But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the presidents $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of up-armored Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraqs security forces.
Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.
Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.
Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A., Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. I tried to push hard with some of Bremers people to engage these people of Al Anbar, he said.
Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. They cant shoot, but then again, they dont, one officer told them, according to one participants notes.
I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south, General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.
The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.
You cant believe the progress, General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be down to a few numbers within months.
We could not be more excited, more pleased, Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment whether to send more troops the analysts were unanimous.
I am so much against adding more troops, General Shepperd said on CNN.
Access and Influence
Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that mainstream journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.
Were hitting a home run on this trip, a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Its success only intensified the Pentagons campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.
The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips have the highest levels of visibility at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfelds closest aides, picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.
Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a conscious decision was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract the increasingly negative view of the war coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had a more supportive view of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen, he said.
For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.
Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. You start to recognize whats most important to them, he said, adding, Theres nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.
Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. Of course we realized that, Mr. Krueger said. We werent naïve about that.
They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the hit, the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon sources, the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.
They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level, Mr. Krueger said. This has been highly honed.
Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. Thats not something that ever crossed my mind, he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. We assume they know where the lines are, he said.
The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of key influentials had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.
An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts are having a greater impact on network coverage of the military. They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues, she wrote.
Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.
We knew we had extraordinary access, said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.
Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that some four-star could call up and say, Kill that contract. For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraqs security forces. I know a snow job when I see one, he said. He did not share this on TV.
Human nature, he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.
Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.
Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraqs purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had smoking gun proof.
We dont have any hard evidence, Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. We are looking at ourselves saying, What are we doing?
Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling very disappointed after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being manipulated to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.
Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.
Theres no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart, Mr. Bevelacqua said. Youre talking about fighting a huge machine.
Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.
Recall the stuff I did after my last visit, he wrote. I will do the same this time.
Pentagon Keeps Tabs
As it happened, the analysts news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on The OReilly Factor or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.
Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.
Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all, the report concluded.
In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable surrogates in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, just upfront information, while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. None of us drink the Kool-Aid, General Scales said.
Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. Not related at all, General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN in the lowest esteem.
Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.
On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the twisted version of reality being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give a heads-up that some of his comments on Fox may not all be friendly, Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfelds senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill OReilly that the United States was not on a good glide path right now in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.
Mr. Cowan said he was precipitously fired from the analysts group for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, simply didnt like the fact that I wasnt carrying their water. The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines deaths further erode support for the war.
The strategic target remains our population, General Conway said. We can lose people day in and day out, but theyre never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.
General, I just made that point on the air, an analyst replied.
Lets work it together, guys, General Conway urged.
The Generals Revolt
The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfelds former generals none of them network military analysts went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.
On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the Generals Revolt dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here, Mr. Rumsfelds office insisted that the boss wanted the meeting fast for impact on the current story.
That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.
Starting to write it now, General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. Any input for the article, he added a little later, will be much appreciated. Mr. Rumsfelds office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.
Vallely is going to use the numbers, a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.
The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept very formal, records show. This is very, very sensitive now, a Pentagon official warned subordinates.
On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.
Im an old intel guy, said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers names.) And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, Oh my God, theyre trying to brainwash.
What are you, some kind of a nut? Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. You dont believe in the Constitution?
There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfelds former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administrations overall war strategy, they counseled, was brilliant and very successful.
Frankly, one participant said, from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.
An analyst said at another point: This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesnt mean a tinkers damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there thats not a threat to us.
Yeah, Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.
But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. America hates a loser, one analyst said.
Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the political tide. One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to just crush these people, and assured him that most of the gentlemen at the table would enthusiastically support him if he did.
You are the leader, the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. You are our guy.
At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: In one of your speeches you ought to say, Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi. And then you just go down the list and say, All right, weve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah. If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, Oh my God, I cant imagine a world like that.
Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next milestone that would, as one analyst put it, keep the American people focused on the idea that were moving forward to a positive end. They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.
When you said long war, you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event, an analyst said. And again, Im not trying to tell you how to do your job...
Get in line, Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.
The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.
Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagons talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted frequently and sufficiently with his generals; that he was not overly concerned with the criticisms; that the meeting focused on more important topics at hand, including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.
Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:
Focus on the Global War on Terror not simply Iraq. The wider war the long war.
Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.
But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.
I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions, he said.
View From the Networks
Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.
Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to keep up the great work.
Hey, Mr. Garrett said in an interview, anything we can do to help.
For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.
Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.
I dont think NBC was even aware we were participating, said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.
Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. None of that ever happened, said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.
The worst conflict of interest was no interest.
Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.
CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.
NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.
Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the networks military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised, he said.
A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives refused to participate in this article.
CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.
Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.
CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.
General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.
We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have, CNN said in a written statement.
In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. I mean, thats what McNeil does, he said.
CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeils military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.
General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. Ive got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest, he said.
But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.
We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him, CNN said.
