Once uncovered during by the Church Committee the CIA tried to paint Operation Mockingbird as something that only functioned to influence foreign press, but Carl Bernstein admits, “The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress.” He goes so far as to say, “The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA.”
CIA director William Colby admitted during the Church Hearing that “people in management” were involved, not just reporters, and that they helped the CIA with the program. And while Colby wouldn’t name names, Carl Bernstein pointed to William Paley, who was President of CBS; Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine; and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, who actually admitted the CIA had him sign a non disclosure agreement.
At least ten employees at The New York Times were working as CIA assets or were actual CIA agents who the paper was providing a cover for, often in their foreign bureau. The CIA even had a training program in the 1950s which taught agents how to pretend to be journalists and were sometimes “placed in major news organizations with help from management.”
It wasn’t just newspapers of course, the Big Three television networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) were involved as well. CBS provided “journalistic cover” for CIA employees and allowed their newsrooms to be monitored by the CIA. Bernstein says that in the 1950s and 60s CBS officials even met for an annual dinner with the CIA.
Sid Mickelson later admitted that when he became president of CBS, “I was told by Paley [CIA director] that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA… He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation [one of the undercover agents] and film arrangements. I assumed this was a normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating—though the Goodrich matter was compromising.”295
High-level CIA officials worked with “top management” of the news agencies to give agents working undercover as journalists assignments in foreign countries, according to Bernstein, and the CIA had, “some of the best-known correspondents in the business” as operatives using TV networks for “journalistic cover.” He also noted that a reporter is the perfect cover for a CIA operative because it’s a reporter’s job to ask questions, investigate things, and travel around the world to do so.
Colby admitted that the agency had “some three dozen” American reporters, editors, or executives, “on the CIA payroll,” including five who worked for “general‑circulation news organizations.”296 William Bader, who supervised the Senate committee’s investigation, admitted that there were CIA officers at management levels in major media companies.297 Malcolm Muir, Newsweek’s former editor said, “Whenever I heard something that I thought might be of interest to Allen Dulles, I’d call him up…. At one point he appointed one of his CIA men to keep in regular contact with our reporters.”
During the Church Hearings, then-CIA director William Colby tried to claim they weren’t doing any of this anymore and downplayed the program saying it didn’t work as well as they had hoped, but he was just whitewashing its effectiveness and many have said that even the Church Hearing itself was part of the cover-up.
For example, they didn’t even question any of the journalists or executives who were working for the CIA. Why wouldn’t they want to get major media executives and reporters on the witness stand to testify under oath about what they were doing? This should have been a key part of the investigation, but it wasn’t. Why? Because they didn’t want to dig that deep. They didn’t want the extent of the program, and who was involved, to be known. The committee was compromised and limited their investigation to prevent the magnitude of what was happening from being made public.
Carl Bernstein wrote that the CIA “were able to convince key members of the committee that full inquiry or even limited public disclosure of the dimensions of the activities would do irreparable damage to the nation’s intelligence‑gathering apparatus, as well as to the reputations of hundreds of individuals.”298
At the time of the Senate investigation George Bush senior was the director of the CIA and pressured members of the committee, and successfully persuaded them to essentially whitewash the investigation. The CIA refused to turn over documents about which journalists were working for them, and only gave the Committee rewritten summaries of documents, all of which had the names of journalists and media executives removed. Most of the documents they did turn over were about foreign journalists on foreign soil, giving the false impression that such thing wasn’t happening in America.
Speaking of the Church Committee’s final report, Senator Gary Hart said, “It hardly reflects what we found. There was a prolonged and elaborate negotiation [with the CIA] over what would be said.”299 In other words, it was a whitewash◦— just another limited hangout with some damning information, but as usual, the full truth would remain hidden. Most people are completely unaware of the Church Committee today, and if they were told about Operation Mockingbird, would just think it’s a conspiracy theory, but as one unnamed Senator quoted in Carl Bernstein’s Rolling Stone story says, “From the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive covert program of all…. It was a much larger part of the operational system than has been indicated.”
White House Correspondents’ Dinner
The same reporters who are supposed to function as watchdogs over the White House are wined and dined every spring at the luxurious red carpet White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner where they rub elbows and share some laughs with the very people they’re supposed to be holding accountable for their actions. The name of the event implies that it would consist of reporters and media executives, but each year A-list Hollywood celebrities are among the most popular guests. Why would movie stars and sitcom actors be key fixtures at a dinner that’s supposed to be for serious journalists covering the White House?
The event includes a professional comedian who cracks jokes about the current administration and the media’s coverage of them, and also involves a scripted stand up routine by the current president who makes jabs at the press, and himself, as those in attendance appear to laugh at the fact that most politicians are liars and fail to deliver on the promises they made during their campaigns.
In 2004, just one year after the War in Iraq started, George W. Bush made some tasteless jokes about not finding the weapons of mass destruction that he and his administration had falsely claimed were there. While at the podium, a slide show of photos were put up on screen showing him bending over and looking under his desk in the oval office to which he then commented, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere,” earning him laughter and applause from the audience. “Nope, no weapons over there.” Another photo was put up on the screen of him strangely looking at another part of his office as he said, “Maybe under here.”300 The audience loved it, laughing and applauding which is so bizarre because he was literally joking about the lies that led us to war. What happened to journalists being watchdogs and keeping those in power in check?