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On December 19, 2005, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the appointment of Ambassador Frank G. Wisner as the Special Representative of the US Secretary of State to the Kosovo Status Talks.
Who is Frank G. Wisner, Jr.?
If his name sounds familiar that is because he is the son of Frank Gardiner Wisner, Sr., the CIA agent most responsible for the recruitment of Nazis by the US government after World War II. A former member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II precursor to the CIA, Frank G. Wisner, Sr., was one of the most infamous CIA agents, the man behind Operation Bloodstone, the US government program of recruiting Nazis and SS members.
Wisner also organized Operation Mockingbird, the successful CIA program to co-opt the US media in the CIA’s propaganda and information war against the Soviet Union and “global Communism”. Wisner was able to co-opt to the CIA the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and other US national publications, as well as prominent US journalists. Wisner recruited Philip Graham, who owned the Washington Post with his wife Katherine Graham, to run the operation. According to biographer Deborah Davis, in the biography Katharine the Great: “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.” Ben Bradlee, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, and James Reston, were among the prominent journalists who were part of Operation Mockingbird. The CIA also controlled foreign media outlets, such as the Rome Daily American, the Manila Times, and the Bangkok Post. In addition, the CIA had its own propaganda dissemination and infowar media outlets, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, RFE/RL. This was a blatant violation of the First Amendment Constitutional right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This was an example of government control of the media in the US. Wisner’s counter-intelligence and subversion operations undermined and subverted democracy and constitutional freedoms in the US.