‘Operation Mockingbird’ is offered online as proof the CIA writes the news. The real record is narrower and stranger: a 1963 wiretap that really was called Project Mockingbird, a Church Committee count of about 50 journalist assets, and Carl Bernstein’s 400. What each source actually says.
MKUltra was real. The CIA tested drugs and other techniques on people, often without consent, and tried to destroy the paper trail in 1973. The 1977 Senate hearing, the finance files that survived by accident, the Frank Olson case, and where the documented program ends and the internet legend begins.
For 15 years the FBI secretly ran operations to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize’ American political groups. It came out only because burglars stole the files.
