This article by Professor James Tracy first
published in August 2015 is of particular relevance in relation to the
“fake news” campaign directed against the alternative and independent
media.
In a bitter irony, the media coverup of the CIA’s covert support
to Al Qaeda and the ISIS is instrumented by the CIA which also oversees
the mainstream media.
Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has
been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable
influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis.
CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, if any,
relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate
collaboration indicates a far different story–indeed, one that media
historians are reluctant to examine.
When seriously practiced, the journalistic profession involves
gathering information concerning individuals, locales, events, and
issues. In theory such information informs people about their world,
thereby strengthening “democracy.” This is exactly the reason why news
organizations and individual journalists are tapped as assets by
intelligence agencies and, as the experiences of German journalist Udo
Ulfkotte (entry 47 below) suggest, this practice is at least as
widespread today as it was at the height of the Cold War.
Consider the coverups of election fraud in 2000 and 2004, the
events of September 11, 2001, the invasions Afghanistan and Iraq, the
destabilization of Syria, and the creation of “ISIS.” These are among
the most significant events in recent world history, and yet they are
also those much of the American public is wholly ignorant of.
In an era where information and communication technologies are
ubiquitous, prompting many to harbor the illusion of being
well-informed, one must ask why this condition persists.
Further, why do prominent US journalists routinely fail to question
other deep events that shape America’s tragic history over the past half
century, such as the political assassinations of the 1960s, or the
central role played by the CIA major role in international drug
trafficking?
Popular and academic commentators have suggested various reasons for
the almost universal failure of mainstream journalism in these areas,
including newsroom sociology, advertising pressure, monopoly ownership,
news organizations’ heavy reliance on “official” sources, and
journalists’ simple quest for career advancement. There is also, no
doubt, the influence of professional public relations maneuvers. Yet
such a broad conspiracy of silence suggests another province of
deception examined far too infrequently—specifically the CIA and similar
intelligence agencies’ continued involvement in the news media to mold
thought and opinion in ways scarcely imagined by the lay public.
The following historical and contemporary facts–by no means
exhaustive–provides a glimpse of how the power such entities possess to
influence if not determine popular memory and what respectable
institutions deem to be the historical record.
- The CIA’s Operation MOCKINGBIRD is a
long-recognised keystone among researchers pointing to the Agency’s
clear interest in and relationship to major US news media. MOCKINGBIRD
grew out of the CIA’s forerunner, the Office for Strategic Services
(OSS, 1942-47), which during World War Two had established a network of
journalists and psychological warfare experts operating primarily in the
European theatre.
- Many of the relationships forged under OSS auspices were carried
over into the postwar era through a State Department-run organization
called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) overseen by OSS staffer Frank Wisner.
- The OPC “became the fastest-growing unit within the nascent CIA,”
historian Lisa Pease observes, “rising in personnel from 302 in 1949 to
2,812 in 1952, along with 3,142 overseas contract personnel. In the same
period, the budget rose from $4.7 million to $82 million.” Lisa Pease,
“The Media and the Assassination,” in James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X, Port Townsend, WA, 2003, 300.
- Like many career CIA officers, eventual CIA Director/Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms
was recruited out of the press corps by his own supervisor at the
United Press International’s Berlin Bureau to join in the OSS’s
fledgling “black propaganda” program. “‘[Y]ou’re a natural,” Helms’ boss
remarked. Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency, New York: Random House, 2003, 30-31.
- Wisner tapped Marshall Plan funds to pay for his division’s early
exploits, money his branch referred to as “candy.” “We couldn’t spend it
all,” CIA agent Gilbert Greenway recalls. “I remember once meeting with
Wisner and the comptroller. My God, I said, how can we spend that?
There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was
amazing.” Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: The New Press, 2000, 105.
- When the OPC was merged with the
Office of Special Operations in 1948 to create the CIA, OPC’s media
assets were likewise absorbed.
- Wisner maintained the top secret “Propaganda Assets Inventory,”
better known as “Wisner’s Wurlitzer”—a virtual rolodex of over 800 news
and information entities prepared to play whatever tune Wisner chose.
“The network included journalists, columnists, book publishers, editors,
entire organizations such as Radio Free Europe, and stringers across
multiple news organizations.” Pease, “The Media and the Assassination,”
300.
- A few years after Wisner’s operation was up-and-running he “’owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek,
CBS, and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six
hundred in all, according to a CIA analyst. Each one was a separate
‘operation,’” investigative journalist Deborah Davis notes, “requiring a
code name, a field supervisor, and a field office, at an annual cost of
tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars—there has never been an
accurate accounting.” Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, Second Edition, Bethesda MD: National Press Inc, 1987, 139.
- Psychological operations in the form of journalism were perceived as necessary to influence and direct mass opinion, as well as elite perspectives.
“[T]he President of the United States, the Secretary of State,
Congressmen and even the Director of the CIA himself will read, believe,
and be impressed by a report from Cy Sulzberger, Arnaud de Borchgrave,
or Stewart Alsop when they don’t even bother to read a CIA report on the
same subject,” noted CIA agent Miles Copeland. Cited in Pease, “The
Media and the Assassination,” 301.
- By the mid-to-late 1950s, Darrell
Garwood points out, the Agency sought to limit criticism directed
against covert activity and bypass congressional oversight or potential
judicial interference by “infiltrat[ing] the groves of academia, the
missionary corps, the editorial boards of influential journal and book
publishers, and any other quarters where public attitudes could be
effectively influenced.” Darrell Garwood, Under Cover: Thirty-Five Years of CIA Deception, New York: Grove Press, 1985, 250.
- The CIA frequently intercedes in
editorial decision-making. For example, when the Agency proceeded to
wage an overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954, Allen and
John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and CIA
Director respectively, called upon New York Times publisher
Arthur Hays Sulzberger to reassign reporter Sydney Gruson from Guatemala
to Mexico City. Sulzberger thus placed Gruson in Mexico City with the
rationale that some repercussions from the revolution might be felt in
Mexico. Pease, “The Media and the Assassination,” 302.
- Since the early 1950s the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both
English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA
operatives,” Carl Bernstein reported in 1977. “One such publication was
the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA
until the 1970s.” Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
- The CIA exercised informal liaisons with news media executives, in
contrast to its relationships with salaried reporters and stringers,
“who were much more subject to direction from the Agency” according to
Bernstein. “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 William Paley to sign a piece of paper saying he
won’t fink.’” Director of CBS William Paley’s personal “friendship with
CIA Director Dulles is now known to have been one of the most
influential and significant in the communications industry,” author
Debora Davis explains. “He provided cover for CIA agents, supplied
out-takes of news film, permitted the debriefing of reporters, and in
many ways set the standard for the cooperation between the CIA and major
broadcast companies which lasted until the mid-1970s.” Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, Second Edition, Bethesda MD: National Press Inc, 1987, 175.
- “The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its
most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials,” Bernstein
points out in his key 1977 article. “From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA
employees were provided 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.” In
addition, Sulzberger was a close friend of CIA Director 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.'” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
- CBS’s Paley worked reciprocally with the CIA, allowing the Agency to
utilize network resources and personnel. “It was a form of assistance
that a number of wealthy persons are now generally known to have
rendered the CIA through their private interests,” veteran broadcast
journalist Daniel Schorr wrote in 1977. “It suggested to me, however,
that a relationship of confidence and trust had existed between him and
the agency.” Schorr points to “clues indicating that CBS had been
infiltrated.” For example, “A news editor remembered the CIA officer who
used to come to the radio control room in New York in the early
morning, and, with the permission of persons unknown, listened to CBS
correspondents around the world recording their ‘spots’ for the ‘World
News Roundup’ and discussing events with the editor on duty. Sam Jaffe
claimed that when he applied in 1955 for a job with CBS, a CIA officer
told him that he would be hired–which he subsequently was. He was told
that he would be sent to Moscow–which he subsequently was; he was
assigned in 1960 to cover the trial of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.
[Richard] Salant told me,” Schorr continues, “that when he first became
president of CBS News in 1961, a CIA case officer called saying he
wanted to continue the ‘long standing relationship known to Paley and
[CBS president Frank] Stanton, but Salant was told by Stanton there was
no obligation that he knew of” (276). Schorr, Daniel. Clearing the Air, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, 277, 276.
- National Enquirer publisher Gene Pope Jr. worked briefly on
the CIA’s Italy desk in the early 1950s and maintained close ties with
the Agency thereafter. Pope refrained from publishing dozens of stories
with “details of CIA kidnappings and murders, enough stuff for a year’s
worth of headlines” in order to “collect chits, IOUs,” Pope’s son
writes. “He figured he’d never know when he might need them, and those
IOUs would come in handy when he got to 20 million circulation. When
that happened, he’d have the voice to be almost his own branch of
government and would need the cover.” Paul David Pope, The Deeds of My Fathers: How My Grandfather and Father Built New York and Created the Tabloid World of Today, New York: Phillip Turner/Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, 309, 310.
- One explosive story Pope’s National Enquirer‘s refrained
from publishing in the late 1970s centered on excerpts from a
long-sought after diary of President Kennedy’s lover, Mary Pinchot
Meyer, who was murdered on October 12, 1964. “The reporters who wrote
the story were even able to place James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s head
of counterintelligence operations, at the scene.” Another potential
story drew on “documents proving that [Howard] Hughes and the CIA had
been connected for years and that the CIA was giving Hughes money to
secretly fund, with campaign donations, twenty-seven congressmen and
senators who sat on sub-committees critical to the agency. There are
also fifty-three international companies named and sourced as CIA fronts
.. and even a list of reporters for mainstream media organizations who
were playing ball with the agency.” Pope, The Deeds of My Fathers, 309.
- Angleton, who oversaw the Agency
counterintelligence branch for 25 years, “ran a completely independent
group entirely separate cadre 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.” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
- The CIA conducted a “formal
training program” during the 1950s for the sole purpose of instructing
its agents to function as newsmen. “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.” The
Agency’s preference, however, was to engage journalists who were already
established in the industry. Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
- Newspaper columnists and broadcast journalists with household names have been known to maintain close ties with the Agency.
“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,” Bernstein
maintains. “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.”
Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
- Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, and Washington Post publisher Phillip Graham were close associates, and the Post developed into one of the most influential news organs in the United States due to its ties with the CIA. The Post
managers’ “individual relations with intelligence had in fact been the
reason the Post Company had grown as fast as it did after the war,”
Davis (172) observes. “[T]heir secrets were its corporate secrets,
beginning with MOCKINGBIRD. Phillip Graham’s commitment to intelligence
had given his friends Frank Wisner an interest in helping to make the Washington Post the dominant news vehicle in Washington, which they had done by assisting with its two most crucial acquisitions, the Times-Herald and WTOP radio and television stations.” Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, 172.
- In the wake of World War One the
Woodrow Wilson administration placed journalist and author Walter
Lippmann in charge of recruiting agents for the Inquiry, a
first-of-its-kind ultra-secret civilian intelligence organization whose
role involved ascertaining information to prepare Wilson for the peace
negotiations, as well as identify foreign natural resources for Wall
Street speculators and oil companies. The activities of this
organization served as a prototype for the function eventually performed
by the CIA, namely “planning, collecting, digesting, and editing the
raw data,” notes historian Servando Gonzalez. “This roughly corresponds
to the CIA’s intelligence cycle: planning and direction, collection,
processing, production and analysis, and dissemination.” Most Inquiry
members would later become members of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Lippmann would go on to become the Washington Post’s best known columnists. Servando Gonzalez, Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People, Oakland, CA: Spooks Books, 2010, 50.
- The two most prominent US newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, kept close ties with the CIA.
“Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign
correspondents and stringers for both the weekly newsmagazines,”
according to Carl Bernstein. “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.” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
- In his autobiography former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt quotes
Bernstein’s “The CIA and the Media” article at length. “I know nothing
to contradict this report,” Hunt declares, suggesting the investigative
journalist of Watergate fame didn’t go far enough. “Bernstein further
identified some of the country’s top media executives as being valuable
assets to the agency … But the list of organizations that cooperated
with the agency was a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of the media industry,
including ABC, NBC, the Associated Press, UPI, Reuters, Hearst
Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, and others.” E. Howard Hunt, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond, Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007, 150.
- When the first major exposé of the CIA emerged in 1964 with the publication of The Invisible Government
by journalists David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, the CIA considered
purchasing the entire printing to keep the book from the public, yet in
the end judged against it. “To an extent that is only beginning to be
perceived, this shadow government is shaping the lives of 190,000,000
Americans” authors Wise and Ross write in the book’s preamble. “Major
decisions involving peace and war are taking place out of public view.
An informed citizen might come to suspect that the foreign policy of the
United States often works publicly in one direction and secretly
through the Invisible Government in just the opposite direction.”Lisa Pease, “When the CIA’s Empire Struck Back,” Consortiumnews.com, February 6, 2014.
- Agency infiltration of the news media
shaped public perception of deep events and undergirded the official
explanations of such events. For example, the Warren Commission’s report
on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was met with almost
unanimous approval by US media outlets. “I have never seen an official
report greeted with such universal praise as that accorded the Warren
Commission’s findings when they were made public on September 24, 1964,”
recalls investigative reporter Fred Cook. “All the major television
networks devoted special programs and analyses to the report; the next
day the newspapers ran long columns detailing its findings, accompanied
by special news analyses and editorials. The verdict was unanimous. The
report answered all questions, left no room for doubt. Lee Harvey
Oswald, alone and unaided, had assassinated the president of the United
States.” Fred J. Cook, Maverick: Fifty Years of Investigative Reporting, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984, 276.
- In late 1966 the New York Times began an inquiry on the
numerous questions surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination that
were not satisfactorily dealt with by the Warren Commission. “It was
never completed,” author Jerry Policoff observes, “nor would the New
York Times ever again question the findings of the Warren Commission.” When the story was being developed the lead reporter at the Times‘ Houston bureau “said that he and others came up with ‘a lot of unanswered questions’ that the Times
didn’t bother to pursue. ‘I’d be off on a good lead and then somebody’d
call me off and send me out to California on another story or
something. We never really detached anyone for this. We weren’t really
serious.'” Jerry Policoff, “The Media and the Murder of John Kennedy,”
in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch and Russell Stetler, eds., The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, New York: Vintage, 1976, 265.
- When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison embarked on an
investigation of the JFK assassination in 1966 centering on Lee Harvey
Oswald’s presence in New Orleans in the months leading up to November,
22, 1963, “he was cross-whipped with two hurricane blasts, one from
Washington and one from New York,” historian James DiEugenio explains.
The first, of course, was from the government, specifically the Central
Intelligence Agency, the FBI, and to a lesser extent, the White House.
The blast from New York was from the major mainstream media e.g.
Time-Life and NBC. Those two communication giants were instrumental in
making Garrison into a lightening rod for ridicule and criticism. This
orchestrated campaign … was successful in diverting attention from what
Garrison was uncovering by creating controversy about the DA himself.”
DiEugenio, Preface, in William Davy, Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim Garrison Investigation, Reston VA: Jordan Publishing, 1999.
- The CIA and other US intelligence
agencies used the news media to sabotage Garrison’s 1966-69 independent
investigation of the Kennedy assassination. Garrison presided over the
only law enforcement agency with subpoena power to seriously delve into
the intricate details surrounding JFK’s murder. One of Garrison’s key
witnesses, Gordon Novel, fled New Orleans to avoid testifying before the
Grand Jury assembled by Garrison. According to DiEugenio, CIA Director
Allen “Dulles and the Agency would begin to connect the fugitive from
New Orleans with over a dozen CIA friendly journalists who—in a blatant
attempt to destroy Garrison’s reputation—would proceed to write up the
most outrageous stories imaginable about the DA.” James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and The Garrison Case, Second Edition, New York: SkyHorse Publishing, 2012, 235.
- CIA officer Victor Marchetti recounted to author William Davy that
in 1967 while attending staff meetings as an assistant to then-CIA
Director Richard Helms, “Helms expressed great concerns over [former OSS
officer, CIA operative and primary suspect in Jim Garrison’s
investigation Clay] Shaw’s predicament, asking his staff, ‘Are we giving
them all the help we can down there?'” William Davy, Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim Garrison Investigation, Reston VA: Jordan Publishing, 1999.
- The pejorative dimensions of the term “conspiracy theory” were
introduced into the Western lexicon by CIA “media assets,” as evidenced
in the design laid out by Document 1035-960 Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report, an Agency communiqué issued in early 1967 to Agency bureaus throughout the world at a time when attorney Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment was atop bestseller lists and New Orleans DA Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination began to gain traction.
- Time had close relations with the CIA stemming from the
friendship of the magazine’s publisher Henry Luce and Eisenhower CIA
chief Allen Dulles. When former newsman Richard Helms was appointed DCI
in 1966 he “began to cultivate the press,” prompting journalists toward
conclusions that placed the Agency in a positive light. As Time
Washington correspondent Hugh Sidney recollects, “‘[w]ith [John] McCone
and [Richard] Helms, we had a set-up when the magazine was doing
something on the CIA, we went to them and put it before them … We were
never misled.’ Similarly, when Newsweek decided in the fall of 1971 to
do a cover story on Richard Helms and ‘The New Espionage,’ the magazine,
according to a Newsweek staffer, went directly to the agency for much
of the information. And the article … generally reflected the line that
Helms was trying so hard to sell: that since the latter 1960s … the
focus of attention and prestige within CIA’ had switched from the
Clandestine Services to the analysis of intelligence, and that ‘the vast
majority of recruits are bound for’ the Intelligence Directorate.”
Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, 362-363.
- In 1970 Jim Garrison wrote and published the semi-autobiographical A Heritage of Stone,
a work that examines how the New Orleans DA “discovered that the CIA
operated within the borders of the United States, and how it took the
CIA six months to reply to the Warren Commission’s question of whether
Oswald and [Jack] Ruby had been with the Agency,” Garrison biographer
and Temple University humanities professor Joan Mellen observes. “In
response to A Heritage of Stone, the CIA rounded up its media assets” and the book was panned by reviewers writing for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun Times, and Life magazine. “John Leonard’s New York Times
review went through a metamorphosis,” Mellen explains. “The original
last paragraph challenged the Warren Report: ‘Something stinks about
this whole affair,’ Leonard wrote. ‘Why were Kennedy’s neck organs not
examined at Bethesda for evidence of a frontal shot? Why was his body
whisked away to Washington before the legally required Texas inquest?
Why?’ This paragraph evaporated in later editions of the Times.
A third of a column gone, the review then ended: ‘Frankly I prefer to
believe that the Warren Commission did a poor job, rather than a
dishonest one. I like to think that Garrison invents monsters to explain
incompetence.'” Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History, Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2005, 323, 324.
- CIA Deputy Director for Plans Cord Meyer Jr. appealed to Harper
& Row president emeritus Cass Canfield Sr. over the book publisher’s
pending release of Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,
based on the author’s fieldwork and Yale PhD dissertation wherein he
examined the CIA’s explicit role in the opium trade. “Claiming my book
was a threat to national security,” McCoy recalls, “the CIA official had
asked Harper & Row to suppress it. To his credit, Mr. Canfield had
refused. But he had agreed to review the manuscript prior to
publication.” Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Chicago Review Press, 2003, xx.
- Publication of The Secret Team, a book by US Air Force
Colonel and Pentagon-CIA liaison L. Fletcher Prouty recounting the
author’s firsthand knowledge of CIA black operations and espionage, was
met with a wide scale censorship campaign in 1972. “The campaign to kill
the book was nationwide and world-wide,” Prouty notes. “It was removed
from the Library of Congress and from college libraries as letters I
received attested all too frequently … I was a writer whose book had
been cancelled by a major publisher [Prentice Hall] and a major
paperback publisher [Ballantine Books] under the persuasive hand of the
CIA.” L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, New York: SkyHorse Publishing, 2008, xii, xv.
- During the Pike Committee hearings in 1975 Congressman Otis Pike
asked DCI William Colby, “Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are
working for television networks?” Colby responded, “This, I think, gets
into the kind of details, Mr. Chairman, that I’d like to get into in
executive session.” Once the chamber was cleared Colby admitted that in
1975 specifically “the CIA was using ‘media cover’ for eleven agents,
many fewer than in the heyday of the cloak-and-pencil operations, but no
amount of questioning would persuade him to talk about the publishers
and network chieftains who had cooperated at the top.” Schorr, Clearing the Air, 275.
- “There is quite an incredible spread of relationships,” former CIA
intelligence officer William Bader informed a US Senate Intelligence
Committee investigating the CIA’s infiltration of the nation’s
journalistic outlets. “You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are Agency people at the management level.” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
- In 1985 film historian and professor Joseph McBride came across a
November 29, 1963 memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover, titled,
“Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” wherein the FBI director
stated that his agency provided two individuals with briefings, one of
whom was “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” ” When
McBride queried the CIA with the memo a “PR man was tersely formal and
opaque: ‘I can neither confirm nor deny.’ It was the standard response
the agency gave when it dealt with its sources and methods,” journalist
Russ Baker notes. When McBride published a story in The Nation, “The Man
Who Wasn’t There, ‘George Bush,’ C.I.A. Operative,” the CIA came
forward with a statement that the George Bush referenced in the FBI
record “apparently” referenced a George William Bush, who
filled a perfunctory night shift position at CIA headquarters that
“would have been the appropriate place to receive such a report.”
McBride tracked down George William Bush to confirm he was only employed
briefly as a “probationary civil servant” who had “never received
interagency briefings.” Shortly thereafter The Nation ran a
second story by McBride wherein “the author provided evidence that the
Central Intelligence Agency had foisted a lie on the American people …
As with McBride’s previous story, this disclosure was greeted with the
equivalent of a collective media yawn.” Since the episode researchers
have found documents linking George H. W. Bush to the CIA as early as
1953. Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 7-12.
- Operation Gladio, the well-documented collaboration
between Western spy agencies, including the CIA, and NATO involving
coordinated terrorist shootings and bombings of civilian targets
throughout Europe from the late 1960s through the 1980s, has been
effectively expunged from major mainstream news outlets. A LexisNexis
Academic search conducted in 2012 for “Operation Gladio” retrieved 31
articles in English language news media—most appearing in British
newspapers. Only four articles discussing Gladio ever appeared in US
publications—three in the New York Times and one brief mention in the Tampa Bay Times.
With the exception of a 2009 BBC documentary, no network or cable news
broadcast has ever referenced the state-sponsored terror
operation. Almost all of the articles referencing Gladio appeared in
1990 when Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly admitted
Italy’s participation in the process. The New York Times
downplayed any US involvement, misleadingly designating Gladio “an
Italian creation” in a story buried on page A16. In reality, former CIA
director William Colby revealed in his memoirs that covert
paramilitaries were a significant agency undertaking set up after World
War II, including “the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable
people, in Washington [and] NATO.” James F. Tracy, “False Flag Terror and Conspiracies of Silence,” Global Research, August 10, 2012.
- Days before the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City DCI William Colby confided to his
friend, Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp his personal concerns over
the Militia and Patriot movement within the United States, then surging
in popularity due to the use of the alternative media of that era–books,
periodicals, cassette tapes, and radio broadcasts. “I watched as the
Anti-War movement rendered it impossible for this country to conduct or
win the Vietnam War,” Colby remarked. “I tell you, dear friend, that the
Militia and Patriot movement in which, as an attorney, you have become
one of the centerpieces, is far more significant and far more dangerous
for American than the Anti-War movement ever was, if it is not
intelligently dealt with. And I really mean this.” David Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, Venice CA: Feral House, 1998, 367.
- Shortly after the appearance of journalist Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury News
chronicling the Agency’s involvement in drug trafficking, the CIA’s
public affairs division embarked on a campaign to counter what it termed
“a genuine public relations crisis for the Agency.” Webb was merely
reporting to a large audience what had already been well documented by
scholars such as Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the 1989 Kerry
Committee Report on Iran-Contra—that the CIA had long been involved in
the illegal transnational drug trade. Such findings were upheld in 1999
in a study by the CIA inspector general. Nevertheless, beginning shortly
after Webb’s series ran, “CIA media spokesmen would remind reporters
seeking comment that this series represented no real news,” a CIA
internal organ noted, “in that similar charges were made in the 1980s
and were investigated by the Congress and were found to be without
substance. Reporters were encouraged to read the “Dark Alliance’ series
closely and with a critical eye to what allegations could actually be
backed with evidence.” http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0001372115.pdf
- On December 10, 2004 investigative
journalist Gary Webb died of two .38 caliber gunshot wounds to the head.
The coroner ruled the death a suicide. “Gary Webb was MURDERED,”
concluded FBI senior special agent Ted Gunderson in 2005. “He (Webb)
resisted the first shot [to the head that exited via jaw] so he was shot
again with the second shot going into the head [brain].” Gunderson
regards the theory that Webb could have managed to shoot himself twice
as “impossible!” Charlene Fassa, “Gary Webb: More Pieces in the Suicided Puzzle,” Rense.com, December 11, 2005.
- The most revered journalists who
receive “exclusive” information and access to the corridors of power are
typically the most subservient to officialdom and often have
intelligence ties. Those granted such access understand that they must
likewise uphold government-sanctioned narratives. For example, the New York Times’
Tom Wicker reported on November 22, 1963 that President John F. Kennedy
“was hit by a bullet in the throat, just below the Adam’s apple.” Yet
his account went to press before the official story of a single assassin
shooting from the rear became established. Wicker was chastised through
“lost access, complaints to editors and publishers, social penalties,
leaks to competitors, a variety of responses no one wants.” Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Coverup of 9/11, Gabrioloa Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2006, 169-170.
- The CIA actively promotes a
desirable public image of its history and function by advising the
production of Hollywood vehicles, such as Argo and Zero Dark Thirty.
The Agency retains “entertainment industry liaison officers” on its
staff that “plant positive images about itself (in other words,
propaganda) through our most popular forms of entertainment,” Tom Hayden
explains in the LA Review of Books. “So natural has the
CIA–entertainment connection become that few question its legal or moral
ramifications. This is a government agency like no other; the truth of
its operations is not subject to public examination. When the CIA’s
hidden persuaders influence a Hollywood movie, it is using a popular
medium to spin as favorable an image of itself as possible, or at least,
prevent an unfavorable one from taking hold.” Tom Hayden, “Review of The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television by Tricia Jenkins,” LA Review of Books, February 24, 2013,
- Former CIA case officer Robert David
Steele states that CIA manipulation of news media is “worse” in the
2010s than in the late 1970s when Bernstein wrote “The CIA and the
Media.” “The sad thing is that the CIA is very able to manipulate [the
media] and it has financial arrangements with media, with Congress, with
all others. But the other half of that coin is that the media is
lazy.” James Tracy interview with Robert David Steele, August 2, 2014,
- A well-known fact is that broadcast
journalist Anderson Cooper interned for the CIA while attending Yale as
an undergraduate in the late 1980s. According to Wikipedia Cooper’s
great uncle, William Henry Vanderbilt III, was an Executive Officer of
the Special Operations Branch of the OSS under the spy organization’s
founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan. While Wikipedia is an often dubious
source, Vanderbilt’s OSS involvement would be in keeping with the
OSS/CIA reputation of taking on highly affluent personnel for overseas
derring-do. William Henry Vanderbilt III, Wikipedia.
- Veteran German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, author of the 2014 book Gekaufte Journalisten
(Bought Journalists) revealed how under the threat of job termination
he was routinely compelled to publish articles written by intelligence
agents using his byline. “I ended up publishing articles under my own
name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services,
especially the German secret service,” Ulfkotte explained in a recent
interview with Russia Today. “German Journo: European Media Writing Pro-US Stories Under CIA Pressure,” RT, October 18, 2014.
- In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm seeking
to “identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge
information technologies that serve United States national security
interests.” The firm has exercised financial relationships with internet
platforms Americans use on a routine basis, including Google and
Facebook. “If you want to keep up with Silicon Valley, you need to
become part of Silicon Valley,” says Jim Rickards, an adviser to the
U.S. intelligence community familiar with In-Q-Tel’s activities. “The
best way to do that is have a budget because when you have a checkbook,
everyone comes to you.” At one point IQT “catered largely to the needs
of the CIA.” Today, however, “the firm supports many of the 17 agencies
within the U.S. intelligence community, including the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA) and the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology
Directorate.” Matt Egan, “In-Q-Tel: A Glimpse Inside the CIA’s Venture Capital Arm,” FoxBusiness.com, June 14, 2013.
- At a 2012 conference held by In-Q-Tel CIA Director David Patraeus
declared that the rapidly-developing “internet of things” and “smart
home” will provide the CIA with the ability to spy on any US citizen
should they become a “person of interest’ to the spy community,” Wired
magazine reports. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do
believe it properly applies to these technologies,’ Patraeus enthused,
‘particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft’ … ‘Items of
interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled
through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor
networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected
to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power
computing,” Patraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in
many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading
to quantum computing.” Spencer Ackerman, “CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher,” Wired, March 15, 2012.
- In the summer of 2014 a $600 million computing cloud developed by
Amazon Web Services for the CIA began servicing all 17 federal agencies
comprising the intelligence community. “If the technology plays out as
officials envision,” The Atlantic reports, “it will usher in a
new era of cooperation and coordination, allowing agencies to share
information and services much more easily and avoid the kind of
intelligence gaps that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” “The Details About the CIA’s Deal With Amazon,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2014.
The original source of this article is Memory Hole
