Author: Ramola D
Re-posted, with thanks, linked here, from PrisonPlanet.com. Article from 2003, covering Operation Mockingbird and CIA media control by Mary Louise, PrisonPlanet.com.
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
By Mary Louise
The CIA’s secret activities, covert missions, and connections of control are all done under the pretense and protection of national security with no accountability whatsoever, at least in their minds. Considering the public is held accountable for everything we think, say, and do there is something seriously wrong with this picture. The CIA is the President’s secret army, who have been and continue to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority, to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.
The “old boy network” of socializing, talking shop, and tapping each other for favors outside the halls of government made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies, thus the systematic infiltration and takeover of the media.
Under the guise of ‘American’ objectives and lack of congressional oversight, the CIA accomplish their exploits by using every trick in the book (and they know quite a few) that they actually teach in the notorious “School of the Americas”, nicknamed the “School of Dictators” and “School of Assassins” by critics. The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that 6 million people had died by 1987 as a result of CIA covert operations, called an “American Holocaust” by former State Department official William Blum. In 1948, the CIA recreated its covert action wing called the Office of Policy Coordination with Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner as its first director. Another early elitist who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 was Allen Dulles, a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other trusts, corporations, and cartels.
Starting in the early days of the Cold War (late 40’s), the CIA began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide.
Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950’s. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the “Skull and Crossbones” Society.