By Robert Burns, Associated Press, 02/20/02

WASHINGTON -- Pentagon officials on Wednesday denied planning to use a new Office of Strategic Influence to plant false information in the news media to promote U.S. war goals.

"The Pentagon does not issue disinformation to the foreign press or any press," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld and his aides said the exact limits of the office's mandate have yet to be defined, but that in any case its efforts to shape world opinion would not include deliberately spreading falsehoods.

Rumsfeld said the Pentagon might engage in strategic or tactical deception, as it has in the past. For example, if U.S. troops were about to launch an attack from the west, they might "do things" that would make the enemy believe an attack was instead coming from the north, Rumsfeld said.

"That would be characterized as tactical deception," the secretary said.

The main reason for creating the new office last fall was to centralize oversight of what the military calls "information operations," such as spreading messages on a battlefield by leaflet or airborne broadcasts, said Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. He oversees the new office.

The office also may explore "all kinds of ways of affecting enemies' perceptions" of U.S. military activities in wartime, he said.

"We have an interest in the enemy not knowing, not being comfortable about what we are going to do" on the battlefield, Feith said in a breakfast interview with a group of reporters.

He stressed that this would not include lying to the public.

"We have an enormous stake in our credibility, and we're going to preserve that," he said. "But we're not going to give up on the obvious usefulness of managing information of various types for the purpose of helping our armed forces accomplish their missions."

Rumsfeld stressed that the new office's mandate is still under discussion. Asked if it would do anything the Pentagon has not done in previous wars, he said: "We do have to think of it in a different way" because of the unique nature of the war on terrorism. "How it will play out over time, I don't know."

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Office of Strategic Influence, which is headed by Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden, has begun circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive campaigns that use not only the foreign media and the Internet but also clandestine operations.

Feith indicated that some proposals would have gone too far. He said senior Pentagon officials, in creating the office after the Sept. 11 attacks, saw a need to "have oversight over all kinds of information."

"What happens is, when you put together an operation to do that, somebody immediately comes forward with suggestions that go beyond this very sensible and rather narrow concept," he said.

Asked whether the Pentagon might secretly enlist a nongovernment entity to spread false or misleading information to the news media, Feith replied, "We are going to preserve our ability to undertake operations that may, for tactical purposes, mislead an enemy. But we are not going to blow our credibility as an institution in our public pronouncements."

Critics worry that the Pentagon is planning to plant false information abroad that could get back to Americans.

"In this age of global communication, misleading information disseminated overseas would quickly become known to U.S. news organizations," Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, wrote in a letter to Rumsfeld.

"There would be no way to ensure that falsehoods told abroad would not also be told to the American public," she added.