After the Second World War, the Cold War began. Nations lead fights and in the choice of weapons, several techniques are used including propaganda. The goal is to make people accept concepts and change the perception of events. The enemy was communism, but not to save the people from this doctrine by bringing democracy, that's the facade. The aim was to achieve economic hegemony.

he United States, and by this we must understand the CIA, had understood that this had to go through the press organs but not only. The agency, a veritable state within a state, created in 1947 by President Truman, had unlimited funds from its inception. And, like any intelligence agency worthy of the name, it knows that one of the fundamental conditions for victory is the unfailing control of public opinion. This will be the mission of Operation Mockingbird. (1)

In 1948, the United States launched the Marshall Plan, an initiative to help devastated Europe recover from war. The CIA decided to siphon off funds to create the "Policy Coordination Office", which would become the agency's covert action arm. We are talking about 265 million dollars per year (the equivalent of 1 million and a half today).

Mockingbird, consisted of recruiting journalists and paying them to write fake articles with classified CIA documents, which promoted the strategic vision of the intelligence agency. To avoid leaks of this top secret information, telephone tapping of political and journalistic figures was carried out, with the complicity of the telephone company and with the consent of the Attorney General. The operation resulted in the identification of dozens of journalist sources, including a White House staffer, an assistant attorney general, twenty-one congressional staffers, six congressmen and twelve senators.

Operation Mockingbord also included student cultural organizations and magazines were reportedly funded as fronts for this operation. In France, Thomas Braden founded the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” in 1950 (2), led by CIA agent Michael Josselson. Established in Paris and in 35 countries, he was one of the major linchpins of the offensive on the left front. It brings together all sorts of iconoclasts and free thinkers united around the rejection of “Stalinist totalitarianism” and the defense of “Western freedom”. Europe, with its old intellectual circles that were often anti-imperialist and ideologically close to communism, thus found itself at the center of the CIA's concerns and in the front line of psychological warfare.

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