CIA media relations
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CIA media relations, per John Kiriakou, no longer requires the kind of covert infiltration associated with Operation Mockingbird. Kiriakou says he agrees with journalist Glenn Greenwald's assessment that the CIA doesn't need such a program anymore, because corporate media now recites CIA messaging willingly, without pressure or infiltration. In his description, most journalists now simply call the CIA's Office of Public Affairs, receive an emailed statement, and rewrite, "gist", that statement into an article, a practice he attributes in part to the disappearance of funding for investigative journalism.

Pressure on journalists

Kiriakou describes a FOIA release that surfaced an angry letter from the CIA to a journalist, threatening that he would never be invited to the CIA Christmas party again and would never receive another interview if he published a particular article, an article that, in the end, was never published. In a fuller telling he identifies the recipient as "this young, unknown, hungry independent journalist" who had stumbled on a genuine story and had done the correct thing, written to the agency offering it a chance to comment. The reply, as Kiriakou quotes it: "So help us God, if you publish this, you will never be invited to the Christmas party ever again, and we will never give you an off-the-record briefing. You're going to be banned." The journalist killed his own article.

Kiriakou draws from it the conclusion that the classic recruitment programme is obsolete: "They don't need Operation Mockingbird anymore. They just threaten you and tell you you're not invited to the Christmas party. They don't need to recruit people anymore." He and his interviewer settle on the name for the replacement, access journalism, and he attributes its effectiveness to the collapse of investigative-reporting budgets: "very, very few outlets anywhere in America have budgets for investigative journalism anymore."

The harder version of the same pressure arrives at the point of publication. Kiriakou confirms an account by the Washington Post national security reporter Joby Warrick, whom he calls one of the most diplomatic people he has ever met: a reporter offering the customary pre-publication comment opportunity will get a call from the CIA or NSA, with his editor in the room, warning that "if you publish this, X number of people will die next year", leaving the newsroom to guess whether this instance is true. "It's absolutely true. Yes," Kiriakou says, adding that when a story is sensitive enough the call comes from the national security adviser, above the CIA director. He treats it as the press-facing version of the blood on your hands accusation used against Tom Drake.

Alleged algorithm manipulation and podcast messaging

Kiriakou believes the CIA runs a program to promote pro-agency messaging through podcasts, and manipulates platform algorithms, including on YouTube, to spread its point of view to a wide audience.

Why the whistleblower loses the coverage

Asked in 2021 why he had received so little public support after going public, Kiriakou gave a structural answer rather than a personal one. When the media is controlled by large corporations, and the big newspapers no longer have an investigative reporting budget, "they rely on on press releases and friendly relations with the cia's office of public affairs or the fbi's office of public affairs and they just [digest] whatever those offices give them."

The consequence he draws is about access rather than sympathy: "a whistleblower doesn't have a chance you don't have a chance because you don't have the same kind of access to this corporate media that the rest of them do you're on your own."

See also

- CIA media revolving door
- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
