Operation Mockingbird: What the CIA Did to the American Press

The CIA put American journalists on its payroll. It placed its own people inside American news organizations. It funded American student and labor groups through foundations that never carried its name. It handed a columnist a briefing paper and watched it published under his name.

That is the operation to propagandize and influence the citizens of the United States. Here is how it worked, and here are some of the names.

Joseph Alsop Took The Assignment

In 1953, Joseph Alsop was one of the most widely read syndicated columnists in America. That year he took a reporting trip.

His syndicate didn't send him. The papers that ran his column didn't send him. The CIA asked him to go, and he went.

Carl Bernstein opened his 1977 investigation focusing on that trip, and he included Alsop among more than 400 American journalists who, over twenty-five years, secretly carried out propagandist assignments for the agency. Bernstein's source documents were on file at CIA headquarters.

Alsop's column ran in as many as 190 newspapers at its peak, and what he wrote reached readers in nearly every city in the country.

The Brothers And The Family Paper

Bernstein named three of the most-read columnists with these ties: Joseph Alsop, his brother Stewart Alsop, and C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times. He reported that CIA files held records of specific tasks all three performed, and that Sulzberger was still considered an active asset at the time he wrote.

Stewart Alsop's column ran in the New York Herald Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, and Newsweek. One CIA official who had served at the highest levels of the agency put it plainly: "Stew Alsop was a CIA agent." Another senior official wouldn't define the relationship, except to say it was formal. Agency sources said Alsop asked questions the CIA wanted answered and planted information that served the agency's goals.

Joseph Alsop called the idea that his brother was an agent nonsense. Then he said he had been closer to the agency than Stewart had been, that Stewart had probably performed some tasks, and that the men who founded the CIA were close personal friends of theirs.

That is the denial and the confirmation in the same breath.

Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the agency in exchange for classified information. On one occasion, according to several agency officials, the CIA handed Sulzberger a briefing paper that he published almost word-for-word under his byline.

His uncle, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was the publisher of the New York Times. He signed a secrecy agreement too.

It Ran With Management's Knowledge

This wasn't a few reporters freelancing on the side.

Bernstein reported that in many cases, the CIA's own documents show that journalists took on agency tasks with the consent of management at America's leading news organizations. A CIA official who briefed him documented five separate instances between 1954 and 1962 in which the New York Times provided cover for agency employees.

Formal paperwork was rare. The relationships ran socially, through Georgetown, between agency officials and media executives who knew each other. Nobody asked a network chairman to sign anything.

The people involved fell into categories. Pulitzer Prize winners who saw themselves as unofficial ambassadors for the country. Reporters whose agency ties helped their careers. Stringers (independent writers who work for a single organization) and freelancers (who work for multiple organizations) are drawn to the spy business. And a smaller group: full-time CIA staffers carrying press credentials as their cover story.

Inside CBS

Penetration happened at several levels. An agency director contacting a publisher. A lower-level officer working with a managing editor. Agency people hired onto news staffs outright.

A CBS News executive said the network had been contacted by the CIA, and that arrangements were already in place by the time he took over the entire news and public affairs operation in 1954.

Sid Mickelson, the former president of CBS, was asked after the disclosures of the seventies whether the agency still worked with reporters. He said he thought they probably did. A reporter would have to be more careful about it now because of the risk of being viewed with disfavor by the public if found out.

Bernstein named CBS as the agency's most useful broadcaster and the New York Times as its most valuable newspaper.

Ben Bradlee, who went on to run the Washington Post, is named in the reporting on this period as having played a role of his own.

The outlets that come up across the record include the Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, the Miami News, CBS, and NBC.

Those were the newspapers delivered to the front porch, the magazines laid out on an end table, and the voices on the evening news.

The Fronts At Home

Frank Wisner ran the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, the covert-action and psychological-warfare arm. He called what he built his mighty Wurlitzer—an organ he could play, with the tune picked up wherever he wanted it to go.

He meant it as a description of cogs and parts of the CIA’s influence machine.

Much of that equipment was American. The National Student Association. The Independent Research Service. The Free Trade Union Committee. American organizations run by Americans, paid through pass-through foundations so the money never carried the agency's name.

Most of the people inside them didn't know. They organized what they cared about while agency officers met with the leadership, gave direction, and covered the bills.

Gloria Steinem ran student conferences under the National Student Association banner. She later acknowledged the CIA connection and said the agency never interfered with her work. That all fell apart in 1967, when Ramparts magazine exposed the agency's funding of the National Student Association. 

The Laundered Story

The agency was never supposed to run propaganda at the American public. That was the line it wasn’t supposed to cross. But it did.

A story the CIA placed in an outlet it controlled would get picked up by American wire services, run in American papers, and reach American readers as news.

It meant the agency could manipulate what Americans read without ever touching an American newsroom, and without breaking the letter of its own charter.

What Congress Got, And What It Didn't

The Church Committee examined the CIA's relationship with the press in 1976. It found fifty American journalists with official but secret relationships with the agency.

In a separate congressional investigation of the agency's illegal domestic operations, the CIA admitted to more than 250 assets in American media in the 1960s. It never named them. Congress never forced the issue.

Bernstein put the number above 400 and accused the Church Committee of deliberately understating the scope to protect the institutions involved.

In open session, an agency witness was asked whether the CIA had people on its payroll contributing to major American journals. The answer was that paid CIA people did submit stories for publishing. Asked the same question about television networks, and the witness said the questioning was getting into detail he'd rather address in a secret executive session.

The Money

Thomas Braden ran the division that handled this work. He described the funding. If he decided a man could use fifty thousand dollars in exchange for a story, he could hand it over and account to nobody. That's a quarter million in today's money.

There was no limit on the money. There was no limit on who could be hired. And there was no limit on what could be called necessary.

The American media took the money and influence. The CIA maintained people across more than twenty-five major American news organizations.

The Ban That Wasn't

In 1973, Director William Colby instructed that the agency would make no clandestine use of staff employees of U.S. publications with substantial influence on public opinion. In February 1976, George H.W. Bush announced the CIA would enter no paid or contractual relationship with any accredited news correspondent.

Accredited. On staff. Under contract.

Stringers weren't covered. Freelancers weren't covered. Non-contract media workers weren't covered—and Bernstein's own reporting identified stringers and freelancers as one of the largest groups the agency used. 

The Name

"Operation Mockingbird" as a label for the media program comes from a 1979 book by Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great.

The agency's own declassified files use MOCKINGBIRD for something more specific. Project MOCKINGBIRD was a telephone tap, run from March 12 to June 15, 1963, on the homes and offices of two Washington columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, who had been publishing classified material. It was approved at the top, with the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense aware.

It was illegal domestic surveillance of two American reporters. Documented and real.

It Never Stopped

We were supposed to believe that there were no more propaganda operations directed at US citizens going on. After all, the government had a committee look into itself. 

However, in the run-up to the Iraq War, most of the American press carried the administration's propaganda lies about a weapons of mass destruction program that never existed. 

Adding to the government propaganda spin, a 2008 report found that military analysts appearing on American television as retired military officials and independent experts were operating inside a Pentagon information apparatus built to generate favorable coverage of the war.

In 2000, it came out that soldiers from the Army's Psychological Operations Group had worked as interns at CNN and NPR in 1998 and 1999. NPR admitted the placements. The CNN placements were terminated once they surfaced.

Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward came to the Washington Post from the Pentagon's secret communications center, where he held a top secret clearance and carried classified traffic to the White House and the National Security Council. A year later, he broke the Watergate story. 

One of his biggest stories about the missing 18 1/2 minutes from the Oval Office tapes came from Alexander Haig, who became Nixon's chief of staff in 1973. When asked about his relationship with Haig, Woodward has always said he never met Haig before that year. 

Three men say otherwise: Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; Melvin Laird, Nixon's Secretary of Defense; and Laird's Pentagon spokesman. All three, in taped interviews, say Woodward was briefing Haig at the White House as far back as 1969—four years before the only relationship Woodward admits to.

Anderson Cooper

Anderson Cooper is a Vanderbilt. The old-money family who built one of the largest fortunes in American history out of shipping and railroads—a name that has kept a seat at the table for a hundred and fifty years.

He also went to Dalton, the Manhattan private school where Jeffrey Epstein taught math in the mid-1970s, hired without a college degree by headmaster Donald Barr, father of the future Attorney General. After Dalton, Cooper attended Yale, where he answered a CIA recruitment flyer in the career counseling office and spent two summers interning at Langley. 

He then graduated in 1989 with no journalism training, couldn't get hired answering phones at ABC, had a friend forge him a press pass, borrowed a camera, and started filing from war zones on his own. Within a decade he was at CNN. He kept his CIA connection buried publicly until Radar broke the story in 2006—seventeen years later. 

Dana Bash

CNN's Dana Bash was married to Jeremy Bash for nine years. During the marriage, he was Chief Counsel to the House committee that oversees the CIA. Two years after the divorce, he was Chief of Staff at the CIA itself, then at the Pentagon, then a founding partner at Beacon Global Strategies—a national security firm he built with Hillary Clinton's former spokesman. He now appears on NBC and MSNBC as an independent analyst. Interestingly, she still uses his name on air. 

The Watching Never Stopped

The agency tapped two Washington columnists in 1963 because they printed things it wanted kept quiet. It ran journalists on its payroll for decades and burned the records before anyone could count them. When Congress finally asked, the answers came from a side room, under immunity, with the files already gone.

Then it happened again, on a bigger scale and with better tools. The Church Committee wrote its report, and the surveillance apparatus grew anyway. Every decade since has produced a new disclosure, a new round of hearings, a new set of assurances, and a new program.

The press was supposed to be the check on this. Instead, it was on the CIA payroll. A payroll paid by your tax dollars, to propagandize you, your family, and the rest of America.