Project MOCKINGBIRD (1963 journalist wiretaps)

For three months in the spring of 1963, the CIA's Office of Security tapped the home telephones of two Washington journalists. Project MOCKINGBIRD ran from March 12 to June 15, 1963. The agency suspected the reporters of receiving classified information from sources inside the government and Congress. The wiretaps were intended to identify the leakers.

The reporters were Robert Allen and Paul Scott, who at the time wrote the syndicated column "The Allen-Scott Report." Their column had carried a series of stories that touched on sensitive intelligence matters, including details about U.S. nuclear policy and ongoing diplomatic talks. Inside the agency, the leaks were treated as a serious security problem.

Howard Osborn, the CIA's Director of Security, ordered the operation. The taps captured calls placed to or from the journalists' homes. According to the Office of Security's own 1973 inventory of "potentially embarrassing" agency activities, the names of the sources who emerged on the tapes included sitting members of Congress and senior officials in several federal departments.

The 1947 National Security Act, which created the CIA, prohibits the agency from conducting law-enforcement or internal security functions inside the United States. Wiretapping American journalists in their homes fits squarely inside that prohibition. The Church Committee, in its 1975 report on intelligence agencies and the rights of Americans, treated MOCKINGBIRD as one of the clearer examples of the agency operating outside its statutory charter.

The project is sometimes confused with a broader, longer-running effort, also called Mockingbird in popular accounts, that has been alleged to involve CIA influence over the American press going back to the 1950s. The 1973 Family Jewels memorandum makes no such claim. It documents only the three months of wiretaps in 1963.