Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
The rise and fall of the Office of Strategic Influence by James Der Derian 
INFOinterventions # Monday, March 4, 2002 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE OFFICE OF STRATEGIC INFLUENCE James Der Derian, Director, ITWP James Dao and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times broke the story on 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.' It seems (since even now the facts remain murky) that the Pentagon shortly after 9.11 set up a special media unit called the 'Office of Strategic Influence.' Its purpose was to bolster support for the war effort in Western Europe, and to counter growing antipathy toward the U.S. in Asia and the Middle East (since confirmed beyond expectations by a recent Gallup poll). Its operations would range, said one senior Pentagon official, from 'the whitest of white' (influencing foreign press and internet audiences through open news releases) to 'the blackest of black' (conducting covert mis- and dis-information campaigns overseas). Its financing, described as 'substantial' and in the 'multimillion dollar range', would be drawn from the October $10 billion emergency supplement voted by the Congress, who seemed not to have a clue that there were funds were going to the likes of OSI. The infowar was on, by the Pentagon against the media -- and, upon disclosure of the existence of OSI, by the media against the Pentagon. The choice of title stacked the deck against the Pentagon. 'Orwellian' competed with 'Kafkaeque' as the media's metaphor du jour. Yet the title made perfect sense. As part of the vaunted transformation of the military, the avant garde of the Pentagon prides itself in making war as one might conduct business, from just-in-time inventories and commercial off-the-shelf equipment to net-work centric warfare and full information spectrum dominance. Most likely, some (now) hapless Pentagon official appropriated the title from the world of consultants who offer communication strategies and information resources to a corporate world buffeted by rapid change and public relations crises. It could in fact have been the Rendon Group, the communications consultancy hired by OSI , who provided the concept. Indeed, perhaps a sense of patriotism, or the principle of eminent domain, protected the Pentagon from a legal challenge from one such firm which had gone so far as to trademark the concept (see Towhey Consulting Group -- 'Leaders in Strategic InfluenceTM'). The setting up of the OSI was all part of a multi-front infowar that reached well beyond the Pentagon. Protestations emanating from the White House about the OSI rang somewhat hollow, considering the early establishment of a media war room in the Indian Treaty Room of the Old Executive Office, or National Security Advisor Condi Rice's telephone calls to network executives warning them off the airing of the Bin Laden videotapes. The OSI was all part of a piece, set in motion shortly after 9.11 when Karl Rove, the President's special adviser, went out to LA to enlist Hollywood in the war effort. On day after the OSI story broke, another bombshell dropped: the Pentagon and Hollywood were collaborating to produce a 13-part 'reality-TV' series on the life of troops in the battle against terrorism. After the entertainment division of ABC (owned by Disney) was promised day-to-day access to the troops in Afghanistan (more than promised the news division throughout the war, adding cause to an internal turf struggle), Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of "Black Hawk Down" and "Pearl Harbor", and Bertram van Munster, creator of the reality series "The Amazing Race" and "Cops", signed on to the primetime project. In the week that followed, the news media, fueled by further Pentagon leaks (most likely from within the Public Affairs Office which felt bureaucratically challenged if not epistemologically undermined by the OIS), fought back. Strategic deception was one thing, as, for example, the WWII propaganda campaign to fool Hitler about the D-Day landing site (Churchill's saw about 'truth being guarded by a bodyguard of lies' was trundled out like an old war engine by the Secretary Rumsfeld and others on just about every Sunday news program). But the prospect of outright lying to the press, friendly or not, not only challenged DOD credibility but also raised the likelihood for some nasty 'blowback'. The proof favored by the press was the Reagan administration disinformation campaign to destabilize Libya's Moammar Ghadafi, which the Wall Street Journal had picked up and ran as true story. I think a much better case would be the reporting on terrorism in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. A short version goes like this (a longer documented version can be found in Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Speed, Terror and War, Blackwell, 1992, pp. 26-7): former New York Times reporter Claire Sterling writes The Terrorist Network, declaring that the KGB was the mastermind behind just about every terrorist attack in Europe; the new CIA director, William Casey, waving the book in front of CIA analysts, claims he learned more from Sterling's book than from all of them; further motivated by Sterling's second book, The Time of Assassins, he orders a commission headed by Robert Gates to look into alleged KGB links to the papal assassination; not until the Senate Committee hearings for Gates' confirmation to replace Casey was it publicly revealed that Sterling's evidence was largely derived from an earlier CIA disinformation campaign: a classic case of blowback that should give pause to the backers of 'Strategic Influence.' This week, after Secretary of Defense Rumsfled declared the Office of Strategic Influence dead (at least officially) upon arrival, ITWP collects the press saga of its brief efflorescence. It is but one battle in what appears to be a sustained infowar. In the spirit of Paul Virilio's Information Bomb (Verso, 2000, p. 108), we value a policy of disclosure and critique over 'duck and cover': 'Thus after the atom bomb and the deployment for over forty years of generalized nuclear deterrence, the information bomb which has just exploded will very soon require the establishment of a new type of deterrence -- in this case, a societal one, with 'automatic circuit-breakers' put in place capable of avoiding the over-heating, if not indeed the fission, of the social cores of nations.' |