Mockingbird Redux: How the CIA just bought a newspaper with someone else's money

One media pundit described the event as an earthquake caused by so many jaws hitting the floor at once. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post for a cool $250 million. A family owned and operated newspaper for nearly eight decades was just gobbled up for a little more than 1% of Bezos's massive personal fortune.

The Washington Post was the gold standard for investigative journalism in America when it came to national security. It broke the Watergate scandal. It defied Nixon again when it published the Pentagon Papers along with the New York Times. It was an early partner with the Guardian in publishing some of Edward Snowden's revelations, although it seems to have gotten cold feet as of late. Perhaps we are seeing why.

Had Bezos been shopping for just any big marque newspaper he could have picked up the Boston Globe for a paltry $70 million just last month. He is one of the few that could easily outbid the Koch brothers for the LA Times and/or the Chicago Tribune. Big name newspapers are a steal for tech moguls. The Washington Post was what he wanted and the Washington Post is what he got.

Bezos was not known to be shopping for newspapers, but the Washington Post was shopping for a buyout. It had quietly engaged the private investment banking firm Allen and Co. to find it a buyer. Allen and Co. found one in the tech savvy Amazon founder.

Amazon recently struck a $600 million deal with the CIA to provide cloud computing services to the intelligence agency. The deal is currently on the rocks, as IBM has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to rebid the contract and take it back, citing an unfair change in the specifications postclosing. Amazon was what the CIA wanted and Amazon was what the CIA got.

Allen and Co. are no strangers to the wants and needs of the intelligence community. Former CIA director George Tennet found a home there after government service. Allen and Co. are notoriously publicity shy so it is not clear what insight Tennet may have had making the decision to court Bezos for the deal, nor is it clear if he was privy to the decision to add Amazon to the CIA's stable of cloud computing companies.

Through its investment arm In-Q-Tel the CIA already controls a stable of cloud computing vendors. These include Adaptive Computing, Cleversafe, Cloudant, Cloudera, and HyTrust. The agency felt that it needed services that only an internet retail giant could provide. Alternately, the CIA strategically invested in Amazon, and thus in Bezos, to bring some cloud technology it possesses to maturity, just as it did with the smaller cloud vendors through In-Q-Tel.

Although the current part-owner of the Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth, will stay on as publisher and CEO, there may be reason to doubt the long term durability of some of the claims she made at an employee meeting yesterday announcing the sale. Despite her commitment to continuing the Post's history of investigative journalism, Bezos may have other ideas. In 2010, after it was revealed that WikiLeaks hosted its site on Amazon, the company received pressure from Congress to censor and shutter the sight. According to Talking Points Memo, Senator Joe Lieberman said “decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material.”

In facilitating the buyout of the Washington Post by Bezos, the agency has taken one more step towards a government controlled media. What began in the cold war with paid reporters and planted stories through Operation Mockingbird has now turned to near outright ownership.

There are many ways to kill the truth. A government can jail the journalists or torture the leakers. It can kidnap, render or kill. Now, the quiet purchase seems to the key to a compliant media for post-constitutional America.