Nick Schou - Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood

Copyright 2016 by Nicholas Schou

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0336-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0341-4

Printed in the United States of America

For Charles Bowden and Gary Webb

All governments are run by liars, and nothing
they say should be believed.

I.F. Stone

Foreword

Y oure holding in your hands the latest Hot Book, one in a series of compact, deeply researched, and highly provocative books on the most burning topics of our day. As the editorial director of Hot Books, and as a journalist and historian who has scrutinized the shadowy operations of our national security state, I view Spooked as a particularly timely and urgent expos of power. As whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden have made clear: power prefers to operate in the dark. And national security elitesespecially in the United States, where we have witnessed the growth of a permanent war state and an enormous empire of surveillancedo everything they can to cloak their activities in secrecy.

Now more than ever, we need a robust and aggressive press to report on this increasingly secretive national security state, and the military operations (and criminal actions) that are often carried out in our name. American freedom begins with freedom of the press. Without an informed citizenry, there can be no democracy. But unfortunately, as Spooked shockingly documents, our media is too often an accomplice of our national security agencies, rather than our guardians of freedom.

The CIAs long, cozy relationship with the media dates back to the Cold War, when our great press watchdogs obediently trailed the heels of spymaster Allen Dulles as the agency wreaked havoc on democratic governments and sovereign nations around the world and even subverted democracy at home. When Dulles and his agents overthrew Irans prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh on August 19, 1953 (a tragedy that still has no end), the Washington Post editorial board saw the calamity as a cause to rejoice. The CIAs criminality put the New York Times in a similar celebratory mood, with its editorialists condemning the fallen Mossadegh as a rabid, self-seeking nationalist. In reality, the deposed prime minister was simply a reform leader who believed that his countrys oil resources should be owned by the people of Iran rather than by Western energy giants. The Times told its readers that Mossadeghs violent overthrow brings us hope. Instead, what it brought was decades of tyranny and sorrow, and the continuing hatred and enmity of Iran against The Great Satan.

Likewise, the following year, when the CIA cooked up a military coup against Guatemalas president Jacobo Arbenz, the New York Times was once again all too willing to do the spy agencys bidding. Arbenz was a progressive reformer who, like Mossadegh, had antagonized corporate clients of the Dulles brothersin this case the all-powerful United Fruit Companyby redistributing some of its vast holdings to the countrys miserably poor peasant farmers. But according to the CIAs spin artists, Arbenz was a dangerous Communist who was giving the Soviet empire a foothold in our hemisphere. When the reporting of Times foreign correspondent Sydney Gruson seemed to contradict this CIA narrative, Dulles simply expressed his concerns to his old friend New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and the problemi.e., the insufficiently compliant Grusondisappeared. He was kept safely away from Guatemala as the CIA went about its dark mischief. In the future, Sulzberger assured the CIA spymaster, the newspapers coverage of Guatemala would be screened with a great deal of more care than usual.

The correspondence files of the late Allen Dulles, stored in a Princeton library, are stuffed full of chummy letters between the godfather of US intelligence and many of Americas top media executives, editors, reporters, and broadcasters. The casual and convivial mind meld between US intelligence and the media establishment is on full display in this voluminous correspondence. Dulles and the journalists, whose job it was to monitor his shadowy agency, sipped cocktails and rubbed elbows at prestigious organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, at Washington power dens such as the Alibi and Metropolitan clubs (two of Dulless favorite watering holes), and at the Georgetown townhouses of CIA-friendly pundits such as Joe Alsop.

This unseemly collusion was finally exposed by Carl Bernstein in a 1977 Rolling Stone article, penned eight years after Dulless death. The piece was explosive, revealing that more than four hundred journalists had carried out secret assignments for the CIA over the previous twenty-five years, including some who were on the agencys payroll. Washington was shocked, shocked by Bernsteins expos, and the CIA duly promised to conduct its relations with the press in a more professional and transparent manner.

But, as Nicholas Schou reveals in Spooked , if the CIA is now more careful about how it goes about manipulating the media, its influence, if anything, is more pervasive these days and no less pernicious. CIA officials might no longer ply journalists with liquor and slip them cash as was common in the past, but they do dole out favors that are no less essential to a national security reporters career: the tips and leaks from a secretive bureaucracy without which the news stories begin to dry up. In todays downsized media business, top Washington news slots are extremely competitive positions. Thus ambitious journalists soon learn to play ball with the right people at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, if they value their professional future.

Despite the reluctance of most journalists and former CIA officials to break ranks and talk openly about the spooking of the press, Schou succeeds in cracking this code of silence. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, he shows us how the Langley media machine works. Spooked provides the kind of revelations and insights that the press, loath to report on its own failings and corruptions, seldom supplies. Schou alerts us to the vital stories that get covered up, the courageous journalists who get punished, and the disastrous national security decisions made when the press becomes too complicit with those in power.

As the manipulation of Americas free press becomes more deeply institutionalized, fact-based reality turns into an increasingly ephemeral concept. The world of make-believe is taking over, filling the vacuum left by our weakened media, with more and more people getting so-called news from entertainment sources. Recognizing the growing power of Hollywood to shape the publics perception of reality, the CIA also makes a strong effort to influence the movies and TV shows with national security themes as they move along the creative assembly lines. Spooked chronicles how the producers, directors, writers and stars of movies such as Zero Dark Thirty and Argo and TV shows such as Homeland, are all too happy to give CIA personnel supervisory powers and screen credits in return for the dubious benefits of private tours of CIA headquarters and meetings with CIA bigwigs. Meanwhile, films and TV series that challenge the CIAs paranoid worldview and expose the crimes of the US national security state rarely get made and when they do, are indifferently marketed and quickly disappear.