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How the public relations industry sold the Gulf War to the US

-- The mother of all clients

Part One

By John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton*

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops led by dictator Saddam Hussein

invaded the oil-producing nation of Kuwait. Like Noriega in

Panama, Hussein had been a US ally for nearly a decade. From 1980

to 1988, he had killed about 150,000 Iranians, in addition to at

least 13,000 of his own citizens. Despite complaints from

international human rights groups, however, the Reagan and Bush

administrations had treated Hussein as a valuable ally in the US

confrontation with Iran. As late as July 25 -- a week before the

invasion of Kuwait -- US Ambassador April Glaspie commiserated with

Hussein over a "cheap and unjust" profile by ABC's Diane Sawyer,

and wished for an "appearance in the media, even for five minutes,"

by Hussein that "would help explain Iraq to the American people."1

Glaspie's ill-chosen comments may have helped convince the

dictator that Washington would look the other way if he "annexed"

a neighboring kingdom. The invasion of Kuwait, however, crossed a

line that the Bush Administration could not tolerate. This time

Hussein's crime was far more serious that simply gassing to death

another brood of Kurdish refugees. This time oil was at stake.

Viewed in strictly moral terms, Kuwait hardly looked like the

sort of country that deserved defending, even from a monster like

Hussein. The tiny but super-rich state had been an independent

nation for just a quarter century when in 1986 the ruling al-Sabah

family tightened its dictatorial grip over the "black gold" fiefdom

by disbanding the token National Assembly and firmly establishing

all power in the be-jeweled hands of the ruling Emir. The, as now,

Kuwait's ruling oligarchy brutally suppressed the country's small

democracy movement, intimidated and censored journalists, and hired

desperate foreigners to supply most of the nation's physical labor

under conditions of indentured servitude and near-slavery. The

wealthy young men of Kuwait's ruling class were know as spoiled

party boys in university cities and national capitals from Cairo to

Washington.2

Unlike Grenada and Panama, Iraq had a substantial army that

could not be subdued in a mere weekend of fighting. Unlike the

Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Hussein was too far away from US soil,

too rich with oil money, and too experienced in ruling through

propaganda and terror to be dislodged through the psychological-

warfare techniques of low-intensity conflict. Waging a war to push

Iraq's invading army from Kuwait would cost billions of dollars and

require massive US military mobilization. The American public was

notoriously reluctant to send its young into foreign battles on

behalf of any cause. Selling war in the Middle East to the Ameri-

can people would not be easy. Bush would need to convince

Americans that former ally Saddam Hussein now embodied evil, and

that the oil fiefdom of Kuwait was a struggling young democracy.

How could the Bush Administration build US support for "liberating"

a country so fundamentally opposed to democratic values? How could

the war appear noble and necessary rather than a crass grab to save

cheap oil?

"If and when a shooting war starts, reporters will begin to

wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich sheiks," warned

Hal Steward, a retired army public relations (PR) official. "The

US military had better get cracking to come up with a public

relations plan that will supply the answer the public can accept."3

Steward needn't have worried. A PR plan was already in place,

paid for almost entirely by the "oil-rich sheiks" themselves.

Packaging the Emir, Part 1

US Congressman Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana -- a conservative

Democrat who supported the Gulf War -- later estimated that the

government of Kuwait funded as many as 20 PR, law and lobby firms

in its campaign to mobilize US opinion and force against Hussein.4

Participating firms included the Rendon Group, which received a

retainer of $100,000 per month for media work, and Neill & Co.,

which received $50,000 per month for lobbying Congress. Sam Zakhem,

a former US ambassador to the oil-rich gulf state of Bahrain,

funneled $7.7 million in advertising and lobbying dollars through

two front groups, the "Coalition for Americans at Risk" and the

"Freedom Task Force. The Coalition, which began in the 1980s as a

front for the contras in Nicaragua, prepared and placed TV and

newspaper ads, and kept a stable of fifty speakers available for

pro-war rallies and publicity events.5

Hill & Knowlton (H&K), then the world's largest PR firm,

served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. It's activities

alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign

ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the

Foreign Agents Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda

campaign to the American people, but the Justice Department chose

not to enforce it. Nine days after Saddam's army marched into

Kuwait, the Emir's government agreed to fund a contract under which

Hill & Knowlton would represent "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" (CFK)

a classic PR front group designed to hide the real role of the

Kuwaiti government and its collusion with the Bush administration.

Over the next six months, the Kuwaiti government channeled $11.9

million dollars to Citizens for a Free Kuwait, whose only other

funding totalled $17,862 from 78 individuals. Virtually all of

CFK's budget -- $10.8 million -- went to Hill & Knowlton in the

form of fees.6

The man running Hill & Knowlton's Washington office was Craig

Fuller, one of Bush's closest friends and inside political advi-

sors. The news media never bothered to examine Fuller's role until

after the war had ended, but if American's editors had read the PR

trade press, they might have noticed this announcement, published

in O'Dwyer's PR Services before the fighting began: "Craig L.

Fuller, chief of staff to Bush when he was vice-president, has been

on the Kuwaiti account at Hill & Knowlton since the first day. He

and [Bob] Dilenschneider at one point made a trip to Saudi Arabia,

observing the production of some 20 videotapes, among other chores.

The Wirthlin Group, research arm of H&K, was the pollster for the

Reagan Administration . . . Wirthlin has reported receiving$1.1

million in fees for research assignments for the Kuwaitis. Robert

K. Gray, Chairman of H&K/USA based in Washington, DC has leading

roles in both Reagan campaigns. He has been involved in foreign

nation accounts for many years . . . Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, account

supervisor on the Kuwait account, is a former Foreign Service

Officer at the US Information Agency who joined Gray when he set up

his firm in 1982:"7

In addition to Republican notables like Gray and Fuller, Hill

& Knowlton maintained a well-connected stable of in-house Democrats

who helped develop the bipartisan support needed to support the

war. Lauri Fitz-Pegado, who headed the Kuwait campaign, had

previously worked with super-lobbyist Ron Brown representing

Haiti's Duvalier dictatorship. Hill & Knowlton senior vice-

president Thomas Ross had been Pentagon spokesman during the Carter

Administration. To manage the news media, H&K relied on vice-

chairman Frank Mankiewicz, whose background included service as

press secretary and advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and George McGov-

ern, followed by a stint as president of National Public Radio.

Under his direction, Hill & Knowlton arranged hundreds of meetings,

briefings, calls and mailings directed toward the editors of daily

newspapers and other media outlets.

Jack O'Dwyer had reported on the PR business for more than

twenty years, but he was awed by the rapid and expansive work of

H&K on behalf of Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "Hill & Knowlton . .

. has assumed a role in world affairs unprecedented for a PR firm.

H&K has employed a stunning variety of opinion-forming devices and

techniques to help keep US opinion on the side of the Kuwaitis . .

. The techniques range from full-scale press conferences showing

torture and other abuses by the Iraqis to the distribution of tens

of thousand of 'Free Kuwait" T-shirts and bumper stickers at

colleges campuses across the US."8

Documents filed with the US Department of Justice showed that

119 H&K executives in 12 offices across the US were overseeing the

Kuwait account. "The firm's activities, as listed in its report to

the Justice Department, included arranging media interview for

visiting Kuwaitis, setting up observances such as National Free

Kuwait Day, National Prayer Day (for Kuwait), and National Student

Information Day, organizing public rallies, releasing hostage

letters to the media, distributing news releases and information

kits, contacting politicians at all levels, and producing a nightly

radio show in Arabic from Saudi Arabia, wrote Arthur Rowse in the

Progressive after the war. Citizens for a Free Kuwait also capi-

talized on the publication of a quickie 154-page book about Iraqi

atrocities titled The Rape of Kuwait, copies of which were stuffed

into media kits and then featured on TV talk shows and the Wall

Street Journal. The Kuwaiti embassy also bought 200,000 copies of

the book for distribution to American troops.9

TO BE CONTINUED. Yet to come: "Packaging the Emir, Part 2,"

"Suffer the little children," and "Front-line flacks."

1. John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in

the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press, 1992),

pp. 51-53.

2. Ibid.

3. Hal D. Steward, "A Public Relations Plan for the US Military

in the Middle East," Public Relations Quarterly, Winter (1990-

91), p. 10.

4. "H&K leads PR charge in behalf of Kuwaiti cause," O'Dwyer's PR

Services Report, Vol. 5, No., Jan 1991, p. 8.

5. "Citizens for Free Kuwait Files with FARA after a Nine-month

Lag," O'Dwyers FARA Report, Vol. 1, No. 9, Oct. 1991, p. 2.

See also Arthur E. Rowse, "Flacking for the Emir," The

Progressive, May 1991, p. 22.

6. O'Dwyer's FARA Report, Vol. 1, No. 9, Oct. 1991, p.2.

7. O'Dwyer's FARA Report, Vol. 5, No. 1, Jan. 1991, pp 8, 10.

8. Ibid, p. 1.

9. Rowse, pp. 21-22.

*From: Toxic Sludge is Good for you! Lies, Damn Lies and the

Public Relations Industry (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press,

1995.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

** From Blazing Tattles (BT) May 1996. Email sent to Blazing

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How the public relations industry sold the Gulf War to the U.S. --

The mother of all clients Part Two

By John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton*,**

PACKAGING THE EMIR, Part 2

Hill & Knowlton produced dozens of video news releases (VNRs) at a

cost of well over half a million dollars, but it was money well

spent, resulting in tens of millions of dollars worth of "free" air

time. The VNRs were shown by eager TV news directors around the

world who rarely (if ever) identified Kuwait's public relations

(PR) firm as the source of the footage and stories. TV stations

and networks simply fed the carefully-crafted propaganda to

unwitting viewers, who assumed they were watching "real" journal-

ism. After the war Arthur Rowse asked Hill & Knowlton to show him

some of the VNRs, but the PR company refused. Obviously the phony

TV news reports had served their purpose and it would do H&K no

good to help a reporter reveal the extent of deception. In

Unreliable Sources, authors Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted

that "when a research team from the communications department of

the University of Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and

correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about U.S. policy in

the region, they drew some sobering conclusions. The more

television people watched, the fewer facts they knew; and the less

people knew in terms of basic facts, the more likely they were to

back the Bush administration.1

Throughout the campaign, the Wirthlin Group conducted daily

opinion polls to help Hill & Knowlton take the emotional pulse of

key constituencies so it could identify the themes and slogans that

would be most effective in promoting support for U.S. military

action. After the war ended. the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

produced an Emmy award-winning TV documentary on the PR campaign

titled "To Sell a War." The show featured an interview with Wirth-

lin executive Dee Alsop in which Alsop bragged of his work and

demonstrated how audience surveys were even used to physically

adapt the clothing and hairstyle of the Kuwait ambassador so he

would seem more likeable to TV audiences. Wirthlin's job, Alsop

explained, was "to identify the messages that really resonate

emotionally with the American people." The theme that struck the

deepest emotional chord, they discovered, was "the fact that Saddam

Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his

own people, and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he

needed to be stopped."2

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

Every big media event needs what journalist and flacks alike refer

to as "the hook." An ideal hook becomes the central element of a

story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a strong emotional response,

and sticks in the memory. In the case of the Gulf War, the "hook"

was invented by Hill & Knowlton. In style, substance and mode of

delivery, it bore an uncanny resemblance to England's World War I

hearings that accused German soldiers of killing babies.

On October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus

held a hearing on Capitol Hill which provided the first opportunity

for formal presentations of Iraqi human rights violations.

Outwardly, the hearing resembled an official congressional

proceeding, but appearances were deceiving. In reality, the Human

Rights Caucus, chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and

Illinois Republican John Porter, was simply an association of

politicians. Lantos and Porter were co-chairs of the Congressional

Human Rights Foundation, a legally separate entity that occupied

free office space valued at $3,000 a year in Hill & Knowlton's

Washington, DC office. Notwithstanding its congressional trap-

pings, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus served as another Hill

& Knowlton front group, which -- like all front groups -- used a

noble-sounding name to disguise its true purpose.3

Only a few astute observers noticed the hypocrisy in Hill &

Knowlton's use of the term "human rights." One of those observers

was John MacArthur, author of The Second Front, which remains the

best book written about the manipulation of the news media during

the Gulf War. In the fall of 1990, MacArthur reported, Hill &

Knowlton's Washington switchboard was simultaneously fielding calls

for the Human Rights Foundation and for "government representatives

of Indonesia, another H&K client. Like H&K client Turkey,

Indonesia is a practitioner of naked aggression, having seized . .

. the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975. Since the

annexation of East Timor, the Indonesian government was killed, by

conservative estimate, about 100,000 inhabitants of the region.4

MacArthur also noticed another telling detail about the

October 1990 hearings. "The Human Rights Caucus is not a committee

of congress, and therefore it is unencumbered by the legal

accouterments that would make a witness hesitate before he or she

lied . . . Lying under oath in front of a congressional committee

is a crime; lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is

merely public relations.5

In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10

came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name

of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full name was being

kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in

occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her

own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was

passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait.

"I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I

was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with

guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators.

They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators,

and left the babies on the cold floor to die."6

Three months passed between Nayirah's testimony and the start

of the war. During those months, the story of the babies torn from

their incubators was repeated over and over again. President Bush

told the story. It was recited as fact in Congressional testimony,

on TV and radio talk shows, and at the UN Security Council. "Of

all the accusations made against the dictator," MacArthur observed,

"none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about

Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies for their incubators and leaving

them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City."8

At the Human Rights Caucus, however, Hill & Knowlton and

Congressman Lantos had failed to reveal that Nayirah was a member

of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father, in fact, was Saud Nasir

al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to the U.S., who sat listening in the

hearing room during her testimony. The Caucus also failed to

reveal that H&K vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached

Nayirah in what even the Kuwaitis' own investigators later

confirmed was false testimony.

If Nayirah's outrageous lie had been exposed at the time it

was told, it might have at least caused some in Congress and the

news media to soberly reevaluate the extent to which they were

being skillfully manipulated to support military action. Public

opinion was deeply divided on Bush's Gulf policy. As late as

December 1990, a New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that 48

percent of the American people wanted Bush to wait before taking

any action if Iraq failed to withdraw from Kuwait by Bush's January

15 deadline.8 On January 12, the US Senate voted by a narrow,

five-vote margin to support the Bush administration in a

declaration of war. Given the narrowness of the vote, the babies-

thrown-from-incubators story may have turned the tide in Bush's

favor.

Following the war, human rights investigators attempted to

confirm Nayirah's story and could find no witnesses or other

evidence to support it. Amnesty International, which had fallen

for the story, was forced to issue an embarrassing retraction.

Nayirah herself was unavailable for comment. "This is the first

allegation I've had that she was the ambassador's daughter," said

Human Rights Caucus co-chair John Porter. "Yes, I think people .

. . were entitled to know the source of her testimony." When

journalists asked Nasir al-Sabah for permission to question Nayirah

about her story, the ambassador angrily refused.9

FRONT-LINE FLACKS

The military build-up in the Persian Gulf began by flying and

shipping hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, armaments and

supplies to staging areas in Saudi Arabia, yet another nation with

no tolerance for a free press, democratic rights and most western

customs. In a secret strategy memo, the Pentagon outlined a

tightly woven plan to constrain and control journalists. A massive

baby-sitting operation would ensure that no truly independent or

uncensored reporting reached back to the U.S. public. "News media

representatives will be escorted at all times," the memo stated.

"Repeat, at all times."10

Deputy Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Pete Williams

served as the Pentagon's top flack for the Gulf War. Using the

perennial PR strategy of "good cop/bad cop," the government of

Saudi Arabia play the "heavy," denying visas and access to the U.S.

press, while Williams, the reporters' friend, appeared to intercede

repeatedly on their behalf. This strategy kept news organization

competing with each other for favors from Williams, and kept them

from questioning the fundamental fact that journalistic indepen-

dence was impossible under military escort and censorship.

The overwhelming technological superiority of the U.S. forces

won a decisive victory in the brief and brutal war known as Desert

Storm. Afterwards, some in the media quietly admitted that they'd

been manipulated to produce sanitized coverage which almost

entirely ignored the war's human costs -- today estimated at over

100,000 civilian deaths. The American public's single most lasting

memory of the war will probably be the ridiculously successful

video stunts supplied by the Pentagon showing robot "smart bombs"

striking only their intended military targets, without much

"collateral" (civilian) damage.

"Although influential media such as The New York Times and

Wall Street Journal kept promoting the illusion of the `clean war,'

a different picture began to emerge after the U.S. stopped carpet-

bombing Iraq," note Lee and Solomon. "The pattern underscored what

Napoleon meant when he said that it wasn't necessary to completely

suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no

longer mattered."11

POSTSCRIPT

For Hill & Knowlton, the Kuwaiti account was a sorely-needed cash

cow, appearing at a time that the PR giant was suffering from low

employee morale amid controversies surrounding some of its sleazier

clients.

When the Kuwait money dried up at the end of the war,

Hill & Knowlton went into a precipitous decline. A series of

layoffs and resignations at its Washington office, including a mass

walkout of two dozen employees, reduced that staff from 250 to

about 90. Clients began deserting the company, and rival PR firm

Burson-Marsteller stepped in to take its place as the world's

largest PR firm.

NOTES

1. Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A

Guide to Detecting Bias in New Media (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1991).

p. xvii.

2. Transcript, "To Sell a War," pp. 3-4.

3. John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda

in the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press, 1992),

p. 60.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 58.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 54.

8. New York Times/CBS News poll, as reported in O'Dwyer's PR

Services Report, Jan. 1991, p. 10

9. "To Sell a War," pp. 4-5,

10. MacArthur, p. 7.

11. Lee & Solomon, p. xix

*Toxic Sludge is Good for You, Lies, Damn Lies and the Public

Relations, 1995.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

**Blazing Tattles, June 96. No part of this may be reproduced

in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the

publisher. Responses to the above article may be quoted in future

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tion about Blazing Tattles send inquiry to .

Blazing Tattles is at P.O. Box 1073, Half Moon Bay, CA 94019.

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