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February 19, 2002

Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad

By JAMES DAO and ERIC SCHMITT

ASHINGTON, 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.

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