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& Programming of Public Opinion (repost)
Operation Mockingbird, Takeover of the Corporate Press
Sun Aug 11 03:17:17 2002
216.244.0.223
by Alex Constantine (Feral House, 1997)]
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"And Now, A Few Words From Our Sponsor ... the CIA"
The Birth of Operation MOCKINGBIRD,
The Takeover of the Corporate Press
and the Programming Of Public Opinion
By Alex Constantine
"My lips have been kind of buttoned for almost twenty years."
Walter Cronkite
Little has been written about the CIA's hidden relationship with the media. John Ranelagh's The Agency an officially-sanctioned, Bible-length history mentions few occasions of meddling. One of them was exposed at the oversight level in 1973 when Vernon Walters, then acting director, asked William Colby to draw up a list of "skeletons" in the Agency's burial ground of a history to submit at a closed Congressional hearing.
The list was single-spaced, 693 pages long.
Among the confessed abuses of power was a Project Mockingbird: "During the period from March 12, 1963 to June 15, 1963, the Office of Security installed telephone taps on two prominent Washington-based newsmen who were suspected of disclosing classified information obtained from a variety of governmental and congressional sources."1
That's it. A routine wiretap. Not a particularly damning disclosure. But this Mockingbird is not to be confused with the wholesale political and cultural pollution of the media known to the ink-stained wretches who study the CIA's international underground as Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
In the first gusts of Cold War, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local embassies, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, hired students abroad to enter the cold war as agents of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, an alumnus of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, publisher of the Washington Post, signed on to direct the propaganda program.2
The following decade, Wisner and Graham would both resign their CIA commissions by committing "suicide."
In the early 1950s, former Village Voice reporter Deborah Davis wrote in her biography of Katharine Graham, "Wisner had implemented his plan and '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."3 The partnership was overseen by Allen Dulles, the ultimate insider, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their point of views represented in the media. Early MOCKINGBIRD swelled to influence some 25 newspapers and wire agencies by 1955, consenting, in the most frigid period of the cold war, to act as founts of right-wing propaganda.4 Many of these were already operated by men with highly reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).
Curious activists digging into the dense mysteries of MOCKINGBIRD have been chagrined to find, in heavily-redacted FOIA documents, agents boasting of their pride at having placed "important assets" within every major news outlet in the country.5 It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted for the first time that journalists on the CIA dole have acted as case officers to agents in the field.6
I. MOCKINGBIRDGATE
So the muckrakers were suppressed, the newspapers were reduced, brought into safe hands, writers were controlled, books privately censored, publishing houses bought into and influenced, peace societies and philanthropic and educational foundations linked up with financial houses and the universities by interlocking directorates, our university teachers kept looking forward to pensions, young recalcitrants dismissed or set in their places.…
Porter Sargent,
"What Makes Lives"
The salting of public opinion, often explained (when the straining dams of secrecy leak) as a necessary reaction to communism, has since served to conceal the criminalization of the intelligence agencies. The CIA's early forays into mind control experimentation on unconsenting subjects, for example, were justified by a fabricated cover story that POWs of the Korean War had been "brainwashed" by their captors. In fact, the U.S. Army investigation was unable to document a single case of "brainwashing" among the prisoners released by the North Koreans the word was the invention of Edward Hunter, a veteran OSS propagandist and a journalist recruited by Dulles for MOCKINGBIRD.
The Korean War itself was urged along by propaganda oozing from the front pages of the country's leading newspapers. A detailed study of the disinformation assault, I.F. Stone's The Hidden History of the Korean War, first appeared in 1952. The book sold well overseas, but in the States, as explained in a note from the publisher in later editions, it "met with an almost complete press blackout and boycott. The book has almost entirely disappeared, even from public libraries, and it rarely turns up in the second-hand book market."
The "muckracking" era was a distant memory; corporate ownership of the press saw to it. "When it began," wrote George Seldes in 1000 Americans, a survey of American corporate power published in 1947, "muckraking" journalism had advocates in "all people who had the general welfare at heart, but as the probes went deeper and further, and seemed to spare none of the hidden powers, the politicians as well as other spokesmen for money, business and profiteering, turned savagely upon the really free press and destroyed it.... Trash may indeed be the opium of the people, but it was not the real aim of the magazines to stupefy the public, merely to suppress the facts, merely to pullify, to create a wasteland."
A Niagara of pro-American propaganda sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), a CIA symbiont, shaped domestic and foreign political sensibilities beginning in the early 1950s. In this period, a host of books with USIA funding were disseminated by Praeger, Inc., the Franklin Press and other publishing houses, bearing no indication of their true origin.
By the mid-Reagan era, the USIA would spend nearly a billion dollars per anum to export propaganda in the form of magazines, books (an average of three million a year) and exhibitions. The agency cranked out ten magazines and commercial bulletins in twenty languages, including Topic (S. Africa) and a radio teletype network that disseminates propaganda to 159 outlets overseas. Some 200 films acquired from private domestic sources were distributed, and a television program entitled Worldnet. 7
The CIA came to dominate the Monopoly board of the corporate press in the 1950s, and drew a card from the stack marked with that monocled millionaire in a top hat (a curious resemblance to Allen Dulles) calling for a strategy of psychological warfare, sometimes with genocidal results.
Cord Meyer, Jr., the ranking Mockingbird in Europe, then a Newsweek correspondent, swung widely throughout Europe, inciting student and union protests. "This localized psychological warfare is ultimately, of course, warfare against the Russians," Davis emphasized, "who are presumed to be the source of every leftist political sentiment in Italy, France, the entire theater of Meyer's operations. In Eastern Europe his aim to foment rebellion."
In 1956, "the CIA learns that the Soviets will indeed kill 60,000 Agency-aroused Hungarians with armored tanks."8 Nevertheless, Radio Free Europe urged the people of Hungary to resist the Kremlin, the conclusion of an investigative committee of the UN: many Hungarians "had the feeling that Radio Free Europe promised help." They believed military aid from the west would arrive to back an uprising.
On November 5, the following year, an unsteady, dry voice crackled through the static of a Hungarian radio station:
Attention: Radio Free Europe, hello. Attention. This is Roka speaking. The radio of revolutionary youth.... Continual bombing.
Help. help. help ... Radio Free Europe ... forward our request.
Forward our news. Help ...
And on November 6, another broadcast:
We appeal to the conscience of the world. Why cannot you hear the call for help of our murdered women and children? Have you received our transmission? Attention! Attention! Munich! Munich! Take immediate action. In the Dunapentele area we urgently need medicine, bandages, arms, food and ammunition.
The final transmission, 24 hours later:
Must we appeal once again?
We have wounded ... who have given their blood for the sacred cause of liberty, but we have no bandages ... no medicine. The last piece of bread has been eaten. Those who have died for liberty ... accuse you who are able to help and who have not helped. We have read an appeal to the UN and every honest man.
Radio Free Europe, Munich! Radio free Europe, Munich!9
MOCKINGBIRD was an immense financial undertaking. Funds flowed from the CIA largely through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), founded by Tom Braden, a "liberal" who would make his mark as a syndicated columnist and co-host of CNN's Crossfire. The CCF was founded in June, 1950 by prominent academics assembled in Berlin's U.S. zone at the Titania Palace theater. The CCF, directed by Denis de Rougemont, was formed to "defend freedom and democracy against the new tyranny sweeping the world." About 20 periodicals were financed by the front, including Encounter in the UK, The New Leader, Africa Report, and El Mundo Nuevo in Latin America.10
The hidden source of CCF's income and the influence the CIA had been exercising over the intellectual life of Europe erupted in a wave of scandal that filled a page of the England's Observer in 1967. The Sunday Times drew down on "CIA Culture," a "Literary Bay of Pigs." Encounter, the epicenter of the scandal, was presided over by Melvin Lasky, a former Army captain. Lasky negotiated with the CIA for funding from the start, and edited the journal for 32 years.
Most literati embroiled in the scandal denied any role in it, including co-editors Stephen Spender and Frank Kermode, who immediately resigned in a huff. Editor Lasky claimed to have "learned" of the true source of funding in 1963. However, Tom Braden, in disclosures that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, acknowledged that he'd set up the "front" program for the CIA, appointed one agent to run the CCF and another to edit Encounter.11
Lasky shaped the reputations of some the UK's most respected anti-communist "scholars," including Hugh Trevor-Roper, a military intelligence officer, and George Urban, previously director of Radio Free America and a later adviser to Margaret Thatcher on German affairs. From the Lasky crowd emerged historian and poet Robert Conquest, whose The Great Terror, an account of the Stalin purge, is widely considered a minor classic (gratis the CIA).12
The Nation reported a major stink over the CIA subsidies to Encounter." The journal, with a circulation of 42, 000, put a number of journals not funded by the CIA out of business." Lasky was unruffled, even though the British press found an "agonizing debate" raging in academia "around the question of what a free thinker should do when he finds out that his free thought has been subsidized by a ruthlessly aggressive intelligence agency as part of the international cold war."13
In 1965 the CCF was renamed Forum World Features and purchased by Kern House Enterprises a CIA front directed by Mockingbird John Hay Whitney, publisher of the International Herald Tribune, a former ambassador to England.14
Without a rumble, the cold war propaganda machine rolled into the book publishing business. Deals were struck with a host of writers, commercial publishers and distributors. The CIA, in collaboration with the USIA, financed the publication of well over a thousand books of anti-Soviet propaganda by 1967. The CIA publication list included The Communist Front and Political Warfare by James D. Atkinson, In Pursuit of World Order by Richard N. Gardner and The Dynamics of Soviet Society by Walt Rostow. Langley also financed the worldwide distribution of an animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm.15
The book business still pumps out radically "conservative" propaganda for mass consumption. In an unpublished proposal for a book on the life of Joe Coors, Delaware writer S.T. Shields reports that the brewer determined the economic policy of Ronald Reagan in his first run for the presidency. To hammer out the details of Reagan's economic plank, Coors, who maintained close ties to the intelligence underground, "recruited his friend and financial mentor, University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, well-known but controversial. Friedman's 1976 Nobel for economics had offended many prior laureates who protested in a letter to the Swedish academy that following the overthrow and assassination of Chilean president Salvador Allende, Friedman had been invited by the Pinochet-headed junta to help the new regime formulate a conservative economic policy.
With backing from MOCKINGBIRD's Richard Mellon Scaife, publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review a gracious financier of Accuracy in Media (AIM, a military-industrial propaganda mill), "Coors paid a politically conservative Erie, Pa. television station, WQLN, to make a ten-part series, Free to Choose, starring Friedman and his monetarist theories. Widely aired on public television during 1980, and anywhere else its sponsors could find audiences, the series was an effective propaganda tool in convincing millions of Americans that the Reagan economic program could work. Issued as a book, Free to Choose was a non-fiction bestseller."
The building of corporate media empires by the CIA occurred throughout the western hemisphere. In the early 1950s the Agency gave $7 million to press baron Axel Springer toward the formation of his vast media conglomerate. The Berlin mogul's holdings came to include a daily newspaper with 11 million readers, Bild Zeitung, an arch-conservative tabloid spiced with sex and violence, several popular magazines and the Ullstein publishing house. A competitor, Rudolph Augstein, the publisher of Der Spiegel, complains, "No single man in Germany, before or after Hitler, with the possible exception of Bismarck or the two emperors, has had so much power as Springer."
When the CIA came along, Herr Springer was well known for his liberal views. As he gained power, however, he espoused increasingly conservative political opinions. Within 20 years his dailies were snatched up by about 35% of the German readership and his Sunday papers exceeded 80% of the market. His star was still rising when Springer launched an aggressive editorial campaign against German liberals. In the spring of 1968, students marched against his media monopoly in Hamburg, Berlin and Munich, stormed the editorial offices.
One CIA official told reporter Murray Waas that some at the agency felt they'd played the role of Dr. Frankenstein: "We had in the long run helped create something that served neither American interests nor West German ones."16
By the time MOCKINGBIRD's ties to Springer were exposed, 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 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 New York Times ran a front-page story detailing a worldwide propa
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