The invisible war

By Arieh O'Sullivan Jerusalem Post, 5.6.00

Today's armies have become professional spin doctors, keeping the media busy with what the government wants reported. Photo By Ariel Jerozolimski/The Jerusalem Post

(June 4) -- How much of the recent saturation coverage of Lebanon actually described what was happening across the border? Not much, says Arieh O'Sullivan, who explains how the IDF succeeded in controlling the flow of information. --

At the Fatma crossing point north of Metulla late one night 2 weeks ago, about half a dozen military reporters looked at each other sheepishly. A war was going on and there they were, corralled with the rest of the ordinary reporters and camera people from around the world.

There was a time when war correspondents would have been riding in the tanks and armored personnel carriers, helmets crookedly on their heads, giving eyewitness dispatches amid the smoke, explosions and fears.

"We didn't see a journalist the whole time we were in Lebanon," said one dusty Golani trooper safely back in Israel. It was a mantra repeated by nearly every soldier interviewed as they unloaded their gear.

The nature of the now-defunct security zone, a neat little place sealed off from the north by a sophisticated and heavily patrolled border fence and virtually impossible for an Israeli to reach, allowed the IDF to control information that reached the public about the withdrawal.

For years, the images of the Hizbullah war against the IDF were supplied almost solely by forces on both sides, without an objective middleman.

Hizbullah guerrillas would attack an IDF or South Lebanese Army convoy or outposts by day and broadcast the footage by nightfall. The IDF caught on and started releasing black-and-white video clips of precision-guided weapons homing in on Katyusha launchers, terror squads, guerrilla bases, and so on.

The public saw each side only as it was hit. With access limited, no one except the soldiers, guerrillas and victims on the ground really knew what was happening in the security zone.

Military reporters were left no choice but to attend briefings arranged by the IDF Spokesman, interview local residents and peer over the border fence. Not all of them may have known this, but the role of the Israeli military reporter has never been so restricted.

And Israeli reporters are not alone. Despite satellite phones, instant TV links, digital photography, and the Internet, armies worldwide seem increasingly able to control how wars are covered.

"Basically, the military has won its 150-year-battle with war correspondents; journalists want to tell the public everything; the military's attitude is: 'Tell them nothing till the war's over, then tell them who won," wrote Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty: the War Correspondent as Hero and Myth Maker.

"Defeated by the military, governments and spin doctors, war correspondents now face an agonizing choice. If they can no longer be heroes, do they want to continue as propagandists and myth makers, subservient to those who wage the wars?" he asked.

DENIALS notwithstanding, the IDF's media strategy was one of control. It wanted to control the pictures and set the agenda.

Retreat is not an easy product to market, but the IDF did a pretty good job by severely restricting access and preventing reporters from supplying the infamous "view from the field."

Lebanon had in fact become so difficult to cover that reporters started breaking unwritten ground rules.

When access to troops was cut, Israel Radio's Carmela Menashe interviewed soldiers without IDF permission and escort. (The soldiers were subsequently punished). Army Radio's military reporter Gur Tzalal-Yehin, who wears a uniform, actually sneaked into Marjayoun, much to the IDF's consternation.

Alon Ben-David, Channel 1's military reporter, had to resort to broadcasting home videos made by a Golani soldier and supplied by a middleman.

"It was brilliant footage. How could I not use it? I was frustrated that the IDF was not letting us in to interview the soldiers," Ben-David said.

The IDF appears to have adopted the doctrine that the Americans brilliantly tested in the 1991 Gulf War and invasions of Grenada and Panama, then perfected in Kosovo. Knightley described it thus:

1. Appear open, transparent and eager to help.

"Sure you can go into the security zone and interview soldiers," the spokesman says and then adds the clincher: "as long as the security situation allows it."

2. Never go in for summary repression or direct control.

"Drive along the border, go ahead. Photograph what you want."

But soldiers have been briefed that they face punishment if they talk to the press. At one outpost, two armed field security officers chased me down and tried to have me arrested for taking illegal photos. I was released half an hour later when Kiryat Shmona police refused to arrive.

3. Nullify, rather than conceal, undesirable news.

"Sure the SLA's 70th battalion collapsed, but it was made up of Shi'ites anyway. The other SLA battalions are much more stable."

4. Control emphasis rather than facts.

"We managed to destroy most of the tanks and artillery abandoned by the SLA."

5. Balance bad news with good.

"IDF soldiers left the security zone without a scratch."

6. Lie outright only when certain that the lie will not be found out during the course of the war.

"The pullback is still weeks away," Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz reportedly told political commentators on May 22, as orders were filtering down telling troops to get ready to leave the next day.

THE IDF had made covering the withdrawal so difficult that reporters, desperate for any access, were willing to cut a deal with the IDF and report on their terms.

According to the IDF plan, a couple of journalists were to have been allowed into a number of outposts before the withdrawal on a pool basis and escorted by officers from the spokesman's unit, who would decide what they saw, when they saw it and whom they spoke to.

It was also planned to let journalists into Marjayoun and the relatively safe outpost of Shani during the pullout itself.

But matters came to a head in what was supposed to be an off-the-record briefing with OC Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi on May 19.

The gruff, Golani-bred general is not particularly known for his love of journalists, the safety of his soldiers is his supreme interest. It is a commendable but anachronistic trait for a general in an army which says it has learned to deal with the media.

After immense pressure from Mofaz and IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Oded Ben-Ami, Ashkenazi agreed to open up somewhat to journalists.

The briefing ended up in a shouting match. Ashkenazi was critical of Channel 1's Ben-David for speculating on the air that the IDF was about to withdraw from the outpost at Reihan. After the broadcast, Hizbullah began to heavily shell the position and a number of soldiers were wounded.

During the ensuing discussion, Ron Ben-Yishai, who as a journalist was decorated for bravery for treating wounded soldiers under heavy Egyptian fire when he was covering the Yom Kippur War, sided with the general and wrote later that reporting IDF movements in Lebanon actually endangered lives.

A long-time military correspondent, Ben-Yishai's views echoed those of others of his generation who sometimes blur the line between objective reporter and what some have called a "shofar" for the defense establishment. It is a work hazard particular to the military beat here.

THE IDF's concerns are not without basis. Boaz Ganor, an expert on Hizbullah from the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, said that the guerrilla group uses the Israeli media to collect information, particularly on the country's morale.

"Perhaps the best intelligence it can gather on the morale of the residents of the North, of the soldiers, etc. comes from the media and not other sources," Ganor told Israel Radio.

Some in the IDF view the media as yet another weapon in its arsenal, to be used to supply disinformation to the enemy. If false or misleading information causes the enemy damage, what's wrong with that?

"From the point of view of a security person there is nothing wrong with it. But you have to remember that we are talking about a long-term relationship between the media and the defense establishment. If you cause a credibility crisis then true things, or things you want to reach the press, will be treated differently," Ganor said.

Sources in IDF Field Security have said they have planted false stories in the press, but these have been restricted to the IDF magazine Bamahaneh.

IDF Spokesman Oded Ben-Ami vehemently denied his office puts out disinformation.

"I was never prepared under any circumstances to be part of any process of disinformation, manipulation [of the media] or psychological warfare," said Ben-Ami, a former Israel Radio and television reporter.

"There were from time to time thoughts like this and I totally rejected them. The IDF Spokesman can never be viewed as one who does not give the absolute truth."

THE IDF Spokesman's Office is no novice in preparing for military operations in Lebanon. Operation Accountability in 1993 and 1996's Operation Grapes of Wrath were meticulously planned, scripted by senior information officers to flood the media with so much information that the media would be focused on just relaying and not necessarily critiquing - until it was too late.

Prior to both operations, the IDF briefed selected opinion makers who were expected to be called upon by the media for their analysis, said one former senior officer involved.

In both previous operations, video footage of bombing runs was rushed to press conferences, maps were prepared for both TV and newspapers and announcements were prewritten. Pilots and artillerymen were presented for interviews to further saturate the media.

The idea was to set the agenda for 24 to 48 hours so by the time the media recovered and started focusing on the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing toward Beirut, the story would no longer be leading international news reports.

The IDF Spokesman's Office perfected the power of live broadcast. It was only afterwards that the media felt they had been manipulated.

Ironically, Operation Grapes of Wrath was supposed to be a bloodless conflict based on precision-guided weapons destroying enemy installations, but the IDF Spokesman's plans were thrown into disarray after Israeli artillery killed over 100 civilians in Kafr Kana and the spin doctors had to shift into a defensive mode.

It planned for the Lebanon withdrawal similarly, beginning work on the unilateral withdrawal operation, dubbed Orech Ruah ("Stamina") in mid-March.

It intended to set up a media center in Metulla, arrange interviews with soldiers and supply film from choppers and perhaps unmanned aerial vehicles. Divisional commanders briefed reporters and Ashkenazi was persuaded to give daily briefings.

But last Sunday, events in Lebanon began to unfold in a way that senior IDF commanders admitted they hadn't foreseen. Under the volatile collapse of the SLA, the army scrapped any plans they had to open the border to journalists.

THE WITHDRAWAL'S sheer haste also caught the foreign press unprepared. The bureau chiefs of the three major news agencies - Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse - were out of the country and it was all over by the time they got here.

Many of the foreign press based here traveled to Lebanon to cover the story from that side. On that frontier there were no restrictions, but there were risks.

Veteran BBC reporter Jeremy Bowen narrowly escaped injury after an SLA tank, according to the IDF Spokesman, fired on the car he had just gotten out of. The driver was killed.

Eyal Alima, the military reporter for Israel Radio's Arabic news, said the IDF would have preferred to put out a notice when the retreat was over and done with - which is nearly what happened.

"The army's thinking was: the less reporting done the better and no photographs except at the border," Alima said. "We could hit our heads against the wall, but that is what we got."

The IDF media center in Metulla was supposed to offer NATO-style briefings based on the Kosovo conflict, a difficult task considering that no matter what the spin, the story was of an army in retreat.

This raised another question about the story. Did the Israeli public really want to hear it?

"No one really cares about south Lebanon. They don't give a damn about the people there. They just want our boys out and want it to happen safely," said Alan Ben-Ami, the veteran military correspondent for Israel Radio's English News.

PERHAPS the truth is sadder than that.

According to Knightley, "government propaganda prepares its citizens for war so skillfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the truthful, objective and balanced reporting that hero war correspondents once did their best to provide."

Filmmaker Haim Tal, who made a critically acclaimed documentary series on military reporters called A Short Military Memory, eulogized the military correspondents, saying they have become - again - clients of the defense establishment.

"After the Yom Kippur War, they broke down and swore that none of them would let the establishment anesthetize them," he said.

But in fact, he said, much the same lax attitude prevailed among military reporters with regard to Lebanon.

"This wasn't a year or two but a long period of time. From 1995 till 1998 there was not one military reporter or analyst who described the true situation there," Tal said.

"I am not blaming the reporters. I only claim that there is a situation where nothing significant comes under discussion and instead the media go on looking for their little scoops.

"The IDF wants to be in control," Tal said. "On one hand you can't argue over the content, everyone knows what the IDF is. But I am always astonished when the IDF Spokesman wraps it up in cellophane and tries to sell it. And people buy it and say, 'Hey, look, how nice.'"