Operation Mockingbird
“The idea of a large organisation controlling the minds and thoughts of individuals… may seem like... an absurd conspiracy that can be found in books and movies…” But in the 1970s it happened...
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
When I was at school, history was well down my list of favourite subjects. I could recall the necessary information well enough. And I appreciated studying some of what had happened in the 20th century, particularly in relation to the two World Wars and the subsequent Cold War. But I preferred the sciences and maths. And I reasoned that in any case there would be ample opportunity to learn about history later in life, whereas getting into science — particularly in a practical way — once I had left school would be rather more difficult.
Over recent years though, I have taken much more of an interest in matters historical. Not least since it became apparent at the local pub quiz that I had some major gaps in my knowledge. And since 2020 I have increasingly realised that understanding the past is rather more useful for understanding the present than I had previously thought.
Anyhow, enough of the preamble. This short post is intended to provide some context for the forthcoming follow-up to this article…
…in the shape of information about Operation Mockingbird.
The website School History — schoolhistory.co.uk…
…proudly serving over 2 million teachers every year (link)…
…has this overview article:
It is consistent with other material I have read.
Some excerpts are below, along with some additional comments.
The article begins with this succinct summary:
Operation Mockingbird is the name given to the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) involvement in the manipulation of the news published in the United States and across the world. Today, we can identify this kind of manipulation as fake news.
Operation Mockingbird commonly refers to the CIA’s involvement in journalism during the 1970s. The CIA bribed students as well as established journalists and reporters to write a CIA version of events.
Senator Frank Church established the Church Committee in order to investigate ‘government operations and potential abuses’. The CIA admitted their manipulation of the mainstream media. They wanted to change the American people’s minds and published the book, Family Jewels.
And continues:
The idea of a large organisation controlling the minds and thoughts of individuals, pushing them towards a specific ideology and certain life choices, may seem like science fiction, or an absurd conspiracy that can be found in books and movies.
I think it would have sounded somewhat far-fetched to my younger self…
However, for some it is certainly not a surprising discovery that corporations, organisations and politicians manipulate public opinion in order to fit certain agendas.
But not after 2020…
And after having read Edward Bernays’ 1928 book Propaganda which I featured in this post:
The School History article continues:
These [corporations, organisations and politicians] are in turn manipulated by even bigger and more powerful organisations, such as the government itself.
I don’t find that difficult to believe, especially now. But there is no mention of organisations influencing governments as discussed e.g. in this post…
…featuring Klaus Schwab who, while Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), said openly that, “we penetrate the cabinets”:
And the WEF is only one of various organisations that form part of what might be described as the Global Public-Private Partnership — discussed in this post:
There is plenty of food for thought in that diagram.
The School History article points out that:
The CIA controlling and manipulating civilians’ minds is not fiction: it is a conspiracy that turned out to be true during the 1970s in the USA. Following the Second World War, the CIA was able to gain control over what was being published not only in the USA but in general across the globe. It exerted much influence over what the public should be allowed to see, and what should be concealed. In essence, it ruled what ‘the public saw, heard and read on a regular basis’ (Tracy, 2018).
Mind control. Or brainwashing.
“A conspiracy that turned out to be true…”
There is then a summary of how Operation Mockingbird was implemented:
Operation Mockingbird [was] a… campaign that aimed not only to influence the media but also to infiltrate it.
From the 1950s, the CIA started recruiting journalists, editors and students in order to write and promulgate false stories. The CIA’s stories were entirely propaganda and their employees were paid huge salaries in order to promote such fake news. Essentially, the CIA managed to control both national and international newspapers through a bribe.
Follow the money is of course often a reliable adage. And the notion that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” is hardly new.
Some more details:
During the 1950s, Cord Meyer and Allen W Dulles devised and organised a propaganda outreach programme. They recruited leading American journalists into a network in order to promulgate the CIA’s views.
The CIA went to the extremes of funding students, cultural organisations and magazines that would spread the CIA’s views of events…
In 1977, Carl Bernstein published ‘The CIA and the Media’ in Rolling Stone magazine. The article exposed much of the CIA’s attitude towards the spreading of fake news and its ‘tacit’ as well as ‘explicit’ collaboration with journalists.
Bernstein explains how journalists did not limit themselves to writing what the CIA suggested: their relationship was much more complicated and intimate. In fact, reporters ‘shared their notebooks with the CIA’, some of the journalists were also award-winning writers, and others became spies in Communist countries (Bernstein, 1977).
According to Dice (2016), more than a billion dollars were being invested each year in such propaganda programmes. The CIA’s writers were generously retributed, and there were no limits on how much they could receive: sometimes they were paid more than half a million dollars to spread the information required by the CIA.
A billion dollars a year invested in propaganda programmes!
When the CIA was caught out in their wrongdoings, they did not reveal the newspapers and the names of the journalists with whom they had collaborated in the past (Harrock 1976).
But there was an investigation:
During the 1970s, the Church Committee was created by Senator Frank Church in order to investigate any ‘government operations and potential abuses’ carried out by the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and the IRS (Goldfarb, 2018). During an interview, Senator Church publicly claimed: ‘we have quite a lot of detailed information and we will evaluate it and we will include any evidence of wrongdoing or any evidence of impropriety in our final report, and we will make recommendation’.
In 1973, the CIA published Family Jewels, a book that exposed all the information that had been hidden and/or manipulated through the years. The book is around seven hundred pages long.
All the information that had been hidden and/or manipulated through the years…?
Moreover, in the same year the Director of the CIA, William E Colby, stated that the CIA would undertake no activity in which there was a risk of influencing domestic public opinion, either directly or indirectly. The Agency would continue its prohibition against the placement of material in the American media…
The adage “Fool me once…” springs to mind.
In 1975, the CIA admitted their manipulation of mainstream media in order to forge and redirect the opinions of American citizens. They admitted that information was distorted in order to fit specific agendas…
I am reminded of the 2019 Trusted New Initiative:
I wonder what history will eventually say about that. And indeed the ways in which the Biden administration waged war on free speech during the covid era:
Although I haven’t yet seen much on that from the Trusted News Initiative…
The apocalypse — in a literal sense, i.e. the removal of concealment, a lifting of the veil — is only just beginning:
It is in the context of learning about the likes of Operation Mockingbird that my interest in history has continued to grow. I have come to see that there is a lot of truth in the notion — often attributed to Mark Twain — that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Until recently, I was largely oblivious not only to Mockingbird, but various other “Operations” which happened not so very long ago. And I will finish here by citing just one other example by way of illustration — Operation Northwoods, featured in this ABC News report from May 2001:
Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included… even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.
The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war…
I can’t help wondering what else America’s “top military brass” — and the modern world’s invisible governors more generally — might have contemplated, or indeed enacted, that is not yet widely known.
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