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         MindNet Journal - Vol. 1, No. 18
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         V E R I C O M M / MindNet         "Quid veritas est?"
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    Notes:

    The following is reproduced here with the express permission of
    the author.

    Permission is given to reproduce and redistribute, for
    non-commercial purposes only, provided this information and the
    copy remain intact and unedited.

    The views and opinions expressed below are not necessarily the
    views and opinions of VERICOMM, MindNet, or the editors unless
    otherwise noted.

    Editor: Mike Coyle

    Contributing Editors: Walter Bowart
                          Harlan Girard
                          Alex Constantine

    Assistant Editor: Rick Lawler

    Research: Darrell Bross

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    Tales from the Crypt

    The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD

    by Alex Constantine

    Who Controls the Media?
            Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with
    grinning, double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates,
    labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric.
    Coca-Cola. Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror
    the world: The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The
    Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser. It is beginning to dawn on a
    growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print
    reports news from a parallel universe -- one that has never
    heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking
    thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with
    secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales -- a place overrun by
    lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best
    behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an
    official can commit is a the employment of a domestic servant
    with (shudder) no residency status.

            This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of
    MOCKINGBIRD.

            It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid
    period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic
    infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often
    included direct takeover of major news outlets.

            In this period, the American intelligence services
    competed with communist activists abroad to influence European
    labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local
    governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department
    official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students
    abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on
    behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, a
    graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then
    publisher of the Washington Post, was taken under Wisner's wing
    to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

            "By the early 1950s," writes former Village Voice
    reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned'
    respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other
    communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in
    all, according to a former CIA analyst." The network was overseen
    by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations
    who wanted their points of view represented in the public print.
    Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies
    consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were
    already run by men with reactionary views, among them William
    Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur
    Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

            Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have
    since been appalled to find in FOIA documents that agents
    boasting in CIA office memos of their pride in having placed
    "important assets" inside every major news publication in the
    country. It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted
    that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to
    agents in the field.

            "World War III has begun," Henry's Luce's Life declared
    in March, 1947. "It is in the opening skirmish stage already."
    The issue featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who
    called for the creation of an "American Empire,"
    "world-dominating in political power, set up at least in part
    through coercion (probably including war, but certainly the
    threat of war) and in which one group of people ... would hold
    more than its equal share of power."

            George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew
    down on Luce in 1947, explaining that "although avoiding typical
    Hitlerian phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking
    over the world and ruling it, began to appear in the  press,
    whereas the organs of Wall Street were much more honest in
    favoring a doctrine inevitably leading to war if it brought
    greater commercial markets under the American flag."

            On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck
    between the CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the
    founder of CBS. A firm believer in "all forms of propaganda" to
    foster loyalty to the Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work
    undercover at the behest of his close friend, the busy grey
    eminence of the nation's media, Allen Dulles. Paley's designated
    go-between in his dealings with the CIA was Sig Mickelson,
    president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.

            The CIA's assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen
    by the Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson,
    formerly an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower's Special
    Assistant for Cold War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by
    Nelson Rockefeller, who quit a year later, disgusted at the
    administration's political infighting. Vice President Nixon
    succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war strategist.

            "Nixon," writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the
    Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, took "a
    small boy's delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft
    -- the hidden microphones, the 'black' propaganda." Nixon
    especially enjoyed his visit to a Virginia training camp to
    observe Nazis in the "special forces" drilling at covert
    operations.

            One of the fugitives recruited by the American
    intelligence underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Blucher,
    the son of A German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that that he
    was trained by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence
    division, while still a civilian in his twenties. He served in a
    recon unit of the German Army until forced out for medical
    reasons in 1944, according to his wartime records. He worked
    briefly as an assistant director for Berlin-Film on a movie
    entitled One Day ..., and finished out the war flying with the
    Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy -- his mission was the
    smuggling of Nazi loot out of the country. His exploits were, in
    part, the subject of Sayer and Botting's Nazi Gold, an account of
    the knockover of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.

            In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a
    photographer named Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately
    paid court to Eva Peron, presenting her with an invaluable
    Gobelin tapestry (a selection from the wealth of artifacts
    confiscated by the SS from Europe's Jews?). Hubert then met with
    Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver German marks worth
    $80 million. The loot financed the birth of the National
    Socialist Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi revival.

            In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job  at the
    Color Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living
    writing scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be
    heard on a film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. Nine
    years later he returned to Buenos Aires, then Dusseldorf, West
    Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts,
    but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government. At the
    Industrie Club in Dusseldorf in 1982, von Blucher boasted to
    journalists, "I am chief shareholder of Pan American Airways. I
    am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas
    is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier
    ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed up by these
    people over their second bottle of brandy."

            Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble from
    the drunken dreams of world-moving affluence were, in their time,
    Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his
    son Walter, the CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like
    most American high-rollers, Annenberg lived a double life. Moses,
    his father, was a scion of the Capone mob. Both Moses and Walter
    were indicted in 1939 for tax evasions totalling many millions of
    dollars -- the biggest case in the history of the Justice
    Department. Moses pled guilty and agreed to pay the government $8
    million and settle $9 million in assorted tax claims, penalties
    and interest debts. Moses received a three-year sentence. He died
    in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

            Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty
    Republican. On the campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush
    flew into Los Angeles to woo Reagan's kitchen cabinet. "This is
    the topping on the cake," Bush's regional campaign director told
    the Los Angeles Times. The Bush team met at Annenberg's plush
    Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands, California. It was at the
    Annenberg mansion that Nixon's cabinet was chosen, and the
    state's social and contributor registers built over a
    quarter-century of state political dominance by Ronald Reagan,
    whose acting career was launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

            The commercialization of  television, coinciding with
    Reagan's recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front,
    presented the intelligence world with unprecedented potential for
    sowing propaganda and even prying in the age of Big Brother.
    George Orwell glimpsed the possibilities when he installed
    omniscient video surveillance technology in 1948, a novel
    rechristened 1984 for the first edition published in the U.S. by
    Harcourt, Brace. Operation Octopus, according to federal files,
    was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program that turned any
    television set with tubes into a broadcast transmitter. Agents of
    Octopus could pick up audio and visual images with the equipment
    as far as 25 miles away.

            Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the
    time of his disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.

            In 1952, at MCA, Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan --
    a screen idol recruited by MOCKINGBIRD's Crusade for Freedom to
    raise funds for the resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according
    to Loftus -- signed a secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest
    rule with the mob-controlled studio, in effect granting it a
    labor monopoly on early television programming. In exchange, MCA
    made Reagan a part owner. Furthermore, historian C. Vann
    Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987, reported that
    Reagan had "fed the names of suspect people in his organization
    to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned 'an
    informer's code number, T-10.' His FBI file indicates intense
    collaboration with producers to 'purge' the industry of
    subversives."

            No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a
    former intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period
    UPI's Moscow correspondent. Cronkite was lured to CBS by
    Operation MOCKINGBIRD's Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis.

            Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a
    horror-film simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among
    other organized-crime Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor
    Lowell Thomas threw in to launch the infamous Resorts
    International, the corporate front for Lansky's branch of the
    federally-sponsored mob family and the corporate precursor to Cap
    Cities. Another of the investors was James Crosby, a Cap Cities
    executive who donated $100,000 to Nixon's 1968 presidential
    campaign. This was the year that Resorts bought into Atlantic
    City casino interests. Police in New jersey attempted, with no
    success, to spike the issuance of a gambling license to the
    company, citing Mafia ties.

            In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics,
    founded the broadcasting company notorious for overt
    propagandizing and general spookiness. The company's chief
    counsel was OSS veteran William Casey, who clung to his shares by
    concealing them in a blind trust even after he was appointed CIA
    director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

            "Black radio" was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined
    in The Invisible Government to describe the agency's intertwining
    interests in the emergence of the transistor radio with the
    entrepreneurs who took to the airwaves. "Daily, East and West
    beam hundreds of propaganda broadcasts at each other in an
    unrelenting babble of competition for the minds of their
    listeners. The low-price transistor has given the hidden war a
    new importance," enthused one foreign correspondent.

            A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the
    propaganda push. One of them, Operations and Policy Research,
    Inc. (OPR), received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the
    CIA through private foundations and trusts. OPR research was the
    basis of a television series that aired in New York and
    Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People and Politics, a "study" of
    the American political system in 21 weekly installments.

            In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same
    CIA/Mafia combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into
    the film studios and labor unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out
    of the Army during the war by a criminal investigation of Chicago
    mobsters in the film industry. Rosselli, a CIA asset probably
    assassinated by the CIA, played sidekick to Harry Cohn, the
    Columbia Pictures mogul who visited Italy's Benito Mussolini in
    1933, and upon his return to Hollywood remodeled his office after
    the dictator's. The only honest job Rosselli ever had was
    assistant purchasing agent (and a secret investor) at Eagle Lion
    productions, run by Bryan Foy, a former producer for 20th Century
    Fox. Rosselli, Capone's representative on the West Coast, passed
    a small fortune in mafia investments to Cohn. Bugsy Seigel pooled
    gambling investments with Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the
    Hollywood Reporter.

            In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a
    full third of the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3,000
    salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in
    propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost
    American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a
    budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and
    the AP news syndicates.

            In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked
    closely with the intelligence services -- in fact, 23 employees
    were full-time employees of the Agency.

            Most consumers of the corporate media were -- and are --
    unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on
    their own beliefs. A network anchorman in time of national crisis
    is an instrument of psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD
    media. He is a creature from the national security sector's
    chamber of horrors. For this reason consumers of the corporate
    press have reason to examine their basic beliefs about government
    and life in the parallel universe of these United States.

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