Talk:Operation Mockingbird

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[edit] Copyright information

Note: This entry has been written by the same person who wrote the article on the Spartacus Education website (John Simkin). It is therefore not a violation of copyright.


[edit] Checking and NPOVing

The original claim seems to come from Alex Constantine, who has written a couple books and has an essay that's been widely reprinted on the Internet. I can't find any skeptical treatment at all, but all the sites that carry it seem to be of the conspiracy-theorist bent. This article needs either serious NPOV, or some fact confirmation. --Isomorphic 07:06, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Well the CIA was established in 1948, and i find it hard to believe that Harry Truman hatched a plot to influence the American media. It is impossible to prove a negative, but this is very weak indeed. Propose deletion. --[[PaulinSaudi 11:47, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)]]
The wikipedia article on Allen Welsh Dulles says...

"Dulles also promoted Operation Mockingbird, a program with a goal to influence American media companies." [unsigned]

That article probably needs the comment removed, or else the word "allegedly" needs to go in. --Quadell 14:37, Apr 30, 2004 (UTC)

There is a considerable amount of documentary evidence that Operation Mockingbird existed. However, it is possible that the operation to manipulate the mass media was not actually given this name by the CIA. The first time "Operation Mockingbird" was used was in Deborah Davis's book, Katharine the Great (1979). The original edition was shredded as a result of CIA pressure. After a legal battle the book was republished in 1983. This included information about Ben Bradlee's role in Mockingbird that had been removed in the 1979 edition.

Published evidence of Mockingbird first appeared in Ramparts 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, former head of head of the of the CIA's International Organizations Division, responded to this by publishing an article entitled, I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral, in the Saturday Evening Post. In the article 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."

Cord 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.

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.

Tom Braden gave an interview interview to the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (UK, June, 1975)where he provided more details of how journalists were bribed to write pro-establishment articles.

Carl Bernstein, who had worked with Bob Woodward in the investigation of Watergate, provided further information about Operation Mockingbird in an article in 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.

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."

For a detailed account of this story see:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm

John Simkin (Spartacus Educational)


[edit] VfD Archived Debate

Article listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion Apr 26 to May 3 2004, consensus was to keep. Discussion:

No evidence this thing ever happened. --[[PaulinSaudi 02:50, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)]]

  • A google search for Operation Mockingbird takes one deep into the echo chamber of conspiracy theory. I think ideally this should be kept and NPOVed, but I can't find any skeptical treatment, or any confirmation from a reliable source. The original claims seem to stem from a guy named Alex Constantine, who has written several books and an essay that's been widely reprinted on the internet. --Isomorphic 07:01, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)
  • "Echo Chamber" is exactly the right imagery. I only heard about this as someone on the Straight Dope asked about it. This story has a life of its own, but I know of no basis in fact. The CIA was established in 1948. Does anyone think that one of their earliest programs (under Harry Truman no less) was to influence American newspapers? Exceptional claims demand exceptional proof. I would like to see it.

--[[PaulinSaudi 11:54, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)]]

  • It's true that a distressing number of articles about Operation Mockingbird (OM) also mention alien abductions and such. But despite this, the op may well have been legitimate. (It's verifiable that the CIA does have, and did have, at least some journalists on its payroll.) So did OM exist? Remember that we're deciding the legitimacy of the article itself (which, please note, does not mention Harry Truman}. Here's the evidence I can find:
  1. The Alex Constantine Article (ACA) is a meandering, paranoid, POV text. It alleges a lot of CIA manipulation of the media, which is outside the scope of this specific decision about OM. All of the info it gives on OM, it gets from two sources:
    1. The book "Katherine the Great" by Deborah Davis, a former Village Voice reporter. I haven't read it. Davis says that by the 1950s, OM had arrangements with "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." Aparently, Davis found this out through researching FOIA requests. Has anyone here read the book?
    2. John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations. According to ACA, John Loftus makes some sensational claims. "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." This doesn't sound even remotely credible.
  2. Google doesn't find any Straight Dope articles or Straight Dope Message Board posts on Operation Mockingbird.
  3. There's a separate essay by Steve Kangas that claims "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." He names Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham as the designers. He cites as his sources the above-mentioned book by Deborah Davis, and a web site that no longer exists.
    • Kangas also claims that "at least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA payroll, according to the CIA's testimony before a stunned Church Committee in 1975." This doesn't refer to OM specifically, but if true it at least shows there must have been a similar widespread operation in the 60s and 70s. That's all I can find. Does anyone else have any information about it? Quadell 14:20, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)
      • This may have come from Carl Bernstein's Oct 1977 piece in Rolling Stone. --Kwantus 03:50, 2004 Dec 16 (UTC)
  • Keep. The amount that can be said about it just above proves it's encyclopedic. Even if there never was such a thing as Operation Mockingbird, clearly there's a sufficient body of belief about it to make documenting THAT worthwhile. --—Morven 21:01, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)
    • I agree that we should have an article on this, except that I don't know how we can make an NPOV article without a lot of research. If it's an unsubstantiated claim, that should be made clear in the article – but how can we call it unsubstantiated if we haven't read the sources of the claim, or seen any critical evaluation of them? If there's substantiation, it should be cited, but we can't find any. The origin of the name "Operation Mockingbird" isn't even clear from what I found. --Isomorphic 21:11, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep if can be made NPOV. --RickK 23:12, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)
    • OK. I added a bunch of modifiers and weasel words. No matter how many conditionals I add, I still think we ought to delete it. [[PaulinSaudi 02:21, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)]]
  • Keep. I just overhauled the article to make it NPOV. --Quadell 14:25, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)
  • Keep. The statements in the article are not altogether implausible, and it appears that it has a following which makes the article worthwhile.

End discussion


[edit] Encyclopedic value?

Just a question at the very beginning here. During the introduction it is stated,

"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." (1) (reference, Weise and Ross, Invisible Government)

However, how accurate is this? Did a single branch of the CIA, named the Office of Policy Corodination, control espionage and counter-intelligence? My general impression was that the whole mandate of the CIA and a permeating agenda is espionage (okay, foreign espionage is probably in a separate department) and counter-intelligence. Did CIA really decide to create a form of 'super-branch', "the espionage and counter-intelligence branch"? While the remainder of the organisation transferred its espionage and intelligence operations to them? Mostly a factual question - I don't have access to the source here, but it sounds implausible. Confirm?


[edit] World Tribunal on Iraq -- WTF?

pmj: Is it just me, or does User:Dr Debug's addition to this article seem out of place? Instead of facts or at best reports, it contains vague "findings". These many claims have only one reference -- a page on worldtribunal.org, which itself has no references. Hey, I appreciate Dr Debug's other input, but this just smells like propaganda. I suggest it be removed. --pmj 05:07, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

I think needs improvement. The reference is to Chalabi who received a million for faulty intelligence with regards to the WMDs. He was also the source for Judith Miller. worldtribunal is a very reliable source. Just check the names behind it. But they could have made the statement clearer. --Dr Debug 20:59, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
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