[iwar] Office of Strategic Influence/Homeland Security

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Date: 2002-02-18 20:39:27
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February 19, 2002
Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad
By JAMES DAO and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 — 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, military officials said.

The plans, which have not received final approval from the Bush
administration, have stirred opposition among some Pentagon officials
who say they might undermine the credibility of information that is
openly distributed by the Defense Department's public affairs officers.

The military has long engaged in information warfare against hostile
nations — for instance, by dropping leaflets and broadcasting messages
into Afghanistan when it was still under Taliban rule.

But it recently created the Office of Strategic Influence, which is
proposing to broaden that mission into allied nations in the Middle
East, Asia and even Western Europe. The office would assume a role
traditionally led by civilian agencies, mainly the State Department.

The small but well-financed Pentagon office, which was established
shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was a response to
concerns in the administration that the United States was losing
public support overseas for its war on terrorism, particularly in
Islamic countries.

As part of the effort to counter the pronouncements of the Taliban,
Osama bin Laden and their supporters, the State Department has already
hired a former advertising executive to run its public diplomacy
office, and the White House has created a public information "war
room" to coordinate the administration's daily message domestically
and abroad.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, while broadly supportive of
the new office, has not approved its specific proposals and has asked
the Pentagon's top lawyer, William J. Haynes, to review them, senior
Pentagon officials said.

Little information is available about the Office of Strategic
Influence, and even many senior Pentagon officials and Congressional
military aides say they know almost nothing about its purpose and
plans. Its multimillion dollar budget, drawn from a $10 billion
emergency supplement to the Pentagon budget authorized by Congress in
October, has not been disclosed.

Headed by Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, the new office
has begun circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive
campaigns that use not only the foreign media and the Internet, but
also covert operations.

The new office "rolls up all the instruments within D.O.D. to
influence foreign audiences," its assistant for operations, Thomas A.
Timmes, a former Army colonel and psychological operations officer,
said at a recent conference, referring to the Department of Defense.
"D.O.D. has not traditionally done these things."

One of the office's proposals calls for planting news items with
foreign media organizations through outside concerns that might not
have obvious ties to the Pentagon, officials familiar with the
proposal said.

General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from "black"
campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to
"white" public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon
officials said.

"It goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white,"
a senior Pentagon official said.

Another proposal involves sending journalists, civic leaders and
foreign leaders e-mail messages that promote American views or attack
unfriendly governments, officials said.

Asked if such e-mail would be identified as coming from the American
military, a senior Pentagon official said that "the return address
will probably be a dot-com, not a dot- mil," a reference to the
military's Internet designation.

To help the new office, the Pentagon has hired the Rendon Group, a
Washington-based international consulting firm run by John W. Rendon
Jr., a former campaign aide to President Jimmy Carter. The firm, which
is being paid about $100,000 a month, has done extensive work for the
Central Intelligence Agency, the Kuwaiti royal family and the Iraqi
National Congress, the opposition group seeking to oust President
Saddam Hussein.

Officials at the Rendon Group say terms of their contract forbid them
to talk about their Pentagon work. But the firm is well known for
running propaganda campaigns in Arab countries, including one
denouncing atrocities by Iraq during its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The firm has been hired as the Bush administration appears to have
united around the goal of ousting Mr. Hussein. "Saddam Hussein has a
charm offensive going on, and we haven't done anything to counteract
it," a senior military official said.

Proponents say the new Pentagon office will bring much-needed
coordination to the military's efforts to influence views of the
United States overseas, particularly as Washington broadens the war on
terrorism beyond Afghanistan.

But the new office has also stirred a sharp debate in the Pentagon,
where several senior officials have questioned whether its mission is
too broad and possibly even illegal.

Those critics say they are disturbed that a single office might be
authorized to use not only covert operations like computer network
attacks, psychological activities and deception, but also the
instruments and staff of the military's globe- spanning public affairs
apparatus.

Mingling the more surreptitious activities with the work of
traditional public affairs would undermine the Pentagon's credibility
with the media, the public and governments around the world, critics
argue.

"This breaks down the boundaries almost completely," a senior Pentagon
official said.

Moreover, critics say, disinformation planted in foreign media
organizations, like Reuters or Agence France-Presse, could end up
being published or broadcast by American news organizations.

The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency are barred by law
from propaganda activities in the United States. In the mid-1970's, it
was disclosed that some C.I.A. programs to plant false information in
the foreign press had resulted in articles published by American news
organizations.

Critics of the new Pentagon office also argue that governments allied
with the United States are likely to object strongly to any attempts
by the American military to influence media within their borders.

"Everybody understands using information operations to go after
nonfriendlies," another senior Pentagon official said. "When people
get uncomfortable is when people use the same tools and tactics on
friendlies."

Victoria Clarke, the assistant secretary of defense for public
information, declined to discuss details of the new office. But she
acknowledged that its mission was being carefully reviewed by the
Pentagon.

"Clearly the U.S. needs to be as effective as possible in all our
communications," she said. "What we're trying to do now is make clear
the distinction and appropriateness of who does what."

General Worden, an astrophysicist who has specialized in space
operations in his 27-year Air Force career, did not respond to several
requests for an interview.

General Worden has close ties to his new boss, Douglas J. Feith, the
under secretary of defense for policy, that date back to the Reagan
administration, military officials said. The general's staff of about
15 people reports to the office of the assistant secretary of defense
for special operations and low-intensity conflict, which is under Mr.
Feith.

The Office for Strategic Influence also coordinates its work with the
White House's new counterterrorism office, run by Wayne A. Downing, a
retired general who was head of the Special Operations command, which
oversees the military's covert information operations.

Many administration officials worried that the United States was
losing support in the Islamic world after American warplanes began
bombing Afghanistan in October. Those concerns spurred the creation of
the Office of Strategic Influence.

In an interview in November, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained the Pentagon's desire to broaden its
efforts to influence foreign audiences, saying:

"Perhaps the most challenging piece of this is putting together what
we call a strategic influence campaign quickly and with the right
emphasis. That's everything from psychological operations to the
public affairs piece to coordinating partners in this effort with us."

One of the military units assigned to carry out the policies of the
Office of Strategic Influence is the Army's Psychological Operations
Command. The command was involved in dropping millions of fliers and
broadcasting scores of radio programs into Afghanistan encouraging
Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers to surrender.

In the 1980's, Army "psyop" units, as they are known, broadcast radio
and television programs into Nicaragua intended to undermine the
Sandinista government. In the 1990's, they tried to encourage public
support for American peacekeeping missions in the Balkans.

The Office of Strategic Influence will also oversee private companies
that will be hired to help develop information programs and evaluate
their effectiveness using the same techniques as American political
campaigns, including scientific polling and focus groups, officials said.

"O.S.I. still thinks the way to go is start a Defense Department Voice
of America," a senior military official said. "When I get their
briefings, it's scary."



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