From: "Richard K. Moore"
Date: 21 Jul 2002
Subject: Alex Constantine : Operation Mockingbird
To: cj-at-cyberjournal.org, renaissance-network-at-cyberjournal.org
======================Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 15:20:16 -0700
From: American Patriot Friends Network
To: APFN Yahoogroups
Operation Mockingbird
By Alex Constantine
Who Controls the Media?
Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations
with grinning, double-breasted executives,
interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and
flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola.
Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that
mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening
Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser .
It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of
armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports
news from a parallel universe - one that has never
heard of politically-motivated assassinations,
CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death
squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets
fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone
gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on
their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most
serious infraction an official can commit __is a
the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder)
no residency status.
This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation
of MOCKINGBIRD.
It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid
period of the cold war, when the CIA began a
systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a
process that often included direct takeover of
major news outlets.
In this period, the American intelligence services
competed with communist activists abroad to
influence European labor unions. With or without
the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner,
an undercover State Department official assigned to
the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to
enter the cold war underground of covert operations
on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination.
Philip Graham, __a graduate of the Army
Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then
publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under
Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named
Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
"By the early 1950s," writes former Village Voice
reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great,
"Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York
Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications
vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in
all, according to a former CIA analyst." The
network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for
German and American corporations who wanted their
points of view represented in the public print.
Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire
agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA
propaganda. Many of these were already run by men
with reactionary views, among them William Paley
(CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time)
and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).
Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD
have since been appalled to find in FOIA
documents that agents boasting in CIA office memos
of their pride in having placed "important assets"
inside every major news publication in the country.
It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly
admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have
acted as case officers to agents in the field.
"World War III has begun," Henry's Luce's Life
declared in March, 1947. "It is in the opening
skirmish stage already." The issue featured an
excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for
the creation of an "American Empire,"
"world-dominating in political power, set up at
least in part through coercion (probably including
war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which
one group of people ... would hold more than its
equal share of power."
George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic,
drew down on Luce in 1947, explaining that
"although avoiding typical Hitlerian phrases, the
same doctrine of a superior people taking over the
world and ruling it, began to appear in the press,
whereas the organs of Wall Street were much more
honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably leading to
war if it brought greater commercial markets under
the American flag."
On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was
struck between the CIA and William Paley, a wartime
colonel and the founder of CBS. A firm believer in
"all forms of propaganda" to foster loyalty to the
Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover
at the behest of his close friend, the busy grey
eminence of the nation's media, Allen Dulles.
Paley's designated go-between in his dealings with
the CIA was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News
from 1954 to 1961.
The CIA's assimilation of old guard fascists was
overseen by the Operations Coordination Board,
directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an executive of
Time magazine and Eisenhower's Special Assistant
for Cold War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by
Nelson Rockefeller, who quit a year later,
disgusted at the administration's political
infighting. Vice President Nixon succeeded
Rockefeller as the key cold war strategist.
"Nixon," writes John Loftus, a former attorney for
the Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations, took "a small boy's delight in the
arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden
microphones, the 'black' propaganda." Nixon
especially enjoyed his visit to a Virginia training
camp to observe Nazis in the "special forces"
drilling at covert operations.
One of the fugitives recruited by the American
intelligence underground was heroin smuggler Hubert
von Blcher, the son of A German ambassador. Hubert
often bragged that that he was trained by the
Abwehr, the German military intelligence division,
while still a civilian in his twenties. He served
in a recon unit of the German Army until forced out
for medical reasons in 1944, according to his
wartime records. He worked briefly as an assistant
director for Berlin-Film on a movie entitled One
Day ..., and finished out the war flying with the
Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy - his
mission was the smuggling of Nazi loot out of the
country. His exploits were, in part, the subject of
Sayer and Botting's Nazi Gold, an account of the
knockover of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.
In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a
photographer named Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he
immediately paid court to Eva Peron, presenting her
with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection
from the wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS
from Europe's Jews?). Hubert then met with Martin
Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver German marks
worth $80 million. The loot financed the birth of
the National Socialist Party in Argentina, among
other forms of Nazi revival.
In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job
at the Color Corporation of America in Hollywood.
He eked out a living writing scripts for the
booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on a
film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney.
Nine years later he returned to Buenos Aires, then
Dsseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm
that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical
warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie
Club in Dsseldorf in 1982, von Blcher boasted to
journalists, "I am chief shareholder of Pan
American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard
Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent
financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier
ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed
up by these people over their second bottle of
brandy."
Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble
from the drunken dreams of world-moving affluence
were, in their time, Moses Annenberg, publisher of
The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the
CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like
most American high-rollers, Annenberg lived a
double life. Moses, his father, was a scion of the
Capone mob. Both Moses and Walter were indicted in
1939 for tax evasions totalling many millions of
dollars - the biggest case in the history of the
Justice Department. Moses pled guilty and agreed to
pay the government $8 million and settle $9 million
in assorted tax claims, penalties and interest
debts. Moses received a three-year sentence. He
died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.
Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty
Republican. On the campaign trail in April, 1988,
George Bush flew into Los Angeles to woo Reagan's
kitchen cabinet. "This is the topping on the cake,"
Bush's regional campaign director told the Los
Angeles Times. The Bush team met at Annenberg's
plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands,
California. It was at the Annenberg mansion that
Nixon's cabinet was chosen, and the state's social
and contributor registers built over a
quarter-century of state political dominance by
Ronald Reagan, whose acting career was launched by
Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
The commercialization of television, coinciding
with Reagan's recruitment by the Crusade for
Freedom, a CIA front, presented the intelligence
world with unprecedented potential for sowing
propaganda and even prying in the age of Big
Brother. George Orwell glimpsed the possibilities
when he installed omniscient video surveillance
technology in 1948, a novel rechristened 1984 for
the first edition published in the U.S. by
Harcourt, Brace. Operation Octopus, according to
federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a
surveillance program that turned any television set
with tubes into a broadcast transmitter. Agents of
Octopus could pick up audio and visual images with
the equipment as far as 25 miles away.
Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at
the time of his disappearance in the midst of the
Watergate probe.
In 1952, at MCA, Actors' Guild president Ronald
Reagan - a screen idol recruited by MOCKINGBIRD's
Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the
resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to
Loftus - signed a secret waiver of the
conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled
studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on
early television programming. In exchange, MCA made
Reagan a part owner. Furthermore, historian C. Vann
Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987,
reported that Reagan had "fed the names of suspect
people in his organization to the FBI secretly and
regularly enough to be assigned 'an informer's code
number, T-10.' His FBI file indicates intense
collaboration with producers to 'purge' the
industry of subversives."
No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter
Cronkite, a former intelligence officer and in the
immediate postwar period UPI's Moscow
correspondent. Cronkite was lured to CBS by
Operation MOCKINGBIRD's Phil Graham, according to
Deborah Davis.
Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose
like a horror-film simian from CIA and Mafia heroin
operations. Among other organized-crime
Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell
Thomas threw in to launch the infamous Resorts
International, the corporate front for Lansky's
branch of the federally-sponsored mob family and
the corporate precursor to Cap Cities. Another of
the investors was James Crosby, a Cap Cities
executive who donated $100,000 to Nixon's 1968
presidential campaign. This was the year that
Resorts bought into Atlantic City casino interests.
Police in New jersey attempted, with no success, to
spike the issuance of a gambling license to the
company, citing Mafia ties.
In 1954, this same circle of investors, all
Catholics, founded the broadcasting company
notorious for overt propagandizing and general
spookiness. The company's chief counsel was OSS
veteran William Casey, who clung to his shares by
concealing them in a blind trust even after he was
appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.
"Black radio" was the phrase CIA critic David Wise
coined in The Invisible Government to describe the
agency's intertwining interests in the emergence of
the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who
took to the airwaves. "Daily, East and West beam
hundreds of propaganda broadcasts at each other in
an unrelenting babble of competition for the minds
of their listeners. The low-price transistor has
given the hidden war a new importance," enthused
one foreign correspondent.
A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance
the propaganda push. One of them, Operations and
Policy Research, Inc. (OPR), received hundreds of
thousands of dollars from the CIA through private
foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis
of a television series that aired in New York and
Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People and Politics, a
"study" of the American political system in 21
weekly installments.
In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the
same CIA/Mafia combination that formed Cap Cities
sank its claws into the film studios and labor
unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the Army
during the war by a criminal investigation of
Chicago mobsters in the film industry. Rosselli, a
CIA asset probably assassinated by the CIA, played
sidekick to Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures mogul
who visited Italy's Benito Mussolini in 1933, and
upon his return to Hollywood remodeled his office
after the dictator's. The only honest job Rosselli
ever had was assistant purchasing agent (and a
secret investor) at Eagle Lion productions, run by
Bryan Foy, a former producer for 20th Century Fox.
Rosselli, Capone's representative on the West
Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia investments
to Cohn. Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments
with Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood
Reporter.
In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed
to a full third of the CIA's covert operations
budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA
employees were eventually engaged in propaganda
efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost
American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year
by 1978, a budget larger than the combined
expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news
syndicates.
In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it
worked closely with the intelligence services - in
fact, 23 employees were full-time employees of the
Agency.
Most consumers of the corporate media were - and
are - unaware of the effect that the salting of
public opinion has on their own beliefs. A network
anchorman in time of national crisis is an
instrument of psychological warfare in the
MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from the
national security sector's chamber of horrors. For
this reason consumers of the corporate press have
reason to examine their basic beliefs about
government and life in the parallel universe of
these United States.
======================
Source: http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?id=657&batch=16&lists=cyberjournal
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