If the director of the CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in Europe – a Labor leader – suppose he just thought, this man can use fifty thousand dollars, he's working well and doing a good job – he could hand it to him and never have to account to anybody... There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war—the secret war."
Thomas Braden
Head of the CIA Unit (IOD)
In 1948, Frank Wisner was appointed to director of the Office of Special Projects, which later became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Wisner was told to create an organization that focused on propaganda and economic warfare. Later that year he would create Operation Mockingbird; a program that was to be used to influence the American population through major media outlets. Wisner recruited several journalists who were willing to promote the views and agenda of the CIA, and some of these journalists just so happened to work for the
New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time Magazine, Miami News and the Washington Post.
"The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers and other foreign media outlets."
Senator Frank Church
argued that misinforming the world costs
American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year
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