Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part series mapping the history of the U.S. secret state. Read part one here.
(LifeSiteNews) — The record shows that to these intelligence agencies, America’s enemies are so frequently found at home that their agents “Now occupy the highest ranking positions in Big Tech.”
This is the claim of Glenn Greenwald in his latest System Update show. He does not claim that the infamous “Mockingbird” CIA program – whose aim was the capture of domestic American media – has expanded to dominate the U.S. media. He says that such a project is no longer required, as the U.S. broadcast media are open about the number of intelligence agents employed as newsmakers.
As Greenwald puts it:
Today, there’s absolutely no need at all for Operation Mockingbird.
That is because, as we previously reported, U.S. security state agents openly send their top operatives to get hired by television networks, which proudly tout the number of former CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security operatives on their payroll to report the news to Americans.
The scope of this infiltration exceeds the wildest dreams of Frank Wisner’s pre-internet Mockingbird operation. With the Twitter Files, the presence of former intelligence agents in commanding positions on social media platforms is no longer a “conspiracy.”
But it’s not only corporate media outlets that are drowning in former operatives of the U.S. security state.
These agencies have also utterly infiltrated Big Tech corporations, especially Google and Facebook, and especially among those positions that are responsible for censoring political content from these monopolistic platforms.
Greenwald notes that this amounts to a coordinated domestic program of censorship and propaganda to shape the minds of the population.
In other words, at exactly the same time that a small army of security state operatives openly get hired by and help shape the propaganda that emanates from the country’s largest media corporations, they are also dictating the boundaries of what citizens can say online, of what ideas and people can be heard and which ideas and people are prohibited.
Greenwald cites a Helsinki Times piece of November 2021, which starkly outlines the legacy of Mockingbird, and the current day operations of the CIA.
Carl Bernstein, a famous American investigative journalist who unveiled the scandal in 1977, said that according to the plan, the CIA recruited journalists that were put on a payroll by the CIA and instructed to write ‘fake stories.’ The CIA admitted that at least 400 journalists and 25 large organizations around the world had secretly carried out assignments for the agency.
To this day, the CIA still attempts to monitor and manipulate public opinion through this despicable practice. The so-called truth that underpins a news story, from the perspective of the U.S. government, is not worth mentioning at all, with news media just being used as a tool to safeguard the country’s hegemony in the world.
Greenwald highlights the long-standing presence in the media of Pentagon officials employed to shape the narrative in favor of forever war – something even The New York Times reported in 2008 with their article “Behind TV analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.”
He also cites coverage of former spies enjoying second careers in the mainstream U.S. media, a phenomenon Politico analyzed in a 2018 piece titled “The Spies Who Came in to the TV Studio.”
Twitter Files publisher Matt Taibbi warned of this in a tweet from 2019, which opened with a list of former spies employed in U.S. media.
John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price, Rick Francona… I can keep going. https://t.co/g7nWvsXmFf
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 13, 2019
Greenwald continued the long list, before reminding his viewers that this “censorship-industrial complex” has extended to the platforms of Big Tech.
He states that a video featuring presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is “polling at 20 percent,” has been removed by Google.
That’s how extreme this censorship has become.
They colluded to remove the sitting President, Donald Trump. They destroyed the most popular app – Parler – in the United States, at a time when people were looking for a platform that didn’t censor.
This regime is dictated, argues Greenwald, “in part by the U.S. Government externally,” as the Twitter Files showed. Greenwald also refers to the ruling by Federal Judge Terry Doughty, whose injunction is aimed at halting the Biden administration’s manipulation of social media platforms.
In response to news of the injunction, which applies to all employees of the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as to federal public health officials, Taibbi published a brief series of tweets which included a damning piece of evidence submitted to the judge.
4. Here’s the whole scheme, in one picture: pic.twitter.com/WbZqoV0EmZ
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 11, 2023
The exchange above shows how the FBI ordered the suspension of three twitter accounts, and how Twitter complied without question – despite being unsure themselves whether the accounts were malign or not.
The legal notice to halt state censorship and media manipulation has been met with cries of protest.
The move “could upend years of efforts to enhance coordination” between government and social media platforms, as The Washington Post reported.
Aside from hampering these years of “enhanced coordination,” the New York Times on July 7 lamented it as a “victory for Republicans.”
The NYT returned on July 13 with the following complaint: “The Future of Online Speech Shouldn’t Belong to One Trump-Appointed Judge in Louisiana.”
It was written by Dr. Katie Klonick, an associate professor of law at St. John’s University “who studies law and technology, including the governance of online speech by private platforms.”
Legal “expert” Klonick has skillfully excluded any mention of the fact that censorship has been proven to have taken place by the direct command of the intelligence services.
Her legal expertise is concentrated here on the total exclusion of the evidence.
The war on truth
Why did the Twitter Files get published? These internal documents from Twitter reveal extensive and detailed manipulation of social media by the U.S. government and its former intelligence agents.
On taking over the social media platform, new owner Elon Musk discovered that Twitter’s main lawyer, James Baker, was not only the former general counsel at the FBI and a key figure in the Trump-Russiagate “witch hunt,” but also ordered the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Musk fired Baker for this practice suppression of information, which as Twitter’s chief legal counsel he would likely have continued – with the very Twitter Files that revealed his actions.
As Fox News reported in December 2022:
Ex-Twitter boss Jack Dorsey has called on current CEO Elon Musk to make all the “Twitter files” public after the company’s former deputy general counsel James Baker was “exited” for his role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Musk has teased the release of additional “Twitter files” that purport to show how the company worked to censor certain speech, as many conservatives have long asserted. Dorsey on Wednesday suggested that Musk release all the internal documents at once, “without filter,” and also explain the actions Twitter will take under its new management.
Musk then released the complete files to journalists Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi. You can read all about the Twitter Files here.
Greenwald’s report mentions CIA influence at Facebook, and that Google’s “Trust and Safety” censorship team, which polices “hate speech,” is “managed by 3 ex-CIA agents” as part of a far wider network of former intelligence agents occupying powerful positions at the company. A report published on Twitter found at least 165 such people, with:
- 27 from the CIA
- 52 from the FBI
- 30 from the NSA (National Security Agency)
- 50 from the DHS (Department of Homeland Security)
- and 6 from the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)
The source gives extensive biographies of many of the above agents. The same account found 115 former intelligence agents working at Facebook as of December 2022, remarking:
Since the 2016 Presidential election, Google/Facebook/Twitter have hired at least 300+ people formerly employed by CIA, FBI, etc…
Ex-CIA agents are Heads of Trust & Safety at Google & Facebook. Is it OK that ex-CIA agents control what ‘misinfo’ is?
These claims were corroborated by independent journalists, such as Michael Shellenberger. He pointed out that Baker wasn’t alone in being a high-level FBI appointee to Twitter.
28. Baker wasn’t the only senior FBI exec. involved in the Trump investigation to go to Twitter.
Dawn Burton, the former dep. chief of staff to FBI head James Comey, who initiated the investigation of Trump, joined Twitter in 2019 as director of strategy.
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) December 19, 2022
Both he and Dawn Burton had been leading figures in the baseless allegations against Donald Trump known as “Russiagate.”
Shellenberger also noted that the sheer number of former FBI agents at Twitter led to the creation of their own welcoming committee and internal social network – with a helpful glossary to translate Twitter-speak to spook-speak.
29. As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — “Bu alumni” — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. pic.twitter.com/prVhPGohOC
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) December 19, 2022
A more recent update appeared in June 2023 suggested Facebook is preparing well in advance for the forthcoming 2024 presidential campaign:
🚨MAJOR UPDATE 🚨
Aaron Berman, former 17 year CIA officer, is now “Head of Elections Policy” for Facebook & Instagram.
Berman joined Facebook in 2019 and was responsible for writing Misinformation Policy & enforcing it for the 2020 election, COVID, Brazil elections etc
He is… https://t.co/o7oLq4oAWr pic.twitter.com/QB6gMxTmSL
— Name Redacted (@NameRedacted247) June 22, 2023
That’s right. A long term CIA agent, whose former job was writing “misinformation” policy over U.S. elections, COVID and international affairs has been promoted to chief election censor.
He will be working to protect the American people from the truth along with 15 other former intelligence agents.
An open secret state
This is the state of America today.
It is the site of an information war prosecuted by a secret state that was created to fight an enemy that vanished thirty years ago.
This industry of information, profiteering and corruption starts endless wars abroad, and manufactures consent for them at home through the control of the media by the secret state.
Any emerging champion of the people, or of the truth, will be ruthlessly smeared and will see every available institution mobilized to discredit and ruin them.
The project of regime change, itself a product of anticommunism, has so completely changed the regime at home that it would be unrecognizable to Eisenhower.
He warned that the money absorbed in the military-industrial complex which shapes the narrative of the West today is money taken directly from the American people.
It is a system that is not only financially bankrupting the wider West, whose aging infrastructure is sorely in need of peace dividend to invest at home, but also of printing money to service endless wars abroad.
The “hostile ideology” of which Eisenhower warned is the one that has captured the United States and its Western allies. It is as indifferent to God as were the Soviets, and has replaced His order with a litany of lies.
If this is a conspiracy, it is no theory. It is in practice a conspiracy against the American people.