News-planting firm has millions in contracts

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1429312.php

News-planting firm has millions in contracts

By Gordon Lubold and William Matthews
Times staff writers

Just two years ago, the Lincoln Group was a small start-up communications firm with an idealistic vision and a handful of employees, many of them former service members.

Today, the company boasts 300 employees worldwide, is drawing $100-million contracts from the military and is at the center of a Washington mini-scandal as the firm that planted pro-American news articles in Iraqi newspapers on behalf of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Even though the placed stories were apparently factually correct, critics worried the contract amounted to a U.S. propaganda campaign that ran roughshod over the fledgling independence of Iraqi media.

Representatives from Lincoln Group, based in Washington, say they were only performing the duties as laid out in the contract and did nothing wrong. Defense officials, who seemed surprised by revelations of the existence of the contract, are investigating.

But Lincoln Group has its eye on bigger fish. The growing firm has a visionary streak that seeks to “spread peace through commerce” by building information and intelligence networks in emerging Third World countries as it expands its own market share, according to company representatives who spoke with Times reporters and editors Dec. 20.

Officials declined to talk in much detail about the nature of their work or with whom they are contracted. But Paige Craig, a 31-year-old former enlisted Marine who co-founded the company, said it is active in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates and is hoping to make inroads in Africa and Asia.

He said the firm’s goal is to promote commerce in hostile environments by “bridging the cultural divide” between those nations and Western governments and businesses.

Lincoln employs an eclectic mix of former military personnel — a former Special Forces medical sergeant works alongside a former New York University professor — as well as public relations specialists, television producers, business development consultants and research analysts. The company, whose founders pride themselves on being on the ground and in the field, have lost some 18 Iraqi employees since arriving on the international scene two years ago, Craig said.

The company’s vision is rooted in the notion that commerce can flourish if people and institutions have the right tools. In countries like Iraq, there is a hunger for information and entertainment content, said Craig, a bearded West Point dropout who joined the Corps to seek broader international experience.

In Pakistan, for example, Lincoln Group is looking at selling syndication rights to an American teen television program. If successful, young children in Pakistan — a key ally in the war on terrorism — would hear news and entertainment with an American bent.

The company earlier contracted with the Marine Corps to distribute plastic water bottles imprinted with a friendly message to thousands of Iraqis.

“A lot of the issues we face are due to ignorance and misperception,” said Craig, who left the Corps in 2000. “One belief we have … is that as the Middle East stabilizes and as the economy diversifies, you’ll see a huge demand for content.”

Lincoln is trying to help build that demand — and then meet it. Company officials consult with psychologists, psychiatrists, historians and other experts to determine the best ways to make favorable impressions on local populations.

For example, Craig said a U.S.-built school in Afghanistan was burned down because U.S. forces had excluded a local tribal leader from the process. Had U.S. personnel been aware of local customs and politics and brought the local chief into the project, the school might not have been destroyed, company officials said.

The private sector definitely has a role to play in efforts to gather and dispense information, said Eric Larson, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. And private marketing and advertising firms tend to attract the kind of “creative types” who can think of ways to get an effective message through to native populations.

“The government and the military are limited,” both in manpower and other resources, to do this kind of thing, he said. “These are complementary skills that are out there in the private sector [and] could be helpful.”

Lincoln Group was one of three firms hired last summer by the Defense Department to work in Iraq to improve public opinion of the America and its military.

The arrangement became controversial last month when the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets reported that Lincoln received a contract worth up to $100 million to do work on behalf of Multi-National Forces Iraq, to include planting favorable stories produced by the U.S. military in Iraqi newspapers and on Iraqi radio.

The question of whether the military should have hired Lincoln to wage a public-relations offensive in Iraq has sparked a Pentagon inquiry and discussion of a congressional probe.

But Craig said the clamor over the contract has not hurt Lincoln Group’s business.

William Matthews is a writer for Defense News.