by John R. MacArthur
The New York Times
January 6, 1992, Section A, Page 17
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In his urgent arguments during the fall and winter of 1990 for military action against Saddam Hussein, President Bush made much of the Iraqi leader's cruelty toward the Kuwaiti people. Mr. Bush's allegations of atrocities by Iraqi forces generally went unchallenged. Mr. Hussein's violent disposal of dissident Iraqis was a matter of record, so few politicians, journalists or human rights investigators were prepared to question the President's campaign to paint his opponent as Adolf Hitler reborn.
Some claims were no doubt true, but the most sensational one -- that Iraqi soldiers removed hundreds of Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them to die on hospital floors -- was shown to be almost certainly false by an ABC reporter, John Martin, in March 1991, directly after the liberation of Kuwait. He interviewed hospital doctors who stayed in Kuwait throughout the occupation.
But before the war, the incubator story seriously distorted the American debate about whether to support military action. Amnesty International believed the tale, and its ill-considered validation of the charges likely influenced the seven U.S. Senators who cited the story in speeches supporting the Jan. 12 resolution authorizing war. Since the resolution passed the Senate by only six votes, the question of how the incubator story escaped scrutiny -- when it really mattered -- is all the more important. (Amnesty International later retracted its support of the story.)
A little reportorial investigation would have done a great service to the democratic process. Americans would have been interested to know the identity of "Nayirah," the 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who shocked the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Oct. 10, 1990, when she tearfully asserted that she had watched 15 infants being taken from incubators in Al-Adan Hospital in Kuwait City by Iraqi soldiers who "left the babies on the cold floor to die." The chairmen of the Congressional group, Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, and John Edward Porter, an Illinois Republican, explained that Nayirah's identity would be kept secret to protect her family from reprisals in occupied Kuwait.
There was a better reason to protect her from exposure: Nayirah, her real name, is the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S., Saud Nasir al-Sabah. Such a pertinent fact might have led to impertinent demands for proof of Nayirah's whereabouts in August and September of 1990, when she said she witnessed the atrocities, as well as corroboration of her charges. The Kuwaiti Embassy has rebuffed my efforts to reach Nayirah.
Today, we are left to ask why Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter allowed such glaring omissions? What made Nayirah so believable that no one on the caucus staff bothered to check out her story?
One explanation might lie in how Nayirah came to the Congressmen's attention. Both Congressmen have a close relationship with Hill and Knowlton, the public relations firm hired by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti-financed group that lobbied Congress for military intervention. A Hill and Knowlton vice president, Gary Hymel, helped organize the Congressional Human Rights Caucus hearing in meetings with Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter and the chairman of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, Hassan al-Ebraheem. Mr. Hymel presented the witnesses, including Nayirah. (He later told me he knew who she was at the time.)
THE INTELLIGENCE CONNECTION
The government's use of PR firms in general, and Hill and Knowlton in particular, goes beyond ethically dubious opinion manipulation. It includes potentially illegal proxy spying operations for intelligence agencies. "H&K recruited students to attend teach-ins and demonstrations on college campuses at the height of the Vietnam War, and to file agent-like reports on what they learned," according to author Susan Trento. "The purpose was for H&K to tell its clients that it had the ability to spot new trends in the activist movement, especially regarding environmental issues." Richard Cheney (no relation to former Secretary of Defense Cheney), head of H&K's New York office, denied this allegation. He said that H&K recommends that its clients hire private investigative agencies to conduct surveillance and intelligence work. But, Cheney admitted, "in such a large organization you never know if there's not some sneak operation going on."
Former CIA official Robert T. Crowley, the Agency's long-time liaison with corporations, sees it differently. "Hill and Knowlton's overseas offices," he acknowledged, "were perfect 'cover' for the ever-expanding CIA. Unlike other cover jobs, being a public relations specialist did not require technical training for CIA officers." The CIA, Crowley admitted, used its H&K connections "to put out press releases and make media contacts to further its positions. ...H&K employees at the small Washington office and elsewhere, distributed this material through CIA assets working in the United States news media." Since the CIA is prohibited from disseminating propaganda inside the U.S., this type of "blowback" -- which former CIA officer John Stockwell and other researchers have often traced to the Agency -- is illegal. While the use of U.S. media by the CIA has a long and well-documented history, the covert involvement of PR firms may be news to many. According to Trento:"Reporters were paid by the CIA, sometimes without their media employers' knowledge, to get the material in print or on the air. But other news organizations ordered their employees to cooperate with the CIA, including the San Diego-based Copley News Service. But Copley was not alone, and the CIA had 'tamed' reporters and editors in scores of newspaper and broadcast outlets across the country. To avoid direct relationships with the media, the CIA recruited individuals in public relations firms like H&K to act as middlemen for what the CIA wanted to distribute.
This close association and dependence upon the intelligence community by reporters has created a unique situation which has shielded PR executives and firms from closer scrutiny by the media and Congress. According to Trento, "These longstanding H&K intelligence ties and CIA-linked reporters' fears that Gray might know about them might partially explain why Gray has escaped close media examination, even though he was questioned about his or his associates' roles in one major scandal after another during his long Washington career."
Over the years, Hill and Knowlton and Robert Gray [Robert Keith Gray, head of Hill and Knowlton's Washington office for three decades, who used to brag about checking major decisions personally with CIA director William Casey, whom he considered a close personal friend.] have been implicated in the BCCI scandal, the October Surprise, the House page sex and drug scandal, Debategate, Koreagate, and Iran-Contra. In October 1988, three days after the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiring with the Medellin Cartel to launder $32,000,000 in illicit drug profits, the bank hired H&K to manage the scandal. Robert Gray also served on the board of directors of First American Bank, the Washington D.C. bank run by Clark Clifford (now facing federal charges) and owned by BCCI. Gray was close to, and helped in various ways, top Reagan officials. When Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's son needed a job, Gray hired him for $2,000 a month. "And when Gray's clients needed something from the Pentagon, Gray and Co. went right to the top." Gray also helped Attorney General Ed Meese's wife, Ursula, get a lucrative job with a foundation which was created by a wealthy Texas client, solely to employ her.
-- Public Relationships: Hill & Knowlton, Robert Gray, and the CIA, by Johan Carlisle, Covert Action Quarterly
Until he started working on the Kuwait account, Mr. Hymel was best known to the caucus for defending the human rights record of Turkey, a Hill and Knowlton client, criticized for jailing people without due process and torturing and killing them. He is also one of the firm's lobbyists for the Indonesian Government, which has killed at least 100,000 inhabitants of East Timor since 1975.
Mr. Lantos's spokesman says that Hill and Knowlton's client list doesn't concern the Congressman, who accepted a $500 contribution from the firm's political action committee in 1988. In fact, Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter allowed the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a group they founded in 1985, to be housed in Hill and Knowlton's Washington headquarters. The firm provides a contribution to the foundation in the form of a $3,000 annual rent reduction, and the Hill and Knowlton switchboard delivers messages to the foundation's executive director, David Phillips.
Hill and Knowlton's client, Citizens for a Free Kuwait, donated $50,000 to the foundation, sometime after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. (The foundation's main supporter is the U.S. Government-financed National Endowment for Democracy.)
Although NED is technically independent of the U.S. government, it receives the bulk of its funding (now about $100 million a year) from Congress. Documents from the Reagan archives also make clear that NED was organized as a way to replace some of the CIA’s political and propaganda covert operations, which had fallen into disrepute in the 1970s. Earlier released documents from Raymond’s file show CIA Director William Casey pushing for NED’s creation and Raymond, Casey’s handpicked man on the NSC, giving frequent advice and direction to Gershman. [See “CIA’s Hidden Hand in ‘Democracy’ Groups.”]
-- How US Flooded the World with Psyops, by Robert Parry
Since the gulf war, Hill and Knowlton's collaboration with the Lantos-Porter human rights enterprise has been strengthened by the naming of the firm's vice chairman, Frank Mankiewicz, to the foundation's board in October 1991. Perhaps the Congressmen and directors were impressed by the recent addition of China to Hill and Knowlton's prestigious portfolio of clients. (The firm's clients, Indonesia and Turkey, were notably absent from the foundation's 1991 list of human rights concerns.)
Congress and the news media deserve censure for their lack of skepticism about the incubator story. As for Representatives Lantos and Porter, they deserve a medal from the Emir for their work on behalf of the Kuwaiti cause. But their special relationship with Hill and Knowlton should prompt a Congressional investigation to find out if their actions merely constituted an obvious conflict of interest or, worse, if they knew who the tearful Nayirah really was in October 1990.