By James F. Tracy

Editor’s Note: In August 2015 MHB published, “The CIA and the Media: 50 Historical Facts The World Needs to Know.” The following series seeks to augment this initial post with several dozen additional facts and observations on the relationship between the US intelligence community, the mass media, and public opinion. 

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Since the late 1940s the Central Intelligence Agency and its military intelligence counterparts have successfully manipulated American public opinion on an array of issues via its direct influence over corporate mass media. Understanding the historical facts substantiating this claim is particularly essential in an age of so-called “fake news”, alleged “Russian meddling” in US elections, and overt censorship of alternative voices by Google and YouTube proceed as a thinly-veiled psychological warfare operation against the domestic US population.

In theory the CIA and its military intelligence counterparts are restricted from carrying out maneuvers on US soil, including propaganda efforts. Yet the historical record is unambiguous: Psychological operations know no boundaries whether in terms of national borders or the fabled editorial firewall between the newsroom and objects of reportage. The intelligence community’s permeation of the film-making, book publishing, and social media industries only bolsters the influence it exerts over the institution that write the first drafts of history—the news media themselves.

With every deep event, be it a political assassination, mass shooting, or terror attack, this “consciousness industry,” in the words of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, proceeds to fashion a truly fantastic, state-sponsored narrative that short circuits the intellectual will and imagination of its captive audience. In this sort of mass psychosis much of what the public claims to know about recent history and current events is at best misleading, while rational efforts to ferret out truth are derided as “conspiracy theory”—a term injected into the popular lexicon by the CIA itself.

The following is intended to further an understanding and broader critical awareness that news stories are sometimes not what they seem, that government statements at all time require intense scrutiny, and that real journalism takes as its first rule of inquiry that the more politically significant a reported event is, the less the corresponding “official” explanation should be accepted as true.

51.During the US occupation of Southeast Asia the US military and CIA carried out The Phoenix Program, a far-reaching project of wholesale terrorism and political assassination throughout Vietnam. Because of the CIA’s infiltration of news media the US public was left in the dark on the practice for decades. “Indeed, without the complicity of the media, the government could not have implemented Phoenix in either Vietnam or America,” historian Douglas Valentine observes.

But the relationship between the media and the government is symbiotic, not adversarial. The extent to which this practice existed was revealed in 1975, when [Director of Central Intelligence] William Colby informed a congressional committee that more than five hundred CIA officers were operating under cover as corporate executives and that forty CIA officers were posing as journalists.

An expert on the CIA, Valentine posits that journalistic investigation and analysis of government activities are rudimentary to a democracy, yet

when those activities are conducted in secret, illegally, reporters tend to look away rather than jeopardize profitable relationships. The price of success is compromise of principles. This is invariably the case; the public is always the last to know, and what it does learn are at best half-truths, squeezed into five-hundred-word columns or thirty-second TV bites, themselves easily ignored or forgotten.

Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990, 338-339.

52. The CIA’s integration with mass media is especially insidious because it operates as a secret organization with its own rules and is answerable to no one. “’The National Security Act of 1947,’” in the words of Allen W. Dulles, “’…has given Intelligence a more influential position in our government than Intelligence enjoys in any other government of the world.’” As journalists David Wise and Thomas B. Ross wrote over a half-century ago,

The American people have not been in a position to assess these changes. They know virtually nothing about the Invisible Government. Its employment rolls are classified. Its activities are top secret. Its budget is concealed in other appropriations. Congress provides money for the Invisible Government without knowing how much it has appropriated or how it will be spent. A handful of congressmen are supposed to be kept informed by the Invisible Government, but they know relatively little about how it works.

Overseas, in foreign capitals, American ambassadors … are told they have control over the agents of the Invisible Government. But do they? The agents maintain communications and codes of their own. And the ambassador’s authority has been judged by a committee of the United States Senate to be a “polite fiction.”

At home, the intelligence men are directed by law to leave matters to the FBI. But the CIA maintains more than a score of offices in major cities throughout the United States; it is deeply involved in many domestic activities, from broadcasting stations and a steamship company to the university campus. The Invisible Government is also generally thought to be under the direct control of the National Security Council. But, in fact, many of its major decisions are never discussed in the Council. These decisions are handled by a small directorate, the name of which is only whispered. How many Americans have heard of the ‘Special Group’? The name of this group, even its existence, is unknown outside the innermost circle of the Invisible Government.

David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government, New York: Random House, 1964, 4, 5.

53. “The CIA is the only US government agency authorized to engage in black propaganda operations,” writes former CIA officer Philip Agee, “but it shares the responsibility for grey propaganda with other agencies such as [United States Information Agency].” Other lettered agencies “must obtain prior CIA approval before engaging in grey propaganda.” This is part of the National Security Council’s “grey law.” The purpose and design of Agency propaganda is inculcated as standard operating procedure in CIA officer training. In NSA and CIA parlance, “white propaganda” is communication overtly disseminated by the US government, frequently through one of its representative organs such as the USIA. The escape clause of “plausible denial” is integrated in to the Agency’s covert propaganda practices. “[G]rey propaganda is ostensibly attributed to people or organizations who do not acknowledge the US government as the source of their material and who produce the material as if it were their own; black propaganda is unattributed material, or it is attributed to a non-existent source, or it is false material attributed to a real source.” As Agee explains, the CIA officer’s training anticipates how journalists and editors will be used—wittingly or unwittingly—to plant information and stories in the public mind. “In propaganda operations, as in all other [psychological and Paramilitary] activities, standard security procedures forbids payment for services rendered to be made by a CIA officer working under official cover (one posing as an official of the Department of State, for instance) … The vehicles for grey and black propaganda,” observes Agee,

may be unaware of their CIA or US government sponsorship. This is partly so that it can be more effective and partly to keep down the number of people who know what is going on and thus reduce the danger of exposing the true sponsorship. Thus editorialists, politicians, businessmen and others may produce propaganda, even for money, without necessarily knowing who their masters in the case are. Some of the obviously will and so, in agency terminology, there is a distinction between ‘witting’ and ‘unwitting’ agents.

During formal instruction in covert operations CIA propagandists impressed upon Agee and other trainees the complex transnational execution of such information operations, which involved

the business of orchestrating the treatment of events of importance among several countries. Thus problems of communist influence in one country can be made to appear of international concern in others under the rubric of ‘a threat to one is a threat to all’. For example, the CIA station in Caracas can cable information on a secret communist plot in Venezuela to the Bogota station which can ‘surface’ through a local propaganda agent with attribution to an unidentified Venezuelan government official. The information can then be picked up from the Columbian press and relayed to CIA stations in Quito, Lima, La Paz, Santiago, and, perhaps, Brazil. A few days later editorials begin to appear in the newspapers of these places and pressure mounts on the Venezuelan government to take repressive action against its communists.

Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, New York: Stonehill Publishing Company, 1975, 71, 72.

54. A historical episode along the lines of the US Democratic Party and corporate media’s feigned concern over “Russian meddling in US elections” arose in 1964 when then-CIA Director John McCone sought to suppress publication of journalists Wise and Ross’ The Invisible Government, an exposé of the CIA’s influence corrupting influence. McCone and his second-in-command, Lieutenant General Marshall Carter, placed phone calls to Random House, the book’s publisher, objecting to its publication. Another CIA official approached Random House with an offer to buy up the book’s entire first printing—15,000 copies. “Calling this action ‘laughable,’ Random House’s president, Bennet Cerf, agreed to sell the agency as many books as it wanted, but stated that additional printings would be made for the public,” former CIA officer Victor Marchetti notes.

“The final chapter in the agency attack against The Invisible Government came in 1965 when the CIA circulated an unattributed document on ‘The Soviet and Communist Bloc Defamation Campaign” to various members of Congress and the press. This long study detailed the many ways used by the KGB to discredit the CIA, including the ‘development and milking of Western journalists. Americans figure prominently among these.’ The study singled out as an example of KGB disinformation a Soviet radio broadcast that quoted directly from The Invisible Government. The agency’s message was not too subtle,” Marchetti concludes, “but then the CIA never put its name on the document.”

Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, 359-360.

55. From its formation in 1948 the CIA sought to influence not only the pedestrian informational landscape via news, but also academe’s intellectual topography. Through propaganda programs the Agency cultivated fierce anti-communist sentiment on a transnational basis to help propel the Cold War and its attendant military industrial complex. This involved, for example, a “campaign against ‘neutralism’” according to communications historian Christopher Simpson. “Beginning in 1950,” Simpson notes,

the CIA sponsored and financed the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a series of politically liberal, strongly anticommunist publications including Encounter (England), Der Monat (Germany), Forum (Austria), Preuves (France), and Cuadernos (Latin America) as a means of combating the perceived neutrality of intellectuals in the face of purported communist expansion. Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, Edward Shils, Daniel Bell, and Daniel Lerner, among others, emerged as prominent public spokesmen for this campaign, though they have insisted in later years that they were unaware of the CIA’s sponsorship for their work.

Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 100-101.

56. Washington Post editorial page editor Bob Estabrook claims that one-time Post publisher Philip Graham “was in daily touch with people in the intelligence community and that he knew more about the Bay of Pigs, for example, than he would tell his own reporters,” writes Katharine Graham biographer Carol Felsenthal. Veteran journalist and former Progressive magazine editor Erwin Knoll recalls how Post editor Al Friendly “’had some CIA involvement. I know there was a pipeline to the CIA that provided occasional guidance on stories.’”

Knoll recollects the controversy that erupted in 1960 when a United States U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down by the Soviets in 1960. “’I found myself riding in the elevator with Bob Estabrook, and I said to him, ‘That’s a hell of a story out of the Soviet Union today, isn’t it?’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve known about those flights for several years, but we were asked not to say anything.’ Now that just astonished me, that the paper knew about things it was asked not to report on, and it complied with those wishes.’” Shortly thereafter, when a US pilot in the employ of Indonesian rebels was grounded, “the Post’s foreign editor warned Knoll to be careful about reporting on the pilot, who, he said, was CIA. Knoll thinks the Post ‘was definitely on the team as far as fighting to cold war was concerned.’”

Carol Felsenthal, Power, Privilege and The Post: The Katharine Graham Story, New York: Putnam, 1993, 372, 373.

57. Following his successful 1998 campaign to be elected Minnesota’s 38th governor former professional wrestler, media personality and Mayor of Brooklyn Park Minnesota Jesse Ventura explains how he was interrogated at length by over twenty CIA agents seeking to assess the ins and outs of his populist political platform.

“The first inkling that certain people inside the federal government were out to keep an eye on me came not long after I took office,” Ventura recalls.

I was “asked” to attend a meeting in the basement of the Capitol building at a time when the State Legislature was not in session. I was informed that the Central Intelligence Agency was conducting a training exercise that they hoped I’d be willing to participate in … I was placed in the middle of a big circle of chairs, and they all sat there staring at me with notebooks on their laps … They all focused on how we campaigned, how we achieved what we did, and did I think we truly could win when we went into the campaign. Basically, how had the independent wrestler candidate pulled this off?”

Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell, American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies and More Dirty Lies the Government Tells Us, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010, xi, xii.

58. The conventional logic concerning the violent suicide of Washington Post publisher Philip Graham in August 1963 is that Graham’s manic depression and alcoholism figured centrally in his death. In fact, Graham’s tragic death is only hinted at in the 2017 film, The Post. Yet as author Deborah Davis suggests, Graham’s death was immediately preceded by his increasingly public criticism of the CIA’s involvement with news media. “’He had begun to talk, after his second breakdown, about the CIA’s manipulation of journalists,” Davis observes. “He said it disturbed him. He said it to the CIA.’” His fellow journalists practiced the unspoken code of “keep[ing] Phil’s insanity ‘out of the papers’ as he had kept stories ‘out of the papers’ for his friends; but now the word was that Phil Graham could not be trusted, and his friends began to see very little of him.”

In the early 1990s Davis claims, “she ‘got a call from a woman who claimed that she knew for a fact that [Phil’s death] was murder.’” Subsequent research by clinical psychologist and author Peter Janney suggests how there are several conflicting accounts of Phil’s supposed “suicide.” Already a loose cannon, Phil Graham died just three months prior to President Kennedy’s assassination. Mr. Graham would have likely been reluctant to cooperate with the CIA by turning a journalistic blind eye toward the President’s murder and, even worse, being compelled to publicly promote the Warren Commission’s cover-up of the assassination.

Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, 265-270; Deborah Davis, Katherine the Great: Katherine Graham and the Washington Post, Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987 (1979), 161.

59. The Central Intelligence Agency often acts to serve the strategic financial interests of transnational corporations as spycraft and corporate largess act symbiotically to conceal each other’s misdeeds. In 1979 the McGraw-Hill publishing house released Kermit Roosevelt’s, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran. In the book former CIA officer told his exclusive story of “how intelligence agencies overthrew a left-leaning Iranian premier, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953 and reinstated the Shah,” former Washington Posteditor and college journalism educator Ben Bagdikian explains.

“The issue was control of oil. The plot was called ‘Ajax,’ of which Roosevelt wrote: ‘The original proposal for Ajax came from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) after its expulsion from Iran nine months earlier.’” Copies of Countercoup“were on sale in bookstores and reviewer copies were already in the mails when British Petroleum, successor corporation to AIOC, persuaded McGraw-Hill to recall all the books—from the stores and from reviewers.”

Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Fourth Edition, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, 39.

60. Since the 1950s the CIA has exerted a powerful influence over the book publishing industry, sometimes petitioning the heads of major publishing houses to submit manuscripts to Agency officers for review or requesting that titles be withheld from circulation altogether. When a book publisher so compromised acquires a politically volatile or otherwise “troublesome” title it may embark on a process recognized in the industry as “privishing.”

Because of certain publishing houses spurning Agency concerns on, for example, Wise and Ross’ The Invisible Government (1964) and Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin (1972), these books saw the light of day. On the other hand, the much more recent English translationof German journalist Udo Ulkotte’s 2014 Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists), appears to have been “privished” by publishing house Taylen Lane. To date there is no accurate estimate of exactly how many such works in the US and overseas may have been subject to CIA interference.

“Privishing is a portmanteau meaning to privately publish, as opposed to true publishing that is open to the public,” writes investigative journalist Gerard Colby. It is usually employed in the following context: “We privished the book so that it sank without a trace.” The mechanism used is simple: cut off the book’s life-support system by reducing the initial print run so that the book “cannot price profitably according to any conceivable formula,” refuse to do reprints, drastically slash the book’s advertising budget, and all but cancel the promotional tour.” The publisher’s goal is to eliminate a book that has the potential to attract controversy. “This widespread activity,” Colby continues, “must be done secretly because it constitutes a breach of contract which, if revealed, could subject the publisher to legal liability.” This is because the publisher’s typical obligation for exclusive rights to a title involves printing and successfully promoting the work in its anticipated market.

Gerard Colby, “The Price of Liberty,” in Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Kristina Borjesson, ed., Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 2002, 15-16.

61. Despite the CIA’s charter forbidding it to operate within the United States, the Agency’s symbiotic relationship with virtually every facet of the media industries suggests how almost since its inception the organization allowed itself to run out of control with little-if-any suggestion of remorse. In fact, when it came to propaganda the CIA effectively “acted as its own State Department,” author Darrell Garwood argues, by allowing Agency-sponsored books to circulate in the US because they might qualify as propaganda abroad, thereby violating diplomatic agreements. One of the CIA’s most favored book publishers in the 1950s-1960s was Frederick A. Praeger Inc. Praeger, president of the company, attests that in the late 1950s the Agency financially backed “’fifteen or sixteen’” Praeger titles.

When knowledge of this arrangement became public Mr. Praeger met with the press to “’put the matter in perspective,’” arguing that the number of books published under CIA auspices was less than one percent of the overall catalog of titles published during the specified time. Although Praeger maintained that the CIA-sponsored books “’were developed according to the standards that we apply to all our books,’” he left unmentioned whether less obvious selection methods might be in play.

In the 1970s E. Howard Hunt informed the Senate Intelligence Committee “that CIA-sponsored books directed at Communist China ‘had to circulate in the United States because Praeger was a commercial US publisher … and we had a bilateral agreement with the British that we wouldn’t propagandize their people.’ This seemed to be showing a lot of admirable consideration for the British,” author Garwood notes, “but none at all for Americans.”

Darrell Garwood, Under Cover: Thirty-Five Years of CIA Deception, New York: Grove Press, 1985, 259, 260.

62. As the documented remarks of numerous established American journalists suggest, throughout the Cold War the news media’s relationships with the CIA were frequently often symbiotic in nature, if not friendly and intimate. For instance, famous Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus notes that in 1960 he was “offered a full-time overseas job with the CIA” while serving as “Washington correspondent for three North Carolina newspapers. I turned down the job,” he continues, “but that year did take two trips overseas to international youth conferences. The CIA arranged and paid the expenses for both trips. In 1967, I wrote of this CIA association in the Washington Post.”

Along these lines one-time Chicago Sun-TimesAssociate Editor Stuart H. Loory warmly recalls how “[d]uring the ten years of covering foreign relations and national security affairs I have traded information with CIA people and I have eaten at the excellent table in the CIA director’s private dining room (after taking a drink from a black-coated waiter in the director’s private sitting room). Has such access hurt or helped the pursuit of information? Naturally, I think it has helped. Not all of my colleagues agree.”

Vitaly Petrusenko, Trans. By Nocolai Kozelsky and Vladimir Leonov, A Dangerous Game: CIA and the Mass Media, Prague: Interpress, 1977, 7, 7-8.

63. The venerable New York Times. long a self-proclaimed bastion of truth and moderation, established its reputation in this way at the turn-of-the century by contrasting the Times brand with William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer-style sensationalism and what was often genuinely embellished or contrived “fake” news. Given its standing in this regard the Times has vigorously supported and
benefited from Agency prerogatives since the 1950s . As Carl Bernstein explains in his largely ignored yet seminal investigative piece, “The CIA and the Media,” the CIA’s “relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials.”

Between 1950 and 1966 around ten CIA personnel were given cover as Times employees under plans endorsed by the newspaper’s then-publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. “The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible,” observes Bernstein. “Sulzberger was especially close to Allen Dulles. ‘At that level of contact it was the mighty talking to the mighty,’ said a high‑level CIA official who was present at some of the discussions. ‘There was an agreement in principle that, yes indeed, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions.  It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates…. The mighty didn’t want to know the specifics; they wanted plausible deniability.’”

Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.

64. Daniele Ganser, the sole academic author thus far to have conducted comprehensive research on the NATO and CIA-supported Operation Gladio that terrorized Europe’s citizenry for two decades, describes how his pathbreaking work was stymied by the CIA’s unresponsiveness to numerous Freedom of Information Act requests. On December 14, 2000 Ganser “placed a FOIA request with the CIA, whereupon two weeks later the CIA replied to the author’s request “pertaining to ‘Operation Gladio’ in an evasive manner by stating that ‘The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request,’” Ganser explains. “By raising FOIA exemptions B1 and B3 the CIA Information and Privacy Coordinator, Kathryn I. Dyer, with her letter declined all information on Operation Gladio.”

Shortly thereafter Ganser appealed, maintaining, “’The documents that were withheld must be disclosed under the FOIA, because the secrecy exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3) can only reasonably refer to CIA operations which re still secret today.’” In February 2001 the CIA responded:

“Your appeal has been accepted and arrangements will be made for its consideration by the appropriate members of the Agency Release Panel. You will be advised of the determination made.”

In 2004, just before Ganser’s book manuscript went to press, “the CIA Agency Release Panel had still not answered the author’s request for information.” Dr. Ganser confirmed to this author in early 2018 that close to 20 years later the CIA has still not turned over the responsive documents or even provided him with a response.

Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, London and New YorK: Frank Cass, 2005, 35.

65. In 2017 publication of the English translation of German journalist and intelligence asset Udo Ulfkotte’s best-selling book, Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists) ceased when its publisher suddenly took down the book’s online promotional material without explanation or comment.  A best-seller in Europe, the work is a powerful first-hand account by a mainstream journalist of how the CIA alongside other intelligence agencies influence the output of Western news media. In early 2017 Next Revelation Press, an imprint of US-Canadian-based publisher Tayen Lane, tentatively released the English version of Bought Journalists, under the title, Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the New. Shortly thereafter Tayen Lane removed any reference to the title from its website.

When this author contacted Ulfkotte in early December 2015 to inquire on the book’s pending translation, he responded,  “Please find the link to the English edition here. http://www.tayenlane.com/bought-journalists . The above address once providing Bought Journalist’s description and anticipated publication date now leads to an empty page. Tayen Lane would not respond to requests for an explanation of the title’s disappearance.  As of April 13, 2018 the English translation of Bought Journalists sells for retail price of $997 at Amazon. As is suggested by previous posts in this series addressing CIA ties to the book publishing industry, Bought Journalists‘ subject matter and unexplained disappearance from the marketplace are cause for serious concern.

James F. Tracy, “English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte’s Bought Journalists Suppressed?” GlobalResearch.ca, July 31. 2017.

66. In the mid-to-late 1960s the CIA initiated concerted efforts to defame independent researchers of the Kennedy assassination that contested the Warren Commission’s findings, seeking to suppress their message at every turn. By 1966 the most prominent of these researchers was New York-based attorney Mark Lane. “As part of the campaign to smear Warren Report critics,” writes historian David Talbot, former CIA Director Allen Dulles “compiled dirt on Mark Lane, whom he considered a particularly ‘terrible nuisance’ because of his growing media visibility and his influence overseas, where he was often invited to speak.” One of Dulles’ moles claimed to have located photos of Lane engaging in “’obscene acts’” with minors. “’He is supposedly Jewish,’” the informant wrote, “’but there are those who claim he is half Negro or at least has Negro blood. He is very dark complexioned, wears horn-rimmed glasses and he’s always in a hurry. My own personal opinion is that he’s deranged.’”

As Lane’s popularity developed the CIA “pressured TV and Radio programs to cancel interviews with him. When he traveled to foreign countries to speak about the Kennedy assassination, the agency sent bulletins to the U.S. embassies there announcing that Lane’s local appearances had been cancelled.”

David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, New York: Harper Perennial, 2015, 594, 595.

67. In 1967 public opinion polls indicated that two-thirds of the American public rejected the Warren Commission Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of President Kennedy. Nevertheless top CIA officials were assured they could depend on US news media to assuage such widespread public skepticism.

According to historian David Talbot, “An exchange of letters between CBS news director William Small and (CIA founder Allen) Dulles in July 1967 summed up the media’s lockstep allegiance to the officials story, no matter how many holes were punched in it by new research.” ’I hope you had a chance to view the four-part series on the Warren Commission,’ wrote Small, referring to his TV network’s massive apologia for the Warren Report. ‘We are very proud of them and I hope you found them a proper display of what television journalism can do.’ … After reviewing transcripts of the entire series that Small had obligingly provided him, Dulles assured the CBS news executive, ‘ If I have any nitpicking to pass on to you, I shall do so as soon as I have read them.’ The spymaster,” Talbot concludes, “was always happy to offer guidance to his media friends, down to the smallest details.”

David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, New York: Harper Perennial, 2015, 597-598.

68. As author Vitaly Petrussenko chronicles, following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion the CIA sustained significant negative impact. To help restore its luster “and his own image at the top of the Establishment” then-CIA Director “Allen Dulles authorized a big article in Fortune magazine, written by his friend Charles J.V. Murphy.” Classified documents intended to place CIA officials in a positive light and relieve them of responsibility of the failed invasion were turned over to Murphy “with Dulles’s consent.”

Shortly thereafter Dulles became the standard public spokesman for the Agency when he “began cultivating relations with television companies as suggested by Attorney General Robert Kennedy who himself was instructed by his President-brother to re-organize the Agency.” For example, “NBC television was offered the unique opportunity of producing a film about the CIA narrated by David Brinkley, NBC’s star commentator. Naturally, the film vindicated the CIA, and praised its cloak-and-dagger agents.

Vitaly Petrusenko, Trans. By Nocolai Kozelsky and Vladimir Leonov, A Dangerous Game: CIA and the Mass Media, Prague: Interpress, 1977, 23.

69. Among the first major CIA clandestine operators and propagandists functioning abroad was OSS veteran and US Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale. An early confidante of Allen and John Foster Dulles, Lansdale was an advertising executive-turned-spy and counterinsurgency expert, all the while projecting “a squeaky-clean, Boy Scout Image, behind which he masked his own perverse delight in atrocity,” writes historian Douglas Valentine.

In the prelude to America’s full-scale involvement in Southeast Asia Landsdale fulfilled a special role in the formation of the CIA’s infamous counterterror assassination program dubbed Phoenix, having successfully organized an anti-Communist movement in the Philippines. Acting in the 1950s as the Dulles’ emissary in Vietnam, Landsdale played an important role as US advisor to the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. And the slogan-savvy Lansdale coined the term “Vietcong”, forever denigrating Vietminh patriots in the Western mind.

Lansdale’s activities in the Philippines earned him the nickname the “Ugly American.” He brought those tactics to Saigon along with a team of dedicated Filipino anti-Communists who, in the words of one veteran CIA officer, ‘would slit their grandmother’s throat for a dollar eighty-five.’”

In one psychological warfare operation Landsdale sought to motivate Vietnamese government troops to vacate a village and engage Communist guerrilla fighters on the outskirts. The problem was that village’s leaders feared assassination by the same guerrillas if the troops left. As ad exec Landsdale recalls,

“A combat psywar [psychological warfare] team was brought in. It planted stories among town residents of a vampire living on the hill where the Huks were based. Two nights later, after giving the stories time to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way up the hill to the camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the vampire had got him and that one of them would be next if they remained on the hill. When daylight came the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity.”

Lansdale deemed the operation “’low humor’ and ‘ an appropriate response … to the glum and deadly practices of communists and other authoritarians,’” notes Valentine. “And by doing so, former advertising executive Lansdale–the merry prankster whom author Graham Greene dubbed the Quiet America–came to represent the hypocrisy of American policy in South Vietnam.

Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990, 25-26.

70. “‘I don’t believe that whom I was or wasn’t friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications,” wrote former Washington Post and Newsweek publisher Katharine Graham in her 1998 autobiography Personal History. Veteran investigative journalist Robert Parry disagrees. A Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the late 1980s, Parry claims to have witnessed “self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures.”

“On one occasion in 1987,” Parry explains, “I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua’s Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation.” According to media critic Norman Solomon, former CIA Director Robert Gates’ 1996 memoir “confirmed that Parry had the story right all along.”

Norman Solomon, “The Real Story Behind Katharine Graham and The Post,” Free Press, December 20, 2017.

71. Despite corporate media’s frequent touting of how they are the principal defenders of the First Amendment and a “free press,” US political leaders regard their nation’s news media as an important if not central component of government propaganda efforts. “[T]he media do not set their own investigative agendas independently, but operate as part (some politicians would say the most important part) of the political establishment,” authors Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall observed in the wake of the US government’s so-called “War on Drugs” and Iran-Contra scandal. They continue,

This is particularly true in matters of intelligence, where government agencies regularly ask for media forbearance and occasionally invoke a 1950 law providing for criminal penalties for anyone publishing classified information about communications intelligence, and in narcotics enforcement, in which a war mentality now prevails against dissenters from the establishment.

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 174.

72. Overseas CIA outreach activities aimed at influencing foreign press personnel in the Cold War years and was aided by using the foremost labor organization for practicing journalists in the US, the American Newspaper Guild (ANG). “The ANG was a founder member of the International Federation of Journalists, a society of anticommunist newspapermen established in Brussels in 1952 in opposition to the Prague-based, communist-dominated International Organization of Journalists,” notes historian Hugh Wilford.

“Following a major expansion of the ANG’s international program in 1960, funded by seed money from the AFL-CIO and a grant from ‘a private philanthropy,’ an ANG staffer … was dispatched to Brussels to oversee free trade unionism and ‘professional journalism’ in Africa and, with occasional assistance from the Asia Foundation, the Far East. Meanwhile,” Wilford chronicles, “another ANG international affairs representative took up residence in Panama City to run the Inter-American Federation of Working Newspapermen’s Organization, a hemispheric trade union secretariat with close links to the CIA’s South American labor front, the American Institute of Free Labor Development.” Such endeavors were funded by “ANG’s International Affairs Fund, which in turn was subsidized by an assortment of foundations all later identified as CIA pass-throughs: The Graanary Fund, the Andrew Hamilton Fund, the Broad High Foundation, the Chesapeake Foundation, and the Warden Trust.”

Hugh Wilford, The Might Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008, 227-228.

73.The research of former US State Department officer John Marks that would become his seminal work on the CIA’s MKULTRA program was preceded by President Gerald Ford’s establishment of a commission led by then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to examine reports of CIA exploits that included spying on domestic political dissidents. “Included in the final Rockefeller report, “Marks observes, “was a section on how an unnamed Department of the Army employee had jumped out of a New York hotel window after Agency men had slipped him LSD.

That revelation made headlines around the country. The press seized upon the sensational details and virtually ignored two even more revealing sentences buried in the Rockefeller text: ‘The drug program was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behavior. Other studies explored the effects of radiation, electric-shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances.’”

John Marks, The Search For the “Manchurian Candidate:”: The CIA and Mind Control, New York: W. W. Norton, 1979, 220.

74. CIA influence over news media likely plays a crucial role in “sourcing” news stories in an effort to establish narratives favorable to Agency interests. One such story involves the unusual circumstances surrounding the death of former Phoenix Program director and DCI William Colby.

In the years before his death Colby became increasingly critical of certain deep state maneuvers. He encouraged his friend, for example, Nebraska lawyer John DeCamp, to write The Franklin Coverup, centering on the child sex scandal in that state. DeCamp was one of Colby’s confidantes, and as DeCamp explains in the video below he has immense reason to question the official narrative of Colby’s death.

Author Christopher Ruddy, who conducted important research on the alleged suicide of Clinton aide and White House counsel Vince Foster, examined Colby’s 1996 drowning death that mainstream news media incorrectly attributed to a heart attack or stroke. Ruddy unearthed an early Associated Press story detailing Colby’s demise, claiming the spy was “missing and presumed drowned.” The article quotes an assumed source close to Colby’s wife “as saying he’d told her that day he wasn’t feeling well ‘but was going canoeing anyway.’”

One week later, however, “Colby’s wife assured the Washington Times that her husband had been well and had not mentioned canoeing.” Police who surveyed the spymaster’s home found dishes at the table and appliances left on, as if no canoeing excursion was even in the offing. And, in contrast to the coroner and media’s conclusion attributing Colby’s death to drowning caused by a heart attack or stroke, the autopsy found no evidence of either.

Donald Jeffries, Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-ups in American Politics, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2014, 300.

75. Abetting the CIA’s efforts to subvert the only criminal investigation ever conducted on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, US news media gave defendant, OSS veteran and CIA asset Clay Shaw overwhelmingly positive coverage while pillorying Garrison at every turn. This included the marshaling of the country’s major television networks to produce programs targeting the Garrison inquiry.

As the district attorney explained in an address to the New Orleans Academy of Trial Lawyers several months after Shaw’s trial ended, “The news media have attacked me for what they consider improper methods and accused me of trying Shaw in the newspaper. They have done this in spite of the fact that since the day Shaw was charged I have consistently refused to mention his name publicly. On the other hand,” Garrison continued,

in their zeal to help the defendant, I have been personally attacked by every newspaper from the New York Times to the Nairobi Express. N.B.C. put an hour nationwide television show to criticize me and my investigation using prisoners that I convicted and sent to the Penitentiary. It’s really not hard to figure out why I am not the most popular man at the Angola State Penitentiary or the Parish Prison. Every charge that was raised on [NBC’s] program has been investigated and proven to be false.

William Davy, Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim Garrison Investigation, Jordan Publishing, 1999.

76. In 1988 Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, the central character in Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film, The Post, declared to CIA staffers during a speech at the organization’s Langley Virginia headquarters that government agencies should employ the doctrine of prior restraint whenever they deem it necessary and appropriate.

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.

Steven L. Vaughn, Encyclopedia of American Journalism, New York: Routledge, 2008, 201. Cited in Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, 269.

77. Among the most admired and telegenic US presidents in recent history, William J. Clinton was also “a CIA asset” within the Agency’s infamous Operation CHAOS, according to CIA insiders. The CHAOS program violated the organization’s own charter by surveilling thousands of American political dissidents from 1959 to 1974 on US soil. This fact was largely ignored by former DCI and incumbent George H. W. Bush as he ran against Clinton in the 1992 US presidential election, as well as by US news media throughout Clinton’s eight years in the executive branch, and to this day.“The time that Clinton was supposed to have gone to Moscow was the time when the CIA was very active recruiting American students and other students to go to Moscow,” former CIA officer Victor Marchetti observes. “Without revealing any secrets as to how I came to this conclusion, I would not be surprised to find out that Clinton was actually kind of working for the CIA.”

While successfully evading conscription during the Vietnam War, author Roger Morris argues that Clinton was a CIA informant operating within the peace movement both in the US and abroad. According to Morris, one former CIA officer recalls

going through archives of Operation CHAOS at Langley headquarters—part of an agency purge amid the looming congressional investigations of the mid-1970s—and seeing Bill Clinton listed, along with others, as a former informant who had gone on to run for or be elected to political office of some import, in Clinton’s case, attorney general of Arkansas. “He was there on the records,” the former agent said, “with a special designation.” Still another CIA source contended that part of Clinton’s arrangement as an informer had been further insurance against the draft. “He knew he was safe, you see, even if he got a lottery number not high enough and even if the ROTC thing fell through for some reason,” the source said, because the Company could get him a deferment if it had to, and it was done all the time.

Roger Morris, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, New York: Henry Holt, 1996, 102-104, 234, 235.

78. Chief executive of CBS broadcasting network, William Paley, was a close acquaintance of CIA director Allen Dulles. Much like New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Paley made arrangements with the Agency for the network to provide cover for CIA officers. Paley’s chosen contact for the Agency was none other than Sig Mickelson—president of CBS News throughout the mid-to-late 1950s.

On one occasion, Mickelson protested to CBS President Frank Stanton “about having to use a pay telephone to call the CIA, and Stanton suggested he install a private line, bypassing the CBS switchboard, for the purpose. According to Mickelson, he did so.” Mickelson went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, both well-documented CIA-backed propaganda organs.

(As with other CIA-media operatives, Mickelson’s 2000 New York Times obituary makes no mention of his indisputable Agency affiliation.)

Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.

79. Years before the formal inauguration of the “War on Terror” following the September 11, 2001 “terror attacks” the CIA has shaped the way news media recognized, defined and reported on “terrorism.” This continues to be accomplished via “word adaptations that will exclude state terrorists and capture only the petty terror of small groups and individuals,” classifying the latter as “international terrorism,” notes economist and media critic Edward S. Herman.

The CIA defines “international terrorism” as “’Terrorism conducted with the support of a foreign government or organization and/or directed against foreign nationals, institutions, or governments.’” Thus countries having friendly relations with the United States and its allies that perchance may be directly carrying out terrorist activities on their subject populations are removed from consideration.

“In short,” Herman observes, “if you use ‘death squads’ to kill 7,000 of your own citizens, this is ‘terrorism’ but not ‘international terrorism.’ Unless, of course, you do this with ‘the support of a foreign government.’” Throughout the Cold War the US government provided direct aid to dictatorial regimes in South America, Africa, and Asia that has dwarfed Soviet backing of independent organizations such as the Irish Republican Army or the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Yet the CIA and in turn the news media address this stark contradiction “[b]y simply assuming, without the slightest discussion, that the United States is not supporting any official terrorists—only Libya and the Soviet Union do that sort of thing; the United States only supports independent governments, protecting them against terrorists, by definition.”

Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda, Boston: South End Press, 1982, 21-23.

80. The CIA’s well-known MKULTRA mind control experimentation program that began in the early 1950s. Operation MKU was partly justified by the Agency and DCI Allen Dulles through a propaganda campaign using the news media to push the false notion that communist forces were carrying out similar tests on US prisoners of war.

Indeed, the term “’brainwashing’ was coined by Edward Hunter, a CIA-employed journalist who authored many emotionally-charged books and articles on the subject,” according to authors Martin Lee and Norman Solomon. During World War II Hunter worked with the Office of Strategic Services, in propaganda operations.

When he launched his crusade to bring “the facts about brainwashing … to the people,” Hunter was working for U.S. intelligence. Popularizing the concept of brainwashing was part of his job as a CIA operative, despite U.S. Army studies which”failed to reveal even one conclusively documented case of the actual ‘brainwashing’ on an American prisoner of war in Korea.” Indeed, it appears that the communist brainwashing scare was a propaganda ploy, a kind of “brainwashing” or mind control in its own right designed to dupe the American people.

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, New York: Carol Publishing, 1992, 118.

81. In early 1967 free-lance journalist Fred Powledge travelled to New Orleans to report on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation of the JFK assassination for New Republic magazine.

In one interview with Garrison the embattled DA told of the “’tremendous pressure from some sections of the Eastern press, especially those with connections with the administration’… that was causing potentially important witnesses who had initially contacted his office to become reluctant to come forward.”

“’I couldn’t  contradict that,” Powledge observed in his June 17, 1967 article.

I had known, since the assassination, that the most influential purveyors of news in the nation had gone out of their way to present the Warren Commission side of the story, and ignore or downplay those who dissented. One organ of communication, I later learned, even sought the CIA’s advice on how to treat the story about the investigation. This, if Garrison’s allegations about CIA involvement are correct, is roughly comparable to a newspaper’s asking “Bull” Connor how he would handle a story on the Birmingham Freedom Ride massacre, and then following his advice.

“The Work of Ray Marcus,” Appendix VIII, in E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, Brookline MA: Kurtz, Ulmer and DeLucia Book Publishers, 1996, 252.

82. During President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Latin America “[t]he CIA used an entire news organization, Copley News Service, as a cover for its agents,” according to investigative journalists Joseph Trento and David Roman.

“’The Agency’s involvement with the Copley organization is so extensive that it’s almost impossible to sort out,’” one CIA official said of the Agency’s relationship with entity. Other CIA officials confirmed that James S. Copley, the news chain’s owner, was directly involved in making cover arrangements for Copley journalists to serve as CIA assets.

In the 1950s, Trento and Roman explain, Copley personally offered his news organization to President Eisenhower to perform as “the eyes and ears” against “the Communist threat in Latin and Central America” for “our intelligence services.” James Copley was also intimately involved in the InterAmerican Press Association, a CIA-backed entity with close relations to rightwing owners of South American newspapers.

Trento and Roman were among the first journalists to elaborate on CIA infiltration of news media in a 1977 article published in Penthouse magazine, “The Spies Who Came In From the Newsroom.”

Joseph J. Trento, A Secret History of the CIA, New York: Prima Publishing/Random House, 2001.