Legacy of Operation Mockingbird Lives On in CIA’s Russophobic Influence Over Media

Former US President Harry Truman once penned an op-ed decrying the unaccountable power of the agency his administration created. The piece ran in the Washington Post one morning in 1963, but was removed from the paper’s evening edition.

Mainstream US media is gearing up for another election season dominated by Russophobia and neo-McCarthyism, if an article by intelligence agency stenographer Julian Barnes in The New York Times is any indication.

“The US government is preparing for its adversaries to intensify efforts to influence American voters next year,” the piece, published late last year, ominously begins. “Russia appears to be paying close attention to the election, as its war in Ukraine is soon to enter a third year… With Republican opposition to Ukraine funding growing, officials believe that Moscow is likely to try to interfere even more in 2024.”

Barnes uncritically cites a report issued by US intelligence agencies – institutions that, as former CIA director Mike Pompeo noted in a rare moment of candor, train their employees to lie, cheat, and steal. Entire volumes of research have been published detailing Western spy agencies’ duplicitous efforts in the name of empire. Barnes, himself an alumnus of Harvard, seems either too dazzled by his sources’ credentials or too sympathetic to their mission to exercise journalistic scrutiny.

"We lied, we cheated, we stole" #CIA #Pompeo #FreeAssangeNOW https://t.co/9a2AKy1i7I https://t.co/Jq7vHDpeim pic.twitter.com/Sn4yIPDbnJ

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 17, 2022

“It's poppycock. I think the British call it bollocks,” said former intelligence analyst Ray McGovern of US media’s recent coverage of Russia and China. “I was tempted to use a different word instead of bollocks. My diplomatic friends from the State Department say ‘male bovine excrement.’ It seethes from The New York Times.”

McGovern, himself a reformed ex-employee of the CIA, left the agency in 1990, eventually going on to co-found Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity during the runup to the US war in Iraq. McGovern joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Tuesday to criticize Western media’s complicity in manufacturing hysteria over the US empire's latest enemy du jour.

“As ludicrous as all this stuff is with prominent congresspeople saying ‘the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming’... it’s nothing to laugh [at],” said McGovern. “Because Americans are so conditioned now – brainwashed is not too strong a word – to believe the worst of the Russians.”

“If Biden decides to up the ante in Ukraine, for example, to prevent a definitive loss to the Russians before the election, I dare say maybe most, at least a good segment of American society will have been so conditioned by this Russiagate stuff that they will support this kind of thing,” he claimed. “And who knows what that will do to the rest of us.”

Host Garland Nixon shared McGovern’s assessment of US lawmakers, speculating, “It's not that they're convinced. And it's not even that they care whether it's true or false. They're, shall we say, apathetic about the truth.”

“Words are just something that are a means to an end. And that's, dare I say, evil.”

“It's worse than apathy,” responded McGovern. “Have you checked how much money Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing... are giving?... It's the military industrial complex writ large.”

US weapons manufacturers maintain influence in Washington not just by contributing to lawmakers, but by funding some of the country’s most important institutions. A study last year by the Quincy Institute found that of the 15 think tanks mentioned most often in America’s major newspapers in relation to coverage of Ukraine, 14 of them receive funding from US military contractors.

Think tanks with defense industry funding were found to be seven times more likely to be cited than those without, according to the study.

“That there is guilt by omission,” said McGovern of US media’s coverage of the so-called Russiagate scandal. “Do Americans know that over six years ago it was published that the head of the cyber firm investigating the [alleged] DNC hack, so to speak, by the Russians testified under oath – this fellow's name is Shawn Henry, the firm is CrowdStrike – that there was no technical evidence that Russia or anyone else hacked into the Democratic National Committee? Sworn testimony under oath.”

“It has not appeared in the New York Times, so most people are blissfully unaware that this thing has been disproven.”

In 1977, investigative journalist Carl Bernstein revealed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird to the American public. US intelligence, the reporter demonstrated, had cultivated assets in mainstream media for decades, allowing it to shape coverage at outlets such as the Associated Press, CBS and The New York Times. Although the CIA is legally forbidden from operating on American soil, the agency faced no consequences from the revelation.

The incident would be quickly swept under the rug, and by 1981 the CIA had a strong ally in the executive branch with the ascension of former CIA director George H.W. Bush to the vice presidency.

US Senator Chuck Schumer once cautioned former President Donald Trump about the power of US intelligence agencies. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you,” the lawmaker warned. Years later it was revealed the CIA had spied on Trump’s campaign: another illegal abuse that, predictably, was met with no consequence.