Operation Mockingbird
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Operation Mockingbird is the shorthand name for the Central Intelligence Agency's mid-twentieth-century program of recruiting and managing American journalists as influence assets. In John Kiriakou's account, the program in its original form is no longer operationally necessary, because the contemporary U.S. media voluntarily prints CIA-supplied material, "the American media just will gladly take whatever the CIA gives them and they'll run with it. They'll just gist a CIA press release and call it news."

The Leopold FOIA disclosures

Specific evidence for the contemporary form of the practice emerged from investigative reporting by Jason Leopold, the Bloomberg investigative journalist who filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and, when the CIA failed to respond, a successful lawsuit, for all correspondence between the CIA Office of Public Affairs and American journalists over a defined date range.

Two documented patterns of agency,press collaboration that emerged from the Leopold disclosures:

- Threats in lieu of recruitment. A reporter who wrote a story the CIA considered unfavorable received an email from the agency: "'You better not publish this. If you publish this, so help me God, you will never be invited to the Christmas party ever again and we will not comment on any of your stories.' And so he withdrew. They don't need to recruit the guy to kill the story. They just threaten him."
- Pre-publication clearance by a national-security correspondent. Ken Dilanian, the chief national-security correspondent at NBC and MSNBC, was found to have sent his own articles to the CIA for clearance "before he sent them to his own editor. That is absolutely unacceptable."

Kiriakou's reading

> They don't need to recruit anybody in the media, they already own everybody in the media. And if you're anti-agency and you're not working for a well-funded media outlet, you're screwed, because you're just not going to be able to get your message out there.

From foreign journalists to legalized domestic propaganda

John Kiriakou says the Church Committee was appalled by Operation Mockingbird and made it illegal for the CIA to recruit American journalists, while recruiting foreign journalists remained legal and encouraged, both to plant pro-American stories and to learn what ended up "on the cutting-room floor." He dates the practice to the CIA's first covert action, the 1949 Italian election, and says the Obama administration effectively reopened the domestic door by legalizing propaganda aimed at Americans in 2015. Kiriakou has separately reiterated that Mockingbird was ruled illegal in 1975, in the course of two other retellings of the CIA-media relationship, one built around the Ken Dilanian pre-clearance episode, the other around the Christmas-party threat.

An 'unofficial' successor

Asked whether a former CIA officer turned online personality, Andrew Bustamante, functions as a disruptor sent out under a program like Mockingbird, Kiriakou said "in an unofficial way, I would say yes", explaining that Mockingbird was ruled illegal in 1975, but the CIA no longer needs a formal, official operation to achieve a similar effect.

'They've co-opted all the journalists' (Reason2Resist)

John Kiriakou says the CIA no longer even needs to recruit journalists, "they've co-opted all the journalists." He cites a Freedom of Information trove obtained by Jason Leopold showing NBC's Ken Dilanian sending his articles to the CIA for clearance before his own editor, and the agency threatening a critical reporter: publish, and "you are not invited to the Christmas party and we will never give you a quote again", which killed the story.

See also

- Ken Dilanian
- Jason Leopold
- National Endowment for Democracy
- Central Intelligence Agency
