Just recently, Benny Johnson asked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about “the media being used as a propaganda mechanism—we saw it flatly. I mean, I think it’s the smoking gun, quite frankly, of the Obamagate narrative and the Russiagate narrative. That it was so baked in, that The New York Times and Washington Post went and ran with it.”
Johnson added: “Some would say that that’s part of Operation Mockingbird. Some would say that that’s part of what we learned in the Church Committee—that the intel agencies were using media outlets as their mouthpieces, and that those mouthpieces would parrot the official narrative. And I wanted to ask you: is this operation still going on? Are you aware of the intel agencies working directly with media outlets in order to push prescribed narratives that may or may not be true?”
The Times of India noted Saturday that “Operation Mockingbird was a covert program launched by the CIA in the late 1940s during the early Cold War. Its primary purpose was to influence both domestic and foreign media in order to promote US foreign policy goals and counter Soviet propaganda. Under this initiative, the CIA recruited leading journalists from major newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting networks, often with their knowledge—and sometimes without it. The strategy was simple: if you control the information, you control the perception of reality.”
This program “extended to prominent media institutions like The New York Times, Time Magazine, CBS News, and others. Journalists were used to plant fabricated stories, shape narratives, and even pass along classified information under the guise of ‘leaks.’” It was supposed to have been shut down in 1974. Gabbard, however, said: “It’s something that we’ve already had to deal with, Benny, within this administration—where there are people within the intelligence community who believe that their will is more important than the will of the American people, and will weaponize intelligence by leaking it to their friends within the mainstream media with the intent of undermining President Trump’s agenda.”
Gabbard added: “Those who leak intelligence to their friends in the mainstream media with the intent of undermining the president who was elected by the American people… are subverting the will of the people and therefore undermining the Constitution.”
Indeed. And this sort of thing has been going on for a long, long time. Nor is the problem with the intelligence community restricted simply to its manipulation of the media. As far back as December 22, 1963, former President Harry S. Truman wrote in the Washington Post that “for some time I have been disturbed by the way [the] CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.”
With the CIA by that time having intervened in the internal affairs of Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, and elsewhere, Truman wrote: “I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.”
Truman concluded: “We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”
Truman was right. But nothing was done. And over sixty years later, still nothing has been done. The involvement of several top intelligence professionals, however, including former CIA chief John Brennan, in the Russian collusion hoax only underscores the crying need for a thorough housecleaning of the Washington intelligence apparatus. The United States got along very well without the CIA for over 150 years. Does it need it now to survive as a free society? Absolutely not.
