December, 2001: Cover Story

By Greg Rushford
Published in The Rushford Report

We need to kill his ideas, too.

“Do not let the world forget that there were many African and many Muslim victims of al Qaeda, both in Kenya and Tanzania, and at the World Trade Center”
—- National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, in a speech to the African Growth and Opportunity Act Forum, November 5.

“And that’s why we have this advisory board of Muslim Americans, so that we can understand what we’re doing. And some of those people will become spokespeople, and maybe they’re in the process of doing this now anyway, and we just make sure that they have access to the audiences they need”
—-Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Charlotte Beers, speaking at the Foreign Press Center, November 9.

Ah, government. It’s so hard to make things work the way you wish them to.

While the “public diplomacy” advocates in the White House and the Department of State understand how important it is to do something about the deep-seated
hatred of America in the Islamic world, they don’t quite know how to go about it. And two of the key institutions in Washington where you will find people who do understand how to wage wars of ideas — the venerable Voice of America and the Central Intelligence Agency — are playing catch-up today because of cutbacks and neglect during the 1990s.

While America possesses the most sophisticated communications in the world, we sure haven’t been very sophisticated about harnessing our abilities to communicate with the rest of the world.

Let’s take it from the top.

About an hour after the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, Charlotte Beers, was trying to sell America’s story to a (largely skeptical) group of foreign reporters on November 9, I called her office asking to be put in touch with American Muslims who are surviving family members of Muslims killed on Sept. 11 by Muslim terrorists. “We’re not geared up to do that sort of thing,”
a Beers’ spokesman replied. The aide said that neither Beers nor any member of her staff would be available for interviews, referring me instead to State’s website.

At least Beers’ spokesman said that he understood the point of my question. But when I posed it to Condoleezza Rice’s National Security Council, I was told I had
called the wrong office. “Why would you call the NSC about getting in touch with American Muslims?” a Rice spokesman asked. After it was politely explained that
Rice thought she was in the business of getting America’s story out to the Islamic world, the official passed me on to the White House press “war room.” But all a spokeswoman there would offer was, “President Bush has visited a mosque and has made it clear that we are not at war with Islam,” as if that was the end of the matter. If it is possible to convey a blank stare over the telephone, the White
House press office has mastered the art.

The White House spokeswoman finally suggested that if I was interested in what American Muslims were thinking, perhaps I should call the Arab-American Institute. (Alas, that outfit turned out to be mainly interested in the question of whether other Americans were violating the civil rights of Muslim Americans, not in help ing their country win the war of ideas).

The point: It would be unwise to take at face value the breathless reports you might have read about how the White House has ginned up a 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “war room.” Even the New York Times, in a lengthy page one article last month, swallowed the notion that the Bush PR experts are in the business of selling America’s story to the world like it hasn’t been sold since World War II’s legendary propaganda onslaught against Hitler. Edward R. Murrow would have cringed at the comparison.

Flacks in disarray
The fact is, White House communications chief Karen Hughes — the woman at the top of the administration’s PR apparatus — is a spinmeister. Spinmeisters and other campaign war-room wizards know how to put out the “message of the
day.” And that’s about it. To such people, hard news is something to be managed, and doled out as sparsely as possible. The spinmeisters’ targets — real journalists who live in the world of hard news — usually see through the puffery.

For example, look at what actually made news in the Arab world on November 9, the day that State’s Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive, tried to woo foreign reporters on how she would be promoting what she calls the America “brand” label. That was hardly news, except for the fact that Beers refers to Uncle Sam as a brand.

Reporters (sensibly) found another State Department announcement that day more newsworthy. “The United States said Friday it would target certain groups from some countries for longer checks before issuing visas in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks by hijackers, many of whom were in the country on temporary visas,” Reuters reported. “A State Department official said the visa delays would apply to ‘young males from certain countries, people along the lines of the people who carried out the hijackings.’” (Note the subtle reference to “highjackers,” not “terrorists.”).

Why would the State Department’s flacks volunteer an announcement that would
only raise the sensitive issue of ethnic profiling in the Arab world? Go figure.

The problems begin with the top man’s attitude toward information. While George W. Bush's grasp — even mastery — of foreign policy and coalition building has been impressive since Sept. 11, the president’s instincts on “information” are hardly enlightened. Release information to the public under the Freedom of Information Act? As little as possible. Release the public papers of former presidents (including those of the first President Bush)? Delay it, no matter what a federal law governing the release of such documents to the public says. Share classified information on the war against terrorism with Congress, which has a
constitutional responsibility in matters of war? Forget it. (At least on this one, Bush has a point).

Notably, Britain’s Tony Blair first put out hard information linking bin Laden to vicious terrorism, not the Bush administration — even though much of Blair’s raw intelligence originated in Washington.

The problems trickle down.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher initially rejected a request from
a British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent to fly with Colin Powell to Pakistan in October. Boucher relented when it was pointed out that the BBC broadcasts to Afghanistan in the Pashto language. And according to news reports, Condoleezza Rice had to be persuaded why it was important for her to appear on the Qatar-based al-Jazeera satellite television network, which reaches some 35 million viewers around the world. Rice has also pressured U.S. television network executives not to run tapes of Osama bin Laden, as if we Americans are so dumb that we could easily be manipulated by the likes of him. No veteran of the news business would make such mistakes.

Rice had a point in worrying about the possibility that bin Laden might send coded signals to members of his al Qaeda terrorist network. But we are talking about television broadcasts that were seen by audiences all over the globe, even by some 150,000 al-Jazeera viewers in the United States. “The press needs to show us more bin Laden, not less,” observed veteran journalist Holman Jenkins, Jr. in the Wall Street Journal. “Americans need to see him for what he is,” Jenkins added. So do Arabs.

The administration later recovered somewhat when Ambassador Christopher Ross, one of Washington’s most experienced Middle East hands, appeared on Al Jazeera, where he calmly refuted — in Arabic — a subsequent bin Laden message. But such efforts mainly have been notable exceptions.

The Bush communications team’s idea of a terrific PR idea is to have First Lady Laura Bush make speeches about how the Taliban have violated the rights and dignities of Afghanistan women. Fine. Madeleine Albright — another woman who confused making speeches with making policy — said the same thing. Meanwhile, bin Laden has been prepared to wage the information war from the beginning. He shrewdly slipped a videotaped statement to al-Jazeera within hours after U.S. air strikes began to hit Afghanistan on October 7. But as the sharp-eyed Niko Price of the Associated Press has observed, it wasn’t until the first week of November that Bush “dispatched public relations teams to London and Islamabad to help get his message to the public.”

Inherited public-diplomacy problems
Don’t just blame the Bush people. When it comes to “public diplomacy,” Uncle Sam has been sadly lagging for years.

In 1998, after six years of the Clinton presidency, the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy sent a report to the president that highlighted one “public diplomacy” success.

“Public diplomacy was used effectively in the UN weapons inspection crisis in Iraq,” the report noted. “Media strategies and visual images shaped the global agenda. Policymakers understood, informed, and influenced foreign publics.”

There was “only one hitch,” the report added. “It was Saddam’s public diplomacy. Not ours.” (The reference was to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein’s
successful campaign “to divert world media attention from his weapons to images of sick and hungry Iraqi children.” Recent pictures of children killed by American bombs in Afghanistan have a déjà vu quality.)

The response of the Clinton administration to the advisory commission’s strong recommendations to beef up the government’s ability to reach out to foreign audiences was to shut down the United States Information Agency and meld the remains into the State Depart-ment. Blame Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) for this, and Madeleine Albright for going along with the dumb idea.

The decimation of USIA has left in its wake poor morale and a nightmarish bureaucracy.

These days State’s public diplomacy undersecretary, Charlotte Beers — who was only sworn in on October 2 — has been widely disparaged for her previous lack of foreign policy experience and her background as a top advertising executive (chairman of both J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather). Many in Washington are asking how Beers, who formerly sold Uncle Ben’s rice, can now hope to sell Uncle Sam’s message?

The question is a good one, but also somewhat uninformed. Many advertising types (like real journalists and intelli-gence operatives) are very good at media operations. I remember the early 1980s, when the CIA’s Bill Casey brought in Los Angeles advertising genius Peter Dailey to run special media operations. Dailey’s mission was to counter an intense Soviet disinformation campaign aimed at preventing the deployment of U.S. Pershing missiles in Europe. This Dailey accomplished brilliantly (if secretly) in a sophisticated campaign to influence European public opinion. Today, Dailey’s ad agency still sells Alpo — but you can trust there are people there who would know how to make dog meat out bin Laden’s ideas.

Beers’ real problem is the same as that of her predecessor in the Clinton administration, Evelyn Lieberman (a former White House aide who was exiled by Clinton to State after she tried to cut off Monica Lewinsky’s access to the presidential lust). The Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs has no line authority over the Voice of America, for example.

And even people who report to the public-diplomacy undersecretary also have other masters. Public diplomacy officers in State’s regional and functional bureaus “are orphaned to a degree,” the U.S. Advisory Com-mission on Public Diplomacy has reported. “[T]hey report first to the deputy assistant secretaries and then assistant secretaries in their respective bureaus and then ultimately to another Under Secretary under State’s Organizational Chart.” As a result, the commission noted, some public-diplomacy officials “are unsure whom to turn to in times of need.”

The VOA and CIA give us the models
Given the deeply rooted problems with the White House and State Department communications bureaucracies, there are two agencies where the Bush administration would now be wise to concentrate its efforts: the Voice of America, and the Central Intelligence Agency. In their different ways, these two agencies
are extremely important in the war to influence public opinion in the Islamic world. But each has been hit hard by (senseless) budget cutbacks in recent years.

The VOA, like the BBC, has long enjoyed a reputation for broadcasting accurate and objective news to listeners around the world. Although VOA also runs editorial comment prepared by the State Department, the heart
and soul of VOA is in its correspondents who cover real news in Washington and overseas. But the 1990s and Bill Clinton were not kind to VOA.

The VOA’s listenership from Morocco to the Iranian border has been very low, about two percent. [At least a 1999 survey reported that VOA was reaching 80 percent of Afghan males who listened once a week, with 67 percent listening every day. Because of Taliban control, the survey was not able to measure female listeners.]

“We don’t even do some of the old things well now,” complains Harold Pachios, a Maine lawyer who chairs the public-diplomacy advisory commission. “The Voice of America is hardly heard in Jordan or Syria. It is scratchy, and on in the early hours when nobody listens.” Pachios says that the transmissions he refers to originate from a station that “is so old and the equipment is so antiquated that they have to make their own replacement parts.”

At least, the VOA has begun to get the support it deserves. “Since Sept. 11 there have been two rounds of increase in our language broadcasts in Afghanistan and in the region,” says VOA spokesman Joe O’Connell. “Before Sept. 11 we were doing one hour and 15 minutes, and by December this will be up to three hours a day.” This month, VOA hopes to be broadcasting 18 hours a day in Arabic, as contrasted with seven hours before Sept. 11. In these broadcasts, VOA has been reporting on America’s sizable Muslim population, and how it worships in freedom here. “Somebody went out to Montgomery County, and talked to Muslim kids, asking them what it was like here,” spokesman O’Connell relates. And the word has gone out that America has a $25 million reward for bin Laden’s head.

There are also plans to build a Middle Eastern radio network, which would broadcast music and news in FM and AM as well as short wave. Other ideas are germinating.

The CIA’s media operations
Although it is not well understood in public, the CIA has a history of planting seeds that germinate into the influencing of public opinion. Now, with Islamic opinion inflamed against America, such media operations have become very important.

In the public mind, covert operations tend to be associated with large paramilitary operations like the CIA’s support for Afghanistan’s mujahedeen against the Soviets in the 1980s. Last month, Bob Woodward reported in the Washington Post that CIA paramilitary forces were on the ground in Afghanistan, using Predator drones to call in air strikes against the al Qaeda.

As Woodward’s report illustrates, the large covert operations tend not to be very secret. Nor are they really typical of what the CIA’s clandestine service is best at. Moreover, the big operations also are often characterized by their failures, the most famous of which was President Kennedy’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. As a (young) congressional aide working on intelligence matters in the mid-1970s, I first learned from Ray Cline, a former CIA deputy director, what most successful covert operations are about. They tend to be small, really secret, and effective because Uncle Sam’s hidden hand is deniable, Cline explained. Soon I would see some of the actual files that showed how right Cline had been. And many of the most successful were media operations.

The main reason for the CIA’s many media operations during the Cold War was the need to counter communist propaganda. Not content to remain on the sidelines and watch the KGB’s massive attempts to influence opinion makers, the CIA got in the business of funding independent journalists, authors, international conferences, and magazines, of which the most prominent was the highly respected Encounter, based in England. Books with ideas and information otherwise unavailable to the average Russian citizen were dropped into the Soviet Union. Many of these operations were aimed at empowering the noncommunist left, particularly in postwar Europe.

Over the years, some of the more successful CIA operations, like Radio Free Europe, became too large to remain covert, and they were spun off. Today, even though most of the success stories are still secret, the American public has a lot to be grateful for.

The parallel with the situation in the Iron Curtain countries after World War II and many of the countries today in the Arab world (also Burma, North Korea, and places like Zimbabwe) is striking.

Throughout the Arab world, there are millions of people who are starved of ideas and information from the free world. There are too many mullahs preaching hate in mosques. From Egypt to Saudi Arabia, there are too many newspaper columnist who constantly spew a drumbeat of anti-American propaganda and conspiracy theories that need to be shot down.

But there is reason to worry that the CIA’s capabilities to do what is necessary appear to have been cut back in recent years. Many of the veterans with grey hair who were very good at these things were weeded out in the 1990s.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence reported in 1995 that the CIA‘s clandestine operations directorate had been “dramatically reduced.” Field operatives had been “drastically cut back,” the report said. Since 1990, “core Humint [human intelligence] collectors” had been cut more than 30 percent, and the number of case officers has been declining by “almost ten percent a year” for years.

The congressional overseers approved the cut backs as a necessary “response to a perceived need to tighten up” the CIA’s bureaucracy and clear out bureaucratic deadwood.

Take that with a grain of salt. The best informed street talk that I have heard instead blames Congress and Al Gore’s “reinventing government” campaign for the demise of experienced case officers — men and women who have been badly missed since Sept. 11.

Of course, the involvement of U.S. intelligence in shaping public opinion is always going to be controversial. Not all of the CIA’s media operations are as benign as I have portrayed them. We are talking about psywar, and the department of dirty tricks that are needed to counter the lies about America that regularly run in Arab media outlets.

Some would question the propriety of such operations.

In one wonderfully written sentence, author Joseph Persico summed up the attitude of critics of secret intelligence in Roosevelt’s Secret War, his account of
FDR’s World War II spy operations.

“Espionage involves peeking at the other fellow’s hand, marking the cards, cooking the books, poisoning the well, breaking the rules, hitting below the belt,
cheating, lying, deceiving, defaming, snooping, eavesdropping, prying, stealing, bribing, suborning, burglarizing, forging, misleading, conducting dirty tricks, dirty pool, skullduggery, black-mail, seduction, everything not sporting, not kosher, not cricket.”

Considering that our enemies have vowed to destroy our civilization and ruin the lives of our children in the 21st century, most Americans would say that Persico’s description sounds like exactly what’s needed now.

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