Many media "analysts" under sway of Pentagon

In 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The detention center had just been branded "the gulag of our times" by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from U.N. human-rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration's communications experts responded swiftly. They flew retired military officers to Cuba for an orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

These men are familiar to the public, presented on TV and radio as "military analysts" who give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the post-Sept. 11 world. Behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance, an examination has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues now, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the war policies they are asked to assess.

Those relationships hardly ever are disclosed to viewers and sometimes not to the networks. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies scramble for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration's war on terrorism.

Media Trojan horse

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse, intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts were wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They were taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They were briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and Stephen Hadley.

In turn, members of the group echoed administration talking points. Several analysts acknowledged they suppressed doubts about information because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the public.

"It was them saying, 'We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,' " said Robert Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. "This was a coherent, active policy," he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

"Night and day," Allard said. "I felt we'd been hosed."

The Pentagon defended the relationship, saying military analysts were given only factual information.

"The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

Pentagon "surrogates"?

Several analysts strongly denied they had been co-opted or had allowed business interests to affect on-air comments, and some have criticized the conduct of the war. Several, such as Jeffrey McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense-industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

"I'm not here representing the administration," McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts' interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could be counted on to deliver administration "themes and messages" to millions of Americans "in the form of their own opinions."

Although many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 an appearance, they sometimes spoke in Pentagon meetings as if they were behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, "the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world." Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — not all — echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

"Good work," Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. "We will use it."

Again and again, records show, the administration enlisted analysts as a rapid-reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage. For example, when articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: "I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena."

Guantánamo visits

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages: how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

Results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

"The impressions that you're getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here, in my opinion, are totally false," Donald Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on "Today."

"There's been over $100 million of new construction," he reported. "The place is very professionally run."

Within days, transcripts of the analysts' appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Wooing "talking heads"

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine have written op-ed articles for The New York Times.

The group was dominated by men immersed in the business of helping companies win military contracts.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC's most prominent analysts, Barry McCaffrey and the late Wayne Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with President Bush's national-security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation's will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a seductive environment: the uniformed escorts to Rumsfeld's private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank-you notes from the secretary.

"Oh, you have no idea," Allard said, describing the effect. "You're back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV."

Access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and one day might slip some to al-Qaida; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive "war of liberation."

On April 12, 2003, three days after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Torie Clarke, the former public-relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon's dealings with the analysts. "Let's think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over," he wrote.

Insurgency downplayed

By summer 2003, the first signs of insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists increasingly were suffused with the imagery of mayhem. The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

An internal Pentagon memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Bush's request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in op-ed pages.

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer, then the U.S. viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, "My Year in Iraq," that he had privately warned the White House the United States had "about half the number of soldiers we needed here."

Yet these harsh realities were ignored, or flatly contradicted, during official presentations for the analysts, records show.

These sessions, records show, depicted an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed.

One trip participant, William Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst, said some briefings were so clearly "artificial" that he joked to another group member that they were on "the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq," a reference to Romney's infamous claim that U.S. officials had "brainwashed" him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

The trip also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president's $87 billion would be spent.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants such as William Cowan and Carlton Sherwood.

Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq.

"Hitting a home run"

In Washington, Pentagon officials kept an eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. "They can't shoot, but then again, they don't," one officer told them, according to one participant's notes.

The Pentagon need not have worried.

"You can't believe the progress," Paul Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007, predicted the insurgency would be "down to a few numbers" within months.

"We could not be more excited, more pleased," Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News.

"I am so much against adding more troops," Shepperd, the retired Air Force general, said on CNN.

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that "mainstream" journalists were ignoring good news in Iraq.

"We're hitting a home run on this trip," a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail to Richard Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized.

"Extraordinary access"

Lawrence Di Rita, one of Rumsfeld's closest aides but no longer at the Defense Department, said a "conscious decision" was made to rely on military analysts to counteract "the increasingly negative view of the war" coming from journalists.

Other branches of the administration began to use the analysts. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping Americans without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David Petraeus was appointed commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

"We knew we had extraordinary access," said Timur Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Eads said he at times had held his tongue on television for fear that "some four-star could call up and say, 'Kill that contract.' " He said he believed Pentagon officials misled analysts about the progress of Iraq's security forces. "I know a snow job when I see one," he said. He did not share this on TV.

Even before the war started, some analysts said, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion but were careful not to express them on air.

Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq's purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had "smoking-gun" proof.

"We don't have any hard evidence," Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed. "We are looking at ourselves saying, 'What are we doing?' "

Another analyst, Robert Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and said he concluded the analysts were being "manipulated." Yet he and Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share misgivings with the public.

Some e-mails between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

"Recall the stuff I did after my last visit," he wrote. "I will do the same this time."

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable "surrogates" in Pentagon documents. Some asserted their Pentagon sessions were, as David Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, "just upfront information." Others noted, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. "Not related at all," Shepperd said, noting that many in the Pentagon held CNN "in the lowest esteem."

Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 Marines died in Iraq. That day, Cowan called the Pentagon to give "a heads-up" that some of his comments on Fox "may not all be friendly," Pentagon records show. When he told Fox's Bill O'Reilly that the United States was "not on a good glide path right now" in Iraq, repercussions were swift.

Cowan said he was "precipitously fired from the analysts group." The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail, "simply didn't like the fact that I wasn't carrying their water."

James Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts the next day.

"Let's work it together, guys," Conway urged.

Defending Rumsfeld

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace perhaps were never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Rumsfeld's former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting the next week, records show. Pentagon officials also helped two Fox analysts, McInerney and Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Rumsfeld.

On April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Rumsfeld and Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. A transcript shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

There was little discussion about the criticism of Rumsfeld. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality.

Much of the session was devoted to ways Rumsfeld could reverse the "political tide." One analyst urged Rumsfeld to "just crush these people" and assured him "most of the gentlemen at the table" would enthusiastically support him if he did.

The meeting ended and Rumsfeld took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Analysts soon hit the airwaves. Reports circulated to more than 80 officials confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon's talking points.

Less air time right now

Two weeks ago, Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

John Garrett, a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News and a Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told Petraeus to "keep up the great work."

For the moment, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time.

Still, the Pentagon almost weekly continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions.

"I don't think NBC was even aware we were participating," said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.