18) Operation Mockingbird
In the late 1940s, the CIA launched a top secret project called Operation Mockingbird. The organization’s goal was to buy influence and control among the major media outlets. The CIA also planned to put journalists and reporters directly on the CIA payroll, which some claim is ongoing to this day. Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post) were the architects of this plan, and intended to enlist American news organizations and journalists to basically become spies and propagandists.
Their list of entrenched agents eventually included journalists from ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, and Copley News Service. By the 1950s, the government organization had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives.
It’s also worth noting that in the 1950s to ’70s, the CIA paid a number of well-known domestic and foreign journalists (from well-known outlets like Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS and others) to publish CIA propaganda. Reportedly, the CIA funded at least one movie, the animated “Animal Farm,” by George Orwell. The activities were finally exposed by the Church Committee in 1975.
