How the CIA Brainwashed Americans under Operation Mockingbird

I go over how the CIA brainwashed Americans under Operation Mockingbird.

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TRANSCRIPT

How the CIA Brainwashed Americans under Operation Mockingbird

Operation Mockingbird is the name of a covert CIA program developed during the Cold War to both gain intel and spread propaganda using journalists, media outlets, and student groups.

Over the course of some 25 years between the 1950s and the 1970s, more than 400 journalists carried out clandestine work for the CIA, from sharing information about foreign targets to publishing pieces that propagandized Americans with the CIA’s agenda.

The first major insight into these activities came with a 1967 exposé by Ramparts magazine which reported that the National Student Association, a confederation of college and university student governments, was being used domestically for intel and spying via CIA funding.

This news piece led to more interest in reporting on the CIA’s secret activities.

In 1977, reporter Carl Bernstein, famous for his pieces on the Nixon Watergate scandal, published a 25,000-word cover story with Rolling Stone Magazine on Operation Mockingbird.

His reporting fingered CIA Director Allen Dulles as being instrumental in setting the agenda for Operation Mockingbird activities.

Those activities were helped along by dozens of news agencies, including The New York Times, ABC, NBC, AP, and Reuters.

Journalists from these agencies would be used to promulgate CIA talking points not only domestically, but also abroad.
Those talking points mostly revolved around favoring U.S. military interventionism and empire building.

Journalist interview appointments were also leveraged to gain access so that the CIA could get insights on the personalities of foreign officials and motivations of political groups.

The publicity of the CIA’s operations caused some concern even among members of Congress as they wondered if they themselves had ever been a target of a CIA program.

Democrat Senator Frank Church of Idaho decided to lead an investigation into the CIA’s activities and called a special U.S. Senate committee for that purpose in 1975.

The committee, commonly known as the “Church Committee,” held hearings and published their findings in six books released April 1976.

During the hearings, CIA Director William Colby admitted that the CIA had people who submitted pieces to American journals.

When asked whether the CIA had agents working for television networks, or agents paid to write for national news services like AP and UPI, Director Colby successfully deflected and asked if he could handle those questions at an executive session, keeping the responses out of public view.

Those hearings not only covered the CIA’s involvement with media propaganda, but they also revealed other secrets such as the infamous CIA heart-attack gun and operation NAOMI, the successor to Project MKULTRA.

While Director Colby claimed that the CIA had broken up the Operation Mockingbird program in 1976, it is abundantly clear that the CIA’s influence has not dwindled and, in fact, looks closer to the CIA directly controlling the media today.

A revolving door from U.S. intelligence to corporate media exists and has been growing over the last 50 years from Oliver North, famous for the Iran-Contra scandal, working as a Fox News reporter, to former CIA Director John Brennan working at NBC News as a senior national security and intelligence analyst.

Even James Clapper, the former National Intelligence director who lied before congress about the NSA’s domestic spying, has found himself a home at CNN as a national security analyst.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist famous for breaking the Edward Snowden story, has noted the continued entrenchment of corporate media and deep state interests, especially where controlling a narrative is important.
For example, Greenwald noted that the media’s dismissal of Hunter Biden’s laptop contents as “Russian disinformation” was a clear indicator that the CIA’s control is alive and well.

So, next time you see some agenda being repeated with eerie similarity across multiple networks, keep in mind that the corporate media is deeply intertwined with maintaining CIA narratives for the control and benefit of themselves and their connected political friends.

SOURCES

Operation Mockingbird — The CIA’s History of Media Manipulation
https://medium.com/@LaurenvonB/operation-mockingbird-the-cias-history-of-media-manipulation-history-fe10cc2f3f9b

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA
https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-stone-10-20-1977

How the National Security State Manipulates the News Media
https://www.cato.org/commentary/how-national-security-state-manipulates-news-media

Church Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

Church Hearing with CIA Video