Operation Mockingbird: Inside the CIA's Media Infiltration.

The phrase "Operation Mockingbird" has become shorthand for something larger than any single operation. The narrow historical question — whether "Mockingbird" was the formal code name for one specific CIA media program, or a retroactive label applied to several — is less important than the underlying documentary record. That record is substantial, declassified, and covers three decades. It describes a sustained institutional effort by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to cultivate working relationships with American and foreign journalists, to place and kill stories, to provide cover identities, and to shape the domestic media environment in a period when such activity was formally prohibited by the Agency's founding charter.

Where it started

The architecture begins with Frank Gardner Wisner and the Office of Policy Coordination. Wisner, a Wall Street lawyer who had served with the OSS in Istanbul and Bucharest during World War II, was appointed in September 1948 to head the newly created OPC — a covert-action unit housed administratively within the State Department but operationally reporting to the Director of Central Intelligence. The OPC was created by National Security Council Directive NSC 10/2 on June 18, 1948, which authorized "covert operations" including "propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world." The OPC was merged into the CIA's Directorate of Plans in 1952, but its personnel and doctrine carried forward.

Within this structure, Wisner reportedly described the network of friendly relationships with journalists and publishers as "the Mighty Wurlitzer" — a reference to the famous theater organ able to produce any sound the operator desired. The image captured Wisner's conception: a system in which a single well-placed instruction could produce coordinated coverage across newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks, wire services, and book publishers on three continents. The OPC's mandate, reflected in NSC 10/2's language, explicitly included propaganda; the interpretive question was only where the line between foreign propaganda and the domestic US media environment would be drawn. Wisner's operational choice was to draw it very liberally.

Allen Welsh Dulles — the Sullivan & Cromwell partner, former OSS Bern station chief, and brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles — became Director of Central Intelligence on February 26, 1953, and served in that role until November 29, 1961, the longest tenure in the Agency's history. Under Dulles, the CIA's relationships with American newspaper publishers, magazine editors, and broadcast executives moved from operational-level to executive-level. Dulles socialized within the same Washington and New York circles as Philip L. Graham (publisher of the Washington Post, 1946–1963), Henry R. Luce (founder and editor-in-chief of Time-Life), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (publisher of the New York Times, 1935–1961) and his son-in-law C.L. Sulzberger (foreign-affairs columnist), William S. Paley (chairman of CBS), and Barry Bingham Sr. (publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal). The relationships, per the Church Committee record, were in most cases not formal contractor arrangements but ongoing cooperative understandings.

Cord Meyer Jr. — a former United World Federalist and Yale-educated Marine veteran whose wife Mary Pinchot Meyer was later connected socially to John F. Kennedy — joined the CIA in 1951 and became the principal operator of the International Organizations Division, the unit that ran much of the press, publishing, student, and labor cooperation of the period. Meyer's biographer Burton Hersh described him as "the case officer for American intellectual life" through much of the 1950s and 1960s. Richard Helms, who rose through the Directorate of Plans to become CIA Director in 1966, was the senior operational figure continuous across much of the relevant period.

What the program actually did

The program's operational types, as documented in the Church Committee record and expanded in Bernstein's 1977 Rolling Stone piece, fell into several categories. Cover relationships — a journalist whose cover was provided by a real news organization but whose primary employment was the Agency. Stringer arrangements — occasional work on specific projects, sometimes paid, sometimes traded for access. Asset relationships — journalists who provided intelligence back to the Agency based on their reporting, travel, and contacts. Placement relationships — editors or publishers who could be relied on to print material provided by the Agency, kill material the Agency wished killed, or shape coverage through editorial direction. Debriefing — journalists returning from overseas who routinely met with Agency officers to share observations. Book placement — through the Frederick A. Praeger publishing house and others, CIA-commissioned or CIA-subsidized titles were published under conventional commercial imprints with varying degrees of disclosure.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in Berlin in June 1950, was the most institutionally visible product of this machinery. Funded in substantial part by CIA front foundations, the CCF operated in 35 countries, published influential magazines including Encounter (London), Preuves (Paris), Tempo Presente (Rome), Der Monat (Berlin), and Quadrant (Australia), and sponsored conferences, exhibitions, and musical events. When Ramparts magazine exposed the funding in April 1967, the CCF was restructured as the International Association for Cultural Freedom with funding transitioning to the Ford Foundation. The episode is one of the relatively few publicly documented cases in which a specific CIA-funded media-and-culture operation was exposed in the period before the Church Committee.

The Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty networks, launched in 1949 and 1951 respectively, were the largest public-facing media products of the architecture. Their publicly stated purpose was broadcasting to audiences behind the Iron Curtain. Their funding through the "National Committee for a Free Europe" and the "American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism" was publicly portrayed as private donations; their actual principal funder was the CIA, a fact disclosed in 1971 by Senator Clifford Case's investigation and confirmed in subsequent documents.

The Praeger publishing arrangement, disclosed by Frederick A. Praeger himself in Congressional testimony, produced between 15 and 20 books on Soviet affairs, Cold War politics, and East European history under CIA funding during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The books carried Praeger's commercial imprint; the Agency's role in commissioning and subsidizing was not disclosed to readers. Encounter magazine — edited in its London offices by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, among others — was the most influential single English-language product of the machinery. Spender resigned when the funding was disclosed; Kristol went on to found the American neoconservative movement.

The variations

Within the umbrella frame, the specific operations and sub-programs that researchers have documented include several distinct strands. Project Mockingbird, according to Church Committee documents, appears to have been a specific early-1960s wiretapping operation targeting two journalists suspected of receiving classified leaks — a narrower and more defensible surveillance program than the broader media-cultivation architecture. The separation of "Project Mockingbird" (the narrow, documented surveillance) from "Operation Mockingbird" (the broader, contested media-cultivation architecture) is one of the interpretive tangles in the public record. Researchers argue that the CIA's own use of overlapping and vague code naming — typical of intelligence tradecraft — was itself part of what made the larger architecture difficult to document publicly.

The QKOPERA and ZRRIFLE cryptonyms appear in the declassified record as related or adjacent operations, with the former apparently related to Latin American media operations and the latter — a personnel / access program — associated with former CIA director William Colby's 1975 testimony on assassination programs. Operation ZRMEDIA, referenced by researchers including David Talbot, appears to have been a 1960s umbrella cryptonym for media-asset operations, though its scope and organization in the declassified record remain unclear.

The Mighty Wurlitzer framing — Wisner's own image — is used by some researchers to describe the system functionally rather than as a named program. In this framing, the question is not "Did Operation Mockingbird exist as a single program?" but "Did a coordinated CIA media-relationship apparatus exist?" The second question is answered conclusively in the affirmative by the Church Committee, the Family Jewels, Bernstein, Crewdson, and the subsequent declassification record. The first question is a terminological dispute.

Carl Bernstein's 1977 Rolling Stone article

The single most detailed public accounting of the program appeared in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977. "The CIA and the Media," by Carl Bernstein — the Washington Post reporter who with Bob Woodward had broken the Watergate story five years earlier — ran to 25,000 words and took Bernstein approximately a year to report. His methodology, as described in the piece, was to obtain CIA records and Church Committee records, then systematically name specific journalists and news organizations. The article's lede claim: "Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services — from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad."

Bernstein named individual journalists. Joseph Alsop (syndicated columnist, one of the most influential US political commentators of the 1950s and 1960s), his brother Stewart Alsop, C.L. Sulzberger (foreign-affairs columnist, New York Times), Joseph Harsch (Christian Science Monitor), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), Ben Bradlee's Newsweek predecessors, and many others. He named the institutional relationships: The New York Times (where he documented that publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA and that roughly 10 Times journalists provided "routine" cooperation), CBS (under William Paley, whom Bernstein described as "the most valuable media asset the Agency had"), Time-Life (under Henry Luce), ABC, NBC, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and the Washington Star.

The piece was followed in December 1977 by a three-part series in the New York Times by John M. Crewdson — the Times' own reporting on the CIA-media relationship, appearing December 25–27, 1977. The two articles together are the fullest public reporting of the period. Bernstein's article was reportedly offered first to the Washington Post, which declined to publish it; the reason given was Bernstein's relationship to Watergate-era reporting, though researchers note the Post was itself a named institution in the reporting.

The Church Committee and the Family Jewels

The official documentary anchor for the program is the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho). The committee was established in January 1975 in response to mounting press disclosures — most prominently Seymour Hersh's December 22, 1974 New York Times front-page story "Huge CIA Operation Reported in US Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years" — and operated through 1976. Its final report, released in April 1976, ran to six books and several thousand pages.

Book I of the Church Committee report (Foreign and Military Intelligence) contained the most substantial public documentation of CIA-media relationships. The committee found approximately 50 formal employment or contract relationships with US journalists, "several hundred" additional relationships internationally, and a long history of operational use of journalist cover. The committee did not publicly disclose individual journalist names; the staff files that would have done so were sealed and remain sealed to this day. The committee's final recommendation was that the CIA terminate paid relationships with full-time US journalists. CIA Director George H.W. Bush announced a corresponding policy in February 1976, though the scope of the policy was narrow: it applied only to full-time US journalists, not to stringers, part-time contributors, foreign nationals, or voluntary cooperators.

The Family Jewels — a 702-page internal CIA compilation of 25 years of documented Agency abuses, commissioned by Director James Schlesinger in May 1973 — was never publicly released during its immediately-relevant period. It was disclosed in heavily redacted form under FOIA in June 2007. The document's media sections describe the Office of Security's files on journalists including Jack Anderson and the Washington Post staff, the Agency's wiretapping of specific reporters during 1963 under Project Mockingbird, and the ongoing relationships the Church Committee would later investigate in more detail.

Udo Ulfkotte and the European continuation

The single most consequential modern documentation of continuing state-press relationships in the Western media environment is the work of Udo Ulfkotte, a German journalist who served as an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for 17 years before his resignation in 2003. In 2014, Ulfkotte published Gekaufte Journalisten (translated as Bought Journalists) — a detailed first-person account of how, during his FAZ years, he was cultivated by US and German intelligence services, invited to CIA and BND functions, provided with briefings that shaped his reporting, and solicited to place specific stories with specific framings. Ulfkotte named names — German journalists, specific story placements, specific instances of intelligence-service-shaped coverage of Middle Eastern and Russian topics.

The book became a German bestseller. An English-language edition under the title Presstitutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA: A Confession from the Profession was prepared for US distribution; its distribution was significantly restricted, with Amazon and other major retailers removing listings at various points. The book's English distribution history became, for researchers, a self-illustrating example of the phenomenon it was describing. Ulfkotte died on January 13, 2017 at age 56; the official cause was heart attack, with no autopsy performed. His death occurred during a period in which he had publicly stated he expected retaliation.

Ulfkotte's work, together with the 2013 Edward Snowden disclosures regarding NSA surveillance of journalists and the 2022–2023 Twitter Files releases documenting FBI and CIA relationships with platform content-moderation teams, is cited by researchers as the principal post-Church-Committee evidence base for the argument that the institutional pattern has continued in evolved forms. The platforms have replaced the newspapers as the principal channel; the structural relationship — state-intelligence agencies shaping the information environment presented to domestic audiences — is argued to be substantially unchanged.

The connections people make

Around the documented Mockingbird record, researchers draw a broader set of structural connections. These are the claims the independent-research community brings into relation with the core case.

The Mary Pinchot Meyer case. Cord Meyer's estranged wife Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered in Washington DC on October 12, 1964. The case was never solved; a suspect was acquitted at trial. Meyer was known to have been in a relationship with President John F. Kennedy in the last two years of his life, and — per Peter Janney's 2012 book Mary's Mosaic — to have kept a personal diary in which she recorded details of the affair and her contemporaneous conversations with Kennedy about topics including Vietnam and the CIA. The diary was reportedly taken from her home shortly after her death by longtime CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, an old family friend. The diary has never been recovered. Meyer's sister Tony Bradlee was married to Ben Bradlee, later executive editor of the Washington Post. The case's connection to the Mockingbird architecture is the intersection of CIA media-operations leadership with a political-assassination-adjacent unsolved murder in the period immediately following the Kennedy assassination.

The Dulles / JFK connection. Allen Dulles was dismissed as CIA Director by President Kennedy following the April 1961 Bay of Pigs failure. Dulles was subsequently appointed by President Johnson to the Warren Commission, the body investigating Kennedy's November 22, 1963 assassination. David Talbot's 2015 book The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government presents the most comprehensive case that Dulles operated the Warren Commission's CIA-relevant witness selection to limit exposure of Agency-adjacent material. The Mockingbird architecture's operational significance in this period included the shaping of press coverage of the Warren Commission findings and of public-facing reporting on the Oswald case — a domain in which the Agency's press relationships, by the Church Committee's findings, were substantial.

Operation Paperclip and the scientific-media network. The postwar US intelligence-community cultivation of press relationships ran in parallel with Operation Paperclip, the program that relocated approximately 1,600 German scientists — many with Nazi affiliations — to US research institutions. Paperclip scientists' public-facing narrative in the US press was managed, per declassified records, with direct Agency attention; the postwar presentation of figures like Wernher von Braun in Life magazine and other outlets was shaped in part by the same architecture under discussion here. The broader point: press-cultivation and scientific-personnel programs operated within a single institutional architecture, not as separate lines.

MK-ULTRA and the behavioral-science press. The CIA's MK-ULTRA program, run through the same Directorate of Plans throughout much of its 1953–1973 operational period, produced its own press-shaping requirements. When the program's existence was confirmed in 1975, the sequence by which press coverage developed — and the ways in which certain more sensitive aspects of the program were not covered — has itself been studied as an artifact of the underlying media architecture. The Frank Olson case, the 1953 death of an Army biological-weapons scientist who had been given LSD as part of an MK-ULTRA experiment, is a particular focus: the press coverage of Olson's death as a suicide was consistent with the program's institutional preference. Olson's son Eric Olson has produced decades of independent research arguing his father was murdered to prevent disclosure.

The modern platforms. The Twitter Files releases of 2022–2023 — Matt Taibbi's initial thread of December 2, 2022, followed by Michael Shellenberger's and Bari Weiss's subsequent batches — documented extensive relationships between the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), the Global Engagement Center at State, and content-moderation teams at Twitter and (per the parallel Facebook disclosures) other major platforms. Researchers argue the modern architecture has largely replaced newspapers and broadcast networks with platforms as the principal channel, and that the underlying state-agency-to-media-operator relationship is structurally similar to what the Church Committee documented. The 2024 Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court ruling addressed standing questions in one major legal challenge to this pattern but did not reach the structural merits; the 2025 Trump administration's related executive orders have produced significant policy shifts but not yet final judicial adjudication.

Key voices

• Carl Bernstein — Washington Post reporter (Watergate); author of the October 20, 1977 Rolling Stone piece "The CIA and the Media," the single most detailed public accounting of the program.
• Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho, 1924–1984) — chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, 1975–76; the committee's final report remains the principal declassified-government source for the program.
• Udo Ulfkotte (1960–2017) — former Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor; author of Bought Journalists (2014) documenting ongoing state-intelligence cultivation of European journalism.
• Matt Taibbi — former Rolling Stone political correspondent; lead reporter on the 2022–2023 Twitter Files; author of Hate Inc. (2019) on the broader modern media machine.
• Michael Shellenberger — Public substack co-founder; Twitter Files co-reporter; congressional testimony on the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
• Glenn Greenwald — journalist; reported the 2013 Edward Snowden NSA disclosures including the surveillance of journalists; author of No Place to Hide (2014).
• James Bamford — national-security journalist; author of The Puzzle Palace (1982), Body of Secrets (2001), The Shadow Factory (2008) — the most-cited public record of US signals-intelligence and press-relationship history.
• John M. Crewdson — New York Times reporter; author of the December 25–27, 1977 three-part Times series on the CIA-media relationship.
• David Talbot — Salon founder; author of The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government (2015), the most comprehensive biography of Dulles.
• Seymour Hersh — independent investigative journalist; his December 22, 1974 New York Times front-page reporting on CIA domestic operations was the precipitating event for the Church Committee.

For connected historical material, see our coverage of MK-ULTRA (the parallel behavioral-science program of the same institutional period), Operation Paperclip (the postwar personnel architecture that produced much of the scientific press-cultivation demand), and the JFK assassination (the central press-shaped event of the Mockingbird period).

The official position

The US Central Intelligence Agency's formally published position is that, following the Church Committee findings and Director Bush's February 1976 policy statement, the Agency does not maintain paid relationships with full-time US journalists. The Agency has not publicly detailed the scope of relationships with stringers, part-time contributors, foreign nationals, or voluntary cooperators — categories not covered by the 1976 policy. The 1995 CIA memo disclosed under FOIA acknowledged continuing "liaison relationships" with journalists domestically and internationally. No formal modern accounting corresponding to the Church Committee's 1976 findings has been publicly produced by the Agency. The Department of Justice's 2022–2024 position in the Missouri v. Biden / Murthy v. Missouri platform-moderation litigation has been that government-platform consultation on content-moderation is lawful and does not violate the First Amendment; the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling found plaintiffs lacked standing and did not reach the merits. The formal position, then, is that the 1976 termination ended the program; the documentary and institutional record argues the underlying pattern has continued in evolved forms.

Where it is now

As of April 2026, the Operation Mockingbird record is substantially declassified, publicly available, and widely discussed, while the question of the program's modern continuation is actively contested. The pre-2025 position of most mainstream US media institutions was that Mockingbird was a Cold-War-era program terminated in 1976 and that contemporary press independence from intelligence-community influence was substantial. The 2022–2023 Twitter Files releases, the 2024 Murthy v. Missouri litigation, and the 2025 congressional hearings on FBI-platform content-moderation relationships have produced a substantial institutional repositioning: the question of state-agency influence on domestic media is now a mainstream political topic, rather than a subject confined to independent research. The 2025 Trump administration's executive orders restricting specific state-agency-to-platform content-moderation coordination have produced documented shifts in FBI, CISA, and State Department Global Engagement Center practices.

The underlying question — whether a coordinated state-intelligence architecture continues to shape the domestic US information environment in ways structurally similar to the Church-Committee-era findings — is the question the next phase of US media-policy adjudication will have to address. The 1977 Bernstein piece remains the template; the 2022–2023 Twitter Files are the modern equivalent evidence base. The gap between the two is a gap of channels, not of structures.

Go deeper

Frequently asked questions

What is Operation Mockingbird?

A post-WWII CIA program that cultivated relationships with American and foreign journalists, editors, and publishers for intelligence collection, propaganda placement, and influence operations. Origins traced to Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination (1948) with Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Cord Meyer as principal architects. Documented in Carl Bernstein's October 1977 Rolling Stone piece "The CIA and the Media" (400+ journalists) and the Church Committee hearings of 1975–76.

Who ran Operation Mockingbird?

Principal architects in the declassified record: Frank Wisner (Office of Policy Coordination, 1948–58), Allen W. Dulles (CIA Director, 1953–61), Richard Helms (Deputy Director for Plans, later CIA Director), and Cord Meyer Jr. (International Organizations Division). Philip L. Graham (Washington Post publisher, 1946–63) is documented as a close collaborator. Wisner's description of the network as "the Mighty Wurlitzer" became the informal name.

What did Carl Bernstein's 1977 article reveal?

"The CIA and the Media," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, reported more than 400 American journalists had "secretly carried out assignments" for the CIA over the preceding 25 years. Named journalists included Joseph and Stewart Alsop, C.L. Sulzberger (NYT), Henry Luce (Time-Life), William Paley (CBS), Joseph Harsch (Christian Science Monitor), among others. It is the single most detailed public accounting of the program.

What did the Church Committee find about CIA and media?

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, 1975–76) documented approximately 50 formal CIA relationships with US journalists and "several hundred" additional international relationships. Final report released April 1976. Individual journalist names were not publicly disclosed. CIA Director George H.W. Bush announced termination of paid relationships with full-time US journalists in February 1976 — a narrow policy not covering stringers, part-timers, or foreign nationals.

Was Operation Mockingbird real?

The specific name "Operation Mockingbird" as a single formally titled program is contested in the declassified record. The underlying program of CIA relationships with journalists is documented in the Church Committee report, the 1973 Family Jewels compilation (released 2007), Bernstein's 1977 reporting, declassified CIA memoranda, and the Crewdson NYT series. Whether "Mockingbird" was the umbrella code name or a sub-operation is unclear; the existence of the underlying relationships is conclusively documented.

Who was Philip Graham?

Publisher of the Washington Post from 1946 to 1963. Son-in-law of Post owner Eugene Meyer, husband of Katharine Graham. WWII military intelligence veteran. Maintained close working relationships with Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner per multiple sources including Deborah Davis's 1979 biography Katharine the Great (the book was subject to lawsuit and withdrawal before republication). Named in the Church Committee record as a senior press-establishment collaborator. Died August 3, 1963 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Who is Udo Ulfkotte?

A German journalist who served 17 years as an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2014 published Gekaufte Journalisten ("Bought Journalists") documenting systematic CIA and BND cultivation of European journalists, including his own. The book became a German bestseller. The English edition (Presstitutes Embedded in the Pay of the CIA) had significantly restricted US distribution. Ulfkotte died January 13, 2017 at age 56.

What is the connection between Operation Mockingbird and the Twitter Files?

The 2022–2023 Twitter Files, released by Elon Musk and reported by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and Lee Fang, documented extensive ongoing relationships between US intelligence (FBI, CIA, State Global Engagement Center) and content-moderation teams at Twitter and other platforms. Researchers argue this documents a modern evolution of the same state-intelligence-to-media-channel relationship — platforms replacing newspapers as the channel.

Did Operation Mockingbird ever end?

CIA Director George H.W. Bush announced formal termination of paid relationships with full-time US journalists in February 1976. The policy was narrow — not covering stringers, part-time cooperators, or foreign nationals. A 1995 CIA memo disclosed under FOIA acknowledged continuing "liaison relationships" with journalists. Ulfkotte's 2014 documentation, the 2013 Snowden disclosures, and the 2022–23 Twitter Files are principal post-Church-era evidence for the argument that the underlying pattern continued in evolved forms.

What are the 'Family Jewels' documents?

A 702-page internal CIA compilation of documented Agency abuses, commissioned by Director James Schlesinger in May 1973, covering approximately 25 years of activities including domestic surveillance, assassination planning, drug experimentation, and media operations. Released in heavily redacted form in June 2007. One of the primary source documents for the Operation Mockingbird / CIA-media relationship record.