Baltimore Independent Media, June 18, 2003. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Talk:Operation_Mockingbird
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Michael Hasty, "Secret admirers: The Bushes and the Washington Post" (Part 1) (http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/020504Hasty/020504hasty.html), Online Journal, February 5, 2004. Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Talk:Operation_Mockingbird&oldid=139903"
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The CIA and journalism From SourceWatch Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s. The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis' 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. But Davis' book, alleging that the media had been recruited (infiltrated) by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was itself controversial and has since been shown to have had a number of erroneous assertions.[1] More evidence of Mockingbird's existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate "plumber" E. Howard Hunt and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008).[2]
Contents 1 History 1.1 Part of the Directorate for Plans 1.2 Guatemala 1.3 First exposure 1.4 Church Committee investigations 1.5 "Family Jewels" Report 2 Books 3 Related SourceWatch Resources 4 External links
History 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). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. 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."[3] Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic and 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."[4] Wisner referred to this apparatus as a "Mighty Wurlitzer", referencing the theater organ capable of controlling diverse pipes, instruments, and sound effects from a central console.[5] 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 organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s.[6] According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative".[7] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_CIA_and_journalism
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In 1977, Rolling Stone alleged that one of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by Rolling Stone Magazine to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), Herb Gold (The Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times).[8] According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.[9] After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William 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).[8] The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning of 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 communism. In 1954, Wisner arranged for the funding of the Hollywood production of Animal Farm, the animated allegory based on the book written by George Orwell.[10] According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts". Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran (See: Operation Ajax) and Guatemala (See: Operation PBSUCCESS).[11] 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."[12]
Part of the Directorate for Plans In August 1952, the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged under the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP). Frank Wisner became head of this new organization and Richard Helms became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DDP.[13] J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the CIA's growing power. He described the OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdos" and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to 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.[14] Joseph McCarthy also began accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a "sinkhole of communists", and claimed he intended to 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, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_CIA_and_journalism
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Wisner's deputy at the OPC, told Meyer that Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added credibility to the accusation by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and Frank Wisner both came to his defense and refused to permit an FBI interrogation of Meyer.[15] Joseph McCarthy did not realize what he was taking on. Wisner unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all engaged in intensely negative coverage of McCarthy, whose political reputation was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.[16]
Guatemala Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala during Operation PBSUCCESS. Allen W. Dulles was even able to keep left-wing journalists from travelling to Guatemala, including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times.[17] Even in the wake of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' 1952 presidential campaign pledge 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 Dwight D. 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 Defence and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were "proper" and in the national interest. It was also decided to include Richard B. Russell, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible deniability" planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee. Eisenhower became concerned about CIA covert activities and in 1956 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." 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."[18] 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 (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 the CIA was playing in foreign policy. This included the 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.[3] John McCone, the new director of the CIA, also attempted to stop Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_CIA_and_journalism
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In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald found out that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, had discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association.[19] FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. 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."[20] This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing this story 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 it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. It named Cord Meyer as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary journal Encounter.[12] In May 1967, Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article entitled, "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'", in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress. As he pointed out in the article: "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."[21] Meyer's role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. The book was highly critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer's when he was a liberal activist after the war.[22]
Church Committee investigations Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the 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." Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.[23] 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." However, he added that the CIA would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.[24]
"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.
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Books Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, Random House, October 2001, ISBN 978-0-7615-2562-2 ISBN 0-7615-2562-9
Related SourceWatch Resources manufactured journalism propaganda
External links The Global Intelligence News Portal: CIA: Use of journalists (http://mprofaca.cro.net/ciapress1.html) Daniel Brandt , "Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer (http://www.namebase.org/news17.html)", NameBase NewsLine, No. 17, April-June 1997. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA & The Media (http://mprofaca.cro.net/ciapress1.html)", Rolling Stone, October 27, 1977. (extract) The Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee, "Written testimony of John M. Deutch, Director of Central Intelligence: Agency Use of Journalists, Clergy, Peace Corps and Volunteers for Intelligence Operations (http://www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/park/1097/ciaclrgy.html)", July 17, 1996. Kate Houghton, "Subverting Journalism: Reporters and the CIA (http://www.cpj.org/attacks96/sreports/cia.html)", Committee to Protect Journalists, 1996. Robert Parry, "Money, Media & the Mess in America (http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/012805.html), Consortium News, January 28, 2005. Jim Boyd, "Editorial Pages: Why Courage is Hard to Find," (http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100453) Nieman Reports, Spring 2006. Davis asserts that Deep Throat was Richard Ober, rather than Mark Felt, as has since been revealed Kazin, Michael (January 27, 2008). "Dancing to the CIA's Tune (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/01/24/AR2008012402369.html)", The Washington Post. Retrieved on 2010-03-19. David Wise and Thomas Ross (1964). Invisible Government. Deborah Davis (1979). Katharine the Great, 137–138. Wilford, Hugh (2008). The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 7. ISBN 978-0674026810. Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA, 42–59. Deborah Davis (1979). Katharine the Great, 226. Carl Bernstein (20 October 1977). "CIA and the Media", Rolling Stone Magazine. Nina Burleigh (1998). A Very Private Woman, 118. Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA, 33. Alex Constantine (2000). Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA. (1975) Thomas Braden, interview included in the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA. John Ranelagh (1986). The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, 198–202. Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA, 98–106. Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA, 60–84. Jack Anderson (1979). Confessions of a Muckraker, 208–236. Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA, 117. Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA, 148–150. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_CIA_and_journalism
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Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA, 86–89. Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA, 330. Thomas Braden (20 May 1967). "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'", Saturday Evening Post. Nina Burleigh (1998). A Very Private Woman, 105. (April 1976) Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, 191–201. Mary Louise (2003). Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation. Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_CIA_and_journalism&oldid=508940" Categories: Media Journalism This page was last modified on 29 January 2011, at 12:37. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike unless otherwise noted.
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The American Media is Controlled Facingfreedomschallenge.blogspot.com/ It wasn’t that long ago the CIA took control over most American Media under a program known as “Operation Mockingbird”. It was Carl Bernstein who exposed the tentacles connecting the CIA and the Media, but it took even longer to connect the dots the CIA has been controlled by a secret society, the same society that is found at Yale University where its select 15 are tapped from the undergraduates and for the most part end up in government roles, the CIA, banking and the media. http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php By 1953, Joseph Alsop, had already signed aboard the CIA list of publishers that could be counted on to promote CIA Propaganda. Others would include William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, (CBS) Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the ‑ LouisviIle Courier Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, (ABC) the National Broadcasting Company, (NBC) the Associated Press, (AP) United Press International, (UPI) Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, the oldSaturday Evening post and New York Herald Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA, have been with the New York Times, (founded by Skull and Bones Sulzberger) CBS and, Time Inc. (Time was Founded by Skull and Bones classmates Henry Luce (tapped ino1920), and Briton Hadden (also tapped in 1920). These elite members of this fascist cult are sworn to support each other and their common cause; they swear no allegiance to the U. S. and they are members of a world organization that does not believe in the U.S. Constitution. That is the reason why so many Skull and Bones families financed Adolph Hitler. Prominent families as the Bush’s, The Rockefeller’s, the Ford family and the CIA infiltrated news media. The New York Times was called on by the CIA to trash the reputation of Gary Webb after he exposed the CIA Drug connections. They did their job, but the story has been told again in the true life movie “The Messenger”
For the most part the founders have passed but the relationships continue. The Skull and Bones continues to churn out more of the future leaders of America in their effort to control and shape our political system. To me it is interesting to watch the drama unfold as both the fascist right wing and the communist left wing go after Trump. This will be an amusing rendition of a centuries old drug cartel that has been influencing American politics since the early 19th Century. A cult founded in Germany with the American branch founded in 1833, this cult has advanced its members to the highest offices and political mechanisms of the media and the intelligence community judgeships and yes even presidents. They have fairly much taken over Wall Street and own the CIA, the reason they go back to illegal drugs is that was their beginning and where the original wealth came into being. Not all were into illegal drugs; some like Percy Rockefeller, S&KClass of 1900 - New York lawyer, oil man, and gun dealer with Remington arms was also part of Wall Street having been a director of Brown Brothers Harriman a Wall Street investment bank, began the family’s S&K History. The Bushes, Harriman’s and Rockefellers financed Adolph Hitler to power, supporting his army and even gave Hitler the formula to make air craft fuel from coal. Franklin MacVeagh, Class of 1862 – was US Secretary of the Treasury under fellow Bonesman President William Taft. Two other bonesmen George HW Bush and W Bush also members of this secret cult would later become president of the United States. Many members of congress are a part and parcel of this secret cult…as are Wall Street Financiers, * Charles Edward Adams (1904), director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York * William McCormick Blair (1907), American financier, heir to the McCormick reaper fortune * Harold Stanley (1908), co-founder of Morgan Stanley * George Leslie Harrison (1910), President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York * Averell Harriman (1913), founding partner in Harriman Brothers & Company and later Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., (A Wall Street Investment bank)
* Prescott Bush (1917), founding partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., US Senator from Connecticut,George HW Bush’s father, George W. Bush’s grand father * Jonathan James Bush (1953), banker, son of Prescott Bush brother of George HW Bush. * George Herbert Walker, Jr. (1927), financier and co-founder of the New York Mets; uncle to President George Herbert Walker Bush * E. Roland Harriman (1917), co-founder Harriman Brothers & Company * Granger Kent Costikyan (1929), partner Brown Brothers Harriman * Lewis Abbot Lapham (1931), banking and shipping executive * John Mercer Walker, Sr. (1931), investment banker * Charles Edwin Lord II (1949), banker, Vice-Chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States * Evan G. Galbraith (1950); managing director of Morgan Stanley * William H. Donaldson (1953), appointed chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by George W. Bush; founding dean of Yale School of Management; co-founder of DLJ investment firm * Edward S. Lampert (1984), founder of ESL Investments; chairman of Sears Holdings Corporation They were not all fascists some were socialists like Albert DeSilver (1910), co-founder American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), while many Skull and Bones were deeply involved in the CIA. * F. Trubee Davison (1918), Director of Personnel at the CIA * William P. Bundy (1939) was an analysis with the CIA. * McGeorge Bundy (1940) CIA
* Robert A. Lovett
(1918), a Wall Street Banker, partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, helped to establish the CIA * James L. Buckley (1944), his wife was a 58 year career CIA asset. * William F. Buckley, Jr. CIA. * Charles S. Whitehouse (1947) CIA. * George H. W. Bush (1948), 11th Director of Central Intelligence (CIA), * William Sloane Coffin (1949), CIA agent. If you check the Skull and Bones roster you will find the graduating classes of Skull and Bones appear to go directly into the CIA! The remainder goes into politics, or become judges! Several become presidents. Robert William Kagan (1980), co-founder of the Project for the New American Century drafted the war plans for the 911 event and U.S. future war strategies.
Stephen Allen Schwarzman (1969), co-founder of The Blackstone Group mercenaries highly paid by George Bush administration a connected Skull and Bonesman. For once we have the appearance of both the right and left working for a common cause, that cause crosses the political isles of congress and the long reach of Wall Street money, the political donors, the king makers have lost grace with the American public. These King Makers that have anointed Hillary Clinton with full knowledge she is a crook, a liar, and scandal ridden, the same donors that financed Barrack Obama knowing of his communist upbringing, and his Muslim beliefs. They along with the RNC fear losing control of Washington and their grip over our financial future or lack of one. You will not find an administration since the later part of the 19th century that has not had Bonesmen in some positions of authority: Reagan had his S&B George H.W. Bush as his VP, but Reagan is not the lily white republican the party worships; it should be noted here that Ronald Reagan, had been the front man back in the 1950s for the money-laundering organization, the Crusade for Freedom, which was part of Dulles's Fascist 'freedom fighters' program. http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.htm We have endured a succession of imbeciles in the White House that have been the problem, beginning with Reagan who began the transition of America to a service society sending the sinew of America, our manufacturing, to Mexico. Under Reagan we lost some 2200 businesses and with it a few million jobs. Then Bush senior, who it is believed was in control of the White House under Reagan, Bush, a known NAZI sympathizer whose family (father Prescott Bush) had made their family fortune financing Adolph Hitler. Prescott, Bush Sr. and W Bush all were members of this Nazi cult at Yale University known as the Order of the Skull and Bones. Prescott financed Hitler through his involvement at Union Bank which was confiscated by the US government under the trading with the enemy statutes. http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.htm When HW Bush ran for president he had known Nazi’s working on his staff. A 1988, Project Censored, a news media censorship research organization, awarded the honor of "Top Censored story" to the subject of George Bush. The article revealed "how the major mass media ignored, overlooked or undercovered at least ten critical stories reported in America's alternative press that raised serious questions about the
Republican candidate, George Bush, dating from his reported role as a CIA 'asset' in 1963 to his Presidential campaign's connection with a network of anti-Semites with Nazi and fascist affiliations in 1988." See The 1993 Project Censored Yearbook: The News That Didn't Make The News - And Why, Project Censored; Dr. Carl Jensen, Director, pp. 230. http://www.projectcensored.org/ http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.htm Both the right and the left, or as each side has become better known, the Communist arm of the Democratic Party (the Obama Hillary contingent) and the fascist arm of the Republican Party want business as usual to continue in DC. The same money is behind the attempt to control who get’s the green light to be the party pall bearer… carrying a banner for each party that has fallen out of favor with voters. This sudden emergence of attacks against Donald Trump, shows how fearful and desperate the left and even the extreme right wing of the Republican establishment are to hold their control over the public by only allowing insiders, those they can control financially to get the nomination. But this time they have grossly underestimated the growing enmity of the voting public this time they have gone too far with the social drama. Obama leaving the borders open, sneaking ISIS commandoes into the U.S. scrubbing their intelligence history. And Obama’s false flag events, supported by Hillary Clinton, has turned the majority of what’s left of the Democratic party against politics as usual, and the RNC is too ignorant to understand we are on the verge of a real revolution, as the only alternative to take our country back. Abraham Lincoln said it best…. What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling seacoasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
Familiarize your selves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises. http://www.trueworldhistory.info/docs/quotes.html
Seo links The SU Independent, Jack Ferm, Hunger Games, Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, The system is broken, The American Media is controlled, the CIA, Operation Mockingbird, Percy Rockefeller, Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush, George W Bush, Skull and Bones, The ACLU,
http://www.ukgaynews.org.uk/Archive/2006jan/0901.htm
UK Gay News - Operation �Mockingbird�: County Rallies to Aid Dying Lesbian 2006-01-09
ukgaynews.org.uk
I n the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch stands alone to do the right thing. Today, people across the world are standing with Laurel Hester, a dying lesbian New Jersey police officer, by sending copies of the classic book To Kill a Mockingbird to the officials in Ocean County, who are refusing to grant pension benefits to Hester and her partner Stacie Andree. The protest is the brain-child of Michael Jensen, a writer of the political blog, The Big Gay Picture. �Laurel was kind enough to let me interview her,� Jensen says. �And in the interview, she mentioned that her favourite novel is To Kill a Mockingbird.� According to Jensen, sending copies of the book seemed the perfect way to express disapproval over the actions of Ocean County�s �freeholders,� the Republican officials, who have so far refused to grant Hester, and all lesbian and gay couples, domestic partnership benefits. Without such benefits, Ms. Hester fears that her partner will lose their home after she is gone. In denying Hester�s repeated request for benefits, the freeholders first condemned her for being a lesbian, then told a series of lies about their reasons, and then, literally, walked out on the wheelchair-bound woman .
■ The 'Infamous Five' GOP (Republican) elected freeholders of Ocean County who walked out on Laurel Hester last month during a public meeting. They avoided the Press by leaving by the back door.
Other than a brief interview with the New York Times, Ms. Hester had not spoken to the press about her life or her fight with the county until doing the interview with Jensen. �Have the freeholders of Ocean County ever read To Kill A Mockingbird,� Jensen asks? �It�s all about doing the right thing, which makes me think they probably haven�t read it. So it made sense to send them copies of the book, along with a note that says, �To the Freeholders of Ocean County: This is Laurel Hester�s favourite book. Please read it. You might learn something about doing the right thing.�� Jensen has teamed with Garden State Equality who will actually deliver the books to the freeholders at their Page 1 ofnext 3
meeting. State and local press is expected to be in attendance and Jensen hopes hundreds of MDT Oct 10, 2016 04:45:29AM
http://www.ukgaynews.org.uk/Archive/2006jan/0901.htm
their next meeting. State and local press is expected to be in attendance and Jensen hopes hundreds of books will be delivered to the freeholders as the media look on. Already dozens have arrived at the Garden State Equality office. Books should be mailed to: Steven Goldstein, 585 Standish Road, Teaneck, NJ 07666-1817. Books need to arrive by January 17th. For more information about Operation Mockingbird or Laurel Hester, visit www.biggaypicture.com, or email Michael Jensen at michael (at) bigggaypicture.com SEE ALSO: Dane Wells: How A Straight, White, Middle-Aged Bush Voter Became a Dying Lesbian's Staunchest Ally. By Michael Jensen. This interview involves Laurel Hester, the woman whose terminal cancer has embroiled her in a domestic partnership benefits controversy with the local government in Ocean County, New Jersey. What Laurel didn't know at the time of her diagnosis was that there would be a second rock supporting her - one she had not ever dreamed of being able to count on. His name is Dane Wells, a self-described straight, middle-aged, white guy who had never given gay rights more than a passing thought and calls himself fairly conservative. Indeed, he voted for Bush twice. Big Gay Picture, January 6, 2006) Laurel Hester's Legacy Just Got Bigger. By Michael Jensen. Laurel Hester must be feeling pretty pleased this morning. No, the homophobic freeholders of Ocean County, NJ haven't relented on the dying woman's request to leave her pension benefits to her partner ... (Big Gay Picture, January 6, 2006) It's Laurel Hester's Wonderful Life. Michael Jensen's The three-part story of New Jersey Police Lt. Laurel Hester. Laurel Hester has spent her whole life trying to make the world a better place. That is why the events that have followed her diagnosis with terminal lung cancer a year ago have seemed so strange to her. She assumed a lifetime spent making the world a better place for others would entitle her to a measure of fairness in her time of desperate need. Laurel Hester was wrong. (Big Gay Picture, December 2005) Freeholders Walk Out of Meeting as Public Demand Pension Fairness for Dying Gay Cop. The tragic case of the dying police officer, who has had her request that her lesbian �life partner� be allowed to receive her pension rights turned down last month by county Freeholders, took a macabre turn this evening as the elected Freeholders stormed out of their meeting. (UK Gay News, December 8, 2005) County to Hester: "Never Mind ..." Editorial. After a frantic scramble, the Ocean County freeholders finally came up with what they believe is a logical reason to deny Lt. Laurel Hester's request to pass on her pension benefits to her registered domestic partner � a woman. "We will not unilaterally extend benefits; They must be negotiated through collective bargaining," the freeholders righteously huffed. Collective bargaining. Yeah, that's the ticket. Never mind that Hester served the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office with valor, excellence and professionalism for more than two decades. ... (Ocean County Observer, November 27) USA: Straight Man Appeals for Justice for Dying Lesbian Cop. Commentary. Dane Wells, who describes himself as a �run-of-the-mill, middle-aged straight guy�, is not very happy with the movers and shakers of his local community, Ocean County in New Jersey. The retired policeman is angry because Ocean County will not extend �domestic partner benefits� to a former colleague, Lt. Laurel Hester, who is terminally ill with lung cancer - and is gay. (UK Gay News, November 26, 2005)
Straight Page 2 of 3
Man Appeals for Justice for Dying Lesbian Cop. Commentary. Dane Wells, who describes Oct 10, 2016 04:45:29AM MDT
http://www.ukgaynews.org.uk/Archive/2006jan/0901.htm
Straight Man Appeals for Justice for Dying Lesbian Cop. Commentary. Dane Wells, who describes himself as a �run-of-the-mill, middle-aged straight guy�, is not very happy with the movers and shakers of his local community, Ocean County in New Jersey. The retired policeman is angry because Ocean County will not extend �domestic partner benefits� to a former colleague, Lt. Laurel Hester, who is terminally ill with lung cancer - and is gay. (UK Gay News, November 26, 2005) NEW JERSEY NEWSPAPER COVERAGE Of THE DECEMBER 8 FREEHOLDERS MEETING ■ A New Jersey gay activist group wants people to boycott Ocean County's chief industry, tourism, because the Board of Freeholders won't permit a veteran, dying police officer to will her pension benefits to her domestic partner. Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, pleaded with the board at Wednesday night's meeting on behalf of Lt. Laurel Hester, who is dying of metastasized lung cancer. �I beg you, beg you with all my heart� to pass a resolution allowing the domestic partner benefits, he said. � Asbury Park Press ■ The Ocean County freeholders should drop their opposition to extending domestic-partnership benefits to county employees. This would finally allow a county Prosecutor's Office investigator dying of lung cancer to pass along her pension benefits to her domestic partner. � Editorial � Asbury Park Press (December 9, 2005) ■ �You have everything to lose. I have nothing to lose,� a dying Lt. Laurel Hester told supporters who failed again last night to convince Ocean County's freeholders to implement the Domestic Partnership Act and give her partner, Stacie Andree, the right to inherit the pension rights she earned after 24 years as a cop with the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office. � Ocean County Observer ■ Among those who spoke was Dick Chinery, a former chief investigator for the Prosecutor's Office who was Hester's longtime supervisor. He spoke highly of her dedication to her job over the years, calling her � a wonderful girl.� �Please do something for her. She spent 20-some years protecting the citizens of Ocean County,� Chinery said. � The Press of Atlantic City. Humanity Missing in County Decision. Letter to the Editor of Asbury Park Press (December 7, 2005) from John P. Evans.
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MEMORANDUM FOR:
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SUBJECT
"Family Jewels"
1. The purpose of this memorandum is to forward for your personal review summaries of activities conducted either by or under the sponsorship of the Office of Security in the past which in my opinion conflict with the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947. 2. These activities cover 'the period from March 1959 to date and represent as accurate a record as is .ava i Lab Le in our files. Those activities which, took place prior to the date of my appointment as Director of Security on 1 ~uly 1964 have been developed to a certain extent through the recollection of the senior people in this Office who were involved or who had knowledge of the activities at the ~irne they occurred. . 3. I have gone back to March 1959 because I believe that the activities occurring since that time st'ill have a viable "flap potential" in that many of the people involved, both Agency and non-Agency are still alive and through their knOWledge of the activity represent a possible potential threat or embarrassment to the Agency. I would be glad to provide clarification or an explanation of any of these activities if desired. You have my assurance that unless otherwise stated each of these activities was approved by higher authority--the
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"FAMILY JEWELS"
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Johnny Roselli -- The use of a member of the Mafia in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro.
3.
Project MOCKINGBIRD -- During the period from 12 March 1963 to 15 June 1963, this Office installed telephone taps on two l\Tashingtonbased newsmen who were suspected of disclosing classified information obtained from a variety of governmental and congressional sources.
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Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko -- A KGB defector who from the peri"6. \ -d appeal' to be the victlm l time' of the assassinatlon at- I were apprehended. This hap·: the American and Cuban un·lo! ~, natural. if mysterious ail. tempts. He acknowledged the I pened around the Iast of Feb·; derworlds. to arrange the a5-1 me, \ : idea had been discussed inside ruary or first of March, 1%3. i sassinatlon. T.ne dapper, hawk-j R.-; -Tl arranged with a [the CIA but Insisted it had, Nine months later, Presl-: faced Roselli, formerly rnar-. Cub» '\ related to one of Cas. i been "r e j e c ted immedi-] dent Kennedy was gunned! ried to movie actress J:une: tro's " "$. to pl.ant the deadlv atelv," He vizorously denied: down in Dallas by Lee Harvey [Lang, was a power in, the !pe.lle!' .. the dictator's food. i1hat the crx had ever partici·l~swald. a fan~tic who pre·in:o\:ie ;n~usrry until hi~ _~0!1'!0!1 :'ILl ,., 1,3,1961, Roselli de' _ I paled in any plot on Castro's: v iously had agitated fpr Cas- vtction with racketeer '.\ Ill ie ] llvered ',. cansules to hlJ .con.' iffe. Asked whether the at·: tro in Xew O:leans f3nd J:ad BioCf ina mil1~oc:-d~lJ.ar HollY·l tacl at : . ,.:ni Be3ch's lilamor. Ilerr.pts d operat.lves. WIllIam! about ,!::' ,·:;:tl lime ior the !pen;d." Among ~hose privy .to .the' H~r\'ey and••TaI?es (Bi~ Jim)! plot 10 ,.'... been !..!l-;-;l'd out, ~ 1,\ e have COlll.:Jl't:te conIl': CIA conspIracy, there IS still a OConnell, ,0 Lie husn.hush; a r;~po": '::1 oi H:a·.4~1'1 l'aid :dence, howe I; e r. in ourl nag gin g suspicion---:-unsup· murder mission. using poony: east~() • H ill. El:~ i,e reo !sources. !ported bY' the Warren Com· names. theY accompanied RO'/coven'd "~':ore the,Ra;. l)i ?igs ; The plot to knock off Castro !r.1ission·s iindings-lhat· Cas- ,.elli on trips to Miami to line ;im"asion .', \prilli, i!i~:I. 'began liS ;Ja,t -(;[ the Bay of! lro became aware uf the u.S, up the assassination teams. i Four n'·" att~m:l~~ '\',;ol't" ;Pi:;s HP~:·.li"n Th~ ;nu·nt.,,·as~rh)t apon. h~ ... U~·~ ~'!~c! .... t:':1~ The;f:zll story r~~ds ~jkl? t~p i:l3dp en .· .. l\t':"o·.~ :;~.a . . tv .t,,·ii:n!:l·~:"~ L~~e '·uoan CHeta·· huw :·t·t :-taH~r! l).. . ..A,a~ i ~~f a··la·.. ':.'j 'f": ::: ~1 Ja:nes ~)onC1 i:10".tJf? :: :':)';~. a...::. :.' 1::;-. ::,..:::-.. ::s.• :::.c i
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MATERIAL REQUISITIONED FROM LOGISTICS BY SECURITY FOR ISSUANCE TO LOCAL POLICE ITEM
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Gas Mask M-9
200
Gas Mask M-17
196
Steel Helmet and Liners
2'31
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Various quantities and types of replacement chemical cartridges, loading kits, and batteries were also ordered for asterisk items.
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00033
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SUBJECT":
Audio Countermeasures S~pport to the United States Secret Service
On 2S July 1968, and at the specific request of the United States Secret Service, this Office provided two audio countermeasures technicians to the United States Secret Service in connection· with the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago, Illinois. This was not an official detail although both men were provided with temporary credentials identifying them as being affiliated with the United States Secret Service. On IS August 1968, we detailed the same two men to the United States Secret Service to cover the Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida~ On both occasions, the team members were debriefed upon, their return and it is clear that their activities were confined exclusively to.sweeping the candidates and potential candidates quarters.
00034
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I 15 May 1973
MEMORANDUM FOR:
Mr. Howard Osborn' Director of Security
SUBJECT
Identification of Activities with Embarrassment Potential for the Agency
1. In responding on 7 May by memorandum to the DDO's request for the identification of any incident which might conceivably have an embarrassment potential for the AgencYt I cited the equipment test which is mentioned in the attached memo. The test in uestion was related to the development of
,
in and out of some four hotels in Miami, with radio equipment. This was shortly before the political conventions, and at least one of the hotels was within a block of the convention hall.
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!'Plot to have been carrled OUI We have complete contl-] CIA conspiracy, there is still a O'Connell, to the hush-hush fa report out of Havana r.air/ 'I'dence, 11 0 we v e r, in our'l nag gin g suspi~ion-unsup. ,murder mission. Usin/(. phony Castro was ill. But he r I sources. ported by the \~arrE'n com'lnamE's, they accompanied ne- covered before the Bay of P;i~ The plot to knock off Castro : mission's fin.dings-that Cas- selli on trips to :Miami to line jim'asion'on April 17.1961. ; be:,:an as part of -the Bay of i tro became awa~e of the U ,5. up the assassination tea~s. I Four more attompts \. I. to i Pi~s op"I'::IiI'/1 The intent was, pld upon hls !l!,. aru! ~"m('ol The full story reads hk(' thp 'maet" on Castro's lire, ,III {'lhniu;.;" 'Ih(' Cuban clit'ta·Jllllw, rC'{'l'liitrcl (),\\:lld :.., :I'I;.!. s\'l'i·p~. of a ,lam{'s Bond movie,' ,'; 19~.,Brl:·M.:: with a Cuban na.tional. .Reporting. by one in.form.ant~ who Was also.~;·.;. ·¥":;;:~:· be~g de:elope~ bY.the-·~~b~; suggested that. the· ~.uban·migh~h~~e::~;~:~·::),L~;.:.·,. an mtelli'gence lIlteres~.lD. the fem.al~.~.T~e .s~.~. ~~~mant·a~so.;,.s.ub- ~.;·~kY: .' ..", sequently reported that. the Cuban had nl.J:l?3.eroq,s· other:contacts aInong . ;:., ," ". .
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5. Inforrnation on the backgr oun d of the Cuban is fairly ex! cn s iv e , but it is inconclusive. He is known to have been a rn crn.be r of antiCastro organizations in this countr y, There are also reports that his' rno the r was i mp r i son ed in Cuba at one time, There are other episodes ·in his life that suggest intelligence Involv ernent all. his part with some hostile service, but this is not yet definitely establi.shed.
6. The Office of Security has had at ti me s a second informant in this case. His reporting has tended to confi r m reporting by the principal info r mant,
8. The Offi de of Security has been running this operation for over two years, in an effort to obtain conclusive proof of its intelligence nature. CI Staff has been kept informed.. The FBI, which was informed of the case at an early stage, has declined to take responsibility for it, on grounds that it concerns CIA's internal security. As a result, the Office ofSecurity has been inhihited in the actions it can take against the: Cuban susp-ect. On the other hand, Security has not taken any action against Agency em.ployees for fear of comprorni s ing the operation. 9. It would appear to me that the, Office of Security has dallied with this case long enough. Apparently unable through positive measures to resolve doubts about the case, O/S has followed the course of watchful waiting, hoping the Cuban would take precipitaif action himself that would give us the evidence we seek. In the m.eantim.e, our knowledge of the relationship between the Cuban and the several other current Agency employees with whom he is known to have contact continues
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The possibility that the employee. In t)J:) DIVISIon may oe passIng information on CIA's Soviet operations is too great to warrant further delav in moving against her. I
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Offj.ce of Security Survey - Office of Security Support to
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1. In D~cember 1970 Robert Ingersoll, head of the Bureau of ~ar cotics and Dangerous Drugs, asked Hr. Helnis if the Agency could give him scir:-e ass ist.ance in shoring up the internal integrity of the BUDD. According to Ingersoll, the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been heavily infiltrated by dishcnest and corrupt ".
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funds used. He felt that only Colonel 'White could supply additional details. He said Senator ~ussell and Representative Mahon were advised of this Agency activity but asked not to be briefed in detail.
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REQUISITIONED FROM LOGISTICS BY SECURITY FOR ISSUANCE TO LOCAL POLICE
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*Searchlight; Tear Gas
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*Chemical Baton 6 1/2"
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*Chemical Baton 12"
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*Chemical Baton 26" *Mustang 35 Pistol *Searchlight with Shoulder S.trap *Stun Gun
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Various quantities and types of replacement chemical cartridges, loading kits, and batteries were also ordered for asterisk items.
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MEMORANDUM FOR: Deputy Director for Management and Services SUBJECT
Contacts with Individuals Named in the Watergate Matter
1. I am addressing this to you instead of to the Director of Central Intelligence since I doubt that the information contained herein is of such signiftcance to warrant his interest and because it has been on record with the Agency since July 1972. However.. if you feel that the information is of such interest that it should be forwarded to the Director I shall put it in the proper format to do so.
2. My only contact with anyone named in connection with the Watergate and related matters was through] la former Agency employee now retired and living in Winterhaven, Florida. In December 19711 Icalled me from Florida and advised that he wanted to get in touch with Howard Hunt. He said that he did not have Hunts home phone number and that it was probably, unlisted but that since Hunt was a former employee, could I contact Hunt and ask him togivel la call. I had only met Hunt once about 10 years before but I agreed to relay the message. I called Howard Hunt at his home and told him that] did not have his home phone and requested he caUl ~ Mr. Hunt thanked me for . relaying the message and said that he woUld ca 11 This seemed of little consequence to me in December 1971 but in July 1972 lof the Office of Security contacted me in regard to the FBI investigation of the Watergate situation. At that time I Informed] lof the telephone call from ., . lin December 1971. Attached is a copy of a Memorandum for the .Record prepared by I [as.a result of our conversation.
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3. In the summer of 1972 I took my family to Disney World in Florida and took that occasion to drop in to seel· .~ Itold me in a private conversation that he had been interviewed ree or four times by the FBI in connection with the Watergate affair and he related to me his contact
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with Howard Hunt. On 19 July 1972 after my return from Florida I reported this conversation to the Director of Security and made it a Memorandum for the Record. This memorandum was sent to Mr. Colby and a copy of the memorandum is attached. 4. Other than knowing Mr. McCord through his employment with the Agency and meeti.ng Howard Hunt once in about 1959. I do not know nor have I had any contact with
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.. 17 July 1972
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MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD SUBJECT:
Charles W. Kane
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1. Last week Special Agent Arnold Par harn of the FBI cop.ta c ted the Acting ,DD/OS. He a s ked whether or net the Subjects worked for-the Central Intelligence Agency. Pr-e viou s Iy, requests of this nature were followed up by the FBI with a.n interview of the subjects. 2. I briefed Mr. Colby who is the Agency's focal point on the "Wa te r-gat;e " case and'the Acting DD/S of, the FBI inquiry. Mr. Colby suggested that "we determine the extent of Lnvo lvcrne nt a nd indicated that we advise the Bur-eau of their employment. 3. 'When Agent Parham was again contacted and advised of the Subjects' employment with the Agency, he bdicated that the -Bureau does not wish to interview them.
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5. I called Mr. Kane both at his office and his residence . and learned that he is in F'Ior ida and will return to dUty on 17 July. I called Mr. Kane this morning to advise him of the inquiry. 6. Mr. Kane stated that he has no firm conclusion as to how the Bureau obtained "his name. He stated that he has seen Mr. Hunt' on only one occasion in 1959. At that time Hunt was the Chief of Station~ The m.eeting wa s occasioned
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Mr. Kane stated further that around LC=·';"'h-:r---;i,. . s""':t·-n-1-a-s-t--;'i-In-e-o"",:£""""I--;9;-;7"""1:;---;]-,e--'· r e c eived a call fr 0 In
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who wanted to get ~n touch with Mr. I·I~nt. lasked Mr. Kane how J:1e could get in touch with him. Mr. Kane obtained Mr. Hunt's telephone nu rnb e r through telephone i nfo r ma.tion channels whereupon he passed the number on tol
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7. Mr , Kane stated that he has infonnation that 1 has talked to the FBI on several occasions in connection with the current investigation and that he su rrni s e s that the Bureau may have obtained his name from him.
Deputy Director of Security
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USIB Technical Surveillance Countermeasures Committee Continuing contacts wcire maintained with the Lnt e l t i gence COTIIIi1Unity regarding technical surveillance countermeai~rs and physical security. This exchange of infol~ation, reports,·and equipment has been conducted und e r the auspices of USIB TSCC and involves State, FBI~. Secret Service, NSA~ DIA,. Army, AF, and . Navy.
State Department. Two contracts for development of countermeasures were funded jointly. with the State Department.
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:~:~:.Ji~~'~~~ive Director ·briefed·on the re~u1ts '~t~'~st~'rdaY's meet:irig--; on.":what the . 'Direct~r now .needs to do in' .~ur§uab:ce of' the: . ":, Presidenc,'s: directive .on disclosure of classi:fi~d;:i:iri.form~tion..'.:-.He:~ will' outliri~ 'in the pirector I s brie:fi~ book actions'·-wid.ci:r:iare to' 'be .'-;.. .'. taken. '.'
rokl' mto the; apartment in :\Ianhaltan of Ja.1 break-in of June I? 19!2. and . . off.ices ~nd res!dences. of; vier Urrutia•. resident of thet there \~'as sp('cula.tlOn tnat the Chilean diplomats In Wash!ng.! Chilean De\'elgpment Corpora.' t:\'o mlf.hl have oeen related. s- " ,• ••,J!>" and New \,prk at least lOur:_t-icm and a close ..economic ad.ll,h~} link nevcr. ~as. been .times from April, J971 to May, viser to Chile's' president, Dr.l proved. and. son~e tn\ esugators .. .. 1972. ., . Salvador Allende Gossens. . doupt that It..ex!sts. • ' . One .explanatlon. offere.~ for Four. break-Ins aaalnst 'Chileans took place in the 14 months Pistol Stolen the Chilean break:m was t~~tl Immediatelv preceding the Mr. Urrutia told the police if cU~Y Cuban-Americans p.arttc\-i break-in at the Democrats' 1hM a .:?5-caliber Bernardelli pared, as was the c~se in .the' Watergate headquarters last pistol had been stolen. How- :Wat'~r~ate,. they might have June. Thev also occurred at a ever, a fur. coat in a closet been 10oklO~ ~or, aocume!lls time when the Chilean Govern- was reportedly untouched, Gov-. that would ~n~lcale. coltuslOnl ment was 'negotiating with the ernment papers were said to' between the Chilean and castro/ International Telephone and have been disturbed. and chew- governments. . Telegraph' Corporation over] illg gum was edged into the' Shortlyafter the spec~ compensation for Chile's take-l apartment's Iock, a. familiar Ilion began in :'-·liami. Chilean] o\;er of the hu~e .conglomerate's practice of .pl'ofes.sional .intrud-' oificia!s acknowledged the telephone subsidiary, CI'S that. gives tnem time to break-In and reported it 'to the! . Ileca\15e or far more scn~a· e5c.~lre ,If they arc surprised 'city·, pol!ce, who started an in-l ; tional disclosures, Watergate m· dut mg the course of an entry. vestigauon that has been :1. vestlgators have not actively The third reported break-in conclusive. . pursued the Chilean case ·in took place on Feb. 10; 1972, Earlier this month, a Cuban: recent weeks. beyond asking a investigators said. at the New/ nam('d Felipe de Dieao was' luestion or two. about the, York residence on East 46th Interrogated' by State Attorney .ireak-ins rl!lrin~ interro;~ationsl Street of Victor Rioseco, for- Richard E. Gerstein in 'Florida ,..- ...: of theWatergate burglars. mcrly a Chilean official atthe regarding participation . in -the \ . However, Senate investigat- United Nations. A radio and break-in at the offices of D:-: '." ers have informed both the! television set were ,reportedlYf Daniel El!sberg'S psychiatrist Senate Watl'r;late committee] taken and papers' disturbed. in Los Angeles.' . . ' and the Watergate prosecutors] Tile fourth and most pub. He and his allorn,,\' indicat;: In' Washington "bout the dctailsl Hclzed break-in took place over ied that, if' granted Imrnunltv [. r, of ,the four break-ins At the 'the weekend of :Vlay 13. '1972, Mr. de Diego might Shed l1e:;;' ! . offices and residences of t:he at lim Chilean' Embassy in ligh], on other surreptitious opChileans. Washington, Files of the Am- eratlons in Washin;:lon. Inves3 Occurred In New Yorkbassador and his Jirst secre- tlgators in Miami hiler indicat. tary, Fermm?o Bachelet, were ed that these operatlons might Fl!rth.C'rlllore, a member of t~e reportedly rifled and two -ra- !.:Jclude the Chilean break-in 'specl3:1 tntelHgcnce Unit of- .tne dios taken. . or' break.ins•. New Y?l:k Police Department Chilean officials have been i '. was scud to have, con,c1l1de~ ordered by their Government;' " that the, three break-ms loat OC-I not to discuss the maUer, bud curr~d tn :'I1an!13ttan w,ere n?/ snurces close to the case said' routme burg lanes. And. mve:;lI- that the former Chilean Am-l ~ators in \Vash.ington s,aid that. l>ilssador, Orlando l.eteHer, had I t:le .four brf.'ak·ms had lOl/OWed confirmed that the Washington! slOlIlar pattern.>. inlrliders ap'llarently wer~ seek-! The~' were arparenliy done ing sensitive Govern'ment noeu-, b~' rroff:'ssionals. \\ill! a' irwi ments. ". Hems tak!.'n to make tll(! .bre~k.i .spl,culatiClll b" III\'e~tinators .. Ins appear to he burglarlcs. 10·1 ~." \,estigators said. Olht'r ,'aillablej . Capitol Hill investi;;:ators itcnlS w('t'e left 'behind, how. have spccul
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FOL.O HERE. TO RE.TURN TO S::NOE:R :.
FROM: N""'E:. AOORESS ANO PHONE: NO.
COl"FIDENTIAL . fORM NO.
". 2-61-
237
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. MEMORANDUM FOR.T>HE..R};:CORD :·:·)D:';:(l'~:
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SUBJECT: Di spo s a.l- 9.r~Cla·ssified Ti-a,sll for the :i'I-a.tio~al Security,
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