"I
Was a Propaganda Intern In Iraq"
By Willem Marx &
Amy Goodman
22 August, 2006
Democracy
Now!
We speak with Willem Marx, a former intern with the Washington-based
government contractor, the Lincoln Group. He spent a summer in Baghdad
paying to plant pro-American articles secretly written by the U.S. military
in the Iraqi press.
He held a loaded submachine gun while being driven through Baghdad by
two Kurdish security men. He had three million dollars in cash locked
inside his bedroom in the Green Zone.
Armed with a gun, he
interrogated Iraqi employees about whether they were doing their job.
He spent a summer in
Baghdad paying to plant pro-American articles in the Iraqi press that
were secretly written by the US military.
He was just 22 years
old and he was an intern at the Lincoln Group, the Washington-based
government contractor. The company gained notoriety last November after
the Los Angeles Times first revealed it was being paid by the Pentagon
to plant stories in the Iraqi press as part of a secret military propaganda
campaign. A subsequent Pentagon investigation in March cleared the Lincoln
Group of any wrongdoing.
Today, we speak with
that former intern of the Lincoln Group. Willem Marx is a freelance
writer and a graduate student in journalism at New York University.
His article detailing his experience is published in the latest issue
of Harpers Magazine. It's titled "Misinformation Intern: My summer
as a military propagandist in Iraq." He joins us on the line from
Uzbekistan.
AMY GOODMAN: Today,
we speak with that former intern of the Lincoln Group -- his name, Willem
Marx. He joins us on the line from Uzbekistan. He's a freelance writer
and a graduate student in journalism at New York University. His piece
-- his latest piece appears in Harper's magazine, detailing his experience.
It’s called “Misinformation Intern: My Summer as a Military
Propagandist in Iraq.” Willem Marx, thank you for joining us.
WILLEM MARX:
Hi, Amy. Good to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN:
It's good to have you with us. Well, why don't you start out just explaining,
how did you get this job?
WILLEM MARX:
Well, it started when I was approaching my final exams at Oxford just
over a year ago, and a cousin of mine who lived in New York told me
about a company that was offering internships in Baghdad. I had a place
to study at NYU the following September, and I thought that a summer
working in Iraq would be a very good experience for me as a burgeoning
young reporter. And I sent off my resume. I saw a sort of position offered
as a media intern. It didn't give a huge amount of detail. And it seemed
like an opportunity that very few people my age would get. And having
sent off my resume, I was contacted by the company, went through a few
telephone interviews, and soon found myself flying over to D.C. to pick
up a military identification card and then, a few days later, landing
in Baghdad.
AMY GOODMAN:
When you came to this country, you met the founders of the Lincoln Group?
WILLEM MARX:
Yes, I did. Two men -- one called Christian Bailey, who is a Brit like
me, and another former Marine called Paige Craig, who -- they have their
headquarters in Washington, D.C.
AMY GOODMAN:
And can you tell us any more about them and about that part of --
WILLEM MARX:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I arrived in D.C., having not been there for
a few years, since I visited a cousin at a university there. I didn't
know the city very well. They put me up in a hotel near their office,
and the morning after I had arrived, I walked up there. It was on K
Street, the heart of the lobbying industry. And I was introduced to
both of them. Paige Craig was very military, not particularly friendly,
and just, you know, muttered a few words to me, whereas Christian Bailey
had also gone to Oxford, and so we chatted about that for a while.
Neither of them were very
forthcoming really about what I would be doing out in Iraq. Pretty sort
of sketchy on details. But both, you know, were telling me there were
great opportunities for young people like me. They were a company that
was growing rapidly. And they welcomed me on board and wished me good
luck.
AMY GOODMAN:
Willem Marx, we're going to break, and then we're going to come back
to hear about your time in Iraq, your time in the Green Zone and out.
Willem Marx, former intern with the Lincoln Group. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN:
Our guest is Willem Marx. We're speaking to him now in Uzbekistan, a
freelance writer and graduate student, spent the summer, last summer,
in Iraq as an intern with the Lincoln Group and has written a piece
about it in the latest edition of Harper's magazine called "Misinformation
Intern: My Summer as a Military Propagandist in Iraq." Willem Marx,
had either man who founded the Lincoln Group been to Iraq?
WILLEM MARX:
Yes. Paige Craig, the former Marine, had certainly spent a lot of time
there, I think after the initial invasion in March 2003, and from what
I understood, he went out there to try and facilitate business opportunities
for foreign investors and in a very roundabout way ended up with a contract
for, I think, what they call “strategic communications”
with the U.S. military.
The other, the Brit, Christian
Bailey, had never, when I first met him, been out to Iraq, and he explained
to me that every time he meant to go out there, something would come
up in D.C., and he was needed to stay behind. Just after I left, at
the end of August, I think he made a trip out there for a few days,
but as far as I’m aware, that's the only time he's been there.
AMY GOODMAN:
So you got on a plane and went to Baghdad. Describe your experience
there.
WILLEM MARX:
Well, I arrived in Baghdad airport and was taken to a villa in the Green
Zone via Camp Victory. After about a week of twiddling my thumbs and
not really doing a lot, I became rather impatient and emailed people
back in D.C., saying, you know, "What am I doing here? I thought
I was going to be doing some work." And within a day or two, I
was taken to lunch by another employee, and he explained to me in detail
what exactly it was the Lincoln Group was doing. And I was going to
take over his position, because he was going on holiday, so -- on vacation,
I should say.
And what he was doing was
receiving English-written articles by soldiers in a certain unit inside
Camp Victory, the major U.S. base just south of Baghdad. He was choosing
which of those articles would be published in Iraqi newspapers. He was
sending them to Iraqi employees, getting them translated into Arabic,
getting them okayed by the command back at Camp Victory and then having
other Iraqi employees run them down to Iraqi newspapers, where they
would pay editors, sub-editors, commissioning editors to run them as
news stories in the Iraqi newspapers. And that was the role, you know,
after about a week or ten days of me being there, that I took over.
And for the first two or
three weeks of that, things seemed to go according to plan. I obviously
wasn't hugely happy about the work I was doing, but I saw it as a very,
very interesting insight into how both the U.S. military operate in
Iraq and also how contractors operate there. And things started to get
slightly more exciting, in that the company was offered a much larger
contract to do all sorts of other types of media placement, both on
television and radio, and the internet and through posters around Baghdad.
And I was involved in setting up some of the budgeting and the execution
of this larger contract, which was worth $10 million a month for the
company.
AMY GOODMAN: $10
million. According to MSNBC, "In December 2005, Pentagon documents
indicate the Lincoln Group […] received a $100 million contract
to help produce these favorable articles, translate [them] into Arabic,
get them placed in Iraqi newspapers and not reveal the Pentagon's role.”
WILLEM MARX: I
think MSNBC has got it slightly confused. The Lincoln Group was one
of three companies also offered -- also contracted for up to $100 million
for a contract with the Psychological Operations Joint Task Force, I
think it’s called, down in Florida. And that $100 million was
dependent on pictures they made, ideas they came up with and could then
sell to the military. That contract, with Lincoln Group at least, has
been canceled, I think as recently as this month. I think I saw a piece
in the Washington Post reporting that. So that $100 million, very little
of it was ever given to the company, I think, and it was certainly touted
by them as one of their major crowning achievements. But these are $20
million over two months, the $10 million a month for media placement
in Iraq, was a separate contract with the military in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN:
So, Willem, talk about how you chose these articles. Talk about the
generals you communicated with, what the content of the articles were.
WILLEM MARX: Sure.
Well, I'd get about five a day from this unit inside Camp Victory. And
they'd vary from profiles of an Iraqi policewoman, maybe, to stories
about factories opening, hospitals opening, terrorists being eliminated.
And I tried as much as possible to stay away from those that dealt with
terrorism and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I thought they were particularly
inflammatory, often badly informed about local feelings towards insurgents
in Iraq.
And I tried as much as possible
to push pieces which talked about reconstruction. I'd pass those ones
onto Iraqi employees, that talked about hospitals being rebuilt, and
they were very clinical stories. There was not often a lot of art to
the writing, but I felt that those were definitely stories that, you
know, the mainstream media, both in Iraq and elsewhere, would not be
writing about, purely because they would have no access to them. And
it was the kind of positive spin on the situation that I felt more comfortable
with using.
AMY GOODMAN:
And then --
WILLEM MARX:
And I'd -- sorry, yes?
AMY GOODMAN:
Talk about then what you would do once you chose these articles? Who
would you transmit them to?
WILLEM MARX:
I would send them to an Iraqi in Lincoln Group's downtown Iraqi office,
which was staffed entirely by local Iraqis, and he would choose one
of the translators they had there, get it turned into Arabic, send back
to me. I unfortunately don't read Arabic at all well. And I would then
send it to the command. I think they had an Iraqi translator there themselves,
who would check that it more or less followed the original English.
They would rubber stamp it, and I would then send it back to the Iraqi
office saying, “This is good to go. Put it in newspaper A, B,
or C.”
And from there, the process
really was beyond my control, and they would do their best to place
it in the newspaper I'd ask them to put it in, and often they didn't,
and I began to grow suspicious about why exactly they weren't putting
it in certain newspapers. And that led to what was, to me, the most
shocking episode of my time in Iraq, when I was called upon to question
some of the Iraqi employees at the downtown office as to why articles
were being placed in newspapers we hadn't asked them to be put in and
also why they were charging these newspapers far more than they had
when I'd first arrived, the suspicion being that Iraqi employees were
taking a cut of the money they then expensed the company.
AMY GOODMAN:
Why don't you explain that whole journey, how you left the Green Zone
and went to conduct this interrogation?
WILLEM MARX: It
was extraordinary. I was asked by my boss at the company to look into
-- you know, I'd noticed these discrepancies myself in the kind of flow
charts we kept, which monitored how many articles were published and
where, and I saw there were some very strange goings on in these records,
and I was sent to go and investigate, myself. So I took a friend from
the Green Zone, an Iraqi guy who lived nearby and worked more or less
as a handyman for another American contractor. He agreed to come down
as a mutual sort of friend of mine and translator, who the other Iraqi
employees wouldn't know and would not be able to follow or suspect,
in case there was any foul play to be experienced.
And he and I drove down to
this downtown office through all the checkpoints, sort of mid-afternoon,
I would say, arrived at this office, which, of course, is bolted and
relatively heavily guarded inside this apartment building. And I went
straight to the head of the Iraqi office and said, “I want to
speak to such-and-such and such-and-such and ask them about these discrepancies.”
And I, at this stage, had no idea who was really involved, who was guilty
and, because my Arabic was very rudimentary, I very rarely understood
much of what was sort of said in front of me, so it was difficult to
know who I should be trusting. And I sat down with one employee after
another and really questioned them about their involvement in the publishing
of these stories and whether they had been taking kickbacks in connivance
with local editors.
And the really startling
episode I write about is sitting down with one of these men, who I'd
never really trusted, and he very angrily was protesting the accusations
I was laying against him. And I carried a gun very often with me when
I traveled outside of the Green Zone, a small sort of Glock revolver,
and carried it in my belt, and as I sat down to talk to this man, after
a few moments, I realized that the revolver was very uncomfortably placed
inside my belt. And as I started asking these very accusatory questions,
I pulled the gun out of my belt and put it on the table between the
two of us and suddenly realized that was a horrifically threatening
motion. And I was really quite disgusted with myself, and the man left.
He ran away out of the office when I was questioning someone else.
The two men who had been
sent to help me put pressure, along with my own translator friend, to
help me put pressure on these employees were former Mukhabarat officers,
part of Saddam's intelligence service, and they told me the best approach
would be to sort of threaten this guy with a CIA investigation, telling
me that those three letters were the most threatening three letters
to any Iraqi. And once I had learned that the man I’d probably
gone on, as it were, had left the building, I decided, you know, it
was getting dark, and I needed to get the hell out of there, and this
was not at all the sort of thing I should be spending my time doing
if I wanted to be a journalist. And that really precipitated my departure
from Baghdad. I decided, you know, that week, I was out of there.
AMY GOODMAN: Can
you talk about the amounts of money that we're talking about on both
ends? Here you were interrogating these Iraqis about whether they had
possibly pocketed some of the money that was supposed to go to the newspapers.
And yet, on the other hand, you had the Lincoln Group receiving millions
of dollars.
WILLEM MARX:
Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN:
Can you explain?
WILLEM MARX:
Well, that was one of the really shocking things to me, is that, you
know, I was sent down to talk to these guys, and at most we paid, I
think, roughly $2,000 to place an article in the best Iraqi newspapers.
And, you know, they were taking half of that. They were pocketing a
grand an article, which in Iraq, as I'm sure you'd appreciate, is a
huge amount of money and would have helped them and their families quite
significantly.
At the same time, items in
the contract that the Lincoln Group had with the U.S. military -- one
such item, a line item, as they would call it, would be placing a TV
commercial on Iraqi television, and that would require them to film,
edit and then air these 30-second-long or minute-long on-air sort of
commercials. And each commercial, they were paid $1 million, just over
$1 million. And when I went to try and, you know, get some idea of prices
for these things, I was told that you could effectively get one of these
on air for about $12,000, and as I’m sure you appreciate, that's
a pretty significant profit margin. And yet, there was I, interrogating
people with guns for a mere $1,000.
AMY GOODMAN:
Can you talk about the U.S. generals involved and also the Iraqi newspapers
you had these articles placed in?
WILLEM MARX:
Yes. The process by which I passed on these articles often involved
a bit of back-and-forth between myself and captains and majors in the
U.S. military unit that I dealt with, and my relationship with them
was very important to the company. I had to at times be diplomatic,
at times be critical. And occasionally I would have to give up my editorial
control over which articles were pushed through to the Iraqi media,
because they had, themselves, received orders from above, from men like
General Casey, who was the top commander in Iraq at the time and, I
believe, still is. And General Casey said, “No, sorry. It's very
important we publish this article. You guys make sure the Lincoln Group
publishes it.” And lo and behold, we'd publish it, even though
it would be something that I felt was, you know, not really suitable
and would grate with many Iraqis reading it, who would think this is
obviously American propaganda.
And, you know, the newspapers
we dealt with, I think on occasions like that, were very, very suspicious,
I would imagine, of who was planting these articles, where they were
coming from, why freelance Iraqi writers would turn up to their offices
and offer them $1,000, $2,000 to publish an article. And there must
have been a huge suspicion from some of these editors that the Americans
were involved.
And one particular article
about the Badr Brigade, which is a Shiite militia, I'm sure you know,
which General Casey was very keen to push, basically applauded the Badr
Brigade for not retaliating against attacks on the Shia in Baghdad.
And he was very keen to get it pushed out, and two newspapers in a row
refused to publish it, because it was too inflammatory in a political
sense. So that was a very interesting experience, having this senior,
senior general getting involved in the nitty-gritty and wanting one
particular story to go out, only to discover that no Iraqi newspapers
in their right mind were willing to publish it for however much money
we offered.
AMY GOODMAN:
Well, Willem Marx, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Have
a safe trip back to the United States. I look forward to meeting you
when you come back to New York to get your journalism education. Willem
Marx has written a piece in the latest edition of Harper's magazine
called "Misinformation Intern: My Summer as a Military Propagandist
in Iraq."