By Donald Jeffries
Donald Trump’s choice of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) as director of national intelligence was one of his best selections. Gabbard removed the redactions to many previously released JFK assassination documents, revealing that virtually all of them had to do with some kind of Israeli connection to the event.
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The CIA has been actively manipulating journalists since the advent of the Cold War. Formerly believed to have some 400 or so journalists, news reporters, and publishers on the payroll and under their control via Operation Mockingbird, the initial disclosures by members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revealed that, in fact, there were thousands of such media assets paid through the U.S. Agency for International Development, all over the world.
Operation Mockingbird was first exposed in the mid-1970s, during the important Church Committee Senate hearings, led by one of the really good Democrats of the era, Sen. Frank Church (Idaho). The committee concluded that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and other various alphabet agencies had been illegally bugging, wiretapping, and harassing American citizens, including Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
But the Church Committee never adopted any oversight program to ensure that Operation Mockingbird was no longer active. In fact, as the DOGE disclosures revealed all too clearly, Mockingbird is not only alive and well, but greatly expanded now. Trump’s most significant appointee, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a 2023 interview with journalist James O’Keefe, stated that Barack Obama had revitalized the odious program, so that “high level intelligence officials” were running powerful news outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, website “The Daily Beast,” and even Rolling Stone magazine.
Ironically, Rolling Stone had published an important article in the 1970s by famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, which talked about the prevalence of CIA influence in our media. RFK, Jr. named influential media figures of the past, such as James Reston of The New York Times, and Benjamin Bradlee (who was supposed to be one of President Kennedy’s closest personal friends) as being operatives under the program.
“The high level people at those journals were working for the agency or signed secrecy agreements with the CIA,” Kennedy said. Reston, Bradlee, and others of their ilk were instrumental in establishing the ridiculous, lone assassin narrative of the JFK assassination.
In that same 2023 interview, RFK Jr. demonstrated impressive historical knowledge, as he explained how the dangerous 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) contained an amendment to “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department, as well as the independent Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is the independent federal agency that oversees all U.S. civilian international media.
“Today [the U.S. government is] the biggest funder of journalism in the world,” Kennedy noted. Foreshadowing the DOGE revelations a few years later, he added, “They fund it through USAID.”
RFK, Jr. noted that the modern day version of Operation Mockingbird is more focused on social media than traditional media. “We know from the ‘Twitter Files’ that both the FBI and CIA were operating portals within Twitter and Facebook that allowed them to manipulate information and deplatform people,” Kennedy declared.
Gabbard suggests that the very much alive Operation Mockingbird has been utilized in the campaign against Donald Trump. In a recent interview with journalist Benny Johnson, Gabbard confirmed that the Trump administration is actively battling intelligence operatives buried deep within the federal government who are in conjunction with the state-controlled media trying to sabotage Trump’s agenda:
It’s something that we’ve already had to deal with, Benny, within this administration—where there are people within the intelligence community who believe that their will is more important than the will of the American people, and will weaponize intelligence by leaking it to their friends within the mainstream media with the intent of undermining President Trump’s agenda.
Regarding efforts to combat Operation Mockingbird, Gabbard stated:
This is why what we’re doing is so important. And this is why President Trump’s mandate in this is really critical. By exposing the truth—by exposing the bad actors within the intelligence community and in the political space who are weaponizing intelligence to advance their own political interests—is so important.
Gabbard is the first official in the history of American intelligence to really attempt to reform it from the inside. Former CIA Director William Colby suffered pangs of conscience later in life, and was found dead in a suspicious canoeing accident after becoming heavily involved in Nebraska state Sen. John DeCamp’s efforts to expose the Franklin Credit child sex scandal.
Those who criticize Gabbard and RFK Jr. need to understand the historical context here. They are attempting baby steps to rein in just a fraction of the systemic corruption that exists. They have been viciously attacked by the same Mockingbird media. Reform will not be easy.
