It’s about time you got to know John Rendon. And thanks to a profile in Rolling Stone, of all places (we can’t remember the last time they broke news like this), we can all become better acquainted with “the man who sold the war.”
Rendon runs a Washington PR firm called Rendon Group that has received millions in government contracts since 1991, mostly to place upbeat stories about U.S. foreign policy in the world’s news outlets. Remember those thousands of Kuwaiti citizens, just liberated from Iraqi occupation, joyfully waving American flags? Rendon put those flags in their hands. And, according to the Rolling Stone piece, he played a critical role in helping to build and support the case for war in Iraq, earning between $50 and $100 million from at least 35 contracts with the Defense Department between 2000 and 2004.
His non-Defense-funded work included working under contract for the CIA to organize the group of Iraqi dissidents led by Ahmed Chalabi that became known as the Iraqi National Congress. According to a former CIA director of operations, Rendon created the Iraqi National Congress in the early 1990s and then engaged in “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.”
And in 2002, Rendon was responsible for disseminating what turned out to be false information on WMD that the INC was producing. One of the people he apparently duped with this faulty intelligence (despite the fact that his source could not pass a CIA lie detector test) was Judith Miller.
Amazingly, James Bamford, the author of the piece, got Rendon to talk a bit about his highly secretive activities, over “a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape.” Rendon has “an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors” according to the article, which makes his talking remarkable. The only previous mention of Rendon that we could find was a piece in the Independent which notes that “No journalist has managed to get more than two words out of him (‘No comment’).” It continues, “But believe me, he is the most powerful man in the world.”
Rendon doesn’t reveal all that much about the Iraq war in the Rolling Stone piece. He does describe a long career of propaganda and media manipulation, from his first overseas job hyping the need for an invasion of Panama to his $100,000 a month work on a “‘perception management’ campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait.” And the Rolling Stone article notes that three weeks after the September 11th attacks, Rendon apparently received another large contract, this time from the Pentagon.
The way Rendon sees it, his job, he says in the article, “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.'”
Though government-sponsored domestic propaganda is illegal, there are no laws against trying to influence press coverage in other countries. And that is what Rendon has done to amazing effect, setting up a sophisticated system to monitor the world media in order to counteract and redirect stories.
Of course, when the Internet makes thousands of international news outlets available with the click of a mouse, the spin doesn’t just stay overseas.
It comes right to your computer.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.