Alex Constantine : Operation Mockingbird

2002-07-21

Richard Moore

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Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 15:20:16 -0700
From: American Patriot Friends Network <•••@••.•••>
To: APFN Yahoogroups <•••@••.•••
Subject: - "Operation Mockingbird" -

http://www.psychicspy.com/ciamed.txt

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            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.

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