The Man Who Sold the War

[XXPANTHAXX]

The Man Who Sold the War

Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war

By JAMES BAMFORD
Courtesy of Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One
of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and
brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on
the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of
the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to
the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a
padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube,
pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another
across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the
man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-
Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his
homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down
Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced
black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an
explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of
questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil
engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of
biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms,
according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells,
hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam
Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush
administration was looking for. If the charges were true,
they would offer the White House a compelling reason to
invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had
flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-
Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was
secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review
of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart,
the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made
up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a
visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another
political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life.
But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it
couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the
product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR
campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and
the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a
war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing
was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington
establishment named John Rendon.

Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know
exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector
test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him 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. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off
government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA
to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein
from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of
secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam
militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi
National Congress -- and served as their media guru
and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising
against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had
outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and
public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin
McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication
O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."

Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-
Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media
war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by
Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of
the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where
he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's
spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors
on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and
Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in
the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group.
According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and
himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri
operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack
Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-
detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't
hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists
who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause
and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of
WMDs.

For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul
Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the
Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something
that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was
living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim,
thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in
the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for
years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the
company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham
Palace.

"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to
Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a
rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The
Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind
of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi
opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group
didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired
them to do this work."

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was
equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York
Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other
neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a
trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for
years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the
straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar,
Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful
supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made
perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency,
but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not
to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test.
Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts"
called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus
adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th,
2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired
to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20
HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi
defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller
wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret
facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in
underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam
Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If
verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide
ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who
have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from
power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making
weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had
been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks
to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of
Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's
on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian
Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White
House and repeated by newspapers and television networks
around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped
and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S.
into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely
on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.

By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from
disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of
global communications, there is nothing to stop it from
planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with
certainty that it will reach American citizens almost
instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the
Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations
affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret
amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops
funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American
policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to
the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration
policies." The report also concludes that military planners
are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes
from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now
believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications
networks and technologies that control access to, and
directly manipulate, information. As a result, information
itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."

It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets
at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-
security strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I
am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet
public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am
an information warrior and a perception manager." To explain
his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from
his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George
McGovern and Jimmy Carter: "This is probably best described
in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, 'When
things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"

John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six
hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins
ingesting information -- overnight news reports, e-mail
messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment
of government documents, many of them available only to those
with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon
documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is
authorized "to research and analyze information classified up
to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS" -- an extraordinarily high
level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense
contractors. "SCI" stands for Sensitive Compartmented
Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. "SI" is
Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted
by the National Security Agency. "TK" refers to
Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance
aircraft and spy satellites. "G" stands for Gamma
(communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources)
and "HCS" means Humint Control System (information from a
very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms
indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret
information from all three forms of intelligence collection:
eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.

Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington's
exclusive Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon
is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara;
just around the corner lives current Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs
his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-
style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made
shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply
tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame.
By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group's headquarters
near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee
for the morning's work: According to federal records, Rendon
charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his
services.

Rendon is one of the most influential of the private
contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over
jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In
recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional
desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the
world; watch officers at the agency's twenty-four-hour crisis
center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence
data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who
oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies.
According to one senior administration official involved in
intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now
performed by private contractors -- people completely
unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official
acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many
rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs -- or how much
unchecked power they enjoy.

Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a
battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in
nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two
decades. In the first interview he has granted in decades,
Rendon offered a peek through the keyhole of this seldom-seen
world of corporate spooks -- a rarefied but growing
profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of
Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon was
guarded about the details of his clandestine work -- but he
boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's
efforts as a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one
countries," he said. "Going all the way back to Panama, we've
been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia."

It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered
politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a
stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped for
McGovern before graduating from Northeastern University. "I
was the youngest state coordinator," he recalls. "I had
Maine. They told me that I understood politics -- which was a
stretch, being so young." Rendon, who went on to serve as
executive director of the Democratic National Committee,
quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and
media manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980,
as the manager of Jimmy Carter's troops at the national
convention in New York, he was sitting alone in the bleachers
at Madison Square Garden when a reporter for ABC News
approached him. "They actually did a little piece about the
man behind the curtain," Rendon says. "A Wizard of Oz thing."
It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his
life.

After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan
revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into
business with his younger brother Rick. "Everybody started
consulting," he recalls. "We started consulting." They helped
elect John Kerry to the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-
CIO to mobilize the union vote for Walter Mondale's
presidential campaign. Among the items Rendon produced was a
training manual for union organizers to operate as political
activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the operation quiet,
Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of the blue
plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would
soon pervade all of his consulting deals.

To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair.
Rendon's wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief
financial officer and "senior communications strategist."
Rendon's brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the
company's Boston office, producing public-service
announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and
coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young
people in the Middle East in contact with American kids
through video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the
company's business is decidedly less liberal and peace
oriented. Rendon's first experience in the intelligence
world, in fact, came courtesy of the Republicans. "Panama,"
he says, "brought us into the national-security environment."

In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W.
Bush signed a highly secret "finding" authorizing the CIA to
funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to
overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency
personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group.
Rendon's job was to work behind the scenes, using a variety
of campaign and psychological techniques to put the CIA's
choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace. Cash
from the agency, laundered through various bank accounts and
front organizations, would end up in Endara's hands, who
would then pay Rendon.

A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with
little political experience, Endara was running against
Noriega's handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon's
help, Endara beat Duque decisively at the polls -- but
Noriega simply named himself "Maximum Leader" and declared
the election null and void. The Bush administration then
decided to remove Noriega by force -- and Rendon's job
shifted from generating local support for a national election
to building international support for regime change. Within
days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.

At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of
Noriega's Dignity Battalion -- nicknamed "Dig Bats" and
called "Doberman thugs" by Bush -- attacked the crowd with
wooden planks, metal pipes and guns. Gang members grabbed the
bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one of Endara's vice-
presidential candidates, pushed him against a car, shoved a
gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras
snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with
a spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs,
turning his white guayabera bright red with blood -- his own,
and that of his dead bodyguard.

Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every
newsroom in the world. The next week an image of the violence
made the cover of Time magazine with the caption POLITICS
PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S.
TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further boost international support for
Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a tour of Europe to meet
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Italian prime
minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when Bush
decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees
were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.

"I arrived fifteen minutes before it started," Rendon
recalls. "My first impression is having the pilot in the
plane turn around and say, 'Excuse me, sir, but if you look
off to the left you'll see the attack aircraft circling
before they land.' Then I remember this major saying, 'Excuse
me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense capability of
Panama is at the moment?' I leaned into the cockpit and
said, 'Look, major, I hope by now that's no longer an issue.'"

Moments later, Rendon's plane landed at Howard Air Force Base
in Panama. "I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where
the president was," he says. "I was choppered over -- and we
took some rounds on the way." There, on a U.S. military base
surrounded by 24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat
Talon AC-130 gunships, Rendon's client, Endara, was at last
sworn in as president of Panama.

Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein
began seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time
out for a vacation -- a long train ride across Scotland --
when he received an urgent call. "Soldiers are massing at the
border outside of Kuwait," he was told. At the airport, he
watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television.
Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan
Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline
of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad.

"I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face,
and I based it on our experience in Panama and the experience
of the Free French operation in World War II," Rendon
says. "This was something that they needed to see and hear,
and that was my whole intent. Go over, tell the
Kuwaitis, 'Here's what you've got -- here's some
observations, here's some recommendations, live long and
prosper.'"

Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton
Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an
old friend from his Democratic Party days. "He put me in
touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the
Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the
Kuwaitis," Rendon recalls. "And by the time I landed back in
the United States, I got a phone call saying, 'Can you come
back? We want you to do what's in the memo.'"

What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of
liberation to the American government -- and the American
public. Rendon proposed a massive "perception management"
campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join
forces to rescue Kuwait. Working through an organization
called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government in
exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his
assistance.

To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in
London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy
trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the
dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-
tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers
began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up
in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti
sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost
instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the
story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed
valentines to American troops on the front lines, all
arranged by Rendon.

Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network,
and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from
Taif, Saudi Arabia. "It was important that the Kuwaitis in
occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was
doing something," he says. Each night, Rendon's troops in
London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif,
ensuring that the "news" beamed into Kuwait reflected a
sufficiently pro-American line.

When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to
chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's
responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-
waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever
stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait
City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful
months, were able to get hand-held American -- and, for that
matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a
pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one
of my jobs then."

Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals
only in "timely, truthful and accurate information." His job,
he says, is to counter false perceptions that the news media
perpetuate because they consider it "more important to be
first than to be right." In modern warfare, he believes, the
outcome depends largely on the public's perception of the
war -- whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the
cost. "We are being haunted and stalked by the difference
between perception and reality," he says. "Because the lines
are divergent, this difference between perception and reality
is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of
war."

By the time the Gulf War came to a close in 1991, the Rendon
Group was firmly established as Washington's leading salesman
for regime change. But Rendon's new assignment went beyond
simply manipulating the media. After the war ended, the Top
Secret order signed by President Bush to oust Hussein
included a rare "lethal finding" -- meaning deadly action
could be taken if necessary. Under contract to the CIA,
Rendon was charged with helping to create a dissident force
with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the entire
Iraqi government. It is an undertaking that Rendon still
considers too classified to discuss. "That's where we're
wandering into places I'm not going to talk about," he
says. "If you take an oath, it should mean something."

Thomas Twetten, the CIA's former deputy of operations,
credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. "The INC was
clueless," he once observed. "They needed a lot of help and
didn't know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought
in." Acting as the group's senior adviser and aided by
truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide
spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in
Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which
he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama,
his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace
him with someone chosen by the CIA. "The reason they got the
contract was because of what they had done in Panama -- so
they were known," recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the
CIA's station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein and the agency's successor of choice
was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by
Washington's neoconservatives.

Chalabi was a curious choice to lead a rebellion. In 1992, he
was convicted in Jordan of making false statements and
embezzling $230 million from his own bank, for which he was
sentenced in absentia to twenty-two years of hard labor. But
the only credential that mattered was his politics. "From day
one," Rendon says, "Chalabi was very clear that his biggest
interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam." Bruner, who dealt with
Chalabi and Rendon in London in 1991, puts it even more
bluntly. "Chalabi's primary focus," he said later, "was to
drag us into a war."

The key element of Rendon's INC operation was a worldwide
media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but
now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to
world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to
the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations.
Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a "management fee" of
ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to
some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the
contract during the five years following the Gulf War.

Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following
the group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the
CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly
paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides,
moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to
flow. "The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these
days," notes Bruner. "Their contracts are much more with the
Defense Department."

Rendon's influence rose considerably in Washington after the
terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke,
Osama bin Laden altered the world's perception of reality --
and in an age of nonstop information, whoever controls
perception wins. What Bush needed to fight the War on Terror
was a skilled information warrior -- and Rendon was widely
acknowledged as the best. "The events of 11 September 2001
changed everything, not least of which was the
administration's outlook concerning strategic influence,"
notes one Army report. "Faced with direct evidence that many
people around the world actively hated the United States,
Bush began taking action to more effectively explain U.S.
policy overseas. Initially the White House and DoD turned to
the Rendon Group."

Three weeks after the September 11th attacks, according to
documents obtained from defense sources, the Pentagon awarded
a large contract to the Rendon Group. Around the same time,
Pentagon officials also set up a highly secret organization
called the Office of Strategic Influence. Part of the OSI's
mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception
operations -- planting false news items in the media and
hiding their origins. "It's sometimes valuable from a
military standpoint to be able to engage in deception with
respect to future anticipated plans," Vice President Dick
Cheney said in explaining the operation. Even the military's
top brass found the clandestine unit unnerving. "When I get
their briefings, it's scary," a senior official said at the
time.

In February 2002, The New York Times reported that the
Pentagon had hired Rendon "to help the new office," a charge
Rendon denies. "We had nothing to do with that," he says. "We
were not in their reporting chain. We were reporting directly
to the J-3" -- the head of operations at the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. Following the leak, Rumsfeld was forced to shut down
the organization. But much of the office's operations were
apparently shifted to another unit, deeper in the Pentagon's
bureaucracy, called the Information Operations Task Force,
and Rendon was closely connected to this group. "Greg Newbold
was the J-3 at the time, and we reported to him through the
IOTF," Rendon says.

According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played
a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with
creating an "Information War Room" to monitor worldwide news
reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with
counterpropaganda. 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 reports, as they are filed, before they are on the
Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four
hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts
them by keyword. 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, which the Pentagon
considered "critical to U.S. objectives in the War on
Terrorism." According to the contract, Rendon would provide
a "detailed content analysis of the station's daily
broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific
journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their
allegiances, including the possibility of specific
relationships and sponsorships."

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 the office should find ways
to "punish" those who convey the "wrong message." One senior
officer told CNN that the plan would "formalize government
deception, dishonesty and misinformation."

According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his
media analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign,
deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to
assist them "in developing and delivering specific messages
to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the
media and the international community." Among the places
Rendon's info-war teams would be sent were Jakarta,
Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo;
Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would
produce and script television news segments "built around
themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives."

Rendon was also charged with engaging in "military deception"
online -- an activity once assigned to the OSI. The company
was contracted to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English
and Arabic -- and "participate in these chat rooms when/if
tasked." Rendon would also create a Web site "with regular
news summaries and feature articles. Targeted at the global
public, in English and at least four (4) additional
languages, this activity also will include an extensive e-
mail push operation." These techniques are commonly used to
plant a variety of propaganda, including false information.

Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which
Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global
Communications, which operated out of the White House and was
charged with spreading the administration's message on the
War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30, Rendon took part in the
White House OGC conference call, where officials would
discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver it. The
office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group,
whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney
chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the
war to the American public.

Never before in history had such an extensive secret network
been established to shape the entire world's perception of a
war. "It was not just bad intelligence -- it was an
orchestrated effort," says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force
colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at
the National War College. "It began before the war, was a
major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict
distortions."

In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks,
Rendon operated at a frantic pitch. "In the early stages it
was fielding every ground ball that was coming, because
nobody was sure if we were ever going to be attacked again,"
he says. "It was 'What do you know about this, what do you
know about that, what else can you get, can you talk to
somebody over here?' We functioned twenty-four hours a day.
We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on
all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers
and 43 countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do
this correctly, I can tell you what's on the evening news
tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a
policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what's
going to be on the news. They'll take that in a heartbeat."

The Bush administration took everything Rendon had to offer.
Between 2000 and 2004, Pentagon documents show, the Rendon
Group received at least thirty-five contracts with the
Defense Department, worth a total of $50 million to $100
million.

The mourners genuflected, made the sign of the cross and took
their seats along the hard, shiny pews of Our Lady of
Victories Catholic Church. It was April 2nd, 2003 -- the
start of fall in the small Australian town of Glenelg, an
aging beach resort of white Victorian homes and soft, blond
sand on Holdback Bay. Rendon had flown halfway around the
world to join nearly 600 friends and family who were gathered
to say farewell to a local son and amateur football champ,
Paul Moran. Three days into the invasion of Iraq, the
freelance journalist and Rendon employee had become the first
member of the media to be killed in the war -- a war he had
covertly helped to start.

Moran had lived a double life, filing reports for the
Australian Broadcasting Corp. and other news organizations,
while at other times operating as a clandestine agent for
Rendon, enjoying what his family calls his "James Bond
lifestyle." Moran had trained Iraqi opposition forces in
photographic espionage, showing them how to covertly document
Iraqi military activities, and had produced pro-war
announcements for the Pentagon. "He worked for the Rendon
Group in London," says his mother, Kathleen. "They just send
people all over the world -- where there are wars."

Moran was covering the Iraq invasion for ABC, filming at a
Kurdish-controlled checkpoint in the city of Sulaymaniyah,
when a car driven by a suicide bomber blew up next to him. "I
saw the car in a kind of slow-motion disintegrate," recalls
Eric Campbell, a correspondent who was filming with Moran. "A
soldier handed me a passport, which was charred. That's when
I knew Paul was dead."

As the Mass ended and Moran's Australian-flag-draped coffin
passed by the mourners, Rendon lifted his right arm and
saluted. He refused to discuss Moran's role in the company,
saying only that "Paul worked for us on a number of
projects." But on the long flight back to Washington, across
more than a dozen time zones, Rendon outlined his feelings in
an e-mail: "The day did begin with dark and ominous clouds
much befitting the emotions we all felt -- sadness and anger
at the senseless violence that claimed our comrade Paul Moran
ten short days ago and many decades of emotion ago."

The Rendon Group also organized a memorial service in London,
where Moran first went to work for the company in 1990. Held
at Home House, a private club in Portman Square where Moran
often stayed while visiting the city, the event was set among
photographs of Moran in various locations around the Middle
East. Zaab Sethna, who organized the al-Haideri media
exclusive in Thailand for Moran and Judith Miller, gave a
touching tribute to his former colleague. "I think that on
both a personal and professional level Paul was deeply
admired and loved by the people at the Rendon Group," Sethna
later said.

Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of
mass destruction that he and Sethna had broadcast around the
world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was
about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White
House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri's fabricated
charges. In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and
Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name
and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had
already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on
the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains
there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's
article for the information.

Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri's tale of
Saddam's villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after
her first article appeared, Miller again reported that
Pentagon "intelligence officials" were telling her that "some
of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan
Saeed al-Haideri." His interviews with the Defense
Intelligence Agency, Miller added, "ultimately resulted in
dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related
activity and purchases, officials said."

Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the
dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to
Iraq by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip
through Baghdad and other key locations, al-Haideri was given
the opportunity to point out exactly where Saddam's
stockpiles were hidden, confirming the charges that had
helped to start a war.

In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal
weapons were buried.

As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush
administration's covert propaganda campaign has intensified.
According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by
Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the
Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military
deception" -- defined as "presenting false information,
images or statements." The seventy-four-page document,
titled "Information Operations Roadmap," also calls for
psychological operations to be launched over radio,
television, cell phones and "emerging technologies" such as
the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the
road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared
even with our allies.

As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare,
Rendon insists that the work he does is for the good of all
Americans. "For us, it's a question of patriotism," he
says. "It's not a question of politics, and that's an
important distinction. I feel very strongly about that
personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in
harm's way, they deserve support." But in Iraq, American
troops and Iraqi civilians were put in harm's way, in large
part, by the false information spread by Rendon and the men
he trained in information warfare. And given the rapid growth
of what is known as the "security-intelligence complex" in
Washington, covert perception managers are likely to play an
increasingly influential role in the wars of the future.

Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he
attended a conference on information operations in London,
where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon's efforts to
manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon
applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American
forces. "He said the embedded idea was great," says an Air
Force colonel who attended the talk. "It worked as they had
found in the test. It was the war version of reality
television, and for the most part they did not lose control
of the story." But Rendon also cautioned that individual news
organizations were often able to "take control of the story,"
shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the
day's events.

"We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to
be fixed for the next war."

James Bamford is the best-selling author of "A Pretext for
War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence
Agencies" (2004) and "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-
Secret National Security Agency" (2001). This is his first
article for Rolling Stone.