On October 30, 1993, the Washington Post published a stunning column by its ombudsman, Richard Harwood. Entitled “Ruling Class Journalists,” Harwood’s article was an extraordinary admission against interest coming directly “from the horse’s mouth,” so to speak. His startling and completely unexpected disclosure (which was probably intended more as a boast than a confession) vindicated the claims long made by this magazine and its predecessors (American Opinion and The Review of the News), to wit, that America’s “Establishment,” as represented by the world government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), had secured a virtual monopoly over our nation’s “mainstream media,” the MSM.

For decades, the Post and other pillars of the CFR thought cartel had either ignored these charges, or scorned them as lunatic ravings. But here was the Post’s Harwood describing the Council on Foreign Relations as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States.” Harwood wrote:

In the past 15 years, council directors have included Hedley Donovan of Time Inc., Elizabeth Drew of the New Yorker, Philip Geyelin of The Washington Post, Karen Elliott House of the Wall Street Journal, and Strobe Talbott of Time magazine....

The editorial page editor, deputy editorial page editor, executive editor, managing editor, foreign editor, national affairs editor, business and financial editor and various writers as well as Katharine Graham, the paper’s principal owner, represent The Washington Post in the council’s membership.

Moreover, wrote Harwood: “The executive editor, managing editor and foreign editor of the New York Times are members, along with the executives of such other large newspapers as the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, the weekly news magazines, network television executives and celebrities, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Jim Lehrer, for example, and various columnists, among them Charles Krauthammer, William Buckley, George Will and Jim Hoagland.”

Notably, the Post ombudsman acknowledged that the CFR’s ruling-class journalists “do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy; they help make it.” This vindicated yet another charge we had frequently leveled at the CFR and the Big Media cabal it had formed (and for which we had just as frequently suffered scoffs and sneers).

However, a crucially important dimension of the ruling-class-journalist phenomenon that Harwood did not touch on is that large intersection where the Council on Foreign Relations mixes with the Central Intelligence Agency. Both organizations are semi-secret; like icebergs, they have a small, visible, public face and a much larger, secret, invisible body. And as with icebergs, it is the hidden portion that is most dangerous and must be most carefully monitored.

A very few prominent CFR/ruling-class-journalist members publicly acknowledged also being “former” members of the CIA (or its forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services, OSS). This included such celebrated names as Cord Meyer, Jr., who was a longtime head of the United World Federalists, and (after nearly 30 years in CIA leadership) a syndicated columnist and author; Thomas Braden, a top-level OSS-CIA leader who later became a newspaper publisher, syndicated columnist, and CNN commentator; Joseph and Stewart Alsop, who, after service in the OSS-CIA in World War II, became nationally syndicated columnists and reporters for the New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post; and William F. Buckley, who, following his CIA service, founded National Review and Young Americans for Freedom. Available evidence indicates that many of these and other acknowledged “former” OSS-CIA members continued as agency operatives throughout their later private lives as ruling-class journalists.

Big Brother’s Mockingbirds

Over the past decade, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits and public pressure have forced the CIA to release millions of pages of documents. Included in the releases are many documents relating to Project Mockingbird (also known as Operation Mockingbird), a long-running CIA program launched in the early 1950s to coopt the American press. Although many of the pages are heavily redacted, the releases have, nevertheless, provided important glimpses inside this clandestine operation. The data show that the CFR-CIA intersection would become the key recruiting ground for Mockingbirds and ruling-class-journalist leadership. The leaders of the OSS-CIA founding generation — General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Allen W. Dulles (shown), Frank Wisner, General Walter Bedell Smith, and Cord Meyer — were CFR one-worlders, and they recruited like-minded spirits from the media world. Among the earliest and most influential recruits were the husband-and-wife team of Philip and Katharine Graham, CFR members and owners of the Washington Post. In addition to the Grahams and those already mentioned above in the quote from Harwood’s column, CIA documents reveal that among Mockingbird’s ruling-class-journalist elites were:

• Joseph C. Harsch, Christian Science Monitor, CFR

• Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, CFR

• Walter Lippman, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, CFR

• William S. Paley, CBS, CFR

• John Scott, Time magazine, CFR

• Harry Schwartz, New York Times, CFR

• Chalmers Roberts, Washington Post, CFR, and

• Malcolm Muir, Newsweek, CFR

However, those named above represent a small tip of the iceberg. Carl Bern­stein, of the Washington Post’s Watergate duo fame, wrote in 1977 that Joseph Alsop (CFR) was “one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.” And Washington Post owner Philip Graham is reported to have said he was told by a CIA operative that members of the press were easier and cheaper than prostitutes. “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month,” the Company man told the Post man.

But that applies only to those on the lower end of the Fourth Estate, naturally; the stars and superstars of the journalistic firmament command greater rewards and perks. Washington Post star David Ignatius, for instance, gets best-seller promotion for his spy novels, is given plenty of face time on MSM “news” shows, and is invited with the billionaires and politicos to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum bash. We still don’t know what type of financial arrangement, if any, Post owners Phil and Kay Graham had with the CIA. Perhaps there were no formal, direct payments; but there was certainly a payoff in the form of contacts and access to important people, information, documents, data — the types of things that gave the Washington Post its cachet as a paper of note to rival the New York Times.

The Post’s ownership has changed hands since the days of the Grahams. It is now owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos — and has a very direct financial connection to the Company. Amazon announced in 2014 that it had secured a $600 million contract with the CIA. It also, around the same time, dropped its hosting of WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that was posting documents from politicians, government officials, and agencies, including the CIA. Many of the other newer tech giants and social-media giants that now play a major role in our news media — Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Yahoo, etc. — have likewise developed relationships (financial and otherwise) with the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, the Pentagon, and the State Department. These unholy unions signal not only a vast expansion of the Big Brother surveillance capabilities of the Deep State, but a huge extension of its propaganda capabilities as well. They signal that the ruling-class journalists of the Mockingbird club are as dangerous as ever to freedom.

Photo of Allen W. Dulles: AP Images

Versions of this article and the related stories below appear in the May 8, 2017 print edition of The New American.