Operation Mockingbird - Part two of: "Nah...that's a conspiracy because the Federal government would never do that!"
Americans love a good conspiracy theory, and plenty have been bandied about, but what about conspiracy theories that turned out to be, well, not theoretical at all?
The CIA has long played the international propaganda game an intelligence agency requires, and during the Cold War, the Agency paid and intimidated journalists into helping promote its messages. Famous Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein broke a story in 1977 for Rolling Stone revealing the workings of Operation Mockingbird, in which many journalists – including Pulitzer Prize winners – joined the CIA's payroll, writing fake stories to disseminate the Agency's agitprop and providing intelligence. Many journalists were threatened and blackmailed into cooperating with Operation Mockingbird. Several others were given fabricated or falsified information about their actions to engender their support for the CIA's mission.
Operation Mockingbird was a covert campaign launched by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War era. The operation aimed to influence media organizations and journalists domestically and internationally to spread propaganda and manipulate public opinion. The program began in the early 1950s and lasted until at least the mid-1970s, although the full extent of its activities remains unknown.
The origins of Operation Mockingbird can be traced back to the Cold War when the United States government became increasingly concerned about the spread of communist ideology and influence throughout the world. The CIA was tasked with carrying out covert operations to combat this perceived threat, and one of the ways it did so was by manipulating the media to promote pro-American narratives and discredit anti-American voices.
Under Operation Mockingbird, the CIA established relationships with journalists and media organizations in the United States and abroad. These relationships often involved the CIA providing journalists with exclusive access to classified information or other benefits in exchange for their cooperation in publishing stories or promoting certain viewpoints. In some cases, the CIA even went so far as to fund the creation of media outlets or to purchase existing outlets outright.
These efforts aimed to create a network of journalists and media organizations sympathetic to the CIA's worldview and willing to promote its interests. This included promoting the actions of the United States government and its allies, discrediting political opponents and dissidents, and spreading disinformation and propaganda to shape public opinion.
The CIA used various methods to influence the media and shape public opinion, including the use of front organizations, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was founded in 1950 and served as a platform for promoting American culture and values worldwide. The CIA also used psychological warfare techniques, such as disseminating propaganda and manipulating public opinion. The CIA used its influence in the media to discredit and attack political opponents, dissidents, and activists who opposed U.S. policies, particularly in countries targeted by the Agency for regime change or destabilization.
Operation Mockingbird was not just limited to manipulating the media to promote American interests; it also involved suppressing dissent and targeting individuals seen as threatening U.S. foreign policy goals. For instance, during the Vietnam War, the CIA targeted anti-war activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., who was subjected to extensive surveillance and harassment by the Agency. The CIA also suppressed the reporting of critical U.S. actions in Vietnam, including the My Lai massacre, which was covered up by the military and the government for years.
Operation Mockingbird also extended beyond the United States, as the CIA sought to manipulate media outlets and journalists in foreign countries to influence public opinion and promote American interests. The Agency often worked with authoritarian regimes to silence dissent and promote pro-American narratives, including efforts to work with the military dictatorship in Brazil to censor the press, suppress political opposition, and support the overthrow of democratically elected governments in countries like Guatemala and Iran.
One of the most notorious examples of Operation Mockingbird in action was the case of the Chilean journalist Orlando Letelier. Letelier was a former government minister under Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1973. After fleeing to the United States, Letelier became a vocal critic of the Chilean government and its American backers. In 1976, he was assassinated by a car bomb in Washington, D.C. It was later revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Washington Post newsroom and attempted to plant false information in the newspaper's coverage of Letelier's murder. The CIA also worked to discredit Letelier's reputation in the media, portraying him as a radical extremist and a threat to American interests.
In the wake of the Watergate scandal and other revelations about the CIA's involvement in domestic spying and covert operations, there was growing public concern about the Agency's activities. In 1976, the Church Committee, a special committee in the United States Senate, launched an investigation into the CIA's activities, including Operation Mockingbird. The committee's findings revealed a vast network of covert operations and propaganda campaigns carried out with the cooperation of journalists and media organizations around the world. The revelations led to a significant backlash against the CIA and other government agencies and helped spur reforms to curb their power and influence. These discoveries helped to shape public debates about the role of the media in a democratic society and led to calls for greater transparency and accountability in government agencies.
The CIA's involvement in the media and its efforts to manipulate public opinion raised significant ethical and legal concerns, particularly as the Agency operated in secrecy and without proper oversight.
The legacy of Operation Mockingbird can still be seen in the ongoing debates about media bias, propaganda, and the role of government in shaping public opinion. While the operation officially ended in the mid-1970s, its impact on the media and the public consciousness is still being felt today. Concerns about media bias, propaganda, and manipulating public opinion remain salient, particularly in the era of government-influenced social media disinformation campaigns.
The legacy of Operation Mockingbird serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of government agencies wielding undue influence over the media and the need for greater transparency and accountability in government operations.
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and the host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Personally, I have long suspected the origins and intentions behind the emergence into the language of American discourse of the very term 'conspiracy theory' itself.
In current and what by now is its longstanding usage, the phrase is a slur, an epithet, a gallery-appealing incantation of ridicule, toward the very notion that any two or more people could possibly have ever crafted any intention which had not been what it was presented to be.
This entirely simplistic means of dismissing the very core nature of human interaction, in effect that human beings tend to do whatever is necessary to secure advantages against our circumstances, by no means excluding that we get together with others and come up with ways to get what we want without stating our motives in complete candor to those we target with our intentions, has actually done a lot of harm in my estimation: to say that a hypothesis about any form of interactive intent is nothing but a 'conspiracy theory' is actually pretty ridiculous, because it dismisses out of hand any possibility that two or more persons might conceivably be acting in accord, with compatible ulterior motives in mind.
So who was it that first launched the term itself? What were they after?
Could it possibly be that, in the early stages of this so-called 'information revolution' brought to us by improved circuitry and semiconductors all consolidated onto a new form of 'information superhighway', the imminent potential for too many people to find out too many things someone else didn't want them to know posed dangers to forces and factions whose very real conspiracies had kept them in positions of advantage all along?
What better way to muddy the waters, of all these new 'information age' discoveries about the true nature of the inner workings of modern civilization, than to trot out a simple-minded phrase, meant to ridicule the idea that things are not always what they seem because somebody is making them seem to be what they are not?
For my own purposes, I don't need any 'conspiracy theory' to be satisfied on the questions of where the loyalties of the American civil-service sector are aligned. I have taken it as a given, since long before this current era of easy online access to entirely distorted, contradictory and rarely truthful 'information', that anyone on government payroll at any level down to the local dogcatcher regards me as their enemy.
All I have to observe is their behavior, which is not concealed at all, to conclude that, given an opportunity to lie to me and manipulate me with falsehoods, they will, and they do. This is simply a matter of policy, and at a much deeper level, of the very nature of public employment itself (and of the standing alliances between corporate interests, financial concerns, unions, and organized-crime syndicates which make it possible at all for any 'government' to keep its own functions functioning from one day to the next.)
There is no such thing as 'government by the people', in the forcibly and deceitfully 'united states' of America, and any fearless reading of our history as a nation reveals this plainly.
It has always been elite interests, held in place by esoteric and essentially separatist means, who have presumed to 'govern' here, and their approach to the idea of 'rule of law' has always been that this is entirely a procedural nuisance which must be outmaneuvered at every opportunity. Part of this maneuvering has always been to deceive the public, primarily by means of deceiving the press and thus allowing this Fourth Estate to do the heavy lifting of misinformation in government's favor itself, while upholding the thoroughly fictitious narrative that what they are reporting is the product of 'freedom of the press.'
The problem with the internet, as soon as it began to be more widely available and especially with the advent of cellular telephones equipped with WiFi, is that this meant that too many people might start asking questions, and finding answers to them, which might compromise the imperialist posture of the public sector, and pose the unthinkable threat of government being compelled at long last to govern according to the rule of law, instead of the dictates of its true owner-operators, in the corporate, financial, big-labor, and criminal spheres.
So then all of sudden here comes this easy phrase, 'conspiracy theory.'
It turned out to be far more effective than the original conspirators who coined it must have ever envisioned.
Some building not hit by the planes on 9/11 seems to have been a target of carefully-engineered explosive demolition engineered far in advance? Don't bring that obvious observation up, that makes you a 'conspiracy theorist.'
Some superbug by all appearances was pretty obviously ninety-nine parts social-media gossip and one part genuine public health threat since the day Fox News ran all ten of its top headlines with the word 'coronavirus' on display? Don't you dare name that emperor as shamefully naked, that would make you guilty of spreading a 'conspiracy theory.'
As for the topic at hand, whenever I encounter the term 'CIA' I mostly just roll my eyes and say to myself 'here we go again.' Discussions throughout my lifetime about what this Cabal of Incompetent Airheads have allegedly been up to ring about as reliable as the discussions of 'The End Times' I've heard out of evangelicals for that entire time do.
What-evarrrr, in other words.
The problem with the whole idea of 'conspiracy' as it is presented in popular discourse is that it is held out as something exceptional, and by extension, sinister and dangerous by its very nature.
This is entirely misleading.
There has never been a species to walk this earth (that we know of) which has indulged in more conspiratorial behavior, as normally and necessarily as breathing, than our own.
It is what we do. To be a human being is to be a conspirator, or else this hairless variety of sentient apes would have proven too vulnerable to every circumstance nature might have confronted us with to have survived long enough to walk out of a cave and build the first house.
I prefer to think of conspiracy in terms of my own self-styled Theory of Conspiratorial Chaos, which holds that conspiracy is so UN-exceptional that literally everyone is doing it, which postulates that at any given moment so many conspiracies are in motion that no one conspiracy could ever possibly hope to achieve its original goals other than purely by accident, because most of its energy is consumed in countering other conspiracies, all of them working against each others' intentions, and many (if not most) of them coming from within the very groups which had set a given conspiracy in motion.
If you want to understand the conduct of government, or human behavior as a whole, you have to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, and are nothing besides normal human interaction.
We are advantage-seekers, more than we can possibly truly believe in such high-toned constructs as 'justice' or 'rule of law', because without the continual quest for advantage over our every circumstance, we would not survive more than a few days.
Government agencies are nothing but human beings, conspiring.
Because this is what human beings do.