| U.S.
Government Has Long Used Propaganda Against the American
People
By WashingtonsBlog
December 01,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WashingtonsBlog"
- First posted on
January 18, 2016
- The United States
Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities found in 1975
that the CIA submitted stories to the American press:
Wikipedia
adds details:
After 1953,
the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles,
director of the CIA. By this time, Operation
Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers
and wire agencies. The usual methodology was placing
reports developed from intelligence provided by the
CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports
would then be repeated or cited by the preceding
reporters which in turn would then be cited
throughout the media wire services.
The Office
of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning
off funds intended for the Marshall Plan [i.e. the
rebuilding of Europe by the U.S. after WWII]. Some
of this money was used to bribe journalists and
publishers.
In 2008, the
New York Times
wrote:
During the
early years of the cold war, [prominent writers and
artists, from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Jackson
Pollock] were supported, sometimes lavishly, always
secretly, by the C.I.A. as part of its propaganda
war against the Soviet Union. It was perhaps the
most successful use of “soft power” in American
history.
A CIA operative
told Washington Post owner Philip Graham … in a
conversation about the willingness of journalists to
peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories:
You could
get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for
a couple hundred dollars a month.
Famed Watergate
reporter Carl Bernstein
wrote in 1977:
More than
400 American journalists … in the past twenty‑five
years have secretly carried out assignments for the
Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents
on file at CIA headquarters.
***
In many
instances, CIA documents show, journalists were
engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the
consent of the managements of America’s leading news
organizations.
***
Among
the executives who lent their cooperation to the
Agency were [the heads of CBS, Time, the New York
Times, the Louisville Courier‑Journal, and Copley
News Service. Other organizations which cooperated
with the CIA include [ABC, NBC, AP, UPI, Reuters],
Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek
magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami
Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New
York Herald‑Tribune.
***
There is
ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and
news executives allowed themselves and their
organizations to become handmaidens to the
intelligence services. “Let’s not pick on some poor
reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby exclaimed
at one point to the Church committee’s
investigators. “Let’s go to the managements.
***
The CIA
even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to
teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence
officers were “taught to make noises like
reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were
then placed in major news organizations with help
from management.
***
Once a year
during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents
joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and
briefings.
***
Allen
Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the
late Henry Luce, founder of Time and
Life magazines, who readily allowed certain
members of his staff to work for the Agency and
agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA
operatives who lacked journalistic experience.
***
In the
1950s and early 1960s, Time magazine’s
foreign correspondents attended CIA “briefing”
dinners similar to those the CIA held for CBS.
***
When
Newsweek waspurchased by the Washington Post
Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by
Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the
magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA
sources. “It was widely known that Phil Graham was
somebody you could get help from,” said a former
deputy director of the Agency. “Frank Wisner dealt
with him.” Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from
1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was
the Agency’s premier orchestrator of “black”
operations, including many in which journalists were
involved. Wisner liked to boast of his “mighty
Wurlitzer,” a wondrous propaganda instrument he
built, and played, with help from the press.)
***
In November
1973, after [the CIA claimed to have ended the
program], Colby told reporters and editors from the
New York Times and the Washington Star
that the Agency had “some three dozen” American
newsmen “on the CIA payroll,” including five who
worked for “general‑circulation news organizations.”
Yet even while the Senate Intelligence Committee was
holding its hearings in 1976, according to
high‑level CIA sources, the CIA continued to
maintain ties with seventy‑five to ninety
journalists of every description—executives,
reporters, stringers, photographers, columnists,
bureau clerks and members of broadcast technical
crews. More than half of these had been moved off
CIA contracts and payrolls but they were still bound
by other secret agreements with the Agency.
According to an unpublished report by the House
Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by
Representative Otis Pike, at least fifteen news
organizations were still providing cover for CIA
operatives as of 1976.
***
Those
officials most knowledgeable about the subject say
that a figure of 400 American journalists is on the
low side ….
“There were
a lot of representations that if this stuff got out
some of the biggest names in journalism would get
smeared” ….
Former Newsweek
and Associated Press reporter Robert Parry notes that
Ronald Reagan and the CIA unleashed a propaganda
campaign in the 1980’s to sell the American public
on supporting the Contra rebels, utilizing private
players such as Rupert Murdoch to spread disinformation:
In the
1980s, the Reagan administration was determined to
“kick the Vietnam Syndrome,” the revulsion that many
Americans felt for warfare after all those years in
the blood-soaked jungles of Vietnam and all the lies
that clumsily justified the war.
So, the
challenge for the U.S. government became: how to
present the actions of “enemies” always in the
darkest light while bathing the behavior of the U.S.
“side” in a rosy glow. You also had to stage this
propaganda theater in an ostensibly “free country”
with a supposedly “independent press.”
From
documents declassified or leaked over the past
several decades, including
an unpublished draft chapter of the
congressional Iran-Contra investigation, we now know
a great deal about how this remarkable project was
undertaken and who the key players were.
Perhaps not
surprisingly much of the initiative came from the
Central Intelligence Agency, which housed the
expertise for manipulating target populations
through propaganda and disinformation. The only
difference this time would be that the American
people would be the target population.
For this
project, Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director William J.
Casey sent his top propaganda specialist Walter
Raymond Jr. to the National Security Council staff
to manage the inter-agency task forces that would
brainstorm and coordinate this “public diplomacy”
strategy.
Many of the
old intelligence operatives, including Casey and
Raymond, are now dead, but other influential
Washington figures who were deeply involved by these
strategies remain, such as neocon stalwart Robert
Kagan, whose first major job in Washington was as
chief of Reagan’s State Department Office of Public
Diplomacy for Latin America.
***
Declassified documents now reveal how extensive
Reagan’s propaganda project became with inter-agency
task forces assigned to develop “themes” that would
push American “hot buttons.” Scores of documents
came out during the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987 and
hundreds more are now available at the Reagan
presidential library in Simi Valley, California.
What the
documents reveal is that at the start of the Reagan
administration, CIA Director Casey faced a daunting
challenge in trying to rally public opinion behind
aggressive U.S. interventions, especially in Central
America. Bitter memories of the Vietnam War were
still fresh and many Americans were horrified at the
brutality of right-wing regimes in Guatemala and El
Salvador, where Salvadoran soldiers raped and
murdered four American churchwomen in December 1980.
The new
leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua also was
not viewed with much alarm. After all, Nicaragua was
an impoverished country of only about three million
people who had just cast off the brutal dictatorship
of Anastasio Somoza.
So,
Reagan’s initial strategy of bolstering the
Salvadoran and Guatemalan armies required defusing
the negative publicity about them and somehow
rallying the American people into supporting a
covert CIA intervention inside Nicaragua via a
counterrevolutionary force known as the Contras led
by Somoza’s ex-National Guard officers.
Reagan’s
task was made tougher by the fact that the Cold
War’s anti-communist arguments had so recently been
discredited in Vietnam. As deputy assistant
secretary to the Air Force, J. Michael Kelly, put
it, “the most critical special operations mission we
have … is to persuade the American people that the
communists are out to get us.”
***
According
to the draft report, the CIA officer who was
recruited for the NSC job had served as Director of
the Covert Action Staff at the CIA from 1978 to 1982
and was a “specialist in propaganda and
disinformation.”
***
federal law
forbade taxpayers’ money from being spent on
domestic propaganda or grassroots lobbying to
pressure congressional representatives. Of course,
every president and his team had vast resources to
make their case in public, but by tradition and law,
they were restricted to speeches, testimony and
one-on-one persuasion of lawmakers.
But things
were about to change. In a Jan. 13, 1983, memo, NSC
Advisor Clark foresaw the need for non-governmental
money to advance this cause. “We will develop a
scenario for obtaining private funding,” Clark
wrote. (Just five days later, President Reagan
personally welcomed media magnate Rupert Murdoch
into the Oval Office for a private meeting,
according to records on file at the Reagan library.)
As
administration officials reached out to wealthy
supporters, lines against domestic propaganda soon
were crossed as the operation took aim not only at
foreign audiences but at U.S. public opinion, the
press and congressional Democrats who opposed
funding the Nicaraguan Contras.
At the
time, the Contras were earning a gruesome reputation
as human rights violators and terrorists. To change
this negative perception of the Contras as well as
of the U.S.-backed regimes in El Salvador and
Guatemala, the Reagan administration created a
full-blown, clandestine propaganda network.
In January
1983, President Reagan took the first formal step to
create this unprecedented peacetime propaganda
bureaucracy by signing National Security Decision
Directive 77, entitled “Management of Public
Diplomacy Relative to National Security.” Reagan
deemed it “necessary to strengthen the organization,
planning and coordination of the various aspects of
public diplomacy of the United States Government.”
Reagan
ordered the creation of a special planning group
within the National Security Council to direct these
“public diplomacy” campaigns. The planning group
would be headed by the CIA’s Walter Raymond Jr. and
one of its principal arms would be a new Office of
Public Diplomacy for Latin America, housed at the
State Department but under the control of the NSC.
***
In the memo
to then-U.S. Information Agency director Charles
Wick, Raymond also noted that “via Murdock [sic] may
be able to draw down added funds” to support
pro-Reagan initiatives. Raymond’s reference to
Rupert Murdoch possibly drawing down “added funds”
suggests that the right-wing media mogul had been
recruited to be part of the covert propaganda
operation. During this period, Wick arranged at
least two face-to-face meetings between Murdoch and
Reagan.
***
Alarmed at
a CIA director participating so brazenly in domestic
propaganda, Raymond wrote that “I philosophized a
bit with Bill Casey (in an effort to get him out of
the loop)” but with little success.
***
Another
part of the office’s job was to plant “white
propaganda” in the news media through op-eds
secretly financed by the government. In one memo,
Jonathan Miller, a senior public diplomacy official,
informed White House aide Patrick Buchanan about
success placing an anti-Sandinista piece in The Wall
Street Journal’s friendly pages. “Officially, this
office had no role in its preparation,” Miller
wrote.
Other
times, the administration put out “black
propaganda,” outright falsehoods. In 1983, one such
theme was designed to anger American Jews by
portraying the Sandinistas as anti-Semitic because
much of Nicaragua’s small Jewish community fled
after the revolution in 1979.
However,
the U.S. embassy in Managua investigated the charges
and “found no verifiable ground on which to accuse
the GRN [the Sandinista government] of
anti-Semitism,” according to a July 28, 1983, cable.
But the administration kept the cable secret and
pushed the “hot button” anyway.
***
As one NSC
official told me, the campaign was modeled after CIA
covert operations abroad where a political goal is
more important than the truth. “They were trying to
manipulate [U.S.] public opinion … using the tools
of Walt Raymond’s trade craft which he learned from
his career in the CIA covert operation shop,” the
official admitted.
Another
administration official gave a similar description
to The Miami Herald’s Alfonso Chardy. “If you look
at it as a whole, the Office of Public Diplomacy was
carrying out a huge psychological operation, the
kind the military conduct to influence the
population in denied or enemy territory,” that
official explained. [For more details, see Parry’s
Lost History.]
Parry notes
that many of the same people that led Reagan’s domestic
propaganda effort in the 1980’s are in power today:
While the
older generation that pioneered these domestic
propaganda techniques has passed from the scene,
many of their protégés are still around along with
some of the same organizations. The National
Endowment for Democracy, which was formed in 1983 at
the urging of CIA Director Casey and under the
supervision of Walter Raymond’s NSC operation, is
still run by the same neocon, Carl Gershman, and has
an even bigger budget, now exceeding $100 million a
year.
Gershman
and his NED played important behind-the-scenes roles
in instigating the Ukraine crisis by financing
activists, journalists and other operatives who
supported the coup against elected President
Yanukovych. The NED-backed Freedom House also beat
the propaganda drums. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A
Shadow Foreign Policy.”]
Two other
Reagan-era veterans, Elliott Abrams and Robert
Kagan, have both provided important intellectual
support for continuing U.S. interventionism around
the world. Earlier this year, Kagan’s article for
The New Republic, entitled “Superpowers
Don’t Get to Retire,” touched such a raw nerve
with President Obama that he hosted Kagan at a White
House lunch and crafted the presidential
commencement speech at West Point to deflect some of
Kagan’s criticism of Obama’s hesitancy to use
military force.
***
Rupert
Murdoch’s media empire is bigger than ever ….
An
expert on propaganda testified under oath
during trial that the
CIA now employs THOUSANDS of reporters and OWNS its own
media organizations.
Whether or not his estimate is accurate, it is clear
that many prominent reporters
still report to the CIA.
John Pilger is
a highly-regarded journalist (the BBC’s world affairs
editor John Simpson remarked, “A country that does not
have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble
place indeed”). Pilger
said in 2007:
We now know
that the BBC and other British media were used by
the British secret intelligence service MI-6. In
what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI-6 agents
planted stories about Saddam’s weapons of mass
destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces
and in secret underground bunkers. All of these
stories were fake.
***
One of my
favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group
of Russian journalists who were touring the United
States. On the final day of their visit, they were
asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to
tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were
astonished to find after reading all the newspapers
and watching TV day after day that all the opinions
on all the vital issues are the same. To get that
result in our country we send journalists to the
gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you
don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?”
Nick Davies
wrote in the Independent in 2008:
For the
first time in human history, there is a concerted
strategy to manipulate global perception. And the
mass media are operating as its compliant
assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose
it.
The sheer
ease with which this machinery has been able to do
its work reflects a creeping structural weakness
which now afflicts the production of our news. I’ve
spent the last two years researching a book about
falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global
media.
The
“Zarqawi letter” which made it on to the front page
of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a
sequence of highly suspect documents which were said
to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and
which were fed into news media.
This
material is being generated, in part, by
intelligence agencies who continue to work without
effective oversight; and also by a new and
essentially benign structure of “strategic
communications” which was originally designed by
doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use
subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist
terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and
badly supervised with the result that some of its
practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the
black arts of propaganda.
***
The
Pentagon has now designated “information operations”
as its fifth “core competency” alongside land, sea,
air and special forces. Since October 2006, every
brigade, division and corps in the US military has
had its own “psyop” element producing output for
local media. This military activity is linked to the
State Department’s campaign of “public diplomacy”
which includes funding radio stations and news
websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting
and Information Operations in the Ministry of
Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops,
based at the Defence Intelligence and Security
School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.
In the case
of British intelligence, you can see this
combination of reckless propaganda and failure of
oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass
Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms
inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book,
Iraq Confidential, how, in London in June 1998, he
was introduced to two “black propaganda specialists”
from MI6 who wanted him to give them material which
they could spread through “editors and writers who
work with us from time to time”.
The government
is
still paying off reporters to spread disinformation.
And the corporate media are acting like
virtual “escort services” for the moneyed elites,
selling access – for a price – to powerful government
officials, instead of actually investigating and
reporting on what those officials are doing.
One of the ways
that the U.S. government spreads propaganda is by making
sure that it gets its version out first. For
example, the head of the U.S. Information Agency’s
television and film division – Alvin A. Snyder –
wrote in his book Warriors of Disinformation:
How Lies, Videotape, and the USIA Won the Cold War:
All
governments, including our own, lie when it suits
their purposes. The key is to lie first.
***
Another
casualty, always war’s first, was the truth. The
story of [the accidental Russian shootdown of a
Korean airliner] will be remembered pretty much the
way we told it in 1983, not the way it really
happened.
In 2013, the
American Congress
repealed the formal ban against the
deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on
American soil. So there’s even less to
constrain propaganda than before.
Another key to
American propaganda is the constant repetition
of propaganda. As Business Insider
reported in 2013:
Lt. Col.
Daniel Davis, a highly-respected officer who
released a
critical report regarding the distortion of truth
by senior military officials in Iraq and Afghanistan
….
From Lt.
Col. Davis:
In context,
Colonel Leap is implying we ought to change the law
to enable Public Affairs officers to influence
American public opinion when they deem it necessary
to “protect a key friendly center of gravity, to wit
US national will.”
The
Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 appears to
serve this purpose by allowing for the American
public to be a target audience of U.S.
government-funded information campaigns.
Davis also
quotes Brigadier General Ralph O. Baker — the
Pentagon officer responsible for the Department of
Defense’s Joint Force Development — who defines
Information Operations (IO) as
activities undertaken to “shape the essential
narrative of a conflict or situation and thus affect
the attitudes and behaviors of the targeted
audience.”
Brig. Gen.
Baker goes on to equate descriptions of combat
operations with the standard marketing strategy of
repeating something until it is accepted:
For years,
commercial advertisers have based their
advertisement strategies on the premise that there
is a positive correlation between the number
of times a consumer is exposed to product
advertisement and that consumer’s inclination to
sample the new product. The very same principle
applies to how we influence our target audiences
when we conduct COIN.
And
those “thousands of hours per week of
government-funded radio and TV programs” appear to
serve Baker’s strategy, which states:
“Repetition is a key
tenet of IO execution, and the failure to constantly
drive home a consistent message dilutes the impact
on the target audiences.”
Of course, the
Web has become a huge media platform, and the Pentagon
and other government agencies
are influencing news on the web as well. Documents
released by Snowden show that spies
manipulate polls, website popularity and pageview
counts, censor videos they don’t like and amplify
messages they do.
The CIA and
other government agencies also put enormous energy into
pushing propaganda through
movies, television and
video games.
In 2012, the
Pentagon launched a massive smear campaign against USA
Today reporters
investigating unlawful domestic propaganda by the
Pentagon.
End Notes:
(1) One of the
most common uses of propaganda is to sell unnecessary
and counter-productive wars. Given that the American
media is
always pro-war, mainstream
publishers, producers, editors, and reporters are
willing participants.
(2) A
4-part BBC documentary called the “Century of the
Self” shows that an American – Freud’s nephew, Edward
Bernays – created the modern field of manipulation of
public perceptions, and the U.S. government has
extensively used his techniques.
(3) Sometimes,
the government plants disinformation in American media
in order to mislead foreigners. For example, an official
government summary of America’s overthrow of the
democratically-elected president of Iran in the 1950′s
states, “In cooperation with the Department of
State, CIA had several articles planted in major
American newspapers and magazines which, when
reproduced in Iran, had the desired psychological effect
in Iran and contributed to the war of nerves against
Mossadeq” (page x).
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
