Operation Mockingbird: What’s Documented About the CIA and the Press

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What happened

If you’ve spent time in conspiracy circles online, you’ve seen “Operation Mockingbird” offered as proof that the news is fake and the CIA writes it. The real record is more interesting than the meme. Some of it is solidly confirmed, some of it rests on a single author, and the famous name turns out to belong to a different, much smaller operation.

The idea of a vast, named “Operation Mockingbird” comes mostly from Deborah Davis’s 1979 unauthorized biography of Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, Katharine the Great. Davis wrote that Frank Wisner, head of the covert Office of Policy Coordination, created the operation to recruit leading American journalists into a propaganda network. As Wikipedia quotes her, “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.” That account is where most of the popular version starts.

The footage

There is no video evidence in this case, and none is attached. The evidence is documentary: the CIA’s “Family Jewels” compilation, a declassified CIA summary of Project Mockingbird in the agency’s FOIA reading room, the Church Committee’s 1976 final report, and Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stone article. The featured image is the 1961 congressional portrait of Sen. Frank Church, who chaired the committee, described from its Wikimedia Commons metadata.

Timeline

• 1948: The National Security Council creates the Office of Policy Coordination, later run by Frank Wisner.
• 1953: Columnist Joseph Alsop covers a Philippine election at the CIA’s request, as Bernstein later reported.
• 12 Mar to 15 Jun 1963: The CIA’s Office of Security taps the phones of columnists Robert Allen and Paul Scott: Project Mockingbird.
• April 1967: Ramparts reports that the National Student Association received CIA funding.
• 9 May 1973: CIA Director James Schlesinger orders the internal compilation later called the “Family Jewels.”
• 22 Dec 1974: Seymour Hersh’s New York Times story on illegal CIA domestic operations.
• 11 Feb 1976: CIA Director George H. W. Bush announces new limits on using journalists.
• April 1976: The Church Committee’s final report is published.
• 20 Oct 1977: Bernstein’s “The CIA and the Media” runs in Rolling Stone.
• 1979: Davis’s Katharine the Great introduces “Operation Mockingbird.”
• June 2007: The CIA releases the 693-page Family Jewels.
• 2019: Historian David P. Hadley assesses the Davis account in a book on the CIA and the press.

What witnesses reported

The primary witnesses here are officials and journalists. Bernstein, drawing on interviews and what he described as CIA documents, opened his article with Alsop: “He went at the request of the CIA.” He named executives he said had cooperated, including William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time Inc. and Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times. CIA officers told the Church Committee that “Fallout in the United States from a foreign publication which we support is inevitable and consequently permissible,” quoting an agency directive.

What the research found

The real Project Mockingbird was a wiretap. The Family Jewels entry says the Office of Security “installed telephone taps on two Washington-based newsmen who were suspected of disclosing classified information obtained from a variety of governmental and congressional sources,” from 12 March to 15 June 1963. The newsmen were Robert Allen and Paul Scott of “The Allen-Scott Report.” A one-page CIA summary, now in the agency’s reading room, reportedly says Director John McCone acted in coordination with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. No released CIA document uses the phrase “Operation Mockingbird.”