Truth be told

The flap over the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence--which was put out of its misery recently--takes us back to that old question: Does the American government have the right to lie? Arthur Sylvester, a one-time Pentagon spokesman, became briefly famous in 1962 for saying the government could indeed lie to save the country. By establishing this new influence office, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reignited the controversy.

Despite Rumsfeld's efforts to caulk every leak in the Pentagon, he missed the one that did him and all the rest of us a favor by revealing the existence of this mysterious ministry of truth to The New York Times. The Times story of February 19 said the new office, overseen by a one-star Air Force general, planned to send news items, "possibly even false ones," to foreign-media organizations as part of the Bush administration's campaign to win offshore hearts and minds.

President Bush and Rumsfeld, who rushed to their damage-control stations after the story broke, subsequently insisted that neither the Office of Strategic Influence nor any other arm of their administration would deliberately lie. For the short term, their reassurance was too late to close the credibility gap opened by establishing the office with no announcement or explanation. In the long term, we still don't know how this administration might bend the truth.

An officer who had just come from the school for military information officers gave some insight into how much short-term damage the revelation of the Office of Strategic Initiative's existence has caused: "They told us [at the school], 'You're not spinners. You're supposed to get out the maximum information in minimum time.' I didn't hear anything about this Office of Strategic Influence." Now he's wondering if he's working in Spin City after all.

A senior information executive said he fears that the Bush administration's squads of mouthpieces from the public relations world are so obsessed with marketing the President's "message," they will break "the trust" between the military and the media that he and others have tried so hard to re-establish since the bad old days of the Vietnam War. Victoria Clarke is the Pentagon's top information officer.

She has a PR background, unlike most of her predecessors, who came from the news media. But in a January 9 exchange with Michael Getler--the Washington Post ombudsman and a former Pentagon reporter--she seemed to suggest that reporters fare better with her than they would with Sylvester, the former Newark, N.J., Evening News Washington bureau chief who ran the Pentagon's information empire from 1961 to 1967:

Sylvester never said the Pentagon should routinely lie. What he said, according to a transcript of his speech in New York City on December 6, 1962, was this: "It's inherent in that government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it's going up into a nuclear war. This seems to me basic. Basic." In elaborating later, during a House hearing, Sylvester said: "In our country, the governmental representatives of this people whom they elect and dispose of have a duty to take whatever means in their judgment, or in the judgment of the top people, is necessary when that people faces nuclear disaster. This was what I was trying to say." His speech was a response to media complaints that the government had deceived them during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

"The Pentagon does not lie to the American people; it does not lie to foreign audiences," Rumsfeld said. However, he and Gen. Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been openly frustrated about not being able to influence foreign opinion, especially about the war in Afghanistan. Because the Pentagon is very much a top-down establishment, it's possible that planning by Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden, head of the Office of Strategic Influence, and his deputies went further than Rumsfeld intended. It's also possible that the Secretary knew more about those plans, and especially about the possibility of the occasional use of disinformation, than he has acknowledged publicly.

Despite Rumsfeld's assurances, recent history documents that our government has lied to us. The Republican Eisenhower administration initially lied about the CIA spy plane that was shot down over Soviet airspace in 1960. At first, the administration told the American public that the plane was a space agency weather aircraft that went down because the pilot had "difficulties with his oxygen equipment." The Democratic Kennedy administration lied during the Cuban missile crisis. The George W. Bush administration's supposed dedication to the truth has not been as severely tested, so far. When it is, Bush and Rumsfeld should remember the warning that Gene Robb, vice president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, gave to a House committee in 1963: "A government can successfully lie no more than once to its people. Thereafter, everything it says and does becomes suspect."