Talk with Rick Staggenborg: The CIA: Operation Mockingbird
by John Kendall Hawkins
"By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed."
-John le Carre'
Rick Staggenborg is a former staff psychiatrist at the Coos Bay VA hospital in Oregon. He is anti-war, because it is anti-people; the wars serve only the corporate overlords turfing out and pawning American patriots into hegemonic actions that often run counter to what makes America the exceptional democracy it often claims to be. Rick ran for the US Senate in 2010.
At Rick's website, Soldiers for Peace International, he describes a goal for the soldiers he supports:
To challenge the US Congress to put the needs of the people above those of their plutocratic sponsors. We can only establish democracy in America and the world by working together to abolish the "rights" of corporations and those who control them to determine the collective destiny of the Peoples of the United States and of the world.
This is Rick's ongoing "cause," but it has significant relevance to domestic and foreign policies -- class containment at home and the mission of militarism abroad.
Today, Rick is here in Podcast 3 to talk about the originals and the mission of the CIA, now celebrating the 75th anniversary of its founding. But first a little backgrounder.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, and through its various great and "noble" wars, no family had had a greater influence on the American Project -- at home and overseas -- than the Roosevelts. In many ways the Roosevelt family was an American dynasty and one could argue that the first half of the 20th century was deeply influenced by the policies and actions of three Roosevelt men and one female -- Eleanor. The men were Teddy, Franklin D, and Kermit. Teddy Roosevelt is largely remembered today for implementing the so-called Manifest Destiny and Pax Americana that saw America as a moral and economic Johnny Appleseed for the world. FDR, a Democrat, and the last three-term president, is still seen as the father of the New Deal that brought Americans social policy insurance against national economic failure in the future -- instituting Social Security and Unemployment Insurance, for example. Often overlooked is the role of another Roosevelt in helping to establish the deep state machinations that connected the domestic and foreign policies, Kermit Roosevelt, son of Teddy, who helped establish the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with William Donovan who was the Coordinator of Information (COI, pronounced coy). The OSS ran from 1942-45. It was modeled on Britain's MI6.
That dynasty was sufficient for the Project as long as the 'worldview' of Americans was largely isolationist under the New Deal Order. Beginning with Reagan, a new Order took to the fore and changed that worldview, and the priorities of America's role in the world, to the Neoliberal Order. And now we are about to enter a so-called new world order, which is largely aligned to the now-legendary deep state document titled Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which contains the infamous 'conspiracy' reference to the need for "a new Pearl Harbor" to get the project rolling. An excellent discussion of this transition of Orders can be found in Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2021). Gerstle tries to end his otherwise excellent book on a 'happy' note, but, unfortunately, he attempts to prop up Joe Biden's presidency as a cause for new hope. See my review of the book here.
By the time OSS curtailed its activities in the 1945, at the end of the war, its usefulness was firmly established. Indeed, Allen Dulles, who was an OSS agent and later became the CIA's longest-serving director, was in on operations that gathered information about Nazi secret weapons, including "extensive information on German strength, air defenses, submarine production, and the V-1 and V-2 weapons. It revealed some of the secret German efforts in chemical and biological warfare." [See pp. 418-19, Honorable Treachery : A History of U.S. Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action from the American Revolution to the CIA by G.J.A. O'Toole]. Its importance was appreciated by president Harry Truman, who had okayed the double-tap of Japs at Hiroshima and Nagaaki, and who understood other nations, especially the Russians, would be looking to acquire the WMD and it would be wise to keep close tabs on the f*ckers. So, the overseas-mandated intelligence service was re-established as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the National Security Act. Two films worth watching for different takes on the doings and early doers of the OSS are The Good Shepherd(2006), starring Matt Damon, and Inglorious Basterds (2009), Tarantino's 'masterpiece'.
In his now famous 'last speech,' former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied forces in Western Europe during World War II, explicitly warned Americans on live TV to beware of the Military-Industrial-Complex that we now refer to as the Deep State, according Bill Moyers. The Deep State stays put no matter who is erected and who ousted. Ike tell us (but did we listen?):
Elsewhere Ike "shudders" to think of what might happen if a president is elected that doesn't understand how the Pentagon budget is played by insiders. [See Eisenhower the President (1981) by William Bragg Ewald, Jr., p. 248]
It didn't take long for the Agency to ignore its limited mandate by becoming participants in domestic political affairs, as the it became more and more a kind of private secret army at the disposal of the Executive branch, its actions kept hush-hush by a national security umbrella of secrecy that essentially made what it does unaccountable to the People and essentially beyond the law's reach. The first signs of how dangerous the Agency could be were seen during the Watergate era, when Nixon used them to spy on the political opposition, both Democratic party figures and dissidents, details of which were later revealed by Seymour Hersh in a 1974 NYT article, "Huge CIA Operation in the US." A year later, the CIA, and other agencies, came under scrutiny and condemnation for its excesses by the Frank Church committee. Its abuses have been over a great length of time and are of a breathtaking array of operations of dubious value or success. A later in-house accounting of the CIA's illicit activities produced at least 700 pages of instances and is known as "The Family Jewels."
The doings of the secret society of men who finesse and enforce the deep state mandate are sometimes so deeply worrisome and controversial that folks begin to wonder if their actions and Democratic values and the rule of Law are co-tenable. It's noteworthy that such were rumors immediately after JFK's murder that one of the first things his attorney general brother Robert did after the shooting was call the CIA and demand to know if they did it. It's also of great noteworthiness that former president Truman, a month after the JFK assassination, felt compelled to write an op-ed for the Washington Post expressing his dismay at the CIA's machinations. He wrote in part,
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it"But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field" and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere. [my emphasis]
Just a month after the assassination. And it's of note that CIA head Allen Dulles was placed on the Warren Commission that helped decide how Americans would "see" what happened in Dallas that day.
Such controversial functioning has continued unabated from the Kennedy era on, with plenty of revelations coming out of the Reagan, GHW Bush (the nation's first former CIA director to become president), the Clintons, GW and Obama's mad love affair with CIA drone warfare that is so prevalent on the battlefields of Ukraine today. And, because they are celebrating the 75th anniversary of their founding, the Agency has been in the news again of late. In a Critic At Large piece in The New Yorker Amy Davidson Sorkin reviews the history of the Agency and raises the question of the Agency's continued value, with references to two recent histories published in response to the Agency's 75 anniversary, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton) and Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence (Mariner). The piece is a sober semi-survey of available texts about the Agency and is worth a read, but not any great shakes.
More compelling is Edward Snowden's very recent return to writing and publishing on his Substack blog, Continuing Ed. His first piece since a hiatus that goes back to last Christmas is a serious critique of the CIA, "America's Open Wound: The CIA is not your friend." It is outstanding writing and comprehensive, too. I love it that he veins his piece with the great Jewish ethics philosopher and pantheist Baruch Spinoza:
Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.
Wise man, indeed, although chuckles were later heard among the swarthy Machiavelli element. Snowden writes, in part, at Substack:
So, the CIA is in the news again. And without further ado, it's Rick Staggenborg. Today he'll bring us through the origins and then we'll talk about Operation Mockingbird.
#######Hawkins:
Rick, it was the Dulles Brothers who are most associated with the early CIA. Can you address the beginning of the Agency and the role of the Dulles brothers in setting its course?
Staggenborg:
Yeah, it's an interesting story. The United States never had a civilian intelligence agency until the establishment of the CIA in 1947, after the Second World War. And Allen Dulles was part of the OSS, the wartime intelligence agency of the United States, which actually worked pretty closely with the British intelligence, because we didn't have a lot of experience in that sort of thing. And the British had been running an empire for years, so they knew all about it. And one of the things they worked together on actually was getting generated pro-war sympathies to try to get the United States to enter the war. That's what British intelligence service was doing in the United States. And that's not just a sidebar. That's really important to realize, because that's an example of propaganda, which is something that the CIA specializes in.
The Dulles brothers have an interesting background. There's Allen, who eventually became director of the CIA under Eisenhower. And then, John Foster Dulles, who was the secretary of state under Eisenhower. They were the most powerful pair in Washington because between them they had a lot to do with the shaping of foreign policy. They were both rabidly anti-communist, as were a lot of folks, including Eisenhower. But Foster Dulles, as they called him, was a fanatic about it. I think Allen was more interested simply in promoting business interests. Both of them were corporate lawyers and, like their grandfather before them, who was also a Foster, they promoted regime change, basically for corporate profit. I mean, that's what Empire is all about. That's what the British Empire is all about. That's what the American Empire is all about.
So, the grandfather Foster was actually involved in the overthrow of the Hawaiian government in 1893.
Hawkins:
Can you say a little bit more about Hawaii?
Staggenborg:
The point is that in Hawaii what they were trying to do was capture the sugar market. And the Castle sugar industry was the main beneficiary of this, and they ended up with tons of Hawaiian property they just stole from the natives, which established a pattern for later on. Guatemala had a lot to do with Dole fruit. So, even individual corporations that are powerful enough can do regime change operations for them, and that gets into who the CIA really represents.
Why is it in America's interest to make Dole pineapple richer? But if you look at who the first people in the CIA were -- really a small band of elites, they are the operatives in the covert operations part of the CIA. A lot of them came from the elite, the ones that got up to higher positions. If you've ever seen the movie, The Good Shepherd, they talk about that. The Skull and Bones is a real thing at Yale and George Bush belonged to it, he's not the only one. And the Bush family actually had an interest in the United Fruit. I mean, so, you know, it's a small circle -who own corporations that own interest in other corporations, forming a fairly tight network in the CIA. That's who the CIA represents, the interests of financial interests and these corporations that they are involved with.
Back in the day, giant corporations themselves, you know, they may have been owned by the stock market, but the majority owners were very rich people. And that was before they got all bought up and consolidated to the point that it's really financial institutions that run the show, this whole conglomeration of all these giant corporations that are whose ownership is interconnected, the board of directors is interlocking, meaning different directors sit on each other's boards and they all work for their common interests. That's what this evolved into. But originally it was just individual, giant corporations and people that were connected to them and making money off them. They all helped each other out. The corporate lawyers were the middlemen, the ancillaries for these criminal corporations.
So the CIA is not supposed to do intelligence gathering. They're supposed to do intelligence analysis, unless they have to engage in covert operations to do it. But they didn't get that power until a year later to engage in covert operations.
Hawkins:
Let's talk about one of the most controversial domestic programs the CIA had going: Operation Mockingbird. It recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network and influenced the operations of front groups. CIA support of front groups was exposed when an April 1967 Ramparts article reported that the National Student Association received funding from the CIA. In 1974, Seymour Hersh, who first reported on the My Lai massacre, wrote another big piece about the CIA for the NYT titled, "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents." And In 1975, Church Committee Congressional investigations revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups.
What do you want to say about this, Rick?
Staggenborg:
Operation Mockingbird started in 1951, and it was not directed at American media by law. The CIA is not supposed to operate within the United States, they planted stories in the foreign media, which of course got picked up by the US media, but that wasn't anticipated (by some who supported giving the CIA this authority). So the same propaganda ended up in US newspapers. That was the scandal. And the scandal didn't really come out until much later as part of the Church Committee in '75.
When I said that the British were propagandizing to try to get America into the war, that's how they did it. They were talking to Americans in the media, to get to plant information, some of it true, some of it not true, but to influence American opinion. While the CIA did that, too, except it was a little trickier because they weren't supposed to put it directly in the US media. So they went through this roundabout way and they also had made a lot of connections with the American media, beginning, as I said, during World War Two and by the time of the Church commission, it was pretty well established, or at least it came out during the Church commission, that they were working with all three major networks. They were working with all the major newspapers, certainly The New York Times, Washington Post. Most of those publishers considered themselves patriots and thought it was their job to promote the US point of view. But, in some cases, they were definitely persuaded to publish things they knew weren't true.
Hawkins:
I want to focus on the Church hearings a little bit, because if it weren't for Church and his committee hearings, we'd be unaware of the doings and would be in deeper sh*t than we are. Church was the first politician to go after the Kennedy assassination and demonstrate and conclude that it was probably more than one gunman or, at least, leave open the door that that could be proved if under a normal evidence gathering process. Church is the one going after the CIA for infiltrating student dissident groups in America, against its mandate to be domestically involved in anything political. And, before we get past it too much, the Warren Commission had Allen Dulles on. And that's always stuck in my craw. And, as you have pointed out, Truman felt a sudden need to write an article a month after the assassination indicating that he felt that the CIA had gone off mission.
Even now, we are in a situation where there are lawyers suing Joe Biden's administration because he's not releasing all of the JFK information whose release Congress has already mandated. I was just reading that yesterday. I don't want to get into a conspiracy theory or anything like that, because that's not useful at this stage. But it's interesting that there were five guys on the Warren commission and Allen Dulles is one of them -- a guy who probably had a lot of inside information that didn't get divulged, and who was in the position to stomp on stuff that might have leaked out.
Staggenborg:
Well, I would say, first off, there are conspiracies. If you're talking about the Kennedy assassination, I mean, even the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that it was probably a conspiracy. There was a civil case in the case of Martin Luther King Jr's murder. And the court concluded that it was definitely a conspiracy involving government figures.
Hawkins:
We've alluded to the crucial '75 Frank Church hearings that revealed a shocking degree of surveillance taking place back then by the national security agencies with the help of the phone companies. You mentioned how Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church committee's report and wrote that more than 400 US press members had secretly carried out assignments with the CIA, including New York Times publisher Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, columnist and political analyst Stewart Alsop, and Time magazine. So Bernstein documented the way in which overseas branches of major U.S. news agencies had for many years served as the eyes and ears of Operation Mockingbird, which functioned to disseminate CIA propaganda through domestic US media. Do you want to add more to that?
Staggenborg:
First of all, if there were a conspiracy involving elements of the CIA and individuals inside and outside of government, powerful individuals, to murder a president, it's important to understand about their press control. A lot of these connections were already made as of 1963. As you said, Church committee only identified a certain number. And then Bernstein showed that there are many, many, many more than that. We don't know the exact number of ones that they were working with at the time of the Kennedy assassination. But here's a little factoid people should keep in their minds. The CIA did issue a directive to its media contacts (after) the Warren Commission hearings saying that, hey, here's something you should do: If somebody questions a Warren Commission report, call them conspiracy theorists. Basically, let's get together and use that term until it's drilled into people's heads. It was revealed during the Church Committee hearings that the CIA had done this and the actual memo was secured by using Freedom of Information Act requests during those hearings.
Hawkins:
And, as you're saying, the CIA would later take this pose, this posture that anything comes out of these hearings will be considered conspiracy theory suggests a line of thinking and defense that we've now become used to. We can use denial and the torture never happened either.
What is the legacy of Mockingbird? And say more about the NED.
Staggenborg:
Well, that's a really good question. The NED is The National Endowment for Democracy. And I'll explain a bit more in a minute, but I'm trying to put it in context. Again, the Church Committee was very significant. It came out right after Watergate when American people were so outraged by minor crimes of a president that they would actually impeach one successfully. And it was a bipartisan vote in the Senate to impeach Nixon because people were so upset that even people in his own party saw they needed to support that. So that's a different time back then. And this is the context of the Church Committee. People were following this and they were pissed and they were not in the mood to tolerate corruption in their government back then.
Yeah, now people have come to accept it and they don't question the media, despite the fact we know that the media are deeply influenced by the national security state. So in terms of the legacy, [one of the things that resulted from the Church hearings] was the CIA was no longer able to exercise all of its abilities to influence the media. You know, it was a hot thing and people had their eyes on them. So it isn't like they didn't still do it. I mean, the Vietnam War was also going on, but the distortions you saw in the media weren't all due to the CIA, don't get me wrong. It's not like they dictated everything. I mean, they kind of do now, but they didn't back then.
But if you want to know more about that, just read Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's book, Manufacturing Consent. They go through a list of other reasons that the media goes along with lying about foreign policy: Reporters want to keep their jobs; editors don't want to say something that's going to upset the American public in the middle of a war. They're naturally anti-communist, too. Most people in the media, business people never question anything that has to do with fighting communism and on and on. So then there's the money. It's true. Corporations influence what they write, too. It was true then.
But anyway, the NED calls itself a non-profit organization. But in fact, 90% of its funding comes from the US government through USAid Agency for International Development. Now, if you think about the name National Endowment for Democracy, that sort of implies that their job is to promote democracy in other countries, and that's how they describe themselves. But in fact, what they're doing is they're putting money into organizations that oppose the [target] government. So like in Russia, the NED was promoting dissident groups and trying to stir up trouble and get people to show up for rallies for Novotny, the supposed really powerful dissident who pulls about 5% more now because Russians are getting a little more ignorant over time, too.
All of these are NED backed operations. They're providing money. They're actually creating an alternative media in some of these countries. They're bribing unions to take part in demonstrations. They're doing all kinds of stuff like that. And that's all in the name of promoting democracy. What does democracy mean in that context? Regime change. They have to be on our side or they're not democratic. You may see them operating in Germany now, too, as long as I'm going to divert on that topic, because Germany is really going to have to start resisting the US; they're just being led to ruination by doing what the US tells them. They had a hand in both Ukrainian revolutions. Victoria Nuland was caught on that intercepted telephone call, when she was out in Maidan Square handing out cookies to the protesters, and was caught saying, f*ck the EU, we spent $8 billion to set this up. We get to pick who's going into government. That's what she said.
Hawkins:
So, let's talk 'fake news' and how it differs, if at all, from the CIA's Mockingbird machinations.
You know, part of the problem with Trump was that he sometimes spoke the truth, but he wasn't the right person with the message. He was saying that there's fake news all around us - and that's spot on. It's just that he's an a**hole, and wasn't the appropriate messenger. Can you just compare fake news versus Operation Mockingbird? Can you say that they are the same thing? How are they different? This whole debate about disinformation is now all the rage, and the mass media seems to be the one deciding who's doing conspiracy theory and who isn't. And that's very dangerous ground.
Staggenborg:
Yeah, that's pretty much the outline of my thinking. So when I first heard Trump use the term 'fake news,' it was in relation to Russiagate. I do know that intelligence agents have been involved in it. CIA. Whether they were behind it, I don't know. But the reason for it is pretty obvious. Russia. He wanted to normalize relations with Russia. It was obvious that was the reason they wanted to discredit him. I mean, most of this had actually started before he was elected, I believe. I couldn't stand to read it constantly in detail like so many people did, because I knew it was lies from the beginning. They were targeting him, the Deep State. And if anybody thinks, Oh, that's a conspiracy. Thank you. I am a conspiracy theorist. I spent a lot of time theorizing about the conspiracies that are obvious and they see all around me, but they're not talked about in the newspaper. Instead, we get sh*t like Russiagate that was manufactured and designed to discredit Trump, specifically because he wanted to normalize relations with Russia. Originally it began with the Steele dossier, which was designed to keep him from getting in office by coming up with a bunch of lies. And that's been proven.
Hawkins:
The first planting of that Steele story was in Mother Jones, a so-called lefty progressive magazine. That's the first appearance of the Steele dossier. Buzzfeed was the first to print the whole goddamn thing.
Staggenborg:
I'm glad you brought that up, because, you know, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones are not lefty magazines. They used to be. I don't know the whole story about how they changed, but just look at the kind of stuff that they publish. Mother Jones is a joke. So people that take that seriously because of its [60s - 70s] reputation are the same kind of people that take Rolling Stone seriously because of its reputation. Jann Wenner endorsed Hillary Clinton, for God's sake. You think that's a progressive magazine? Sure. They'll print some stuff nobody else will print. They printed Taibbi, who was awesome, but he was taking on the banks. So, you know, that's a very popular thing. So yeah, people just have to realize the same goes with any mainstream news organization. You know, [some of them] didn't used to be mainstream. They are now, and that's part of what [the deep state is] doing. There's a tighter and tighter control of the media, and you see this in a lot of ways.
There was nothing good you could say about Trump. But whenever the truth came out about Russia, well, that's just Trump propaganda. That's Putin propaganda. And the Republicans like it. Keep that split going between Republicans and Democrats. Liberals and conservatives should have stood up together and screamed about this attempt to take down a sitting president, however horrible he was. I mean, my God, you and I both know the guy was a clown. He's got dangerous ideas. He had no business being anywhere near the White House. He shouldn't have been elected dogcatcher by rational people, who were seriously misinformed. But he said some [true] things and they didn't want that out there. So they discredited him. And when he brought up the idea of the deep state, which exists, then they made fun of it. So he's going, well, you know, Russiagate's disinformation. He said it's fake news. And like you, I cheered that. I said, good, somebody's pointing it out. Yay! And if he had just stuck to Russiagate, and things that were obvious, these provable lies, it would have maybe gotten more traction. But he started calling everything he didn't like 'fake news.' I was so disappointed. But, you know, what do you expect from a clown? The guy's a genius at whipping up people's negative emotions and nothing else. He's not a genius of business. He's not a genius of politics. He's not a genius at geopolitics. But at least he has some decent instincts.
Hawkins:
But let's finish this up by just talking a little bit about the role of propaganda in generating war. And do we see that it is working its magic in the war in Ukraine?
Staggenborg:
We see it in all of the modern conflicts. I'm sure there are some, but I can't think, offhand, of any major conflict that the US doesn't have their hand in. They say that the first casualty of war is truth, right? That goes all the way back to Aeschylus. You lie to manufacture the consent of the public. You lie to make people angry at the perceived enemy who is usually whoever they're targeting for regime change or targeting for sanctions; they demonize countries. Or central banks that aren't beholden to the Bank for International Settlements system that is controlled essentially by New York and London. So most people don't understand anything about geopolitics, [and it's] not that complicated. It's how you take over the whole world.
Hawkins:
"You will know the lies and the lies shall make you a slave." John, in old age.
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More information on the early CIA and Operation Mockingbird:
The Family Jewels The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power (John Prados)
The Mighty Wurlitzer How the CIA Played America, especially Ch 10, Things Fall Apart: Journalists (Hugh Wilford)
Who Watches the Watchmen (Gary Ross)
Permanent Record (Edward Snowden)
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