Counterpunch | Here is a brief historical note on how at the height of the Cold
War the CIA developed it’s very own stable of writers, editors and
publishers (swelling to as many as 3000 individuals) that it paid to
scribble Agency propaganda under a program called Operation Mockingbird.
The disinformation network was supervised by the late Philip Graham,
former publisher of Timberg’s very own paper, the Washington Post.
Craig Timberg’s story, which was about as substantial as anonymous
slurs scrawled on a bathroom stall, lends rise to the suspicion that
the Post may still be a player in the same old game it perfected in the
1950s and continued across the decades culminating in its 1996
hatchet-job on my old friend Gary Webb and his immaculate reporting on
drug-running by the CIA-backed contras in the 1980s. The Post’s
disgusting assault on Webb was spearheaded, in part, by the paper’s
intelligence reporter Walter Pincus, himself an old CIA hand.
For Timberg, this was probably just another day at the
office: fling some red slurs on the wall and see what sticks before
moving on to his next big tech scoop (courtesy of hot tips from a couple
of anonymous teenagers in Cupertino) on software glitches in the
i-Phone 7.
For the subjects of hit-and-run journalism such as this, however,
it’s often a different matter entirely. In Webb’s case, the Post’s
deplorable and baseless attacks killed his career as an investigative
reporter and sparked a spiraling depression that ended with Gary taking
his own life. Although the CIA’s own inspector general, Frederick Hitz,
later confirmed Webb’s reporting, the Post never retracted its
slanderous stories or apologized for ruining the life of one of the
country’s finest and most courageous journalists.
Now it appears that the paper is circling round for yet another drive-by.
(This article is adapted from our book End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate.) –JSC
