The Office of Strategic Information:
Part Two of the Post 9-11 Saga “Stupid Plastic Shoes”
“The Office of Strategic Influence, or OSI, was a department created by DoD in October 30, 2001, to support the Global War on Terror through coordinated Psychological Operations- PSYOPS- at target countries around the world. OSI was prohibited from operations iin America, since the Pentagon is barred from PSYOPs in the U.S. by US Code. Due to the new wonder of the ubiquitous Internet, that was shortly going to cause reconsideration of the OSI mission. The media was concerned they might pick up a story carried abroad that was “black propaganda planted by the Pentagon under OSI.”
“Closure of the office was announced by SECDEF Rumsfeld shortly after the story broke.”
– Stop me if this sounds like what has become routine practice not only here in The Swamp, but around the world. Ask Mr. Mueller about that. Vic
The story broke on that Monday in 2002, with the revelation that the Department of Defense had established an Office of Strategic Influence. It started like this in a copyrighted article from the New York Times:
Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad
By James Dao and Eric Washington
Feb. 18, 2002
The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said…
The idea of the Pentagon managing information for the U.S. Government was an interesting concept. After all, wouldn’t you assign a mission requiring guile, subtlety, agility and perfect knowledge to an organization having those attributes as core values?
Of course. The organization was the U.S. Army! They were the only ones who maintained a psychological operations (PSYOPS) capability, resident in the 4th Psychological Operations Group (4th POG). They were a tactical organization, not a strategic organization. But there wasn’t a strategic organization any longer, and hadn’t been since they shut down the Office of War Information in 1945.
Naturally, exposure to the light made the Office of Strategic Influence implode. It was a classic piece of Information Operations, conducted in the usual Washington way. Nothing high-tech. Just a phone call, a quick briefing to one of the usual suspects on “deep background,” fuel the fires of righteous journalistic suspicion of the great machine of national defense. It was a natural, an excellent story line set in motion by part of the machine itself.
So that little media event ran along, hissing and buzzing. In a way it was a good thing, since having mapped the players and the issues I was way out of my box, out of my lane, and far too exposed. The ensuing swirl provided me the top-cover to climb back in and pull the flaps closed. There are plenty of other little skirmishes going on around town in which to engage, and I am still engaged on strange fronts in odd places. There are multiple little wars that came along with the big one- the important ones inside the Beltway.
What Else Would Be Useful?
I had the privilege to be the Langley Liaison to a few of the designated survivor Cabinet members- the ones who had to chill in an undisclosed location in situations where the President and his legal successors could be eliminated by terrorists. No one was particularly happy with the way it was working out, but it did open up some unusual relationships with seniors in some of the Departments I had never thought about.
That is how I wound up trying to help Health and Human Services, which never had a classified idea in it’s fuzzy head, learn how to deal with the fact that First Responders are going to have to have sensitive information and the means to communicate it and protect it. Interesting problem.
One of the problems was articulated by Tommy Thompson, HHS Secretary. He was in the bunker, cooling his heels. He is an active man and frustrated by the isolation. He was hearing about the one-acre plots attributed to terrorist agricultural experiments. The thought was al Qaida was interested in biological weapons.
The Secretary looked at me and said: “You know I am responsible for the nation’s Strategic Pharmaceutical Stockpile?”
“Yessir. Necessary drugs have to be anywhere they are needed within eight hours.”
“Well how am I supposed to know what to have in the stockpile?”
“I am sure Langley will give you plenty of warning, Sir.”
Then the whole Office of Strategic Influence circus began, but when Mr. Rumsfeld shut it down I was itching to do something else.
Then, late in one week I was earnestly talking to a very nice lady from the Office of Homeland Security about how we might go about establishing a fusion intelligence office to bring together Justice Department criminal information with the Intelligence Community’s all-source intelligence methodology. The goal would be to address domestic terrorism issues and scoop up bad guys before they got into their Ryder trucks or boarded their airplanes.
The problem was this: the culture of Justice is about building cases, not about producing actionable intelligence. Watch the television show “Law and Order” to see why they hang onto information like rabid dogs. The Intelligence Community is about sharing information, within reason, and getting to the best guess about the future. The two views are inconsistent and the collision of these philosophies won’t be rationalized until after the next bit of awfulness.
Conclusion
Avoid shoes constructed exclusively of materials not found in nature. As to the Global War on Terror, I had some trial runs already, working on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. The events ranged from Beirut to Nairobi to the USS Colebombing, I thought then that we really should have had quite enough experience to move on and do something to fix the problem.
But oh well, that is the kind of world we are living in. We had a flurry of excitement after 9-11, similar to the bombing in Kenya, more robust, but now devolved to the same weird status quo—some furious planning, lots of meetings, but otherwise, business as usual. Until the next time, anyway.
We all should have been fired. Go figure. At least the swelling is down on my foot. My career advice is don’t get a job that features a lot of walking and a requirement for very shiny shoes.
Copyright 2019 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com