Cold
War disinformation operations run by the CIA took the form of
clandestinely placing stories in the media that were clearly untrue
but designed to shift public perceptions.
by
Philip M. Giraldi
When an
intelligence agency arranges to disseminated fake news it is called
“disinformation” and it is a subset of what is referred to as
covert action, basically secret operations run in a foreign country
to influence opinion or to disrupt the functioning of a government or
group that is considered to be hostile.
During
the Cold War, disinformation operations were run by many of the
leading players in both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and in
the opposition Warsaw Pact. Sometimes the activity and the
sponsorship were clearly visible, as when Radio Free Europe and Radio
Moscow would exchange barbs about just how bad daily life was in the
opposition alliance. Sometimes, however, it took the form of
clandestinely placing stories in the media that were clearly untrue
but designed to shift public perceptions of what was taking place in
the world. The Vietnam War provided a perfect proxy playing field,
with stories emanating from the U.S. government and its supporters
presenting a narrative of a fight for democracy against
totalitarianism while the Communist bloc promoted a contrary tale of
colonial and capitalist oppression of a people striving to be free.
The
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) inherited the mantle of covert
action operations as a legacy from its OSS predecessor, which had had
considerable success in conducting disinformation operations during
World War 2. But there was from the start considerable opposition to
continuing such programs as they were both expensive and subject to
devastating blowback when they were identified and exposed. In
Western Europe, powerful domestic communist parties were quick to
publicize U.S. intelligence missteps, but nevertheless the ability to
manipulate the news and information media to place stories critical
of the Soviets and their allies led to major programs that funded
magazines and books while also seeking to acquire a cadre of
journalists that would produce pieces on demand proved too tempting
to ignore.
There
has been considerable ex post facto examination of the CIA’s use of
covert funding mechanisms including the Congress of Cultural Freedom
to fund writers and magazines in Europe, the best known of which were
The Paris Review and Encounter out of London. As there was a low
intensity war going on against communism, a conflict which many
patriotic writers supported, funding magazines and finding
contributors to write appropriate material was relatively easy and
hardly challenged.
Some
senior editors knew or strongly suspected where their funding was
coming from while some did not, but most didn’t ask any questions
because then as now patrons of literary magazines were in short
supply. Many of the writers were in the dark about the funding, but
wrote what they did because of their own personal political
convictions. The CIA, seeking value for money, would urge certain
editorial lines but was not always very aggressive in doing so as it
sought to allow the process to play out without too much
interference.
Opinion
magazines were one thing, but penetrating the newspaper world was
quite a different story. It was easy to find a low or mid-level
journalist and pay him to write certain pieces, but the pathway to
actual publication was and is more complicated than that, going as it
does through several editorial levels before appearing in print. A
recent book cites the belief that CIA had “an agent at a
newspaper in every world capital at least since 1977” who could
be directed to post or kill stories. While it is true that U.S.
Embassies
and intelligence services had considerable ability to place stories
in capitals in Latin America and parts of Asia, the record in Europe,
where I worked, was somewhat mixed. I knew of only one senior editor
of a major European newspaper who was considered to be an Agency
resource, and even he could not place fake news as he was answerable
both to his editorial board and the conglomerate that owned the
paper. He also refused to take a salary from CIA, which meant that
his cooperation was voluntary and he could not be directed.
The CIA
did indeed have a considerable number of journalist “assets” in
Europe but they were generally stringers or mid-level and had only
limited capability to actually shape the news. They frequently wrote
for publications that had little or no impact. Indeed, one might
reasonably ask whether the support of literary magazines in the
fifties and sixties which morphed into more direct operations seeking
journalist agents had any significant impact at all in geopolitical
terms or on the Cold War itself.
More
insidious was so-called Operation Mockingbird, which began in the
early 1950s and which more-or-less openly obtained the cooperation of
major American publications and news outlets to help fight communist
“subversion.” The activity was exposed by Seymour Hersh in 1975
and was further described by the Church Commission in 1976, after
which point CIA operations to influence opinion in the United States
became illegal and the use of American journalists as agents was also
generally prohibited. It was also learned that the Agency had been
working outside its founding charter to infiltrate student groups and
antiwar organizations under Operation Chaos, run by the CIA’s
controversial if not completely crazy counterintelligence Czar James
Jesus Angleton.
As the
wheel of government frequently ends up turning full circle, we appear
to be back in the age of disinformation, where the national security
agencies of the U.S. government, including CIA, are now suspected of
peddling stories that are intended to influence opinion in the United
States and produce a political response. The Steele Dossier on Donald
Trump is a perfect example, a report that surfaced through a
deliberate series of actions by then CIA Director John Brennan, and
which was filled with unverifiable innuendo intended to destroy the
president-elect’s reputation before he took office. It is
undeniably a positive development for all Americans who care about
good governance that Congress is now intending to investigate the
dossier to determine who ordered it, paid for it, and what it was
intended to achieve.
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