MEDIA, US POLITICSFebruary 25, 2020
Vanderbilt oligarch heir Anderson Cooper worked at CIA in college
CNN and 60 Minutes host Anderson Cooper, who red-baited Bernie Sanders over old
comments praising Fidel Castro’s literacy program, worked in CIA headquarters
for two summers.
By Ben Norton
Anderson Cooper sits at the heights of the US corporate media. A host of his
own program on CNN and a correspondent for 60 Minutes, he may be one of the
most powerful people working in journalism.
On February 24, 60 Minutes produced a report criticizing Bernie Sanders for
comments he made in the 1980s tepidly praising social programs run by the
revolutionary leftist governments in Cuba and Nicaragua.
The 60 Minutes feature was hosted by Anderson Cooper, who pressured Sanders to
denounce Fidel Castro and stressed, “There’s a lot of dissidents imprisoned in
Cuba.”
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The exchange with Sanders set off a firestorm of attacks on the Vermont
senator, with campaign rivals and a bipartisan cast of pundits slamming him for
his mild defense of Cuba’s gains in literacy. But Cooper and his red-baiting
performance remained above scrutiny.
The seemingly non-partisan media celebrity rarely talks about his upbringing,
and understandably so, because Cooper comes from a background that most average
working-class Americans could only dream of.
The media’s favorite “silver fox” hails from one of the most powerful families
in human history. He is the son of oligarch Gloria Vanderbilt, and his
great-great-great grandfather was Cornelius Vanderbilt, a prototypical American
robber baron who had in fact helped lead a bungling imperial plot to build a
canal through Nicaragua during the 1850s.
It is by no means uncommon for scions of elite families to get rewarded with
massive platforms in US corporate media. The mainstream press is chock-full of
figures like Cooper’s CNN colleague Erin Burnett, who was hired by the media
giant after occupying senior positions at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.
A blue-blooded TV anchor coming from money and privilege is one thing, but a
top news personality with a background at the Central Intelligence Agency is
quite another.
In 2006, Cooper published an article at CNN admitting that he worked at CIA
headquarters for two summers while he was a student at Yale University — an
intelligence agency-linked elite bastion where former CIA director George H. W.
Bush also studied.
Anderson Cooper CIA
The CNN host downplayed his work in the infamous spy agency, which has
orchestrated coups, armed and trained death squads, and tortured and
assassinated people all across the globe. Cooper even flippantly likened it to
a job he had as a waiter another summer.
“It was less James Bond than I hoped it would be,” Cooper would later joke to
the Washington Post. He said he ultimately found the job “bureaucratic and
mundane.”
But Cooper chose to work for the CIA not just for one summer, but two. After
one stint at the agency’s headquarters, he returned a year later.
In fact Cooper justified his work at the CIA in his 2006 article writing, “I
was a political science major and was interested in serving my country.” This
makes it clear that the CNN host believes good, patriotic Americans can help
their compatriots by joining the intelligence apparatus.
This mindset Cooper took into the CIA cannot be divorced from the mentality he
brought into his interview with Sanders, where he grilled the left-wing
politician for his insufficient opposition to progressive governments in Latin
America.
But Cooper’s perspective is emblematic of corporate media culture, and he is
hardly the only prominent journalist with CIA ties.
In 2014, a prominent American national security reporter, Ken Dilanian, was
exposed for having collaborated extensively with the CIA. At the Associated
Press and Los Angeles Times, Dilanian shared stories with spy officials before
publication, and even plotted with CIA officers to manipulate public opinion on
the drone assassination program.
Dilanian follows in a long line of spy agency collaborators. As the Cold War
kicked off in the 1950s, the CIA initiated an operation called Project
Mockingbird, with the intent of surveilling and ultimately recruiting
journalists, using corporate media outlets as weapons to advance the US
government’s foreign-policy agenda and bolster Washington’s crusade against
communism.
The Grayzone has previously referred to an investigation by renowned journalist
Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter who exposed the Watergate
scandal.
In 1977, Bernstein published a Rolling Stone cover story titled “The CIA and
the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the
Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.”
Bernstein obtained CIA files that showed that more than 400 American
journalists in the previous 25 years had “secretly carried out assignments for
the Central Intelligence Agency.”
How this program continues today is not known. But what is clear is that
Anderson Cooper and other media professionals have enjoyed special
relationships with the CIA. And in their work, they have treated those who
challenge the agency’s imperatives with suspicion, and its targets around the
world with reflexive contempt.
Ben Norton
Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor
of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he
co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets
at @BenjaminNorton.
bennorton.com
