OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD
Operation Mockingbird was, allegedly, a huge project which CIA began developing in the 1950s; they started hiring American journalists and enticing them in their propaganda web. The hired journalists were being paid by CIA and CIA gave them instructions on how to write the fake stories which spoke highly of the agency. Student and cultural agencies were also financed for this operation.
“Operation Mockingbird” was an alleged project of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who hired journalists from all over the world to write fake news and stories which promote the government’s ideas and, at the same time, slander the communists.
“A group of students has admitted receiving money from the CIA”. This was the headline on The New York Times, February 14, 1967. The New York Times then proceeded publishing a sequence of articles related to the Operation Mockingbird.
The History of Operation Mockingbird
As Operation Mockingbird began to spread out, it later impacted the foreign media. Frank Wisner, the head of the spying and counterintelligence branch of the CIA led the operation; he was told to focus on “propaganda, economic war, preventive direct actions including sabotage, anti- sabotage, destruction and evacuation measures, subversion against the enemy countries, including help in the underground resistance movements and support to the autochthonous anti-communist elements in the endangered countries of the free world.
The journalists were, allegedly, blackmailed and threatened, in order to remain a part of this web. Creating “admirable stories” wasn’t the only goal of CIA’s financing of the independent and private organizations. It also served as CIA’s secret information gathering from the other countries which were relevant to the American national security. Like the article in The New York Times, the magazine Ramparts uncovered the operation in 1967, when it published how the National Student Association received financing from CIA.
In an article from 1977 in the magazine Rolling Stone, titled “CIA and the media”, Carl Bernstein wrote that CIA “secretly paid for the numerous pages of the journalist agencies, magazines and newspapers – in English and in other languages – which served as a great cover-up for the CIA operative.
These reports have led to series of investigations, led by the committee which was formed by the Senate in the 1970s; they were nicknamed the Church Committee. The investigators of the Church Committee have gone through government’s operations and potential abuse from the CIA, NSA, FBI and the Tax Administration.
In 2007, CIA published 700 pages of the documents from 1970s, which were marked earlier as “strictly confidential” in a collection nicknamed “Family Jewels”. Operation Mockingbird is mentioned only once in those documents; that mention refers to the case of two American journalists who were bugged for a few months.
According to analysts, the means which were collected during the Operation Mockingbird are still being used by the CIA and White House; in other words, it’s thought that they still influence the American and foreign media. This theory was confirmed by a German journalist who works for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – Dr Ugo Ulfkotte.
Although declassified documents show that this kind of operation indeed happened. it was never officially confirmed – which can lead us to think it never officially stopped.
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