“Operation Mockingbird” is the popular name for a CIA program of media influence that ran from the late 1940s into the early 1970s. It was not a single program with a single budget line; it was a set of relationships between the agency’s Office of Strategic Influence (later the Directorate of Plans) and individual journalists, wire services, book publishers, and front organizations. The Senate’s Church Committee in 1975 documented the relationships but did not use the name. For more on the CIA article; the Church Committee itself is covered separately.
The most ambitious phase of the program began after 1953, when Allen Dulles became Director of Central Intelligence. The agency was already using contacts in the American press built up during the Second World War — Cord Meyer, a former Marine wounded at Guam, became the agency’s senior officer in charge of media relations after 1953. By the late 1950s, the agency had an extensive, if informal, network of relationships with reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, Time, and the Associated Press, and with stringers abroad. The relationship was not always the one the popular version of “Mockingbird” suggests: most of the journalists in question believed, in many cases correctly, that they were exchanging information with intelligence officers, not that they were being run.
What the program actually did
The agency’s media work fell into three categories, and most of the controversy concerns the third.
The first was the placement of stories the agency believed served U.S. policy. The agency funded and supplied the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a Paris-based anti-communist intellectual organization that ran conferences, magazines (Encounter, Preuves, Tempo Presente), and literary prizes from 1950 to the late 1960s. The agency’s funding was concealed from the Congress’s leadership, publication of the funding in 1966–1967 by the New Left intellectual Christopher Lasch and others was a major embarrassment. The CIA also subsidized the publication of books, including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in an inexpensive paperback edition for distribution at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, and the foreign-language edition of Arthur Koestler’s anti-communist novels.
The second was the use of journalists as intelligence assets abroad. Some were paid directly; others were witting and cooperative. The agency’s relationship with The New York Times’ Vietnam bureau chief David Halberstam in 1962–1963 is the most-cited example: Halberstam had been identified by the agency as a useful conduit for declassified material, and the agency’s Saigon station chief, Lucien Conein, had frequent contact with him.
The third, and most controversial, was the use of agency assets to plant false or unattributable stories. The Church Committee documented a series of cases, including a 1967 operation that placed false stories about the diversion of U.S. military aid in Italian newspapers, and the agency’s support of the Cuban Information Service, an exile group that put out unattributed propaganda. The agency’s Inspector General, in a 1975 report on the “family jewels,” documented a substantial body of such activity and recommended reforms that were largely enacted in the CIA’s 1976 charter.
The legacy
The agency’s relationship with the press has been regulated since 1976 by an internal directive that prohibits the CIA from using journalists for intelligence purposes without the consent of their employers. The regulation, and the post-Watergate sensitivity of the press, has substantially narrowed the program. But the use of unattributed media placement by the U.S. government, in particular the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Influence (closed down in 2002) and the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs, has been a recurring controversy in the twenty-first century. The Mockingbird case remains the historical reference for any discussion of covert American media influence abroad.