@@ Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war @@
Arash
November 17, 2005
The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
By James Bamford
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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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. 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 Saeed al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean
wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam 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 Adnan
Ihsan Saeed 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. Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, in fact, was the
product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR (Public Relation)
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
(http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=1487&name=John-Rendon).
John Rendon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendon_Group) 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,
John 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 Saddam from power". Working under this extraordinary transfer of
secret authority, John 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
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion) to the advertising and
public-relations firm of James Walter Thompson
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_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"
(http://www.odwyerpr.com/contact_odwyers/contact.htm). "It's all cloak-and-dagger
stuff".
Although John Rendon denies any direct involvement with Adnan Ihsan Saeed 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 John Rendon helped install as
leader of the INC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_National_Congress) -- 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
(http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=1488&name=Francis-Brooke), the
INC's man in Washington and himself a former John Rendon employee, the goal of the
Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to
attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam.
As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his
briefcase, Ahmad Chalabi and Zaab 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, Zaab Sethna contacted Paul Moran
(http://www.paulmoran.org/biography.html), an Australian freelancer who frequently
worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (http://www.abc.net.au) "I think
I've got something that you would be interested in", he told Moran, who was living in
Bahrain. Zaab Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old
journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Paul Moran had also been on
Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations", working with Zaab 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", Zaab 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: Ahmad Chalabi
contacted Judith Miller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_%28journalist%29)
of The New York Times.
Judith Miller, who was close to Irv Lewis "Scooter" Libby
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Libby) and other neoconservatives in the Bush
administration (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/charts/fpteam.php), 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 Adnan
Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Judith Miller flew to Bangkok to
interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Judith Miller later
made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), 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.
(http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2002/ajan/10_hiddensites.html) "An Iraqi defector
who described himself as a civil engineer", Judith 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 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
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 Judith Miller's story, they could point to
"proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat". The story, reinforced by Paul Moran's on-camera
interview with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting
Corp. (ABC), 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, John 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
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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,
email messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government
documents. 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.
John Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington's exclusive Kalorama
neighborhood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalorama,_Washington,_D.C.). A few doors
down from Rendon is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara); just around the corner lives current
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld).
At fifty-six, John 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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupont_Circle),
he has already racked up a handsome fee for the morning's work: According to federal
records, John Rendon charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his
services.
John 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, John 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, John Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped
for McGovern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_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". John 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 Jimmy Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan revolutionaries came
to power in 1981, John 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, John 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
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush) signed a highly secret "finding"
authorizing the CIA to funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow
General Manuel Noriega (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Noriega).
Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group.
John 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
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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,
Guillermo Endara was running against Noriega's handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With
Rendon's help, Guillermo Endara beat Carlos 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 Manuel 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 Guillermo 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, John 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 Guillermo Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on
a tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher), the Italian prime minister and even
the pope.
In December 1989, when Bush decided to invade Panama, John 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, Guillermo Endara, was at last sworn in as president of Panama.
John Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam 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
PanAm 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, John Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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. John Rendon proposed a massive "perception
management" campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to
rescue Kuwait. The Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month
for his assistance.
To coordinate the operation, John Rendon opened an office in London. Once the second
Persian 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.
John 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 second Persian 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 Saddam included a rare "lethal
finding" -- meaning deadly action could be taken if necessary. Under contract to the
CIA, John 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 John 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.
Ahmad 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", John Rendon says, "Chalabi
was very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam". Former head of
the CIA station in Baghdad (now director of the Iraq branch of private security firm
"Diligence" http://www.diligencellc.com), Whitley 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 Saddam, 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. John 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 second Persian Gulf War.
John 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 Whitley 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
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=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 or IOTF
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Information_Operations_Task_Force), and
Rendon was closely connected to this group. "Lieutenant General Greg S. 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 John 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, John 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".
John 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 or OGC
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=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 Irv Lewis
"Scooter" 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, John 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 John 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.
Paul 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". Paul
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".
Paul 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 Paul Moran. "A soldier handed me a
passport, which was charred. That's when I knew Paul was dead".
As the Mass ended and Paul Moran's Australian-flag-draped coffin passed by the
mourners, John Rendon lifted his right arm and saluted. He refused to discuss Paul
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 email: "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 Paul 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 Paul Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction
that he and Zaab Sethna had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months
earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the UN, the
White House had given prominent billing to Adnan Ihsan Saeed 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.
Judith 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
Judith Miller and Paul Moran about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, Adnan Ihsan
Saeed 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, John 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, John 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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?rnd=1133741587812&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1069
Rolling Stone Magazine
November 23, 2005
Response by the Rendon Group
We read with some interest James Bamford's article about the Rendon Group ["The Man
Who Sold the War, RS 988]. For the record, the Rendon Group (TRG) had no role
whatsoever in making the case for the Iraq war, here at home or internationally. Mr.
Bamford's contention to the contrary is flatly untrue. TRG reviews open source media
reports for the Department of Defense and analyzes and charts positive and negative
trends very much the same way public opinion researchers analyze polling data. Unable
to find facts that support his thesis, Mr. Bamford relies on false information and
mischaracterization to create his story. Some of the many mistakes in the article
include:
1. Mr. Bamford states "Judy Miller's front-page story, which hit the stands on
December 20th, 2001 was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to
provide." This is false. The Rendon Group does not produce or disseminate false
information and has no connection at all with Judith Miller's work.
2. Mr. Bamford incorrectly writes that TRG worked for the controversial Defense
Department Office of Strategic Influence. The former director of that office himself
has publicly confirmed in the Chicago Tribune that the Rendon Group had nothing to do
with the Office of Strategic Influence as Mr. Bamford falsely asserts.
3. Mr. Bamford incorrectly reports that the Kuwait Government worked through Citizens
for a Free Kuwait to hire The Rendon Group. The Rendon Group had a contract directly
with the Government of Kuwait, had no association with Citizens for a Free Kuwait and
had no association with their activities.
4. Mr. Bamford absurdly characterizes the late Paul Moran as an "agent" of the Rendon
Group. In fact, Mr. Moran was a journalist tragically killed while reporting for the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation. While we are proud to acknowledge that Mr.
Moran, a gifted freelance cameraman, provided video services to TRG (and many other
clients), he had not done any TRG work for years prior to the events described by Mr.
Bamford.
5. Mr. Bamford incorrectly states that TRG participated in on-line chat-rooms in
Arabic or English or helped clients do that. TRG as a PR company specializing in
international media analysis tracks on-line media as part of its core competency but
has never participated in any chat rooms.
6. Mr. Bamford states that Mr. Rendon "rises at 3 A.M. each morning...and begins
ingesting information...an assortment of government documents, many of them available
only to those with the highest security clearance." Mr. Rendon does not have access
to classified material in his home or via Internet, and his limited access to such
material is no different from that of thousands of other DoD contractors who work for
the US government.
7. Mr. Bamford quotes from a publicly available contract document, which indicated
that TRG would "identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an
understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific
relationships and sponsorships." Tracking media and journalist dynamics is undertaken
by every PR firm, marketing agency and business intelligence company in today's wired
world - this is commercial grade media analysis, not "secret targeting of journalists
that may have a sinister purpose".
8. Mr. Bamford implies throughout the article that TRG's fees are excessive. TRG's
contracts with the U.S. Government are priced according to the GSA-approved billing
rates, which are often substantially discounted when compared to corporate rates. A
review of published figures regarding U.S. Government contractors will show that
TRG's rates are in line with industry standards.
Finally, Bamford implies that the location of his interview with Mr. Rendon, the menu
and the expensive French wine were all of Mr. Rendon's choosing. Readers of Rolling
Stone should know that Mr. Rendon was an invited guest to Mr. Bamford's elite
Washington club described in the story and that Mr. Bamford ordered the French wine
and lamb chops. Mr. Rendon had seafood.
Kind Regards,
The Rendon Group
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8868449?rnd=1133893382235&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1059
James Bamford Replies:
The Rendon Group asserts that it had "no role whatsoever in making the case for the
Iraq war, here at home or internationally." In fact, the selling of a war in Iraq
began with the creation of the Iraqi National Congress more than a decade ago and the
installation of Ahmad Chalabi as its head. In both of these events, the Rendon Group
played a major role, and continued to play a major role over the years. The INC had a
single purpose: the forceful removal of Saddam and his government from power and the
installation of a government run by Chalabi. To achieve this goal, Chalabi spent more
than a decade attempting to hard-sell senior U.S. officials on the idea of launching
a war against Iraq - finally succeeding in 2003. As Whitley Bruner, the former CIA
station chief in Baghdad, said: "Chalabi's primary focus was to drag us into a war".
He added, "Absolutely, that was his goal and he succeeded". John Rendon also told me:
"From day one, Chalabi was very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of
Saddam". It was the Rendon Group that created the INC, helped install Chalabi as its
leader, and funded the organization with money supplied by the CIA. John Rendon told
me that he himself acted as the "senior advisor" to the group. The job of the Rendon
Group was to use "perception management" techniques - propaganda - to help put
Chalabi in as president of Iraq, the same way they used propaganda to help put
Guillermo Endara into the presidential palace in Panama a few months earlier. Again,
to quote the CIA's Whitley Bruner, "The reason they got the contract was because of
what they had done in Panama." Another CIA official who worked extensively in Iraq
with Chalabi and the INC, Robert Baer, was even more blunt. In 2003 he said: "John
Rendon has an enormous contract with the Pentagon until today. He's got easy access,
go to the Pentagon any time he wants. He was responsible for selling this war and
selling the peace if you like". Robert Baer added, "They are all over the war. Every
time you talk to anybody in the government, that's had conference calls on the Iraq
war, they tell me that Rendon is on the conference calls that involve all the
government agencies involved in the war". As to the other "mistakes" alleged by the
Rendon Group, let me address each individually:
1. I never claimed the Rendon Group was either connected with Judith Miller or
deliberately disseminated false information. What I said was that the Rendon Group
was hired to provide publicity favorable to Chalabi and his INC and to help them
demonize Saddam around the world. The Rendon Group even created a road show that
traveled around Europe hawking the evils of Saddam's regime.
2. Another false accusation. I state clearly in the article that it was The New York
Times that made the allegation about the Office of Strategic Influence, and that it
was "a charge Rendon denies. 'We had nothing to do with that', he says".
3. I am happy to accept this correction - that Rendon worked directly with the
government of Kuwait - and I regret the error.
4. It is clear that Paul Moran alternated between worlds - working off and on for the
Rendon Group, which specializes in highly secret activities, including propaganda and
"perception management" on behalf of the CIA, the Pentagon and the INC; and at other
times working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other legitimate news
organizations as a freelance journalist - reporter as well as photojournalist.
According to the June 25th, 2003 issue of Australia's highly respected The Bulletin,
the country's longest-running news magazine and part of the American Newsweek: "Two
close friends and two of Moran's brothers sat down with an Adelaide journalist the
day after the funeral. They drank coffee and reminisced about their friend . . . one
of the friends mentioned that Moran worked for a "shadowy" company. Shadowy company,
wondered the journalist. Whatever could you mean? The friend mentioned a name: the
Rendon Group. He talked of Moran's involvement in helping an Iraqi defector escape
and Moran's work with the INC. Moran, he said, had helped mobilise a popular uprising
against Saddam's regime and trained dissidents in the use of hidden cameras. There
were the renowned "Paul Moran channels" - he seemed able to contact important people
with little bother - and the "James Bond lifestyle". In short, Moran had spent a
decade, on and off, trying to destabilise Saddam Hussein's regime for a company hired
by both the CIA and Pentagon". In addition, Zaab Sethna, who worked for both the
Rendon Group and the INC, told an Australian television audience in 2003: "They
continued to use Paul for projects . . .The Rendon group would hire Paul. He
continued to work with the Rendon group over the years".
5. As I stated, the Pentagon's contract with the Rendon Group called for the company
to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic - and "participate in these
chat rooms when/if tasked". The words in quotation are the Pentagon's, not mine, so
if the Rendon Group has a problem with that language I suggest they discuss it with
the Pentagon.
6. I am happy to accept that Mr. Rendon waits until he gets into his office to read
his classified documents. But there are few, if any, other PR companies cleared to
"research and analyze information classified Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS", as his
Pentagon contract states.
7. I appreciate the Rendon Group's modesty, but "every PR firm" is not cleared for
Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS information, does not work for the CIA, doesn't have a
history of helping to overthrow foreign governments, and is not targeted against an
Arabic news organization accused of helping America's enemy during a war.
8. Throughout the entire article, I never once implied that the Rendon Group's fees
were excessive. I simply stated how much they are according to documents I obtained.
I am happy to let the public make its own judgment as to whether Mr. Rendon's fee of
$311.26 per hour ($12,450.40 per week) is excessive for PR advice.
Finally, I never implied "that the location of his interview with Mr. Rendon, the
menu and the expensive French wine were all of Mr. Rendon's choosing." It is a common
practice for journalists to pay for a meal when asking someone out to dinner for a
long interview. The wine was actually one in the middle price range on the menu and
the choice of the club was largely for Mr. Rendon's privacy, not mine. According to
the receipt, Mr. Rendon ordered "sate lamb chops" - I never eat lamb chops. And just
for the record, I also paid for Mr. Rendon's apple tart dessert and his coffee -
decaf black.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8868453?rnd=1133893590855&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1059
Arash
December 3, 2005
James Bamford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford) returns to explain how the
PR (Public Relation) firm The Rendon Group
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendon_Group) created the Iraqi National Congress, and
has helped lie the American people into every war since Panama in 1988.
Audio
http://www.weekendinterviewshow.com/InterviewDisplay.aspx?i=150