Propaganda, the Pentagon, and the Rendon Group

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.