The Man Who Sold the Iraq War

Amy Goodman Interviews James Bamford

How did the Bush administration sell the invasion of Iraq to the American public? In an article in the December 1, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, “The Man Who Sold The War,” investigative journalist James Bamford wrote about the role of the Rendon Group, one of the most powerful public relations firms in Washington DC, and it’s founder and CEO John Rendon, the former Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee, in setting the stage for the Iraq war. Bamford’s article examined how the Bush administration and Iraqi National Congress used the Rendon Group to feed journalists—including Judith Miller—fabricated stories in an effort to sell the war. The firm has received millions in government contracts since 1991 when it was used by the CIA to help “create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power.” Bamford writes that the Pentagon secretly awarded Rendon a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, 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. The following interview aired on Democracy Now! on November 21, 2005.

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Amy Goodman: Tell us first about the Iraqi defector in the Gulf of Thailand who failed the lie detector test.

James Bamford: This took place in December of 2001 and was really the opening shot of the propaganda war to get the United States into war. The person being polygraphed was an Iraqi defector by the name of al-Haideri, and the Iraqi National Congress (INC) had brought him out of Iraq to Thailand primarily to expose him to the media and to try to get his story told. His story was that Saddam Hussein had not only chemical and biological weapons but even nuclear weapons and precursors to nuclear weapons hidden in Iraq in various places. Some of the biological weapons were supposedly hidden under the main hospital in Baghdad, for example. So it was an amazing story.

Up until this time there was a lot of speculation in the press and in Congress and other places about what Saddam may have, what might have been left over from the Gulf War and so forth. But this was going to be the very first time that somebody could actually point to information as proof, having seen where these things were buried and so forth. The INC, which was led by Ahmed Chalabi, decided to call in two journalists to broadcast this information to the world.

But first the CIA flew a polygraph operator with his machine to Pattaya, Thailand, which is south of Bangkok, and they went into a hotel room, they strapped up al-Haideri, and they asked him all these questions. They went over and over for hours his allegations regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they came away with charts that indicated he was deceptive, that he was lying, that this was not true. And they flew back to Washington and, presumably, assumed this was going to be the end of it. But that was information that was never made public. They didn’t broadcast that information. The INC and Chalabi decided to take that bogus information that al-Haideri was giving and broadcast it around the world. They called in two journalists. One of the journalists was Judy Miller, who was given the worldwide print exclusive rights to the story. Chalabi asked her if she wanted to do the story, and she flew from Washington to Bangkok to interview al-Haideri.

Was Chalabi on the payroll of the CIA?

Chalabi had been getting money from the CIA up until the mid-1990s, and then he started getting money from the Pentagon after the CIA failed to trust him any more. The other journalist that they called in was Paul Moran, who was working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. What makes this very interesting was how this came about—the people setting this up were members of the INC whose main goal from the very beginning was overthrowing Saddam Hussein any way possible. And ironically, one of the people they called in, Paul Moran, had formerly worked for the INC, and had also worked for another company called the Rendon Group.

The Rendon Group plays an important part in this because it was the Rendon Group, who few people have heard about, that actually set up the Iraqi National Congress in the first place. In a very unusual move the first Bush administration outsourced the propaganda for the war in Iraq basically to a private company.

Why?

Because they specialize in this. The Rendon Group for years have been able to take information that the CIA was trying to get across to the public and broadcast it. For example, just before the US action in Iraq in 1990, the Bush administration invaded Panama and ousted Manuel Noriega. All along, the CIA had a person they wanted to put in there to take Noriega’s place, a person by the name of Endara. The CIA outsourced the propaganda campaign to put Endara in there to the Rendon Group, who took a person who was basically a lawyer, a businessman, and built him up into a presidential candidate. They took him around Europe, introduced him to the Pope, and when his group was attacked, one of his vice presidents was attacked, a very bloody attack, it made the front page of newspapers all over the world, including Time magazine.

With the Rendon Group’s help getting that image out?

Exactly, the Rendon Group is the public relations group that pushed all of that information out there.

John Rendon flew in a few minutes before the actual invasion of Panama took place.

As the invasion took place, before the planes actually started attacking, John Rendon was in a plane about to land in Panama. He was there right at the beginning, and he was there, too, right about the same time that his candidate, Endara, was sworn in as president. So he did such a good job in Panama in terms of regime change, getting the CIA’s man into office, the first Bush administration decided to use him to help do regime change in Iraq. And after the first Gulf War, the whole idea was to oust Saddam Hussein and put in Ahmed Chalabi as the leader. So, John Rendon, his company the Rendon Group, created an umbrella group known as the Iraqi National Congress.

Who came up with the name?

John Rendon came up with the name. He formed an organizational meeting in Vienna. He helped install Chalabi as the head of the group, and then the money was originally funneled from the CIA through the Rendon Group, about $350,000 a month, to Chalabi.

Was this also for deniability, so it wouldn’t be the CIA directly giving the money?

Definitely. That’s one of the key reasons that they wanted to use a private company like the Rendon Group as a cutout. And they did that in Panama also. So it was a very convenient organization to turn to in order to help regime change. The CIA could help in terms of the combat, overthrowing a foreign leader like Saddam Hussein, but in terms of building up the world propaganda, number one, hating Saddam Hussein, number two, loving Ahmed Chalabi, that was something that they had to outsource, and the Rendon Group had become specialists in that type of propaganda.

Let’s go back to Judith Miller and Paul Moran. One is a radio reporter who worked for the Rendon Group, and you could talk about that; and the other, Judith Miller, worked for The New York Times.

This comes full circle: the Rendon Group created the INC, put in Chalabi, and then in December of 2001, right after the September 11 attacks, is there when the administration is gearing up to get the public behind the administration in going into war in Iraq. Up until this time it had been all speculation about what had been going on in terms of Saddam’s use of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and now the Iraqi National Congress comes up with this defector who is telling this huge lie about where all of these weapons are being hidden.

And they know it’s a lie?

Well, I don’t know when they knew it, but they certainly should have known it at some point, that the CIA person who walked out of the room wasn’t smiling about all of the happy news he was hearing …

And the guy who did the lie detector test said, “He is not telling the truth.”

That’s right, and it didn’t seem to make much difference, because they called in the press, including Paul Moran, a journalist who has the worldwide broadcast exclusive for the interview with this defector who is telling a lot of lies, who actually had formerly worked for the group putting this show on the road. And then they called in Judy Miller, who was going to be granted the worldwide print exclusives—who in her own words in a memo she wrote to her bureau chief in Baghdad at one point, mentioned that for a decade Chalabi had been one of her key sources and that he was responsible for many of the front page stories on WMD in The New York Times.

So, they called in two very sympathetic journalists to broadcast this story, and it made huge news. It came out, I think it was December 20, 2001, and again it made a great impact, because this was the first time that an actual eyewitness was able to say that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. So, this was a major milestone in the road to the war. And from then on, the INC began coming up with other defectors, and The New York Times and other organizations started promoting the war. But a lot of it had its origins with this first defector, al-Haideri.

Paul Moran died in Iraq.

One of the biggest and most tragic ironies of the entire war was the fact that this journalist, Paul Moran—who had formerly worked for both the INC and the Rendon Group and then had the worldwide broadcast rights for this story about al-Haideri, which helped push the US into invading Iraq—actually became the very first journalist killed in the war. He was in northern Iraq, and a car bomb exploded very close to him, and he was killed instantly. I think it was within two or three days of the beginning of the war. So, Paul Moran, who helped generate some of the early publicity for the war ended up being one of the first people killed in the war. The Rendon Group went to a lot of trouble and expense to create a lot of memorials for Paul Moran. John Rendon flew to the funeral in Australia. They had a memorial service for him in Washington. They had another larger memorial service for him in London, where Rendon and Paul Moran first began working around 1990. It was a tragedy for the Rendon Group, who had relied on Paul Moran for many, many years.

Can you talk about the IOTF, what it stands for, and the Information War Room?

The Information Operation Task Force was set up by the Pentagon because they wanted to turn information into a major weapon to use during a war. They realized with the internet and with the explosion of information technology around the world getting a message out is extremely important. It’s especially important because this wasn’t a case of the United States defending itself against an attack. The United States had to go on a propaganda war in order to convince the world that this preemptive invasion had legitimacy. In order to do that the Pentagon created a number of organizations to help promote this information around the world—the Information Operation Task Force was one of those—and the Rendon Group played an extremely important role in that. One of the key objectives of the Rendon Group in this aspect was to analyze media all over the world. John Rendon, in my interview with him, and it was the first interview I think he’s ever granted, or at least within probably twenty years …

Why did he grant it to you?

You’re going to have to ask him. I don’t ask questions, I just am very happy when somebody does agree to be interviewed. One of the ironic aspects of John Rendon is you have somebody here who started out as basically an anti-war activist. He went to work for the George McGovern campaign, actually ran the operation up in Maine for George McGovern. So you have a person who started out as an anti-war activist and a lifelong Democrat, Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee, and here he is the chief of propaganda for the Bush administration in their war with Iraq. It was a very interesting progression, and when I interviewed him, he said he’s still never voted for a Republican, he still votes Democratic, and he donated money to the Democratic Party not long ago.

His role was chief of propaganda and the Pentagon has been using him a great deal to analyze information around the world. Rendon told me that they analyze something like 143 newspapers and a lot of broadcast media around the world and that he prides himself on being able to get to policy makers information on what news organizations all over the world are going to do six hours before they actually do it. And that way, the Pentagon can prepare a response or some kind of rebuttal to whatever may be coming on a news organization hours in advance.

You write, “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 services as they’re filed, before they’re on the internet, before CNN can read them on the air, and 24 hours before they appear in the morning papers, and sorts them by key word. 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 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.” Why, what did they do?

Well, it’s a very interesting area, this media mapping. And basically, what it is, is they were directed to take a close look at the actual reporters who were reporting the news and analyze them. What is their slant? What is their bias? What is the background for these people? What makes that very worrisome is that there was another group that was set up by the Pentagon, Office of Strategic Influence, and that was eventually closed down, but one of the things …

Forced to because it became public?

That’s right—one of the aspects was that they were going to plant phony stories in news organizations around the world, and when you plant a phony story in a news organization anywhere in the world today, I mean, it’s immediately accessible to people in the United States. So, it would have had a very bad blowback effect.

I remember when Rumsfeld closed it. He said, “Yeah, we may change the name, but it doesn’t mean we have to stop doing what we are doing.”

Exactly. And a lot of people believed that it sort of disappeared and then emerged secretly again someplace else in the Pentagon. Douglas Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy set up that organization.

And it’s now being investigated.

Yes, I think it was The New York Times came out with the story on it. And as soon as that happened, it was within weeks that Donald Rumsfeld closed it down, at least said he closed it down, or at least took that name away from it. But one of the aspects of that was to actually look very secretly at these journalists around the world, and that’s what’s worrisome, when you do media mapping. How far do you go? And what are you going to do with the journalists? And at the time, the Pentagon was claiming that Al-Jazeera was aiding the enemy, aiding the insurgency and so forth. It’s a very dangerous situation when you have part of the US government acting secretly to do something about foreign media that may end up deceiving media back in the United States.

Now, you write, “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 that the office should find ways to punish those who convey the wrong message. One senior officer told CNN the plan would formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation.” Punish, coerce, how?

I don’t know. That’s as far as the information we have been able to obtain has come out. But when you talk about “punish” and “coerce,” they’ve got very ominous definitions to them. How do you punish and coerce a foreign journalist? So, the Office of Strategic Influence was closed down. Whether that aspect of it was also done away with, nobody knows at this point. John Rendon, during the interview, said his office, or his company, was not involved with the Office of Strategic Influence.

Who heads up the Rendon Group, and what is it doing today, what is John Rendon doing? Is this a family organization?

Yes, it’s very much a family organization, and another irony is that the company has its main headquarters here in Washington, and it is involved enormously with the CIA and the Pentagon and has been over the years. They have received between $50 million and $100 million worth of contracts. They had 35 contracts in the last three or four years just with the Pentagon.

His brother is working out of Boston?

Yes. Down here in Washington they deal with the CIA and the Pentagon, and Rendon actually said that they have been involved in every shooting conflict involving the United States since Panama, except for the Horn of Africa, Somalia. The irony here is that they are involved in all of this very secret activity in Washington, while the Rendon Group in Boston operates a very liberal-sounding organization where they do public service announcements for the Museum of Fine Arts and work for Whale Conservancy and a number of other groups like that.

And you say, “coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video conferences.”

That’s right, so it’s sort of the reverse image of what they are doing down here. I mean, just to give you an idea of the secrecy that’s involved with this organization in Washington, one of the contracts I found for the Rendon Group from the Pentagon said that they are cleared to research and analyze information classified top-secret, SCI, SI, TK, G, HCS. That’s enormous—in the world of secrecy that’s a very big—a lot of secrecy. You start with top-secret and all of these afterwards are what are known as code words, which indicate special access to information. Each of these are different. SCI has to do with sensitive compartmented information. It usually deals with National Security Agency information. SI is specifically NSA intercept information. TK stands for talent keyhole which is the code word for imagery information—top secret imagery information. G is very, very secret NSA intercept information. It stands for Gamma, which is a code word, and HCS is human control system which is very, very secret information from CIA human sources. For a public relations firm to have all of these clearances and accesses is rather extraordinary.

Why don’t we wrap up in the place where we began with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, who the US government eventually brought back to Iraq, the man who in Thailand was given a lie detector test which he failed. So, al-Haideri went back to Iraq.

Yes, he went back to Iraq after the US invasion, and he was asked, well, “Okay, now is your opportunity. You can point out where all of these facilities are located,” and he couldn’t find a single one. At one point, he said, “Well, they have moved them all.” But what he’d claimed originally was a lot of these were hidden in wells and other things. I mean you don’t move a well. So again, it confirmed the polygraph operator’s determination that this was all one big lie.

Now you would think that after that the US government would disown al-Haideri, since he failed the polygraph and then failed to find the weapons of mass destruction, but before George Bush went to the UN to argue for war he actually created a document, and they quoted from al-Haideri in that document. This was at least nine months after the polygraph showed that he was lying, and even today if you go on the White House web page they still have that document quoting from al-Haideri. Not only after he flunked the polygraph but after he failed to show where these weapons were in Iraq.

So al-Haideri fails a lie detector test, and the Bush administration quotes him. Ambassador Joe Wilson comes back and says that the nuclear weapons did not prove to be the case in Niger, and the Bush administration says the opposite?

Exactly. He didn’t use his name, but even in George Bush’s State of the Union address he referred to the al-Haideri revelations, and again this is information that his own agency said was wrong, was a lie. It’s very hard to justify.

Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a national radio/tv show which airs on over 350 radio and TV stations, including Pacifica, NPR, community, college radio stations; on public access, PBS, satellite TV stations (DISH network: Free Speech TV ch. 9415 and Link TV ch. 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV ch. 375); as a podcast, automatically downloaded to your computer or portable audio player; and streams live M-F at 8am EST. Visit www.democracynow.org for radio and TV stations in Oregon and Northern California with daily broadcasts. James Bamford is the author of the first book ever written about the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace: Inside America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization. His most recent book is A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies.

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