-Caveat Lector-
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/5188
When Things Turn Weird, The Weird Turn Pro
Propaganda, The Pentagon And The Rendon Group
Jeff Stein is co-author, with Khidhir Hamza, of Saddam's Bombmaker: The Daring
Escape of the Man Who Built Iraq's Secret Weapon (Scribner 2000).
A few years ago, Washington media consultant John Rendon was regaling an
audience of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy with one of his favorite war
stories.
When victorious U.S. troops rolled into Kuwait City, he noted, they were greeted by
hundreds of Kuwaitis waving American flags. The scene, flashed around the world
again and again on CNN, left little doubt that the U.S. Marines were welcome in
Kuwait.
"Did you ever stop to wonder," he asked, "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?"
A ripple of knowing chuckles passed across Rendon�s military audience.
"Well you now know the answer," he said, "That was one of my jobs then."
And what a job it was. It was a global propaganda coup, especially in corners of the
Arab world where even Saddam Hussein usually wins a popularity contest with Uncle
Sam. From Cairo to Karachi, millions of people saw the American liberators
welcomed to Kuwait -- again and again.
And that�s just one of the reasons that John Rendon, a beefy media wizard who
started out in national politics scheduling campaign stops for Jimmy Carter, shuns
the label of public relations flack in favor what he billed himself at the Air Force
Academy: "an information warrior and a perception manager."
Rendon has had a lot of plum assignments since Desert Storm, including a $23
million propaganda campaign in 1991 aimed at undermining Saddam Hussein with
smuggled leaflets and radio broadcasts beamed into Iraq. And now Rendon has
another plum -- it was reported recently that he�d been hired for $100,000 a month to
help the Pentagon plant propaganda in the foreign media as part of the Bush
administration�s War on Terrorism.
According to The New York Times, which broke the story February 19, "The
Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to
foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and
policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries."
The leak clearly ambushed the Pentagon, which quickly retreated in a fog of
contradictory statements that culminated in an announcement just a week later by
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the whole idea had probably been
scrapped.
"I met with Undersecretary Doug Feith this morning and he indicated to me that he's
decided to close down the Office of Strategic Influence," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon
news conference.
That didn�t mean, of course, that the idea was dead, or couldn�t be moved to another
agency with more experience in "disinformation," such as the Central Intelligence
Agency.
No one at the Pentagon, the White House, or The Rendon Group would respond to a
reporter�s call asking whether the idea could be resuscitated elsewhere, or whether
The Rendon Group�s contract had been canceled or transferred.
Rendon was already working for the Pentagon. After the terrorist attacks of
September 11, the Pentagon quickly awarded The Rendon Group a $392,000
contract to counter negative portrayals of the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan abroad,
according to news accounts last fall.
A spokeswoman for the company said she could not reveal what the company did for
the Pentagon on that project, but a well-informed source who has worked with
Rendon said it went beyond wooing foreign journalists to setting up disguised-
source, pro-U.S Web sites in several foreign languages and blast-faxing foreign
media and search engines with pro-U.S. information.
If the Rendon Group�s track record is any guide, however, the company�s real
expertise is in spending taxpayer dollars.
Rendon has had clients in 78 countries, according to its own Web site, ranging from
the Kuwaiti Royal Family to the embattled Colombian Army to the Haitian
government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In 1989, it was hired by the CIA to assist the
campaign of Guillermo Endara against Manuel Noriega in Panama, according to
ABC News. It also has corporate and non-profit clients, such as the Vietnam
Veterans of America Foundation, which it helped promote the ban of landmines.
If the Rendon Group�s track record against Saddam Hussein is any guide, however,
the company�s real expertise is in spending taxpayer dollars.
In 1992, according to several later accounts, including a book by the journalists
Andrew and Patrick Cockburn (Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam
Hussein) the CIA hired The Rendon Group to assist London-based Iraqi exiles in
toppling the Baghdad regime. It started out by giving the exiles, an unwieldy coalition
of Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Kurds, its name: the Iraqi National Congress (INC).
A forward headquarters was set up in the "no-fly zone" of northern Iraq.
According to Rendon company documents cited by ABC News, the firm "spent
$23,651,463 in the first year of the anti-Saddam campaign." The firm produced a
traveling photo exhibit of Iraqi atrocities, videos and radio spots that ridiculed
Saddam, and anti-Saddam comic books. Frances Brooke, who now runs the INC�s
Washington office, was paid $19,000 a month to work with the organization in
London.
Former CIA man Warren Marik told Congress later that he "helped divert millions of
dollars" from The Rendon Group to the INC. The covert campaign was eventually
investigated by the CIA�s own Inspector General.
Over several hours of interviews, a former CIA operations agent who worked closely
with the INC provided me with an inside account of the clandestine program that
captured its no-strings accounting chaos.
He called it "a $150 million rip-off."
"The money went to consultants in Washington -- millions, and millions, and millions
of dollars," he said on strict condition of anonymity.
"Millions" went to American consultants in London, as well as to other consultants
posted around the Middle East, he alleged, who made small fortunes that were used
later to buy big houses in poshest Washington neighborhoods.
"There was one woman who was getting $500,000 a year in salary" to work on the
Iraq campaign in London, he said. "She was getting per diem when she was hired,
about $400 a day in London." Then she was put on the payroll, "but they never
stopped the per diem," he said. "So she was getting a salary of a hundred [thousand]
and something, and then she moved into an apartment, so she wasn�t paying for a
hotel. And this went on for three years.
"And then she said, I need some office space, and so she went out and rented this
office space. And then she subleased it. So right there I can account for a million
dollars, siphoned off."
According to the ex-CIA man -- now well known in intelligence circles as a critic of
his
former employer -- "there were 20 other cases like that."
"I said it�s illegal to have Americans working for us who don�t know it. And I was
told,
'You don�t understand the politics of this.'"
Some people were hired by cover organizations set up by the agency and didn�t even
know they were working for the CIA, he said.
"I said it�s illegal to have Americans working for us who don�t know it. And I was
told,
�You don�t understand the politics of this.�
"Congress said, 'We want you to get rid of Saddam,' and we said, 'Okay, we�re
gonna hire the best,' one element of which was The Rendon Group.
"At the end of the year we -- the CIA�s Iraq Group -- had money left over, so we got
instructions from the DO [the CIA�s Directorate of Operations]: 'Well, go and spend
it.' So we went out and bought brand new Jeep Cherokees.... All the cars we had in
the Middle East for the Iraqi program were going to the wives of the COS�s [the
chiefs of station].... It was a $150 million rip-off. Go up to northwest [Washington,
D.C.] and look at those big houses, and you'll know how they got paid for."
When the CIA audited the project years later, however, blame was heaped on
Ahmad Chalabi, the portly, MIT-educated banker and CIA-backed leader of the Iraqi
National Congress. But according to the CIA man, "Chalabi got nothing [illegal] from
it."
Even where the money could be accounted for, The Rendon Group�s effort was
clumsy, even amateurish, according to several sources. One such effort was the
project to beam anti-Hussein news broadcasts into Iraq.
"Rendon hired this Potemkin village to write scripts for the radio, in Kuwait. But it
was
all [managed] by these kids, that had all been in Latin America," the ex-CIA official
said.
"And then he submitted all these fake translation bills from English into Arabic. It
was
always done somewhere else, like in Egypt, you know? So instead of paying $60,000
a month, like he was claiming, he was paying $100 a month. See? So we�re talking
six people writing scripts, six translators -- we�re getting into some big bucks."
The scripts were sent to Boston, where they were recorded for broadcast and
eventually "sent out about five days late," the source said. "You always listen to news
that�s five days late, don�t you?"
"And what was the program like? It sucked. The Iraqis never listened to it. It was like
broadcasting Rush Limbaugh into Iraq, in English. Nobody knew what the fuck it was.
The only people that we found out listened to it was the Israelis."
The Israelis were listening closely in 1996, he said, when somebody produced "a
horribly anti-Zionist program, just as a joke, and broadcast it. It was this horrible
thing, you know, about the Jews being Nazis, and they should all be tried for war
crimes. Mossad (Israeli intelligence) came down on our shit like you wouldn�t believe.
But apparently they were the only people who listened to this stuff."
Somewhere between two and three million dollars budgeted for the Iraqi National
Congress (INC) went down the drain that way, he said. A spokeswoman for The
Rendon Group said John Rendon "won�t talk about clients," with whom
"confidentiality agreements go on forever." As to allegations of financial
irregularities
in the INC account, she could say only that, "if anything not proper had occured, the
company would not have been able to contract with the government again.... I mean,
that seems obvious, doesn�t it?"
Two close allies of Rendon and the INC now sit close to the Oval Office. Retired
Gen. Wayne Downing, a former Special Forces commander who advised the INC in
recent years, runs the White House�s new domestic counter-terrorism office. Former
CIA operations officer and Rendon Group consultant, Linda Flohr, is now Director of
Security for the Office of Homeland Security and the NSC's Director of Counter-
Terrorism. Frances Brooke, now Ahmad Chalabi�s chief assistant in Washington,
worked on the anti-Iraq campaign in London for the Rendon Group (at a salary of
$19,000 a month).
If the Office of Strategic Influence goes forward, Rendon should find selling America
a lot easier than some of his other clients -- the Kuwaiti royal family, Indonesia,
Panama, and Uzbekistan, now run by former communist thugs.
But he�s always an optimist.
Quoting onetime gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, he told the Air Force cadets,
"When things turn weird, the weird turn pro."
Published: Feb 26 2002~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
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simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. Do not
believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men.
Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all.
Then accept it and live up to it."
The Buddha on Belief, from the Kalama Sutta
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
German Writer (1759-1805)
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It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that
prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell
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"Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless
of frontiers."
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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teach you to keep your mouth shut."
--- Ernest Hemingway
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