Information Wars. Richard Stengel
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say, “don’t get no respect.” PD officers had a bit of an inferiority complex. They were underrepresented in the ambassadorial ranks, the great goal of all foreign service officers. Politics and economic officers didn’t have to justify what they did. But public diplomacy was kind of nebulous.
I was thinking less about reimagining PD than defining it in the first place. I disliked the mushy language around public diplomacy and I absolutely hated the phrase, so often used to describe PD, “winning hearts and minds.” Everything we’ve learned in the last 50 years from social science and psychology suggests that changing someone’s mind is a nearly impossible task. The more you try to change an embedded view, the more likely people are to double down in their beliefs (i.e., the “backfire effect”). In the department, public diplomacy was described as people-to-people diplomacy, in contrast to state-to-state. Everyone also talked about “telling America’s story,” which was the earnest phrase used during the Cold War. In all my reading, I hadn’t seen a very good definition of PD. The one I liked best was also the briefest: Joe Nye’s phrase “soft power.”2 I generally felt that the more time we spent talking about PD rather than policy, the more we marginalized ourselves.
The other thing that irked me was all the discussion of the “golden age” of public diplomacy during the Cold War. Very often a Representative would say, We used to know how to counter the Russians. In fact, PD was seen as a success only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Before then, PD practitioners were blamed for not getting our message across. The fabled United States Information Agency (USIA) never really had a seat at the table, and the sainted Edward Murrow famously complained about it (“If you don’t include us in the takeoff, we can’t help you on the crash landing”). Members of Congress had this naive idea that without USIA, the Berlin Wall would never have fallen and the Soviet Union would still exist. If anything, it was more Edward G. Robinson and Mr. Ed than Ed Murrow that led to the fall of communism. American popular culture was the secret weapon, not schmaltzy USIA documentaries about African American athletes and musicians.
On my first morning as Under Secretary, I sent out a message to all public diplomacy officers abroad that commended them for what they did, but said that we had to use the power of social media and mobile technology. For PD officers in the field, these missives from newly confirmed political appointees must be somewhere between forgettable and comical. For them, each new person has his or her priorities that tend to last for only as long as that person stays in the job, which in the case of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy had not been very long.
There was a lot of resistance and just plain lack of knowledge about digital and mobile. State officials were equipped with clunky old BlackBerrys, and plenty of officers didn’t even have that. People were resistant to social media. At that time, there were only a few dozen State Twitter accounts, and even the Secretary did not have one. Later, at a town hall meeting I had for our ambassadors, an ambassador to a small European country raised his hand and said that his problem with social media was that it’s too easy to make a mistake.
Getting more folks on digital platforms was a challenge. I had a tour of International Information Programs, a bureau under public diplomacy that had once been part of USIA and helped create content in support of policy. Staff escorted me to a large conference room to proudly show me … magazines. Spread across an enormous rectangular table were all the print magazines they produced and distributed around the world. I guess they thought that I, as a former magazine editor, would be pleased to see all the wonderful magazines they produced. In fact, I was horrified. I had just sent out a message about focusing on social media, and here they were showing me glossy legacy products from the 1970s. Heck, didn’t they know the magazine business was dying? I eventually killed about half the titles.
Silos, Silos, Everywhere
A couple of weeks after my confirmation, I got my State Department email address—with the domain state.gov—but there was very little in my inbox every morning. I was still getting more State Department email at my Gmail address than at my government one. I noticed that while my inbox sat empty, my staff received all kinds of internally produced news summaries and lists of clips and press releases. It was strange that there was no process to get you set up digitally—no set of lists or schedules. In fact, it took months to get on the lists I needed to be on to get news articles about the State Department, to get opeds and editorials about foreign policy, to get the rundown of weekly meetings—and even then, I’m sure I wasn’t on nearly all the lists I needed to be on. Occasionally, a longtime State Department hand would say, Hey, what’s that list? I didn’t even know about that one.
The truth was, few people at State knew what was going on in a 360-degree way. I was stunned, for example, to find that people at the State Department didn’t seem to know when the Secretary of State was giving a speech. Or what it was about. Or where it was taking place. In those first few months, when I’d mention to other Under Secretaries that the Secretary was giving a speech on, say, arms control or countering violent extremism, they would say, Really! How did you know about that?
This siloification extended far beyond the Secretary’s speeches. When the European bureau made a statement about some action of Putin’s or the Africa bureau condemned an action by a terrorist group in Mali, almost no one knew about it. There was no cross-promotion. Statements were issued from their silos and then not amplified. Public Affairs was often quite reticent about chiming in on such statements. They didn’t see their role as amplifying other statements—after all, they had their own statements to make! They thought it was the Secretary’s job to make speeches and the press’s job to report on them, and that’s how our policies got out to the public. Very 20th century. We literally didn’t have a single person assigned to tweet or be on social media while the Secretary was speaking.
One of the first ideas I had was to form a digital hub in PD that would not originate content but rather share, amplify, and coordinate it. Nobody seemed to be doing this. It would take only a handful of people—three or four—who could retweet and repost what the department had done that day. It would essentially be an aggregator of content for the department. But it could also refute false information about U.S. foreign policy. It would be a hub, and that’s what I called it. I thought it was a no-brainer. But the no-brainer was me, it turned out. Everyone objected. Public Affairs didn’t like the idea and said it was their function. International Information Programs thought this was their function. The seventh floor was skeptical and didn’t really understand the purpose.
I talked about it all the time. I wrote an action memo to the Secretary. And nothing happened. S did not sign the action memo. I didn’t get the go-ahead from management to hire people. I was frustrated and didn’t understand what was happening. It was my first experience with how ideas get blocked within the department. Ideas died at State because people saw them as violating their turf, not because they weren’t good. They died not because anyone overtly objected—they died from a kind of aggressive passivity. It took me a while to understand Colin Powell’s dictum that in government no idea on its own is good enough to rise; every idea needs a coalition to succeed.
The Birth of Counter-Messaging
When I first looked at the structure of R and the bureaus underneath it, one piece didn’t seem to fit: CSCC, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications. All the other parts—Public Affairs, Educational and Cultural Affairs, International Information Programs—had been cobbled together from the 1999 legislation that created the office of public diplomacy, but CSCC was new. It had been created in 2010 by Secretary Hillary Clinton in collaboration with CIA chief Leon Panetta to combat the communications of a radical terrorist group that was using revolutionary new techniques to get out its message: al-Qaeda. Remember, this was 2010. Al-Qaeda had shot videos of Ayman al-Zawahiri sitting on a hillside in Pakistan giving a jihadist lecture directly to the camera for 54 minutes. They then uploaded that video to YouTube, where it got a few thousand views. That was cutting-edge back then.
The genesis of CSCC occurred at a Situation Room meeting in 2010. The U.S.’s drone war against terrorists was having success on the ground but wounding the image of America abroad. At that meeting, State’s coordinator for