Replies to post #371463 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[janice shell]

You know, I'd call your post propaganda. And not very well done propaganda at that.

[blackhawks]

Any post that includes zero hedge as a source has, not least of all for that, zero value.

[BOREALIS]

Your blindly post your "Propaganda news" to possibly make an impression.

Congratulations. It's all BULLSHIT !!!!!

[fuagf]

Da Kine 17, Saw last night we'd missed some of your earlier drama-queen posting. You may be surprised to see much of what you see yourself as exposing has been discussed in public in the past. This may also help you to see the real world in a healthier (for you) perspective.

"Operation Mockingbird. (Propaganda news)"

Related: hookrider, i knew that too. Hey, while looking back at Operation Mockingbird
.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird ..
today i bumped into an old one of yours. 11 years ago, 2009
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164035798

COLBY ACKNOWLEDGES U.S. PRESS PICKED UP BOGUS C.I.A. ACCOUNTS

By John M. Crewdson Special to The New York Times

Dec. 28, 1977



The New York Times Archives
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WASHINGTON, Dec. 27—William E. Colby, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, acknowledged today that the C.I.A.'s efforts over the last three decades to mold foreign opinion had resulted in some instances in which bogus propaganda planted by the agency overseas had been treated as genuine by American news organizations.

“That is a problem, the feedback problem,” Mr. Colby told a House subcommit

Excerpts from Colby statement, page A13.

tee at the outset of two weeks of hearings into the agency's past relationships with American and foreign journalists. “It's happened very rarely, I gather, but there have been a few minor occasions.”

Most of the C.I.A.'s propaganda has been disseminated abroad through foreign news organizations, and Mr. Colby said today that, as a C.I.A. officer, he had always been careful not to influence the reporting of American journalists working for the agency in secret. But he added that there had been “a few cases” in which such journalist-agents had been told what to report in their dispatches by superiors in the C.I.A.

Warnings in the Past

Mr. Colby. who repeated his earlier defense of C.I.A. relationships with the news media, said that in the past the agency occasionally warned major American news organizations to ignore reports generated by false propaganda it had spread overseas. But he added that he did not believe that such warnings would any longer be held in confidence.

“You could do that then,” Mr. Colby said, referring to the 1950's and early 1960's, when, he said, two of his predecessors as Director of Central Intelligence, Allen W. Dulles and John A. McCone, sometimes issued such warnings to American news executives. “I'm not sure you could do it now,” Mr. Colby said. “You'd generate a story right away.”

Mr. Colby, who left the C.I.A. last year and now practices law in Washington, was the first witness to testify today before the House intelligence committee's oversight subcommittee, which is beginning an examination of the extent and propriety of past and present relations between the C.I.A. and American and foreign journalists,’

Representative Les Aspin, Democrat of Wisconsin, the subcommittee chairman, said during a luncheon break following Mr. Colby's appearance that “what this hearing showed this morning is that the protections against feedback into this country” from propaganda disseminated

Continued on Page Al2, Column 1

Colby Acknowledges That U.S. News Organizations Picked Up Bogus C.I.A. Accounts by the CIA. through foreign-based publications “really are not adequate.”

Conceding that false propaganda poses “a tough problem,” Mr. Colby suggested that the subcommittee consider a plan whereby the C.I.A. would be required to report to Congress and the President in the event that a piece of bogus propaganda assumed the proportions of a major news report.

What he had been thinking of, Mr. Coby said later, was not that the President might make a public statement naming the C.I.A. as the source of the propaganda, “but he might make a statement that we didn't believe it.”

In his statement Mr. Colby also asserted that the latest disclosures in The New York Times about the C.I.A.'s role in opposing what he termed the “massive propaganda campaigns of the Communist world” in Europe and developing nations in the 1950's end ‘60's “should not dismay us” but rather should “give us pride that our nation met those challenges with the weapons of ideas” and without resorting to “bloodier weapons.”

All of the other retired C.I.A. officers who appeared before the subcommittee today acknowledged that the problem of the “domestic blowback” of agency propaganda had been a genuine problem, out most of them dismissed the mounting concern over C.I.A.'s past employmnit of American journalists as misguided.

All, including Mr. Colby, spoke of the value that the C.I.A. had derived from its past use of American journalists as sources and agents, and from allowing its own employees to pose as journalists abroad. All of them lamented a recent C.I.A. directive prohibiting all but voluntary exchanges of information between the C.I.A. and American news organizations. Mr. Colby called it the result of “sensationalism” over recent disclosures of some of the agency's clandestine activities.

David A. Phillips, the retired chief of the C.I.A.'s Western Hemisphere Division who began his intelligence career in the 1950's while editor of a Santiago newspaper, The South Pacific Mail, said he had found “a natural affinity between American journalists and American intelligence officers abroad. They perform tasks which are similar, except that one reports to the public and the other to his government.’

Mr. Phillips said he was “concerned because it appears intelligence officers abroad have fewer and fewer opportunities to find cover and meet well-informed sources.” He quoted a colleague in the C.I.A. who, he said, had recently asked, “If the restrictions continue, will we soon be allowed only to collect intelligence from pimps and prostitutes?”

Chiding the Press

Ray S. Cline, a former official of’ the C.I.A. and onetime director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told the subcommittee: “At this historical moment, the American news media, which have so successfully wrapped themselves in the First Amendment as if there were no other Constitutional obligations, constitute the only relatively unfettered espionage organizations in this country.”

Mr. Cline chided the press for what he termed “the recent wave of sanctimony” that had made its historical ties to the C.I.A. a matter of concern. “You know, that First Amendment is only an amendment,” he said.

“Reporters investigate all leads to good stories,” Mr. Cline said in a prepared statement, “pay sources whose secrecy they preserve, and receive—and print—stolen documents from inside our own Government.

“That is exactly what United States intelligence agencies do, except that they concentrate exclusively on penetrating foreign ‘governments and institutions. no our own.”

John Maury, another retired C.I.A. official, told the Aspin subcommittee that he could “appreciate the concern to protect the American reader from false information disseminated abroad.”

But, he saic.s, “the great bulk of C.I.A. media operations has been aimed at disseminating the truth to areas where it is not otherwise available.”

“News manipulations no doubt Is a problem for a free press,” Mr. Maury continued. “Indeed, news is manipulated every day by the reporters who file it and the editors who present it. News manipulation is both a common practice and a lucrative nrofession.”

Mr. Colby, who answered the subcommittee's questions for nearly three hours this morning, said that, as has been asserted in recent news reports, the C.I.A. “did involve itself in a lot of activities” in mass communications in the course of its cold mar propaganda battles with the Soviet Union and other hostile nations.

“I think we won that war,” Mr. Colby said, adding that the portion of the C.I.A.'s budget devoted to covert activities, and therefore to covert propagandizing, had declined from nearly 50 percent at the height of the cold war to something near 2 percent now.

Little Effect Now

Although such propagandizing still continues, he said, its extent and.irnportance are now minimal and the resultant i domestic “blowback” s of little consequence.

“If it's just a little story at the bottom of page 14,” he said, “it really doesn't matter very much.”

But he responded to a question from Mr. Aspin about whether the C.I.A. ought to be barred from any relationships with foreign journalists and news organizations by saying that he did not “believe in unilateral disarmament.”

“The fact is that there is an international ideological contest going on,” he said. “I believe that we should not disarm ourselves in this contest in the hopes that the rest of the world will be gentler.”

Mr. Colby contended that the great bulk of the C.I.A.'s propaganda efforts over the years had been devoted to putting forward true accounts that were not receiving the attention that the agency thought they warranted.

The C.I.A.'s extensive campaign of propaganda against the Government of President Salvator Allende Gossens of Chile had been such a case, he said, adding that Dr. Allende's Government had shown no hesitation in making its own case in the media.

“The C.I.A. program was to try to get the other story circulated,” he said, “and some of the American press did pick up. I think the question was not whether the raw facts were true. They probably were true on both sets of stories.’

Mr. Colby also said he recalled a number of bogus news accounts floated by the C.I.A. over the years, including at least two that fulfilled their own propheries.

One, he said, concerned a resistance movement in a country he would not name that was having little success in its endeavors to overthrow the existing government. C.I.A. propagandists, he said, pictured the group as ‘a lot bigger than it actually was.” Because of the publicity, he said, it prevailed in the end.

“If -you support the XYZ Party and it wins the election, then it's true,” he said.

“I'm not sure that's what we want,” replied Mr. Aspin.

Mr. Colby added that, in his view, there is a built-in mechanism that prevents bogus propaganda from taking on major proportions around the world. If the press focuses on a false report planted by the CIA., he said, it will soon wither away. And “if it does become a big story,” he said, “it becomes a real story.’

Use of Journalists Defended

Both Mr. Maury and Mr. Cline told the subcommittee that they had seen nothing wrong with the C.I.A.'s employment of American journalists as agents who collected intelligence overseas and provided support for other C.I.A. operations.

“I know of some who have served their country in this capacity willingly and well,” Mr. Maury said. “I know of none where this service was at the expense of their obligation either to their employers or to their readers.”

“I'm not sure the passage of money is indeed the dividing line between correct and incorrect behavior,” Mr. Cline said.

“Moonlighting American employees of American media organizations who pro. vide information to C.I.A..” Mr. Cline went on, “do not damage the U.S. press in any way unless they undertake so much special work for C.I.A. that handicaps them in carrying out their normal duties.”

“Obviously, if serious encroachment on journalistic time and performance does occur, the media outfit involved should fire the journalist for not doing his job and the problem is solved,” Mr. Cline said. “It should not matter that his difficulty was moonlighting for C.I.A. anymore than if it was excessive time spent on wine, women, gambling or even stamp collecting.”

A Basic Assumption

Most other governments, Mr. Cline sald, have traditionally assumed that all journalists, including Americans, are working for their own intelligence services on the side.

“There is simply nowhere, except in • the United States,” he said an “immaculate conception” of journalism as a , profession that needs protection from intelligence contacts of every kind, Mr. Cline asserted.

“I think American journalists will be better served if they accept this real international world and live in it. Most of them did for many years without any injury to our free press.

“It is only the extravagant post-Watergate pretension to purity and morality that suggests to some journalists that they should preserve a reputation for ‘cloistered and fugitive virtue’ at the expense of a healthy relationship with the parallel profession of newsgatherers in the C.I.A.”

The subcommittee's hearings will continue this week with testimony from representatives of the journalistic community.

The New York Times/George Tames

William E. Colby at hearing

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/colby-acknowledges-us-press-picked-up-bogus-cia-accounts-tells.html