CIA Operation Mockingbird – How the CIA Controls the Media – COLLECTION / DOCUMENTS

August 20, 2018 in News by RBN Staff

 

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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

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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, 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 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

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what he wrote at www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html,

www.korpios .org/resurgent/CIA timeline .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! Flaving 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 napaiming of villages, which caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about. He
has written about Vietnam’s onfocus= ” if(this .blurlthis .blurO; “>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://serendipitv.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase report 1 .htm (and 2.htm),
onfocu s= ” iflthis .blurlthis .blurO : “>http ://serendipitv.magnet .ch/cia/death squads .htm . and
onfocu s= ” iff this .blurithis .blurO : ” >http ://w w w.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.blurfthis.blurO:”>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=”iffthis.blurfthis.blurO:”>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 often 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 free-

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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.
ROB ART’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?” “ A retired CIA agency caseworker with twenty years experience: “I
never gave a thought to legality or morality. Frankly, I did what worked.”

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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

3

agency’s crimes and atrocities.

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

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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 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 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.

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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. 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

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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. 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
1 963 , 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 Fangley, 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 . Eater 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

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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 Lreedom, 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

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 L. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National
Review and gadfly host of TV’s Piring 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. Pirst, 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 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, 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 Fiberty. 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 Fiberty. Clare Boothe Fuce – 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 Fuce, 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 Fee Iacocca – Chairman, General Motors William S. Schreyer – Chairman,
Merrill Fynch. Richard R. Shinn – Chairman, Metropolitan Fife Insurance Company. Joseph Kennedy

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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 (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.” 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.”

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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 Detente 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 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.” 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.

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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.” 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: Fynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Carthage Foundation Earhart Foundation Charles G.
Koch David H. Koch Claude R. Fambe 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. 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 facade 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. 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

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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. 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. – ‘

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/bluml.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.

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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 tty 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, 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,

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according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.
onfocus=”if(this.blur)this.blurO;”>http://www.realhistorv archives.com/media/ciamedia.htm

Author: Ashley Overbeck

Title: A Report on CIA Infiltration and Manipulation of the Mass Media

original source: onfocus=” iflthis .blur Ithis .blurO: “>www.geocities .com/cpa blacktown/200003 1 8mediao verb .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 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 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,”

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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 Stansheld 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, 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 Hies. And although members concluded

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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 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 Hint 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 Hint 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, “Lorum Service” (later known as Lorum World
Leatures), in addition to the CIA-funded “Africa Report and “Survey.” Howe was fully aware of his employer’s CIA ties, referring
once to the LWL 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 (CLR) on the other hand was a CIA agent before taking a job as a Post reporter. Geyelin joined the

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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 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 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 Homell, 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

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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

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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 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 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 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 Bliicher, 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?).

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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 Diisseldorf, West
Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the
Industrie Club in Diisseldorf in 1982, von Bliicher 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.

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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.eom/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)

mockingbird

– 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.

– Time Warner — 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 1 8th 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

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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 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 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 Focal 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. FRONTFINE: The Merchants of Cool –
Media Giants On PBS.org, the FRONTFINE 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 Faden 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

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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.blurO:”>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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