Window into US ‘psyops’ in Iraq

Thomas Ricks had an interesting piece in yesterday’s WaPo, reporting on some leaks he’d gotten from U.S. Army officers about some PSYOPS (disinformation/ black propagnda) operations that they’d done back in 2004 to try to blacken the name of the possibly mythical Al-Qaeda figure, Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi.
Among the things that at least one officer reported having done, according to the first of these two Power Point stills that someone gave to Ricks, was to make a “Selective leak to [the NYT’s] Dexter Filkins” about Zarqawi, back in February ’04.
Ricks writes,

Filkins’s resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.
Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.

You can actually still read the Filkins article in question from February 2004. It’s datelined Baghdad.
He wrote there that he’d been shown the Arabic letter in question and an English translation made by the US military, and was allowed to copy down large chunks of the English translation. No indication that he could read the Arabic, or that he was allowed to take his own Arabic translator in there with him…
The gist of the “Zarqawi letter” that Filkins described was– in effect– that Zarqawi was planning to foment a sectarian war. (Gosh, that makes Mr. Z. look rather bad, don’t you think?)
And this– for an administration that was struggling hard to persuade people of the connection between their war in Iraq and the broader “war on terrorism”:

The document would also constitute the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Are we scared yet???
Filkins did retain enough of his reportorial indpendence to write that, in addition to the claims made by his US military contacts that the letter was an “authentic” communication from Zarqawi, “other interpretations may be possible, including that it was written by some other insurgent, but one who exaggerated his involvement.”
He notably didn’t mention the possibility that the whole thing may have been a piece of black propaganda (PSYOPS) perpetrated on him and his unsuspecting readers by the US military.
Oh, but he did try to authenticate the letter in one way. His Washington colleague Douglas Jehl evidently contacted, “a senior United States intelligence official in Washington.”
This person, Filkins wrote,

said, “I know of no reason to believe the letter is bogus in any way.” He said the letter was seized in a raid on a known Qaeda safe house in Baghdad, and did not pass through Iraqi groups that American intelligence officials have said in the past may have provided unreliable information

Phew, that was a relief– to learn that the letter did not come from “Iraqi groups” who may have been unreliable… Just, as it happens, from some quite reliably mendacious US PSYOPS people…
In Ricks’s piece yesterday, he wrote,

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter “because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized.” No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document’s authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.

Well, if he was skeptical at the time about the letter’s authenticity, he sure didn’t share any of that skepticism with his readers. Instead, with all earnestness, he tried to “persuade” us that, because he’d received authentication from “a senior US intelligence in Washington”, then it was probably genuine.
Greg Mitchell over at Editor & Publisher has dug up some more info about the fallout from the Filkins piece. Writing yesterday, he noted:

In his Post story today, Ricks also does not mention what happened next.
William Safire, in his Feb. 11, 2004, column for the Times titled “Found: A Smoking Gun,” declared that the letter “demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a ‘’clear link’ between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.” Safire mocked the Washington Post for burying the story on page 17, while hailing a Reuters account quoting an “amazed” U.S. officials saying, “We couldn’t make this up if we tried.”
Three days later, another Times columnist, David Brooks, covered the letter as fact under the heading “The Zarqawi Rules.” The letter was covered in this manner by other media for weeks. So clearly, the leak to Filkins worked.
A Web search of New York Times articles in the two months after the scoop failed to turn up any articles casting serious doubts on the letter. Two leading writers for Newsweek on its Web site quickly had a different view, however.
Christopher Dickey, the Middle East regional editor, on February 13, 2004, asked: “Given the Bush administration’s record peddling bad intelligence and worse innuendo, you’ve got to wonder if this letter is a total fake. How do we know the text is genuine? How was it obtained? By whom? And when? And how do we know it’s from Zarqawi? We don’t. We’re expected to take the administration’s word for it.”
Rod Nordland, the magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief, on March 6 wrote: “The letter so neatly and comprehensively lays out a blueprint for fomenting strife with the Shia, and later the Kurds, that it’s a little hard to believe in it unreservedly. It came originally from Kurdish sources who have a long history of disinformation and dissimulation. It was an electronic document on a CD-ROM, so there’s no way to authenticate signature or handwriting, aside from the testimony of those captured with it, about which the authorities have not released much information.”
Ricks… quoted one internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, which revealed that Kimmitt [Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military’s chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004] had concluded that, “The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date.”

Does that make Dexter Filkins the biggest shill to date, I wonder?