What is Operation Mockingbird?

photorandy2023

8 months ago

This is a new series of articles where I explain various terms, catchphrases, and other confusing topics, as well as many secret government projects and agencies. If there are any subjects you’re interested in learning about, please include them in the comment section.

Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early years of the Cold War and attempted to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes. According to author Deborah Davis, Operation Mockingbird recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network and influenced the operations of front groups. CIA support of front groups was exposed when an April 1967 Ramparts article reported that the National Student Association received funding from the CIA. In 1975, Church Committee Congressional investigations revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups.

In 1973, a document referred to as the “Family Jewels” was published by the CIA containing a reference to a different operation named “Project Mockingbird“, which was the name of an operation in 1963 which wiretapped two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, “from March 12 to June 15, 1963”. They had published articles based on classified material. The document does not contain references to “Operation Mockingbird”.

Background

In the early years of the Cold War, efforts were made by the United States Government to use mass media to influence public opinion internationally. After the United States Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 uncovered domestic surveillance abuses directed by the Executive branch of the United States government and The New York Times in 1974 published an article by Seymour Hersh claiming the CIA had violated its charter by spying on anti-war activists, former CIA officials and some lawmakers called for a congressional inquiry that became known as the Church Committee. Published in 1976, the committee’s report confirmed some earlier stories that charged that the CIA had cultivated relationships with private institutions, including the press. Without identifying individuals by name, the Church Committee stated that it found fifty journalists who had official, but secret, relationships with the CIA. In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, “The CIA and the Media,” reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee’s report and wrote that more than 400 US press members had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA, including New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, columnist and political analyst Stewart Alsop and Time magazine. Bernstein documented the way in which overseas branches of major US news agencies had for many years served as the “eyes and ears” of Operation Mockingbird, which functioned to disseminate CIA propaganda through domestic US media.

In Katharine the Great, Deborah Davis’ 1979 unauthorized biography of Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post, the author states that the CIA ran an “Operation Mockingbird” during this time, writing that the Prague-based International Organization of Journalists (IOJ) “received money from Moscow and controlled reporters on every major newspaper in Europe, disseminating stories that promoted the Communist cause”, and that Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination (a covert operations unit created in 1948 by the United States National Security Council) had created Operation Mockingbird in response to the IOJ, recruiting Phil Graham from The Washington Post to run the project within the industry. According to Davis, “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.” Davis wrote that after Cord Meyer joined the CIA in 1951, he became Operation Mockingbird’s “principal operative.”

In The Rising Clamor: The American Press, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Cold War, David P. Hadley wrote that the “continued lack of specific details [provided by the Church Committee and Bernstein’s exposé] proved a breeding ground for some outlandish claims regarding CIA and the press”. He mentioned that Davis provided no information on her sources for her 1979 biography of Katharine Graham and that the Church Committee and other investigations that followed it did not reveal an operation as described by Davis. According to Hadley, “Mockingbird, as described by Davis, has remained a stubbornly persistent theory”; and added, “The Davis/Mockingbird theory, that the CIA operated a deliberate and systematic program of widespread manipulation of the U.S. media, does not appear to be grounded in reality, but that should not disguise the active role the CIA played in influencing the domestic press’s output.”

At various times, under its own initiative or in accordance with directives from the President of the United States or the National Security Council staff, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has attempted to influence public opinion both in the United States and abroad.

Subsidies of non-government groups

In 1947, the Soviet-dominated Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) was created by Joseph Stalin. The conference, at which it was created, was a response of Eastern European countries to invitations to attend the July 1947 Paris Conference on the Marshall Plan. Cominform’s stated purpose was to coordinate the work of Communist parties, under Soviet direction, so the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin called the conference in response to divergences among the eastern European governments on whether or not to attend the Paris Conference on Marshall Aid in July 1947.

The initial seat of the Cominform was located in Belgrade (then the capital of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). After the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the group in June 1948, the seat was moved to Bucharest, Romania. The expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform for Titoism marked the beginning of the Informbiro period in that nation’s history.

The intended purpose of the Cominform was to coordinate actions between Communist parties, and scores of Communist-controlled professional, artistic and intellectual groups under Soviet direction. The Kremlin had set up the Cominform in the early years of the cold war to coordinate the activities of the Cominform acted as a tool of Soviet foreign policy and Stalinism.

In response, CIA psychological operators decided that the Cominform-controlled groups could best be countered by Western groups, including not only intensely anti-Communist right-wing groups, but groups across the ideological spectrum. Many of them were unaware of CIA subsidy, or such knowledge was restricted to a few leaders, and thus these groups were not expected to follow orders. Wilford cited, as examples, the small magazines Partisan Review and The New Leader, which received CIA funds in one way or another, but owed nothing to the agency, either in their founding or in their operations, and were not “front” organizations. Other groups formed by the CIA, however, were true fronts, although some of the individuals being sponsored were unaware of the source of funds.

Philip Agee suggested that funding from the CIA to the National Student Association, which had been formed in 1947, may have begun in 1950. Tom Braden, head of the CIA International Organizations Division, does not disclose what year this funding began; but it clearly began in the 1950s and continued until 1967. Braden said that the Division was established in 1950, when Director of Central Intelligence Allen W. Dulles overruled Frank Wisner, who headed the quasi-autonomous Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). Until 1952, OPC was the covert action branch of the U.S. government, loosely part of CIA but also with direct access and appeal to the Secretaries of Defense and State.

1950 also marked the beginning of the ten-year Crusade for Freedom, an operation to generate American support for Radio Free Europe that was covertly backed by the CIA.

Another organization set up on 26 June 1950, as the cultural arm of the International Organizations Division, was the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

In 1967, a number of clandestine subsidies to associations and journals became public. Given the CIA’s prohibition from domestic activities, support of US groups with worldwide presence, such as the National Student Association, were especially problematic. The exposure, by Ramparts magazine, of CIA subsidies to the National Association, according to Time, led to the term “orphans”, referring to nearly 100 private agencies that had been getting CIA money, and were affected by a Presidential order that support must end by the end of 1967. Time succinctly summarized the issue with “the question is whether, in a free society, it is right, wise—or necessary—for supposedly independent organizations to receive secret subsidies.”

Whatever the merits or demerits of the CIA’s methods, most of these groups served the U.S. well in its contest for the faith and understanding of the world’s workers and thinkers, students and teachers, refugees from yesterday and leaders of tomorrow. This led to the appointment of a presidential commission, headed by Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, to figure out how the gap left by the CIA should be filled. … a politically ambitious former California newspaper publisher who served with the CIA between 1950 and 1954, added further details. In an article in the Saturday Evening Post, Braden indignantly defended the CIA against charges that it had been “immoral” by recording some of the extremely useful things it accomplished early in the cold war.

By 1953, according to Braden, the US subsidy program was operating in earnest.

By 1953 we were operating or influencing international organizations in every field where Communist fronts had previously seized ground, and in some where they had not even begun to operate. The money we spent was very little by Soviet standards. But that was reflected in the first rule of our operational plan: “Limit the money to amounts private organizations can credibly spend.” The other rules were equally obvious: “Use legitimate, existing organizations; disguise the extent of American interest: protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy.

A front organization organized in 1959 was the Independent Service for Information, set up at Harvard specifically for the purpose of getting some young anti-Communist Americans to attend a huge youth festival being organized by the Communists in Vienna. Among those sponsored were Gloria Steinem who had just spent a year and half in India, where she befriended Indira Gandhi and the widow of the “revolutionary humanist” M. N. Roy, and had met a researcher who seems to have been a C.I.A. agent or contact. Steinem was hired to run the I.S.I. and to recruit knowledgeable young Americans who could debate effectively with the Communist organizers of the festival, defending the United States against Communist criticism.

Disclosures

Planted news

Ralph McGehee, a former CIA officer, stated that the CIA often placed news stories anonymously in news publications to spread false ideas favorable to CIA goals. Stories that CIA planted might be picked up and further spread by additional newspapers and other third parties, in a slightly altered form, or even picked up as news and then rewritten by a journalist.

Propaganda thus planted by the CIA to shape public opinion could circle back and contaminate the CIA’s own information files. An example given by McGehee based on his own experience is the CIA fabrication in 1965 of a story about weapon shipments sent by sea to the Viet Cong in a CIA effort to “prove” foreign support for the Viet Cong. The CIA “took tons of Communist-made weapons from its own warehouses, loaded them on a Vietnamese coastal vessel, faked a firefight, and then called in Western reporters…to ‘prove’ North Vietnamese aid to the Viet Cong.” The story got picked up by other news sources, so much so that the Marines later began to patrol the coast to intercept reported contraband of the type earlier “found.”

CIA secret funding for “cutouts”

In March 1967, Ramparts magazine reported that the CIA had been funding the National Student Association through a series of foundation cutouts. Resulting journalistic and other investigations led to the cessation of most CIA subsidies.

After reading of the disclosures, Tom Braden wrote about looking at “a creased and faded yellow paper. It bears the following inscription in pencil:

Received from Warren G. Haskins, $15,000. (signed) Norris A. Grambo.” For I was Warren G. Haskins. Norris A. Grambo was Irving Brown, of the American Federation of Labor. The $15,000 was from the vaults of the CIA, and the piece of yellow paper is the last memento I possess of a vast and secret operation whose death has been brought about by small-minded and resentful men.

Relationships with organized labor are not surprising considering the CIA’s direct predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had a Labor Branch under Arthur Goldberg. European labor groups often provided OSS with volunteers to penetrate occupied Europe, and, with greatest danger, into Nazi Germany.

Arthur Goldberg, head of the Labor Division of the OSS clandestine intelligence unit, later appointed to the US Supreme Court by President John F. Kennedy—was known at the time for his defense of the Chicago Newspaper Guild during its 1938 strike against the Hearst Corporation. Joining OSS/London in 1943, Goldberg convinced colleagues and OSS director, Gen. William J. Donovan, of the need to establish contact with underground labor groups in occupied and Axis countries. … Because such groups were already major forces of internal resistance behind enemy lines, they constituted a ready made source of valuable military and political intelligence.

CIA and mass media

Historically, the CIA made use of mass media assets, both foreign and domestic, for its covert operations. Popular coverage of the subject came to the attention of the public in 1973, when columnist Jack Anderson reported that the Nixon campaign had used a foreign correspondent and Hearst bureau chief in London to spy on Democratic Party candidates, both for the 1968 Nixon campaign and for the 1972 Nixon campaign. Anderson also reported that the accused journalist in question, Seymour K. Freiden, worked for the CIA. The article led the New York Times and the Washington Star-News to followup on the story, asking then director William E. Colby if their own journalists were on the CIA payroll. Colby ordered an internal CIA inquiry and delivered the results to the Star News. They reported that the CIA had enlisted more than thirty Americans working abroad as journalists.

Congressional investigations

A wide range of CIA operations were examined in a series of Congressional investigations from 1975 to 1976 including CIA ties with journalists. The most extensive discussion of CIA relations with news media from these investigations is in the Church Committee‘s final report, published in April 1976. The report covered CIA ties with both foreign and domestic news media.

For foreign news media, the report concluded that:

The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.

For domestic media, the report states:

Approximately 50 of the [Agency] assets are individual American journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations. Of these, fewer than half are “accredited” by U.S. media organizations … The remaining individuals are non-accredited freelance contributors and media representatives abroad … More than a dozen United States news organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad. A few of these organizations were unaware that they provided this cover.

CIA response

The Church report stated that prior to the report’s completion, the CIA had already begun restricting its use of journalists. According to the report, former CIA director William Colby told the committee that in 1973 he had issued instructions that “As a general policy, the Agency will not make any clandestine use of staff employees of U.S. publications which have a substantial impact or influence on public opinion.”

In February 1976, Director George H. W. Bush announced an even more restrictive policy: “effective immediately, CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.

By the time the Church Committee Report was completed, the Report stated, all CIA contacts with accredited journalists had been dropped. The Committee noted, however, that “accredited correspondent” meant the ban was limited to individuals “formally authorized by contract or issuance of press credentials to represent themselves as correspondents” and that non-contract workers who did not receive press credentials, such as stringers or freelancers, were not included.

Other coverage

Journalist Carl Bernstein, writing in an October 1977 article in the magazine Rolling Stone, said that the Church Committee report covered up CIA relations with news media, and named a number of journalists and organizations who CIA officers he interviewed said worked with the CIA.

Influencing public opinion abroad

The CIA urged its field stations to use their “propaganda assets” to refute those who did not agree with the Warren Report. An April 1967 dispatch from CIA headquarters said: “Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit circulation of such claims in other countries.” The Agency instructed its stations around the world to “discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors” and “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”

In 1974, E. Howard Hunt, a former officer of the agency, revealed that he had been sent by the CIA’s Psychological Warfare department to obtain the film rights of Animal Farm from George Orwell‘s widow, and the resulting 1954 animation was funded by the agency.

Work with entertainment

In the mid-1990s, a man named Chase Brandon, an operations officer for the CIA who was assigned to South America, as liaison to Hollywood. Brandon’s film credits include The Recruit, The Sum of All Fears, Enemy of the State, Bad Company and In the Company of Spies. He has consulted for television programs including The Agency and Alias. He has appeared on Discovery, Learning Channel, History Channel, PBS, A&E, and has been interviewed on E! Entertainment, Access Hollywood, and Entertainment Tonight.

The Guardian journalist John Patterson criticizes the CIA assistance as being only to complimentary productions, including not running material, such as “the original pilot episode of The Agency, which was pulled. It featured the spymasters preventing a plot by a Bin Laden-backed terrorist cell to blow up a fictionalized Harrods. The airing of such an episode might have pointed up the real CIA’s corresponding lack of success in foiling the World Trade Center attacks.”

According to Brandon, the agency would not endorse Spy Game, starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. The final rewrite “showed our senior management in an insensitive light and we just wouldn’t want to be a part of that kind of project”, said Brandon, who also withheld approval from 24, a Fox series about a fictional intelligence agency, CTU, that “also suggests all is not hunky-dory in the company’s upper echelons.” And The Bourne Identity, based on the 1984 novel by Robert Ludlum, was “so awful that I tossed it in the burn bag after page 25”.

Patterson observed:

It used to be the case that if a movie explicitly condemned CIA actions – such as Under Fire – the studios could be counted on to bury it. That was no longer true after Costa-Gavras’s Missing won Jack Lemmon an Oscar in 1982, and Iran-Contra slimed the CIA in the late 1980s. Since then, “CIA renegade” has become a dependable staple not just of big-budget movies like Enemy of the State, but also of a million straight-to-cable action-schlockfests starring Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal.

Other films that the CIA has provided assistance to include the 1992 film version of the Tom Clancy novel Patriot Games, and the 2003 movie, The Recruit. According to director Roger Donaldson, when the Agency commits to providing their support to a project, that can include letting a photographer shoot stills to help in designing sets, or, in certain instances, having the actors spend time in the building. By visiting Langley, the director says, he came to “understand how the space worked and looked. I needed a real sense of how a new person would feel when they saw the place for the first time.”

In 2012, Tricia Jenkins released a book, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television, which further documented the CIA’s efforts at manipulating its public image through entertainment media since the 1990s. The book explains that the CIA has used motion pictures to boost recruitment, mitigate public affairs disasters (like Aldrich Ames), bolster its own image, and even intimidate terrorists through disinformation campaigns.

In 1977, journalist Carl Bernstein published an article in Rolling Stone with a serious allegation: that hundreds of American journalists worked cheek by jowl with the Central Intelligence Agency. This operation purportedly operated for decades and involved some of the most prominent news organizations in the U.S., including The New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.

Bernstein’s reporting mostly focused on journalists who worked abroad, but ominous rumors soon emerged that the CIA was also using reporters to spread propaganda across America and manipulate public opinion at home. By 1979, that alleged program had a name: Operation Mockingbird.

Facts about Operation Mockingbird remain murky — including whether it ever ended — but the idea of news organizations working with intelligence agencies struck many citizens as deeply alarming. Operation Mockingbird was even invoked as recently as mid-2024 when then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that the program is still being used.

So what is Operation Mockingbird? How did this alleged program begin and who was involved? And is it really still being used to brainwash Americans?

What Is Operation Mockingbird?

The term “Operation Mockingbird” seems to have originated from Deborah Davis’ unauthorized — and controversial — biography of Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, Katharine the Great. The term is not often used in reporting about journalists working with the CIA from the 1970s, and it shouldn’t be confused with “Project Mockingbird” — a confirmed CIA operation that tapped the phones of two journalists in the 1960s.

For clarity’s sake, however, “Operation Mockingbird” will be used here.

So, how was Operation Mockingbird first unveiled? According to a December 1977 New York Times article — which was published after Bernstein’s Rolling Stone report — the closer-than-expected relationship between the CIA and the press was first made public in 1973. Then, CIA Director William E. Colby shared some details of the practice with reporters, and the issue was publicized by the Washington Star. This led to Congressional investigations.

Four years later, Bernstein expanded on the relationship between the CIA and American journalists in an article for Rolling Stone, “The CIA And The Media.” He claimed that for 25 years, some 400 American journalists had “secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

How Did Operation Mockingbird Emerge?

Bernstein claimed that the relationship between the press and the CIA first began during World War II, when journalists formed close relationships with members of the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA. “When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue,” Bernstein explained.

In the 1950s and 1960s, during the early part of the Cold War, the program was mostly focused in Western Europe. “[W]e had journalists all over Berlin and Vienna just to keep track of who the hell was coming in from the East and what they were up to,” one CIA official told Bernstein.

Public DomainThe CIA has been accused of carrying out a number of nefarious projects, including Operation Mockingbird.

The program expanded to South America in the 1960s, but the CIA rarely placed journalistic assets in Eastern Europe. There, journalists would be in danger of being accused of being spies, so it often wasn’t worth the risk.

“The tasks they performed sometimes consisted of little more than serving as ‘eyes and ears’ for the CIA,” Bernstein wrote, “reporting on what they had seen or overheard in an Eastern European factory, at a diplomatic reception in Bonn, on the perimeter of a military base in Portugal.”

On other occasions, he noted, their tasks were more complex, ranging from planting misinformation to hosting parties that would attract foreign spies to sending instructions to CIA-controlled members of foreign governments.

So who was involved? Bernstein wrote that the program was composed of accredited staff members of news organizations, freelancers, editors, publishers, columnists, and commentators who worked for organizations like The New York Times, CBS, Time Inc., and Newsweek. The CIA also “bankrolled numerous foreign press services” to provide cover for operatives.

But — even though the whole truth is difficult to discern — many also said that the operation wasn’t widespread or well-organized.

The Murky CIA Connections With Journalists

After the publication of Bernstein’s article, CIA officials told The New York Times that the number of journalists on the CIA’s payroll was smaller — between 40 and 100 over 25 years. (However, they also claimed that a definitive number would be hard to establish since files about such topics were often scattered, incomplete, and sometimes even nonexistent.)

Alterego/Wikimedia CommonsThe New York Times was one of many news organizations alleged to be involved in Operation Mockingbird.

But many of these journalists weren’t spying for the CIA, per se. The New York Times reported that it was long “common practice for American correspondents returning home or preparing to go abroad to spend time with the C.I.A.’s experts on their region of the world.” These reporters were often purportedly asked to write the CIA “longer, more detailed versions of the dispatches” that they were assigned, “spiced with unprintable gossip and innuendo that might be helpful” to the agency.

Indeed, one reporter took issue with being called an asset and told Bernstein that his dealings with the CIA were the normal “give and take.”

“I might call them up and say something like, ‘Papa Doc [Haitian politician François Duvalier] has the clap, did you know that?’ and they’d put it in the file,” the journalist explained. “I don’t consider that reporting for them… it’s useful to be friendly to them and, generally, I felt friendly to them. But I think they were more helpful to me than I was to them.”

According to Bernstein, a CIA officer likewise downplayed the program. Many reporters, he said, “were recruited for finite [specific] undertakings and would be appalled to find that they were listed [in Agency files] as CIA operatives.”

Another officer told The New York Times that such journalists were often used as “support assets,” not necessarily as spies.

In any case, the CIA claimed that the organization started cutting back on using journalists in 1973, and officially declared in 1976 that it would not engage in “any paid or contractual relationship with any full‑time or part‑time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.”

So where does the alleged Operation Mockingbird stand today?

The Mysteries About Operation Mockingbird

Some believe that Operation Mockingbird — if it existed — consisted mostly of what was reported about the CIA’s relationship with the press in the 1970s. But others think it was used to push propaganda and brainwash Americans, an idea that gained traction after the publication of Deborah Davis’ book Katharine the Great. Though the book focused on Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, it also gave a name to the alleged Operation Mockingbird.

Those who believe in the large-scale program often say that the operation started during the Cold War and aimed to infiltrate the domestic news media and manipulate public opinion. Disturbingly, some even claim that Operation Mockingbird is still being used by the CIA right now.

While Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was running for president in 2024 — he dropped out that August — he alleged that Operation Mockingbird was “alive and well today.” Kennedy stated that the covert operation had never gone away, and that it was being used to brainwash Americans through some of the nation’s top news organizations, and even some history and science publications.

Maxlovestoswim/Wikimedia CommonsRobert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2017.

While fact-checking his claims, ABC News found that there was “no information to support Kennedy’s claims that journalists were used to deliberately propagandize Americans or that a propaganda-pushing program called ‘Operation Mockingbird’ even existed.”

Indeed, even Bernstein’s reporting from the 1970s did not allege that such an operation was targeting Americans — its purpose was to gather or influence information abroad. (However, the CIA acknowledged that “fallout” from these efforts could make its way into news stories reported in the U.S.)

“We have taken particular caution to ensure that our operations are focused abroad and not at the United States,” former CIA Director William Colby (who held his position from 1973 to 1976) stated.

Naturally, however, much of what’s become known as Operation Mockingbird likely took place behind closed doors. The shortcomings of the Congressional investigations frustrated many in the 1970s, and the extent of the program — if it can be called that — may never be known for sure.

Likewise, it’s unknown if Operation Mockingbird continued in one form or another. Today, the CIA is prohibited from recruiting American journalists.

That said, a CIA officer told The New York Times in 1977 that they expected the “pendulum” would swing back toward recruiting journalists at some point in the future — and that “they’re ripe for the plucking.”

Resources

en.wikipedia.org, “Operation Mockingbird.” By Wikipedia Editors; en.wikipedia.org, ” CIA Influence on public opinion.” By Wikipedia Editors; allthatsinteresting.com, “What Is Operation Mockingbird, The CIA’s Alleged Program That Infiltrated America’s Top News Organizations?” By Kaleena Fraga; libertywingspan.com, “Operation Mockingbird.” By Aden McClure;