White House says information system not aimed at U.S.

By Ben Barber THE WASHINGTON TIMES

White House spokesman David Leavy on Thursday adamantly denied a new International Public Information (IPI) system would be directed at American audiences.

IPI is a secret Clinton administration program to control public information disseminated by the departments of State and Defense and intelligence agencies.

It is meant to "influence foreign audiences in a way favorable to the achievement of U.S. foreign-policy objectives," according to a draft IPI charter obtained by The Washington Times.

But critics claim that IPI will be used for domestic propaganda.

"That is totally inaccurate," Mr. Leavy said. "The IPI initiative is designed to better organize the government and the instruments we have to support our public diplomacy, military activities and economic engagement overseas. There is no impact on the domestic press."

Mr. Leavy said that U.S. information officials at home and abroad serve different functions.

"There are officers who work with the media in the United States and officers who support the U.S. policy overseas. They are totally separate. They are totally different functions," Mr. Leavy said.

But a former deputy chief of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) under three presidents said he fears the IPI plan would mean U.S. propaganda aimed at foreigners would be used to influence American elections.

Gene Kopp, who served under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Bush, said the elections of President Kennedy and President Carter were directly influenced by leaks of USIA foreign public-opinion polls showing a decline in U.S. prestige abroad.

"I am concerned this could happen again under the IPI plan," said Mr. Kopp, currently a Washington lawyer. "The administration is transferring all assets, except broadcasting, to State, where they will not be separated in any way. It will be very difficult to separate what is disseminated in the United States and overseas."

He said that the opportunity for abusing the system will be great. "The temptation to spin this stuff in a partisan way will be very strong -- probably irresistible," he said. "The other ominous feature is that this includes the intelligence agencies. They are in the business of misinformation. God only knows where that goes."

New allegations emerged Thursday that the Clinton administration has been trying to control how American news organizations cover foreign affairs, at least since the Bosnia peacekeeping mission in 1996.

According to a former government official, who insisted on anonymity, the White House created a Strategic Planning Directorate, which used the State Department and USIA to pressure American reporters into favorable coverage of the U.S. troop deployment in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

It came into being just prior to the 1996 presidential election. "I heard them talk about it in conference telephone calls --how they had to control the media out there, the bureau chiefs, because if the Republicans picked this up [the Clinton administration] would be exposed as having no foreign policy," said the former government official.

Shortly after President Clinton won re-election in 1996, the administration announced that U.S. troops would not be home by Christmas, as promised. Today, nearly three years later, some 7,000 U.S. troops remain in Bosnia.

"The U.S. public wanted to know how long American troops had to be there," said the ex-official. "The Clinton people said 'only one year,' and [that] they would be home in December, after the election. But everyone knew the only way to keep the warring sides apart was robust international and American presence."

This former official said this was widely discussed. "In the conference calls, they openly discussed how they had to prevent American journalists from discussing this," he said.

The source said that USIA officials and National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger tried to convince American editors not to publish accounts by their reporters who wrote that Bosnia was unsafe for Americans, that Muslim extremists were a threat, and that the warring sides would never be pacified.

Ivo Daalder, who was a staffer on the National Security Council at the time, said discussions had no ulterior motives.

Mr. Daalder, who is now at the Brookings Institution, said the talks among the USIA, National Security Council and other agencies "had the sole purpose of making sure they share information among them, and when the U.S. government speaks to the outside world, it does so in a coordinated manner."

Mr. Daalder said "there was no deliberate campaign designed to put out false information prior to the 1996 presidential election."

He said that USIA did increase staffing and efforts to convince American reporters in Bosnia of the administration's perspective in September, prior to the Bosnian elections.