... While Tripping Up on Propaganda Abroad

By DOUGLAS WALLER, Elaine Shannon

Top aides at the Pentagon and State Department are furious that the President's big speech last week touting progress in Iraq was largely drowned out by disclosures that the U.S. command in Baghdad had been secretly planting rosy stories in Iraqi newspapers. Administration sources say Karen Hughes, who is in charge of improving the U.S.'s image abroad, is fuming and that neither she--as the State Department's Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy--nor such senior Pentagon officers as Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace knew of the program until the Los Angeles Times broke the story last week.

Under a $5 million contract negotiated last year by the U.S. command's Information Operations Task Force, the Lincoln Group, a Washington-based p.r. firm, translated upbeat stories written by military information officers and then paid Iraqi newspapers to print them or hired Iraqi journalists to sell them as their own stories. U.S. officers in Baghdad insisted last week they were only trying to get the truth out by buying editorial space, a customary practice in Iraq that prompted Hughes to launch programs there to train journalists to be more independent. Says a Defense Department official: "This certainly undercuts what she's trying to do."