They even admitted that, “the propaganda effort had an impact on the American public and congressional opinion.”276 One example was the CIA paying $170,000 to create pro-Vietnam War propaganda magazines in the 1970s which were then distributed to American readers including the offices of all United States Congressmen and Senators.”277 The CIA funded magazine (which wasn’t named) even sponsored American Congressmen to travel to Vietnam. The Church report admits that, “Through this institution the CIA engaged in propagandizing the American public, including its Congress, on the controversial issue of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.”278
The report even noted, “The CIA recognizes that it risks seriously misleading U.S. policymakers,”279 and that their propaganda, “might influence the thinking of senior U.S. officials or affect U.S. intelligence estimates,” and “No mechanism exists to protect the U.S. public and the Congress from fallout from black propaganda or any other propaganda.”280
The CIA also secretly ran various newspapers in foreign countries to take their propaganda to a whole new level and provide cover for CIA operatives. One paper was The Daily American in Rome which was used by the Agency to help influence Italy’s electorate.281 Operation Mockingbird also funded the publishing of various books, although they refused to mention which ones.
Former CBS president Sig Mickelson was later asked if he thought despite these revelations the CIA was still covertly working with reporters, and he answered, “Yeah, I would think probably, for a reporter it would probably continue today, but because of all the revelations of the period of the 1970s, it seems to me a reporter has to be a lot more circumspect when doing it now or he runs the risk of at least being looked at with considerable disfavor by the public. I think you’ve got to be much more careful about it.”282
It’s interesting to point out that CNN’s Anderson Cooper interned for the CIA during the summer after his sophomore year of college, and again the following summer while he was attending Yale University, a hotbed of the CIA.283 Radar Online reported in 2006 that, “Anderson Cooper has long traded on his biography, carving a niche for himself as the most human of news anchors. But there’s one aspect of his past that the silver-haired CNN star has never made public: the months he spent training for a career with the Central Intelligence Agency.”284
Cooper then confirmed his connections with the CIA in a blog post on CNN’s website and said he decided not to talk about it publicly until Radar contacted CNN telling them they were going to publish their story and were looking for a comment.285
Carl Bernstein, who worked for The Washington Post when he blew the lid off the Watergate scandal which led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974, became an instant icon in the news business and gained a reputation for his continued investigations into government corruption and abuse of power. A few years after his Watergate bombshell he left The Washington Post, and for six months investigated the CIA’s relationship with the press, leading to a cover story in Rolling Stone.286
While the Church Committee was reluctant to name names and news agencies, he certainly wasn’t. He named some of the papers and reporters who had cooperated with Operation Mockingbird, including people at The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The New York Herald Tribune, The Associated Press, and even his former employer, The Washington Post; although he did defend the paper saying that the publisher (Katherine Graham at the time) and the managing editors were unaware of the operation and claimed only “stringers” were involved. Was he protecting his former employer, or treating his investigation into them with kid gloves? While that is likely the case, it’s also possible he was just in denial about their involvement, but his Rolling Stone story was still packed with information not mentioned at all during the Church Hearing.
Bernstein wrote, “Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services◦— from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs… CIA documents show journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”287
He pointed out that part of the operation included using journalists to “aid in the recruitment and ‘handling’ of foreign nationals who are channels of secret information reaching American intelligence.”288 He continued, “Many journalists were used by the CIA to assist in this process and they had the reputation of being among the best in the business. The peculiar nature of the job of the foreign correspondent is ideal for such work: he is accorded unusual access by his host country, permitted to travel in areas often off‑limits to other Americans, spends much of his time cultivating sources in governments, academic institutions, the military establishment and the scientific communities. He has the opportunity to form long‑term personal relationships with sources and◦— perhaps more than any other category of American operative◦— is in a position to make correct judgments about the susceptibility and availability of foreign nationals for recruitment as spies.”289
He goes on, “The tasks they performed sometimes consisted of little more than serving as ‘eyes and ears’ for the CIA; reporting on what they had seen or overheard in an Eastern European factory… On other occasions, their assignments were more complex: planting subtly concocted pieces of misinformation; hosting parties or receptions designed to bring together American agents and foreign spies; serving up ‘black’ propaganda to leading foreign journalists at lunch or dinner; providing their hotel rooms or bureau offices as ‘drops’ for highly sensitive information moving to and from foreign agents; conveying instructions and dollars to CIA controlled members of foreign governments.”290
Bernstein even explained how unsuspecting journalists were recruited for the program. “Often the CIA’s relationship with a journalist might begin informally with a lunch, a drink, a casual exchange of information. An Agency official might then offer a favor◦— for example, a trip to a country difficult to reach; in return, he would seek nothing more than the opportunity to debrief the reporter afterward. A few more lunches, a few more favors, and only then might there be a mention of a formal arrangement◦— ‘That came later,’ said a CIA official, ‘after you had the journalist on a string.’”291
Could this explain how The Washington Post and The New York Times keep getting classified information leaked to them in order to damage the Trump administration? Are they willing servants of the Deep State trying to bring down the president by any means necessary? Senator Chuck Schumer once gave an ominous warning to President Trump when he said that the intelligence agencies have “six ways from Sunday to get back at you,” if they don’t like what he’s doing.292
Bernstein quotes one CIA official as admitting, “In return for our giving them information, we’d ask them to do things that fit their roles as journalists but that they wouldn’t have thought of unless we put it in their minds.”293 This was all informal and unofficial. The “formal recruitment” of reporters, Bernstein says, only occurred after they had been vetted with background checks to ensure they could be trusted as “agents of the government.” Journalists being considered had to sign non disclosure agreements before the offer was even made, and Bernstein quotes an unnamed former assistant to the CIA Director as saying, “The secrecy agreement was the sort of ritual that got you into the tabernacle.” David Atlee Phillips, a former CIA chief operations officer himself, admitted that more than 200 journalists had signed non disclosure agreements with the CIA, which Bernstein described as making up a “good old boy” network that “constituted something of an establishment elite in the media, politics and academia,” who wrote “propaganda for CIA proprietary publications.”294