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The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
By JAMES BAMFORD
11/17/05 "Rolling
Stone" -- -- The road to war in Iraq led through
many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the
strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.
On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the
crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring
and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The
officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an
accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen.
Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on
the inside of his upper arm.
Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri,
a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan
and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as
thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper,
al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a
series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil
engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of
biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms,
according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden
in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital,
the largest medical facility in Baghdad.
It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush
administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would
offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose
Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to
Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that
Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the
sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the
intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the
entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.
The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another
political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But
just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to
good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine
operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set
up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of
selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of
the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the
Washington establishment named
John Rendon.
Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists.
Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the
Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target
Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful
people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field
known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and,
by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His
firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts
since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the
conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under
this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a
group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name --
the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and
"senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against
Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the
Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm
of J. Walter Thompson.
"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley,
an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily.
"It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."
Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the
defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by
Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon
helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought
to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the
group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors
on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was
certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of
propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis
Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon
employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure
the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector
charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They
picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history
of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive
on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.
For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an
Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian
Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be
interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna
knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A
former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on
Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with
Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near
Buckingham Palace.
"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam
set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview
broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and
said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on
behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the
Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had
hired them to do this work."
The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy:
Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who
was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush
administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam
propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert
slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a
liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful
supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls
to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted
intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of
al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed
"government experts" called his information "reliable and
significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.
Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001,
was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide.
AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES,
declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a
civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on
renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and
nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the
Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If
verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to
officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that
Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his
unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite
his pledges to do so."
For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been
pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's
story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The
story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on
the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by
the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks
around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and
fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war
with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert
propaganda campaign targeting the media.
By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from
disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global
communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony
pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach
American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report
suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological
operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a
"secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops
funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American
policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the
Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies."
The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away
from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons
systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can
be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control
access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result,
information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."
It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the
U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-security
strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I am a
politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or
corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior
and a perception manager." To explain his philosophy, Rendon
paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the
presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: "This is
probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he
wrote, 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"
John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours
of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting
information -- overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and
domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many
of them available only to those with the highest security clearance.
According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the
Rendon Group is authorized "to research and analyze information
classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS" -- an extraordinarily
high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense
contractors. "SCI" stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information,
data classified higher than Top Secret. "SI" is Special
Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National
Security Agency. "TK" refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for
imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. "G" stands
for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive
sources) and "HCS" means Humint Control System (information from a
very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate
that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all
three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging
satellites and human spies.
Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington's exclusive
Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon is the home of
former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; just around the corner
lives current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At fifty-six,
Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray
hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad
in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a
sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky
frame. By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group's headquarters
near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee for the
morning's work: According to federal records, Rendon charges the CIA
and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his services.
Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in
Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for
highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have
begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine
operations around the world; watch officers at the agency's
twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of
intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the
field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited
spies. According to one senior administration official involved in
intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now
performed by private contractors -- people completely unaccountable
to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately
that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently
employs -- or how much unchecked power they enjoy.
Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a
battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in nearly every
American shooting conflict in the past two decades. In the first
interview he has granted in decades, Rendon offered a peek through
the keyhole of this seldom-seen world of corporate spooks -- a
rarefied but growing profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a
bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon
was guarded about the details of his clandestine work -- but he
boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as
a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one countries," he said.
"Going all the way back to Panama, we've been involved in every war,
with the exception of Somalia."
It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered politics as an
opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew
up in New Jersey and stumped for McGovern before graduating from
Northeastern University. "I was the youngest state coordinator," he
recalls. "I had Maine. They told me that I understood politics --
which was a stretch, being so young." Rendon, who went on to serve
as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly
mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media
manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980, as the manager
of Jimmy Carter's troops at the national convention in New York, he
was sitting alone in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden when a
reporter for ABC News approached him. "They actually did a little
piece about the man behind the curtain," Rendon says. "A Wizard of
Oz thing." It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his
life.
After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan
revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into business
with his younger brother Rick. "Everybody started consulting," he
recalls. "We started consulting." They helped elect John Kerry to
the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-CIO to mobilize the union
vote for Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. Among the items
Rendon produced was a training manual for union organizers to
operate as political activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the
operation quiet, Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of
the blue plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would
soon pervade all of his consulting deals.
To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair. Rendon's
wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief financial officer and
"senior communications strategist." Rendon's brother Rick serves as
senior partner and runs the company's Boston office, producing
public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute
and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people
in the Middle East in contact with American kids through
video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the company's
business is decidedly less liberal and peace oriented. Rendon's
first experience in the intelligence world, in fact, came courtesy
of the Republicans. "Panama," he says, "brought us into the
national-security environment."
In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W. Bush
signed a highly secret "finding" authorizing the CIA to funnel $10
million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow Gen. Manuel
Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA
turned to the Rendon Group. Rendon's job was to work behind the
scenes, using a variety of campaign and psychological techniques to
put the CIA's choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential
palace. Cash from the agency, laundered through various bank
accounts and front organizations, would end up in Endara's hands,
who would then pay Rendon.
A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with little
political experience, Endara was running against Noriega's
handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon's help, Endara beat
Duque decisively at the polls -- but Noriega simply named himself
"Maximum Leader" and declared the election null and void. The Bush
administration then decided to remove Noriega by force -- and
Rendon's job shifted from generating local support for a national
election to building international support for regime change. Within
days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.
At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of Noriega's
Dignity Battalion -- nicknamed "Dig Bats" and called "Doberman
thugs" by Bush -- attacked the crowd with wooden planks, metal pipes
and guns. Gang members grabbed the bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one
of Endara's vice-presidential candidates, pushed him against a car,
shoved a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras
snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with a
spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs, turning
his white guayabera bright red with blood -- his own, and that of
his dead bodyguard.
Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every newsroom in
the world. The next week an image of the violence made the cover of
Time magazine with the caption POLITICS PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA
BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S. TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further
boost international support for Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a
tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the
Italian prime minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when
Bush decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees
were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.
"I arrived fifteen minutes before it started," Rendon recalls. "My
first impression is having the pilot in the plane turn around and
say, 'Excuse me, sir, but if you look off to the left you'll see the
attack aircraft circling before they land.' Then I remember this
major saying, 'Excuse me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense
capability of Panama is at the moment?' I leaned into the cockpit
and said, 'Look, major, I hope by now that's no longer an issue.'"
Moments later, Rendon's plane landed at Howard Air Force Base in
Panama. "I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where the
president was," he says. "I was choppered over -- and we took some
rounds on the way." There, on a U.S. military base surrounded by
24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat Talon AC-130 gunships,
Rendon's client, Endara, was at last sworn in as president of
Panama.
Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began
seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a
vacation -- a long train ride across Scotland -- when he received an
urgent call. "Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait,"
he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi
invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class
cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an
outline of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad.
"I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face, and I
based it on our experience in Panama and the experience of the Free
French operation in World War II," Rendon says. "This was something
that they needed to see and hear, and that was my whole intent. Go
over, tell the Kuwaitis, 'Here's what you've got -- here's some
observations, here's some recommendations, live long and prosper.'"
Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the
former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his
Democratic Party days. "He put me in touch with the Saudis, the
Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and
had a meeting with the Kuwaitis," Rendon recalls. "And by the time I
landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, 'Can
you come back? We want you to do what's in the memo.'"
What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to
the American government -- and the American public. Rendon proposed
a massive "perception management" campaign designed to convince the
world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. Working through
an organization called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti
government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his
assistance.
To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once
the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the
American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti
government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy
sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were
actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying
in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked.
Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the
story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed
valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by
Rendon.
Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and
developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi
Arabia. "It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait
understood that the rest of the world was doing something," he says.
Each night, Rendon's troops in London produced a script and sent it
via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the "news" beamed into Kuwait
reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.
When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After
Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make
the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France
after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later
remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage
for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held
American -- and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition
countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer.
That was one of my jobs then."
Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals only in
"timely, truthful and accurate information." His job, he says, is to
counter false perceptions that the news media perpetuate because
they consider it "more important to be first than to be right." In
modern warfare, he believes, the outcome depends largely on the
public's perception of the war -- whether it is winnable, whether it
is worth the cost. "We are being haunted and stalked by the
difference between perception and reality," he says. "Because the
lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality
is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war."
By the time the Gulf War came to a close in 1991, the Rendon Group
was firmly established as Washington's leading salesman for regime
change. But Rendon's new assignment went beyond simply manipulating
the media. After the war ended, the Top Secret order signed by
President Bush to oust Hussein included a rare "lethal finding" --
meaning deadly action could be taken if necessary. Under contract to
the CIA, Rendon was charged with helping to create a dissident force
with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the entire Iraqi
government. It is an undertaking that Rendon still considers too
classified to discuss. "That's where we're wandering into places I'm
not going to talk about," he says. "If you take an oath, it should
mean something."
Thomas Twetten, the CIA's former deputy of operations, credits
Rendon with virtually creating the INC. "The INC was clueless," he
once observed. "They needed a lot of help and didn't know where to
start. That is why Rendon was brought in." Acting as the group's
senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled
together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a
conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization,
which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama, his
assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with
someone chosen by the CIA. "The reason they got the contract was
because of what they had done in Panama -- so they were known,"
recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA's station in
Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and
the agency's successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty,
avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington's neoconservatives.
Chalabi was a curious choice to lead a rebellion. In 1992, he was
convicted in Jordan of making false statements and embezzling $230
million from his own bank, for which he was sentenced in absentia to
twenty-two years of hard labor. But the only credential that
mattered was his politics. "From day one," Rendon says, "Chalabi was
very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam."
Bruner, who dealt with Chalabi and Rendon in London in 1991, puts it
even more bluntly. "Chalabi's primary focus," he said later, "was to
drag us into a war."
The key element of Rendon's INC operation was a worldwide media
blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained
regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each
month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the
INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely,
receiving a "management fee" of ten percent above what it spent on
the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100
million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf
War.
Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the
group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost
confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi
and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and
the money continued to flow. "The Rendon Group is not in great odor
in Langley these days," notes Bruner. "Their contracts are much more
with the Defense Department."
Rendon's influence rose considerably in Washington after the
terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke, Osama bin
Laden altered the world's perception of reality -- and in an age of
nonstop information, whoever controls perception wins. What Bush
needed to fight the War on Terror was a skilled information warrior
-- and Rendon was widely acknowledged as the best. "The events of 11
September 2001 changed everything, not least of which was the
administration's outlook concerning strategic influence," notes one
Army report. "Faced with direct evidence that many people around the
world actively hated the United States, Bush began taking action to
more effectively explain U.S. policy overseas. Initially the White
House and DoD turned to the Rendon Group."
Three weeks after the September 11th attacks, according to documents
obtained from defense sources, the Pentagon awarded a large contract
to the Rendon Group. Around the same time, Pentagon officials also
set up a highly secret organization called the Office of Strategic
Influence. Part of the OSI's mission was to conduct covert
disinformation and deception operations -- planting false news items
in the media and hiding their origins. "It's sometimes valuable from
a military standpoint to be able to engage in deception with respect
to future anticipated plans," Vice President Dick Cheney said in
explaining the operation. Even the military's top brass found the
clandestine unit unnerving. "When I get their briefings, it's
scary," a senior official said at the time.
In February 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had
hired Rendon "to help the new office," a charge Rendon denies. "We
had nothing to do with that," he says. "We were not in their
reporting chain. We were reporting directly to the J-3" -- the head
of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Following the leak,
Rumsfeld was forced to shut down the organization. But much of the
office's operations were apparently shifted to another unit, deeper
in the Pentagon's bureaucracy, called the Information Operations
Task Force, and Rendon was closely connected to this group. "Greg
Newbold was the J-3 at the time, and we reported to him through the
IOTF," Rendon says.
According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major
role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an
"Information War Room" to monitor worldwide news reports at
lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda.
A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon's "proprietary
state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called 'Livewire,'
which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before
they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and
twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and
sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current
real-time access to news and information available to private or
public organizations."
The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the
Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon
Group to undertake a massive "media mapping" campaign against the
news organization, which the Pentagon considered "critical to U.S.
objectives in the War on Terrorism." According to the contract,
Rendon would provide a "detailed content analysis of the station's
daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific
journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their
allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and
sponsorships."
The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister
purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon's Office of
Strategic Influence was one to "coerce" foreign journalists and
plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said
the office should find ways to "punish" those who convey the "wrong
message." One senior officer told CNN that the plan would "formalize
government deception, dishonesty and misinformation."
According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his media
analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams
of information warriors to allied nations to assist them "in
developing and delivering specific messages to the local population,
combatants, front-line states, the media and the international
community." Among the places Rendon's info-war teams would be sent
were Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia;
Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would
produce and script television news segments "built around themes and
story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives."
Rendon was also charged with engaging in "military deception" online
-- an activity once assigned to the OSI. The company was contracted
to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic -- and
"participate in these chat rooms when/if tasked." Rendon would also
create a Web site "with regular news summaries and feature articles.
Targeted at the global public, in English and at least four (4)
additional languages, this activity also will include an extensive
e-mail push operation." These techniques are commonly used to plant
a variety of propaganda, including false information.
Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon
played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which
operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the
administration's message on the War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30,
Rendon took part in the White House OGC conference call, where
officials would discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver
it. The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group,
whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief
of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the
American public.
Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been
established to shape the entire world's perception of a war. "It was
not just bad intelligence -- it was an orchestrated effort," says
Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and
military operations at the National War College. "It began before
the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as
post-conflict distortions."
In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks, Rendon
operated at a frantic pitch. "In the early stages it was fielding
every ground ball that was coming, because nobody was sure if we
were ever going to be attacked again," he says. "It was 'What do you
know about this, what do you know about that, what else can you get,
can you talk to somebody over here?' We functioned twenty-four hours
a day. We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on
all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers and 43
countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do this
correctly, I can tell you what's on the evening news tonight in a
country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a
six-hour break on how you can affect what's going to be on the news.
They'll take that in a heartbeat."
The Bush administration took everything Rendon had to offer. Between
2000 and 2004, Pentagon documents show, the Rendon Group received at
least thirty-five contracts with the Defense Department, worth a
total of $50 million to $100 million.
The mourners genuflected, made the sign of the cross and took their
seats along the hard, shiny pews of Our Lady of Victories Catholic
Church. It was April 2nd, 2003 -- the start of fall in the small
Australian town of Glenelg, an aging beach resort of white Victorian
homes and soft, blond sand on Holdback Bay. Rendon had flown halfway
around the world to join nearly 600 friends and family who were
gathered to say farewell to a local son and amateur football champ,
Paul Moran. Three days into the invasion of Iraq, the freelance
journalist and Rendon employee had become the first member of the
media to be killed in the war -- a war he had covertly helped to
start.
Moran had lived a double life, filing reports for the Australian
Broadcasting Corp. and other news organizations, while at other
times operating as a clandestine agent for Rendon, enjoying what his
family calls his "James Bond lifestyle." Moran had trained Iraqi
opposition forces in photographic espionage, showing them how to
covertly document Iraqi military activities, and had produced
pro-war announcements for the Pentagon. "He worked for the Rendon
Group in London," says his mother, Kathleen. "They just send people
all over the world -- where there are wars."
Moran was covering the Iraq invasion for ABC, filming at a
Kurdish-controlled checkpoint in the city of Sulaymaniyah, when a
car driven by a suicide bomber blew up next to him. "I saw the car
in a kind of slow-motion disintegrate," recalls Eric Campbell, a
correspondent who was filming with Moran. "A soldier handed me a
passport, which was charred. That's when I knew Paul was dead."
As the Mass ended and Moran's Australian-flag-draped coffin passed
by the mourners, Rendon lifted his right arm and saluted. He refused
to discuss Moran's role in the company, saying only that "Paul
worked for us on a number of projects." But on the long flight back
to Washington, across more than a dozen time zones, Rendon outlined
his feelings in an e-mail: "The day did begin with dark and ominous
clouds much befitting the emotions we all felt -- sadness and anger
at the senseless violence that claimed our comrade Paul Moran ten
short days ago and many decades of emotion ago."
The Rendon Group also organized a memorial service in London, where
Moran first went to work for the company in 1990. Held at Home
House, a private club in Portman Square where Moran often stayed
while visiting the city, the event was set among photographs of
Moran in various locations around the Middle East. Zaab Sethna, who
organized the al-Haideri media exclusive in Thailand for Moran and
Judith Miller, gave a touching tribute to his former colleague. "I
think that on both a personal and professional level Paul was deeply
admired and loved by the people at the Rendon Group," Sethna later
said.
Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass
destruction that he and Sethna had broadcast around the world lived
on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his
case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent
billing to al-Haideri's fabricated charges. In a report ironically
titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to
al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the
CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on
the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there
today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for
the information.
Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri's tale of Saddam's
villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after her first article
appeared, Miller again reported that Pentagon "intelligence
officials" were telling her that "some of the most valuable
information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri." His
interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Miller added,
"ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi
weapons-related activity and purchases, officials said."
Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the
dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam's weapons of
mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to Iraq by the CIA's
Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip through Baghdad and other
key locations, al-Haideri was given the opportunity to point out
exactly where Saddam's stockpiles were hidden, confirming the
charges that had helped to start a war.
In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal
weapons were buried.
As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush
administration's covert propaganda campaign has intensified.
According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by
Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the
Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military deception" --
defined as "presenting false information, images or statements." The
seventy-four-page document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap,"
also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio,
television, cell phones and "emerging technologies" such as the
Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is
also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our
allies.
As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare, Rendon
insists that the work he does is for the good of all Americans. "For
us, it's a question of patriotism," he says. "It's not a question of
politics, and that's an important distinction. I feel very strongly
about that personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in
harm's way, they deserve support." But in Iraq, American troops and
Iraqi civilians were put in harm's way, in large part, by the false
information spread by Rendon and the men he trained in information
warfare. And given the rapid growth of what is known as the
"security-intelligence complex" in Washington, covert perception
managers are likely to play an increasingly influential role in the
wars of the future.
Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a
conference on information operations in London, where he offered an
assessment on the Pentagon's efforts to manipulate the media.
According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of
embedding journalists with American forces. "He said the embedded
idea was great," says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk.
"It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of
reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control
of the story." But Rendon also cautioned that individual news
organizations were often able to "take control of the story,"
shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day's
events.
"We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be
fixed for the next war."
James Bamford is the best-selling author of "A Pretext for War:
9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies" (2004)
and "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security
Agency" (2001). This is his first article for Rolling Stone.
©Copyright 2005 Rolling Stone
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