Pentagon Closes Besieged Strategy Office

The Pentagon’s flirtation with a high-level office to influence public sentiment abroad came to an abrupt end Tuesday, when the fledgling effort was ingloriously disbanded in response to pressure from the White House and dissension within the Defense Department.

But with or without an Office of Strategic Influence, the Pentagon intends to continue its long-standing practice of dispensing misleading information to enemies in wartime, officials said.

That means telling the truth to reporters--but not necessarily the whole truth--conducting and publicizing military exercises with the express purpose of misleading foes about future military operations and keeping the details of new weapon systems under wraps. All have been routine practice at the Pentagon for generations.

“We’re going to preserve our option to mislead the enemy about our operations,” said Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy who oversaw the office.

What the Pentagon will not and never intended to do, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said this week, is to consciously plant false stories about its operations in the press.

Established in November, the Office of Strategic Influence was described as an effort to consolidate under one command various functions such as psychological and information warfare that until now had been spread through the Department of Defense. It grew out of the Pentagon’s frustration over early backlash in the Islamic media against the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

But the operation came under fire last week when the New York Times said the office, headed by Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden, had proposed spreading false information to foreign journalists as a means of furthering the U.S. war on terrorism.

Rumsfeld and others responded that the Pentagon would never lie. The Pentagon’s public affairs office, which coordinates news media coverage of the military and works with journalists daily, expressed its reservations publicly, with officials telling reporters they feared the new operation would undermine their credibility. Inside the Pentagon, pressure became intense to dismantle the office.

“I can’t say anything more than that the biggest disinformation campaign was leveled at us,” said Lt. Col. Marty France, a spokesman for the office.

The idea was to “make sure that all our efforts among all the agencies are better coordinated, not conflicting or stepping on each other’s feet,” France said. “We’re interested in getting the facts out to foreign audiences that are prevented from receiving them.”

When the controversy broke, Rumsfeld professed to know little about its mandate. But on Tuesday, in disclosing that the office would be shut down, he said criticism of the office had been “off the mark” and had made it impossible for the agency to do its job. He appeared to blame the press.

“The office is done. What do you want, blood?” Rumsfeld asked reporters.

The military has several agencies charged with conducting various types of information warfare. Most are kept under wraps, but one, the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations group at Ft. Bragg, N.C., has been widely publicized recently for the leafletting campaigns and radio broadcasts it has conducted in Afghanistan.

Much of information warfare consists of what the Pentagon calls “white,” or factual news releases and interviews based strictly on the truth. But military special operations teams have in the past also conducted “gray” operations, in which the public is misled, and “black” operations that include disinformation.

The disinformation operations, highly secret, are often conducted by intelligence agencies, sometimes with support from the Pentagon, current and former defense officials said.

In the buildup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the military went to elaborate lengths to let it be known that it was conducting amphibious assault exercises off the coast of Kuwait. It was all part of a psychological warfare operation aimed at deceiving Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein into believing that the U.S. would attack to the north.

“We put out every indication to the press and therefore to the Iraqis that we were going to do an amphibious landing in Kuwait,” said Jay Farrar, who handled press and congressional relations for the joint chiefs of staff at the time. “We gave the Iraqis the distinct impression that we were going to put this big assault up through Kuwait City.”

But because the military exercises were real, the Pentagon says it was not lying about them, just encouraging the press to cover them instead of something else.

“It was a conscious decision to let the press cover it. That doesn’t mean it’s a lie,” Farrar said. “We were practicing it. We were getting the troops ready. The troops were fully expecting to go. But it served a purpose.”

The military did the same thing in World War II, when it conducted amphibious operations near Calais, France, to fool the Nazis into believing the invasion would happen there instead of at Normandy.

“Now they didn’t land at Calais, but they never lied to the world and said they were going to land at Calais,” Rumsfeld said last week of the World War II effort. “What they did do is they did a whole series of activities that led people--the Germans--to believe they might land at Calais. And that would be called strategic influence or information operations.”

But with today’s instantaneous communication and the world’s media blanketing the globe, critics say it becomes almost inevitable that misinformation aimed at foreign leaders would find its way into legitimate news reports presented to allies and the American people.

“Deception is a perfectly routine kind of practice in the military--you may want the other side to have an unrealistic portrayal of what you can do,” said Eliot Cohen, director of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “What you’re seeing now is that in a world which is globalized, there is much more possibility that these things can come back into the main news stream.”