Operation Mockingbird -
3-24-00
Operation Mockingbird -
The Subversion Of America's Free Press By The CIA
http://www.psychicspy.com/ciamed.txt
"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
point 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 f__ind 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 tha__t "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 Blcher, 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?). 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 Dsseldorf, West Germany, and
established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but
anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie
Club in Dsseldorf in 1982, von Blcher 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
{{ Anniversary of Terror: October 12 - Operation Octopus I was
reminded this morning - as if anyone could ever forget - by a
newsman that October 11 would mark the one-month anniversary of the
terrorist attack on America. Memorial services will be held in New
York and Washington for the victims
http://www.theperspective.org/octopus.html ]]
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.
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.
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Audio: Media & Mind Control in America
by Steven Jacobson
#1
http://www.apfn.net/audio/L001I060312110344-mind-control1.MP3
(5.24MB) 22Min 52 Sec
#2
http://www.apfn.net/audio/L002I060312112719-mind-control2.MP3
(4.75MB) 20Min 45 Sec
Operation
Mockingbird (Continued)........
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mockingbird3.htm
Media "SPIN" Doctors & Their Tactics
'SPIN'
Part 1
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Spin1.htm
Part 2
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/Spin2.htm
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