Office of Strategic Influence

This article is part of the Propaganda Portal project of Spinwatch.

The Office of Strategic Influence was a propaganda unit set up within the US Department of Defense shortly after the September 11 attacks.

The office reported to Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith and co-ordinated its work with the White House counter-terrorism office run by General Wayne A. Downing, who had previously been in charge of over-seeing the military's covert operations. Among the units assigned to carry out the Office's operations was the Army's Psychological Operations Command.

Creation

According to the Department of Defense, the Office of Strategic Influence was created in November 2001.

Black propaganda role

An article in the New York Times commented on the Office's black propaganda role:

One of the office's proposals calls for planting news items with foreign media organizations through outside concerns that might not have obvious ties to the Pentagon, officials familiar with the proposal said.

General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from 'black' campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to 'white' public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon officials said.

'It goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white,' a senior Pentagon official said.

Feith defended the office after these proposals were revealed in the New York Times.

'We have an enormous stake in our credibility, and we're going to preserve that,' he told reporters at a breakfast meeting. 'But we're not going to give up on the obvious usefulness of managing information of various types for the purpose of helping our armed forces accomplish their missions.'

While he said American officials would not lie, he declined to rule out the possibility that the Pentagon might give outside contractors the authority to disseminate false or misleading information to foreign news agencies.

But the Pentagon later issued a clarifying statement saying, 'Consistent with Defense Department policy, under no circumstances will the office or its contractors knowingly or deliberately disseminate false information to the American or foreign media or publics.'

The controversy about the proposals led Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to distance himself from the office:

Mr. Rumsfeld said he would leave its fate in the hands of his top lieutenants. He said he had 'never even seen the charter for the office.'

But the office's assistant for operations, Thomas A. Timmes, a former Army colonel and psychological operations officer, said at a recent industry conference that General Worden had briefed Mr. Rumsfeld on the purpose and goals of the office at least twice, and that Mr. Rumsfeld had given his general support.

The office, which has a secret multimillion-dollar budget and a staff of about 15, had started planning its activities and coordinating with the National Security Council, the State Department and other federal agencies.

Rendon Group

Several of the New York Times Stories linked the office to Pentagon contacts with the Rendon Group, an angle that was later picked up by journalist James Bamford:

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."

Closure

Donald Rumsfeld announced the closure of the Office on 26 February 2002:

Mr. Rumsfeld moved swiftly to quell a controversy that threatened to undermine the entire Defense Department's public credibility. Asked today if the Pentagon's integrity had been compromised, Mr. Rumsfeld said: 'I doubt it. I hope not. If it has, we'll rebuild it.'

The office's demise came just a day after President Bush expressed alarm at some of its proposed activities. On Monday, when asked whether he had told Mr. Rumsfeld to close the office, Mr. Bush said: 'I didn't even need to tell him this. He knows how I feel about this.'

Afterlife

Donald Rumsfeld told a press conference on 18 November 2002 that the Office's intended activities had been carried out by other means:

And then there was the office of strategic influence. You may recall that. And "oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall." I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.

That was intended to be done by that office is being done by that office, NOT by that office in other ways.

James Bamford suggests that many of the unit's operations were shifted to the Information Operations Task Force.

In 2009, The New York Times described the Office of Strategic Influence as a precursor of the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Support to Public Diplomacy.

People

• Brigadier General Simon P. Worden - Director
• Thomas A. Timmes - Assistant for Operations.

Affiliations

• Rendon Group

See also Information Operations Task Force