![]() ![]() Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. “Let’s not pick on some poor reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee’s investigators. There is ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. 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.Īmong the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps?Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald?Tribune. More than 400 American journalists … in the past twenty?five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. ![]() You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.įamed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein wrote in 1977: It was perhaps the most successful use of “soft power” in American history.Ī CIA operative told Washington Post owner Philip Graham … in a conversation about the willingness of journalists to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories: as part of its propaganda war against the Soviet Union. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers.ĭuring the early years of the cold war, were supported, sometimes lavishly, always secretly, by the C.I.A. The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning off funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services. The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. By this time, Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities found in 1975 that the CIA submitted stories to the American press:Īfter 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W.
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