by David Barstow
April 20, 2008
from
TheNYTimes WSebsite
A PENTAGON CAMPAIGN
Retired Officers Have Been
Used to Shape Terrorism Coverage From Inside The TV and Radio Networks.
In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration
confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention
center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty
International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human
rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.
The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one
Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the
jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a
carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented
tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts”
whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered
judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon
information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate
favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an
examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to
this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and
also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to
military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to
assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and
sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on
the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150
military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members
or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores
of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors
scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the
administration’s war on terror.
It is a furious competition, one in which
inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control
over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a
kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism
coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior
military leaders, including officials with significant influence over
contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours
of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed
by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department,
including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.
In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points,
sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.
Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared
jeopardizing their access.
A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort
to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military
analysis.
“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our
hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’” Robert S. Bevelacqua,
a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.
Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst
who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said
the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation.
“This was a coherent, active policy,” he
said.
As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard
recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private
briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.
“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt
we’d been hosed.”
Dining with Donald H.
Rumsfeld, second from left,
during his final week as
secretary of defense were the retired officers Donald W. Shepperd, left,
Thomas G. McInerney and
Steven J. Greer, right.
The Pentagon defended its relationship with
military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about
the war.
“The intent and purpose of this is nothing
other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan
Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.
It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military
officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense
Department.”
Many analysts strongly denied that they had
either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect
their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the
conduct of the war.
Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS
military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their
networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage
that touched on business interests.
“I’m not here representing the
administration,” Dr. McCausland said.
Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged
only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the
administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential
conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical
standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests.
The onus is on their analysts to disclose
conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts,
they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for
years in all its complexity.
Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution
of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times
successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of
e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private
briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking
points operation.
These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines
between government and journalism have been obliterated.
Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as
“message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to
deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in
the form of their own opinions.”
“Meet the Press”
Appearing with
Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” in 2005 were
Wesley K. Clark, center;
Wayne A. Downing; Montgomery Meigs, right; and Barry R. McCaffrey,
foreground.
Though many analysts are paid network
consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they
sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and
transcripts show.
Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to
outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld,
then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of
the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of
their correspondence with network news executives.
Many — although certainly not all — faithfully
echoed talking points intended to counter critics.
“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired
Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the
Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use
it.”
Again and again, records show, the
administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what
it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own
Pentagon correspondents.
For example, when news articles revealed that
troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior
Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues:
“I think our analysts — properly armed — can
push back in that arena.”
The documents released by the Pentagon do not
show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts
said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking
opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.
John C. Garrett is a retired Marine colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News
TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win
Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq.
In promotional materials, he states that as a
military analyst he,
“is privy to weekly access and briefings
with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
other high level policy makers in the administration.”
One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s
special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance —
and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and
other agencies.
In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his
dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not
get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq.
He also acknowledged using this access and
information to identify opportunities for clients.
“You can’t help but look for that,” he said,
adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you
try to fill it.
“That’s good for everybody.”
At the same time, in e-mail messages to the
Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his
television and radio commentary.
“Please let me know if you have any
specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he
wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the
surge strategy in Iraq.
Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for
sustained criticism, many analysts said.
“You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.
With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all
administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in
the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts
frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and
interviews show.
Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the
first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts
against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of
inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo
and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so
analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the
facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded
detainees.
The results came quickly.
The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying
Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting
that all detainees were treated humanely.
“The impressions that you’re getting from
the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who
have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd,
a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from
Guantánamo that same afternoon.
The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired
Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.”
“There’s been over $100 million of new
construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”
Within days, transcripts of the analysts’
appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials,
cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.
Charting the Campaign
By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way,
yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about
invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play
a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.
Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the
Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for
public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what
she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she
argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and
utterly independent.
And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to
recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the
proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr.
Rumsfeld’s priorities.
In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own
all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed
a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the
ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war
heroes, all reaching mass audiences.
The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters,
and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters.
They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while
the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They
were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the
administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players
in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an
Iraq war.
Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the
administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of
whom were friends.
“It is very hard for me to criticize the
United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and
ABC analyst. “It is my life.”
Other administrations had made sporadic,
small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military
analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in
mind.
Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a
strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of
the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were
secondary.
“We didn’t want to rely on them to be our
primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.
The Pentagon’s regular press office would be
kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be
catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person
being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke.
The decision recalled other administration
tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for
example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration.
They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments
with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself
has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition
propaganda.
Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques
simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said,
the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.
Assembling the Team
From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in
which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of
potential recruits, and suggesting names.
Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing
their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.
“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all
invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a
spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)
Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75
retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically.
The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and
CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS
and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network
payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought
out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were
quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers.
At least nine of them have written op-ed
articles for The Times.
The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping
companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with
contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon
business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004
to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive
with McNeil Technologies.
Still others held board positions with military
firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General
McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several
military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of
communication networks.
Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works
at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director
of a national security team that represents several military contractors.
“We offer clients access to key decision
makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.
Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making
this pledge.
Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general.
Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston
was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a
former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs”
analyst for CNN.
“The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’
in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or
abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date
understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the
company tells prospective clients on its Web site.
There were also ideological ties.
Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late
Wayne
A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation
of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to
help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein.
Both men also had their own consulting firms and
sat on the boards of major military contractors.
Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that
pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and
there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.
This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News
analyst from 2001 to 2007.
A retired Army general who had specialized in
psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused
American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy”
propaganda during Vietnam.
“We lost the war — not because we were
outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote.
He urged a
radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars —
taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too.
He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to
“strengthen our national will to victory.”
The Selling of the War
From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and
his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.
In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment —
the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best
government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of
PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty
and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.
The access came with a condition. Participants
were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe
their contacts with the Pentagon.
In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its
analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic
case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological
weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al
Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of
liberation.”
At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the
analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings
as if it was their own.
“You could see that they were messaging,”
Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the
secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And
they were saying it over and over and over.”
Some days, he added, “We were able to click
on every single station and every one of our folks were up there
delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”
On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost
over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke.
“Let’s think about having some of the folks
who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,”
he wrote.
By summer, though, the first signs of the
insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were
increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.
The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.
It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize
surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military
analysts.
The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in
September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s
request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.
The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC,
and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear
regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.
The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in
Iraq.”
The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul
Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year
in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United
States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”
“We’re up against a growing and
sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during
a private White House dinner.
That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the
analysts were touring Iraq.
Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the
official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary,
scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few
refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave
and even the gardens of Babylon.
Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show,
spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with
political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the
crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line:
No reinforcements were needed.
The “growing and sophisticated threat” described
by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.
“We’re winning,” a briefing document
proclaimed.
One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said
some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group
member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a
reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had
“brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in
1965, while he was governor of Michigan.
But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a
business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military
leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s
$87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside
information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission:
the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent
building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious
plans to train Iraq’s security forces.
Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip
participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.
Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive
of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice
president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of
millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq.
In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement
to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar
Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.
“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,”
Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition
Provisional Authority.
Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the
trip.
“I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these
people of Al Anbar,” he said.
Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip
translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the
trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to
packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets.
Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering.
“They can’t shoot, but then again, they
don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.
“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General
Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview
with The Times.
The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.
“You can’t believe the progress,” General
Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return.
He predicted the
insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.
“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van
Susteren of Fox News.
There was barely a word about armor shortages or
corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the
moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.
“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.
Access and Influence
Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a
masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel
to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in
Iraq.
“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a
senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers
and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s
campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized.
Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul
to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States
Central Command.
The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were
slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an
e-mail message warning that the trips,
“have the highest levels of
visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence
Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts
calling the 4-stars.”
Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that
a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to
counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from
journalists in Iraq.
The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive
view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV
platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical
coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate
equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces.
“On those issues, they were more likely to
be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.
For analysts with military industry ties, the
attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials
beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.
Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a
consultant who helps small companies break into the military market.
Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom
he had never met.
It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon
leadership.
“You start to recognize what’s most
important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff
firsthand.”
Some Pentagon officials said they were well
aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business
advantage.
“Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”
They also understood the financial relationship
between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by
the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst
could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,”
the more hits he could expect.
The more hits, the greater his potential
influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently
advertised their network roles.
“They have taken lobbying and the search for
contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been
highly honed.”
Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to
him that analysts might use their access to curry favor.
Nor, he said, did
the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic.
“That’s not something that ever crossed my
mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks
were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they
know where the lines are,” he said.
The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at
least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had
dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and
access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in
Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as
often as the analysts.
An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why.
The memorandum, written
by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based
on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater
impact” on network coverage of the military.
“They have now become the go-to guys not
only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she
wrote.
Other branches of the administration also began
to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met
with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping
terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records
show.
When David H. Petraeus was appointed the
commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to
meet with the analysts.
“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said
Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is
vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a
fast-growing military contractor.
Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he
had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star
could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’”
For example, he believed
Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security
forces.
“I know a snow job when I see one,” he said.
He did not share this on TV.
“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he
was critical.
Some analysts said that even before the war
started, they privately had questions about the justification for the
invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.
Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in
early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled
asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.
“‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr.
Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts
were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying,
‘What are we doing?’”
Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired
Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor,
attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after
being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with
a hidden weapons program.
Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts
were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the
evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts
who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American
public.
Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3
Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.
“There’s no way I was going to go down that
road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re
talking about fighting a huge machine.”
Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and
the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable
coverage.
Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and
analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company
advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted
the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.
“Recall the stuff I did after my last
visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”
Pentagon Keeps Tabs
As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely
monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions,
hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the
analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The
Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.
Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate
branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq
in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes
on all the networks.
“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was
extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.
In interviews, several analysts reacted with
dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon
documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L.
Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront
information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always
agree with the administration or each other.
“None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General
Scales said.
Likewise, several also denied using their
special access for business gain.
“Not related at all,” General Shepperd said,
pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”
Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw
a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from
displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.
On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he
had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality”
being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a
heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,”
Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a
private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United
States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions
were swift.
Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this
appearance.
The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message,
“simply didn’t like
the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.”
The next day James T. Conway,
then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another
conference call with analysts.
He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let
the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.
“The strategic target remains our
population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day
out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and
will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us
not let that happen.”
“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.
“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.
The Generals’ Revolt
The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than
in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of
them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of
his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.
On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt”
dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military
analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show.
When an
aide urged a short delay to,
“give our big guys on the West Coast a little
more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that
“the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”
That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General
McInerney
and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal
defending Mr. Rumsfeld.
“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely
wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he
added a little later, “will be much appreciated.”
Mr. Rumsfeld’s office
quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a
spreading revolt.
“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that
afternoon.
The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for
this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday.
In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting
as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very
formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon
official warned subordinates.
On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr.
Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared
determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the
war.
“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst.
(The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up,
unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear
that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’”
“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing
laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”
There was little discussion about the actual
criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued
that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media,
not reality.
The administration’s overall war strategy, they
counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”
“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a
military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost,
3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”
An analyst said at another point:
“This is a wider war. And whether we have
democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up
with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a
threat to us.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.
But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the
administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans
viewed Iraq as a lost cause.
“America hates a loser,” one analyst said.
Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr.
Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.”
One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld
to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at
the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.
“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr.
Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”
At another point, an analyst made a suggestion:
“In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and
imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and
say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic
center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just
paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a
world like that.’ ”
Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this
public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should
cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it,
“keep the American people focused on the
idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.”
They placed particular emphasis on the growing
confrontation with Iran.
“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the
psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational
event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to
do your job...”
“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.
The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing
pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off
treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.
Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports,
circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many
of the Pentagon’s talking points:
-
that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently
and sufficiently” with his generals
-
that he was not “overly concerned” with
the criticisms
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that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,”
including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government
Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective
guidance into bullet points.
Two were underlined:
“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not
simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”
“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or
Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”
But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session
instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was
repulsed.
“I walked away from that session having
total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two
exceptions,” he said.
View From the Networks
Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress
about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts. Mr. Garrett, the
Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during
the call to “keep up the great work.”
“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview,
“anything we can do to help.”
For the moment, though, because of heavy
election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting
nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of
analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced
little in the way of immediate coverage.
Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with
selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only
dimly aware of these interactions.
The networks, they said, have little grasp of
how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.
“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were
participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the
network.
Some networks publish biographies on their Web
sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases,
give at least limited information about their business ties.
But many analysts also said the networks asked
few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their
work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest.
“None of that ever happened,” said Mr.
Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.
“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”
Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network
handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying
their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear
ethical violation for most news organizations.
CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’
business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential
conflicts.
NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring
military analysts.
The network issued a short statement:
“We have clear policies in place to assure
that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and
that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a
conflict of interest.”
Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said
that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same
ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the
network informed about any outside business entanglements.
“We make it clear to them we expect them to
keep us closely apprised,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives
“refused to participate” in this article.
CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside
sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its
military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it
gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of
interest.
Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.
CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its
main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business
of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.
General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management
position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and
intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he
received income from McNeil Technologies.
But the disclosure form did not require him to
describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do
additional vetting.
“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up
questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.
In an interview, General Marks said it was no
secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning
contracts.
“I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.
CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of
McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he
was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified
him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and
fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in
Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion
contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in
Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that
won the huge contract in December 2006.
General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on
CNN.
“I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,”
he said.
But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007,
when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier,
and finally made inquiries about his new job.
“We saw the extent of his dealings and
determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN
said.
Corrections Appended
-
Correction: April 22, 2008
An article on Sunday about the Pentagon’s relationship with news media
military analysts misidentified the military affiliation of one analyst,
John C. Garrett. He retired as a colonel from the Marines, not
the Army.
-
Correction: April 24, 2008
The continuation of an article on Sunday about a Pentagon effort to use
military analysts to generate favorable news coverage carried 10
paragraphs that were partly obscured in some editions by a chart.
