Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.
The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis' 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. Davis' book, detailing how the media had been recruited and infiltrated by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was controversial and not always accurate.
More evidence of Mockingbird's existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate “plumber” E. Howard Hunt and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008).
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