George W Bush and CIA Director Porter Goss address the media

Intelligence In The Media: Reading Between The Lies

Posted by Jon King on Mar 01, 2010

Tagged with: biderberg, carl bernstein, cia, conspiracy, frank church, henri paul, intelligence agencies, james andanson, jfk, media, mi5, mi6, new world politics, princess diana, rupert murdoch, tony blair, watergate

Has the media been hijacked by governments and intelligence agencies – the CIA, MI5, MI6 – to manipulate public opinion…?

Intelligence In The Media: Reading Between The Lies

By Jon King

The Paradox, And The Shared Agenda

To some, the phrase ‘Intelligence In The Media’ describes a paradox. To others, a fantasy suffered by conspiracy theorists and paranoids.

Others still accept that intelligence agencies secretly utilize the media for their own subversive purposes, but fail to realize the sheer extent to which that practice is actually employed.

And then are those who know well enough that a nation’s mainstream media is little more than an extension of its foreign and domestic intelligence eye, an information front by which public opinion is manipulated and international power games are won and lost.

There are those, also, of course, who know exactly how the manipulating is achieved—the deep-cover sleeper agents we know best as career journalists, whose columns are read daily by the faithful majority, yet who in fact are MI5 and MI6 officers, CIA agents and information operatives on the black propaganda payroll, secretly placed to write prejudices and lies.

In the final analysis, the media is a tool, owned by moguls, manipulated by governments, infiltrated and utilized by intelligence agencies to further their shared agendas.

Intelligence In The Media: Reading Between The Lies

Already Written

jfk_assassination When JFK’s head was shot in half in Dallas on that fateful day in November 1963, the stories accusing ‘lone gunman’ Lee Harvey Oswald of assassinating the president had already been written.

They’d been written in advance as well about James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan and Mark David Chapman, alleged ‘lone gunmen’ assassins of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and John Lennon respectively.

And when Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, splashed across the front pages of the British press the following day was the face of Henri Paul, drink in hand, and a headline accusing him of manslaughter.

Diana had died as the result of drink-driving, the media had already decided. But where did these stories come from?

Intelligence In The Media: Reading Between The Lies

Operation Mockingbird

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1997, Carl Bernstein, famous as the Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate story, revealed that more than 400 American journalists were either deep-cover CIA officers or agents on the CIA payroll.

And in 1975, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, headed up by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, found that, under the codename Operation Mockingbird (link to video), the CIA had since the 1950s been manipulating the media at home and abroad in order to influence opinion and events.

cia-seal According to the Committee report, published a year later in 1976:

“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 at the time that misinforming the world had cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year—a lot of dollars in 1975.

Intelligence In The Media: Reading Between The Lies

MI6 And The Paparazzi

If the CIA has, for half a century and more, been using and manipulating the media, it’s fairly safe to assume that a similar situation probably exists in Britain with MI5 and MI6.

diana_book_cover Certainly when John Beveridge and I were busy investigating Princess Diana’s death back in the late 1990s we were told by two British intelligence sources that the UK media was literally crawling with intelligence agents.

The article cited below, written by the Guardian’s David Leigh, certainly tends to support this claim.

We were also told that the press and paparazzi in France would have included British intelligence agents on the night Diana died, a fact later born out by the revelation that paparazzo James Andanson, a central figure in the French inquiry into Diana’s death, was an MI6 agent.

For the record, Andanson took compromising photographs in the crash tunnel which he later threatened to publish in a book.

He was found dead, locked in his burnt-out car, 400 miles from where he was supposed to be, with a bullet hole in his temple. Following news of his death his entire photographic archive was stolen by an armed gang, never to be seen again.

Intelligence In The Media: Reading Between The Lies

Information Ops

Further evidence that British intelligence agents utilize the media for covert means emerged in an article in the Guardian, written by the paper’s investigations editor, David Leigh.

On Monday, June 30th, 2000, David Leigh wrote:

“There is – or has been until recently – a very active programme by the secret agencies to colour what appears in the British press called, if publications by various defectors can be believed, information operations, or ‘I/Ops’.”

Leigh went on to cite several instances when the British public had been sold stories written by secret agents—complete lies, but loaded with agenda and serving the interests of the agency concerned, usually MI6.

When, for example, in the 1970s the News of the World carried the headline “Russian Sub in IRA Plot Sensation”, MI6’s covert media arm, the Information Research Department (IRD), was exposed by Leigh as the author—an attempt to imply a working relationship between the IRA and the Soviets which of course never existed.

Gaddafi And when some years later, in 1995, Con Coughlin writing in MI6’s favourite rag, the Sunday Telegraph, accused Colonel Gadafy’s son of fraud, causing the Libyan leader to threaten the paper with a libel suit, the source of the story was again exposed as MI6. On this occasion the spy agency had been working in concert with then Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, who persuaded Coughlin to write the article.

It was, notably, also MI6’s favourite son Coughlin who sold us the one about Weapons of Mass Destruction—that Iraq had the capability to obliterate the West within 45 minutes.

On the back of that one, as we all know, almost a million innocent Iraqis were slaughtered.

Intelligence In The Media: Reading Between The Lies

The Mogul And The Protégé

This is not to say, of course, that every story published in the corporate media comes with a hidden agenda. Nor that, necessarily, it was written by MI6 or the CIA.

But it does suggest we should read the news with extreme caution.

Some of us are old enough to remember the lead up to the 1997 General Election, when Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper ditched its traditional right-wing allegiances and swung its support behind Bilderberg protégé Tony Blair.

And we all know what happened next—911, Iraq, the ‘war on teror’: the overthrow of Saddam and the opening up of Iraq’s vast oil reserves to Western corporations. It was as if some unseen hand had manipulated the players into position, and the ‘unseen hand’ was the media.

More recently, of course, the world’s most powerful media mogul has changed his mind again, pledging to back Conservative frontrunner David Cameron in Britain’s upcoming general election. At the very least this surely means that, come spring, Britain can expect a new government.

Of course, knowing that the media is little more than a government-sponsored propaganda factory by no means guarantees we’re immune to its connivances. But it does give us half a chance.

It means the next time we’re told a leading statesman or icon has been shot by a ‘lone gunman’ or killed in an ‘accident’;

Or that ‘Al Qaeda’ has committed another ‘911 or 7/7-style’ atrocity;

Or that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out by a couple of Libyan spooks acting alone…

We’re at least more likely to read between the lies than swallow them whole, blindly.

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