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.”[1]
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.[1][2][3]
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.”[4]
- 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.”[5]
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.[6]