US seen boosting Zarqawi's profile

WASHINGTON -- The US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program.

The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the US campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. US authorities claim some success with the effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the ''US Home Audience" as a target of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role might have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings, and at least one leak to an American journalist.

Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain ''a very small part of the actual numbers," Colonel Derek Harvey, who was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, ''Our own focus on al-Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the US media. One briefing slide about US ''strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army General George W. Casey Jr., the top US commander in Iraq, describes the ''home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.

One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a ''selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page Feb. 9, 2004.

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi.

''There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said in an interview Friday. ''We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."