3 days ago - Without identifying individuals ... fifty journalists who had official, but secret, relationships with the CIA. In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, "The CIA and the Media," reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee's report and wrote that more than 400 US press members ...

June 18, 2022 - However, evidence of recent media-intelligence agency collaboration suggests that while the manipulation may have become more subtle, it has not gone away. A startling September 2014 exclusive report in the Intercept confirmed that the problem of excessively close ties between the CIA and certain prominent journalists is not a merely a historical artifact.

April 15, 2025 - In its investigation of U.S. foreign ... Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) – found that more than 50 American journalists had worked clandestinely as CIA agents during the Cold War era....

July 11, 2026 - The remaining individuals are ... and media representatives abroad ... More than a dozen United States news organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad. A few of these organizations were unaware that they provided this cover. The Church report stated that prior to the report's completion, the CIA had already begun restricting its use of journalists...

February 1, 2003 - A month before his capture, Editor and Publisher speculated about whether CIA agents were “covering” as journalists in Afghanistan after a Taliban defector told the Washington Post that he was approached by intelligence agents in journalist guise. Such events invoke a decades-old history of federal agents masquerading as the very people who should be watching them and the several accounts of foreign reporters imprisoned because they were believed to be spies. ... Media manipulation by the CIA and FBI came to the forefront of public attention with the admission of the practices by Congressional intelligence committees in early 1976.

November 19, 2020 - It is well documented that the CIA uses the media to spread disinformation. After 1945, the agency, in what is known as “Operation Mockingbird,” recruited journalists in major U.S. media to promote its Cold War anti-Communist perspective.

February 18, 2020 - The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations ...

S.4615 | May 20, 2026 · Public Law 119-60 | Dec 18, 2025

S.4615 | May 20, 2026 · Public Law 119-60 | Dec 18, 2025

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has paid journalists, used information from unpaid journalists, owned foreign media outlets, planted stories, and put the lid on other stories throughout its 30-year history. Journalism makes a good cover for agents because journalists can ask questions ...

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January 30, 2018 - Angleton, who oversaw the Agency counterintelligence branch for 25 years, “ran a completely independent group entirely separate cadre of journalist‑operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.” · The CIA conducted a “formal training program” during the 1950s for the sole purpose of instructing its agents to function as newsmen.

Answer (1 of 9): * The CIA has an explicit working relation with the owner of every major US media outlet, the only exceptions being Rolling Stone, Playboy, and The Village Voice. When in 1975 there were major leaks about the CIA, these are the only publications that printed them in whole, witho...

June 9, 1982 - The policy bars the paid use of journalists for secret intelligence operations except in extraordinary circumstances such as ''an emergency involving human lives or critical national interests.'' The new document does not name the journalists ...

February 18, 2020 - The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations ...

Even if you wanted to say all that, ... that they commit something that is about as anti-American as anything in our system. Which is: more secrecy, more media penetration to the point of penetrating, first, the anti-Vietnam War press; second, the student, the college student newspapers and press; the alternative, so-called, press. Which essentially is a license to do what they did later. So, where Ramparts was penetrated, leads to Operation Chaos, presumably; that leads to Operation Mockingbird in the seventies. By the time we have Carl Bernstein reporting on Operation Mockingbird, and John Crewdson reporting on its international equivalent in the New York Times–Bernstein in Rolling Stone–you essentially see the CIA trying to have at least one agent at every major news and media organization it can do in the world....

The same could apply in Canada as well, but would we ever find out? The CIA used more than 400 journalists from 1953 to 1977. “Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit,” Bernstein reports. “There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap.

December 27, 1977 - On occasions when he added an American ... activity.” · Most of the reporter‐agents, sources said, were asked to sign agreements pledging to keep secret any confidential information that came their way....

Answer (1 of 7): This is one of the cardinal rules of US spycraft (some countries have no such compunctions), is that we do not place agents in news organizations. There are multiple reasons for this. 1. It affects the credibility of the news organization. If a spy was discovered as a reporter ...