London, Sunday, October 17, 1999

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Below: Tomahawk cruise missile launched at Belgrade target

How the Kosovo War was Spun

Spinning for victory

FOUR MONTHS ago the war in Kosovo ended. But pictures of victorious soldiers and smiling civilians that were beamed round the world belied a narrow escape.

Edward Stourton describes how Nato nearly lost the media war

APRIL 15, 1999. It was the low point of what he was to look back on as the worst week of the Kosovo war, and Jamie Shea, Nato spokesman, was still at his desk in Brussels at 11 at night when the call came through from Washington. It was an old friend, now working for Bill Clinton's National Security Council. "Jamie," he said, "I wanted to tip you off that I've just been listening in on a phone call between Tony Blair and President Clinton. Their conclusion is that you need help, and your life is about to change."

It was not until the next day, when Shea received another call, this time from Downing Street, that he understood what change would mean. Alastair Campbell, Blair's press spokesman, was on his way from London, and he was bringing a blueprint for a revolution. The world's most powerful military machine was now to be directed not by soldiers but spin doctors.

The way they penetrated the heart of Nato's operation is the untold story of the Kosovo campaign: "The fact that we were successful in our media operation," one White House official who was seconded to work in Brussels claimed to me, "ultimately led Milosevic to capitulate."

Nato had embarked on the air campaign three weeks before with a weakness in its political armoury that could have proved fatal. There was always a risk that the Alliance's unity of purpose would crack because of the politics in play in its 19 member states, but the resources dedicated to selling the war to the people were derisory. Jamie Shea bubbles with energy, and is blessed with a gift for the crisp phrase; the combination of an academic mind (a doctorate in modern history from Oxford) and a down-to-earth manner (East London upbringing, son of a sewing-machine engineer) made him a highly effective communicator. But he had only a tiny staff, and in the early days of the conflict he was fighting a debilitating bureaucratic battle on the home front.

He faced a press corps 300- to 400-strong and ravenous for up-to-date information. But he could offer them only what had come through the military reporting process, and that was so cumbersome that most of his news was stale before he could deliver it. It might take four or five hours before pilots were fully debriefed after a mission. Their reports would be compiled locally, then sent up the chain of command to Shape (Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers in Europe). Shape is at Mons, 45 minutes from Nato itself, and because of the military suspicion of open phone lines, an officer from the media department - usually Colonel Konrad Freytag, a punctilious German - would drive up the motorway to Brussels each afternoon with his bag of goodies for the daily briefing. By the time Shea stood before the press at 3pm, Belgrade had had a clear run at dictating the day's news agenda.

Shea felt the military were giving the information war a low priority. "They had to have an organisation on the military side which could find things out quickly," he says, adding, in a slightly catty aside directed at the media office at Shape, "With the military, what counts is rank. If you have a four-star general saying he needs the facts, you get them rather more quickly than if you have a lieutenant-colonel." The system, he said, needed "a lot of prodding".

In the Kosovo campaign, Nato's political masters, especially Bill Clinton, were determined to minimise risk. Airpower alone was to be used; high altitudes would protect the pilots, while technology provided the precision. But the strategy that gave Nato command of the air delivered command of the airwaves to the enemy; and no one was prepared for that. Nato's images of the war would always be one stage removed - those now-familiar grainy cockpit video shots that seem so much less real than the "virtual reality" of most modern computer games. By contrast, the close-up images of the battlefield were Belgrade's to control.

When the big broadcasters began to report regularly from Serbia, Nato's inability to provide first-hand information from the ground left its media team even more exposed. The experience left many of them with a deep-seated contempt for the way the Western media reported from the Serb side. Let them talk for a while, and the venom begins to flow.

General Wesley Clark, Nato's Supreme Commander, routinely took time off from the war effort to shout at the television screen in general and CNN in particular. The press, he told me, acted "under compellance" to "satisfy the masters in Belgrade".

On April 14 came the defining moment in the information war. Nato planes flying from Aviano, in northern Italy, made two attacks near the town of Djakovica in southern Kosovo. One of the targets turned out to be a column of refugees heading for the Albanian border.

The Bajrami family were typical of those travelling the Djakovica to Prizren road that day. Since being driven from the family farm by Serb police a month before, Rukmani, her two sons, their wives and 12 children had been on the move, internal refugees. On the morning of April 14, the Serbs forced them to join this convoy, several miles long, heading for the Albanian border.

Nato's attack came without warning. At 12.19 GMT or "Zulu" in military-speak, American F16s flying at high altitude dropped the first of nine 500lb laser-guided GBU bombs. Ferat Bajrami was driving a tractor near the front of the convoy. He was killed the moment he was hit and his body was blown on top of his children. His brother, Sokol, lost his hand but somehow managed to stop his own tractor and take cover in the field by the roadside.

By mid-afternoon Serb forces were reporting 80 dead. Even today, some Nato officials maintain there were military vehicles mixed in with the civilian tractors and trailers, but there seems little independent evidence to support that. Sokol Bajrami told me, "The convoy stretched a long way, but up front there were no police."

In a vivid illustration of the sluggishness of Nato's internal information-flow, Jamie Shea was tipped off about the strike by a journalist friend who rang from Belgrade. The Supreme Allied Commander got his first hint of trouble when he turned on CNN.

The way General Clark reacted to those first Serb pictures showing what seemed to be civilian victims of Nato planes, sounds suspiciously like panic.

There was an interview with American radio booked into his diary for that afternoon, and just before he went on the air, one of his staff rushed in with the transcript of a Serb radio transmission Nato had just intercepted. On the basis of this raw intelligence, General Clark publicly accused the Serbs of an act of extreme brutality; he said they had opened fire on the civilians in the refugee column, in revenge for Nato's strike on Serb forces north of Djakovica.

It was simply not true. The radio conversation Nato had intercepted had been mistranslated. It was, Clark told me lamely, all a question of "the use of indefinite articles and some other things in the translation itself".

Nato had a significant fund of goodwill to draw on; most of the correspondents trusted Jamie Shea. But in the days that followed, the Alliance ran through that trust like a spendthrift. Clark's blunder was a bad start; the following day's briefing made things worse.

On April 15 a lieutenant-colonel from the media department at Shape appeared at Nato bearing a video tape of an American pilot's debriefing from Aviano.

The pilot had been in action above Djakovica on the day the refugee convoy was hit. The picture could not be shown because it was judged that it might endanger the officer, but his voice had been cleared for use at the briefing.

The press assumed they were listening to the voice of a pilot who had bombed the main refugee column, and so did Jamie Shea; they were not. Quite how this extraordinary confusion arose is still unclear. Shea rather generously puts it down to an excess of military zeal. "They watched CNN and the BBC -- they wanted to help me and they tried to get me anything they could." The effect was to add to the impression of deliberate deception by Nato.

The tensions between the military at Shape and the civilians at Nato came to a head under the pressure. Two days after the bombing, Brigadier General Giuseppe Morani, the colourless Italian who stood at Jamie Shea's side for many of the daily briefings, appeared with yet another explanation of what had happened. Shea looked through the text, decided it would only add to the confusion and stopped Morani from using it.

Relations with the press were deteriorating rapidly. Mark Laity, the BBC's defence correspondent, who was based in Brussels throughout the conflict, had been promised, "Today you're going to get the story." When it did not come out, the official who had tipped him off was "literally red-faced with rage". "We couldn't tell it," he said to Laity. "We were blocked."

It was not until Monday, April 19, five days after the convoy bombing, that Nato finally admitted what its planes had done. It was bad enough that the Alliance was killing the people it was supposed to be protecting; over that weekend, as the military struggled to get the story straight, there was a strong suspicion that it was prepared to lie about it too.

The Djakovica incident forced Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to recognise that Nato's press operation could prove to be the Alliance's Achilles heel. Support for the bombing campaign among its members had been tentative from the start. The war was now three weeks old and some governments - especially the Social Democrats' coalition in Germany, which was engaged in its first offensive military action since the Second World War - were growing increasingly nervous about public opinion. Another PR disaster like this could have catastrophic political consequences. Alastair Campbell took the Eurostar to Brussels.

Campbell's campaign strategy   Senior soldiers and experienced government aides were summoned from across Europe and the United States to staff Alastair Campbell's Media Operation Centre. The strategy Campbell put in place left nothing to chance. Set tasks to be dealt with daily by the "brightest and best" included:

• Rebuttal Identifying and responding to misinformation put out by the Yugoslav news agency, Tanjug.
• Lines Drafting catchy phrases for Jamie Shea, General Wesley Clark and other Nato spokesmen to use in press conferences
• Talking heads Monitoring the views of armchair generals and other pundits in television interviews
• Article Factory Writing pieces to appear under the bylines of Nato leaders on the comment pages of national newspapers.
• The Grid Twice-daily conference calls between Brussels and the key national capitals to co-ordinate the diaries and "message" of Nato's national leaders to ensure maximum media impact

On the train, he sketched out an organisational chart; Jamie Shea kept a copy in his office drawer as a souvenir when the war was over. The new Media Operations Centre - or MOC, as it became known in a military culture addicted to acronym - was to be structured to cover every conceivable front in what was now to be fought as a full-scale information war.

The Campbell blueprint broke down the work into distinct, snappily named sections. "Rebuttals" and "Talking Heads", for example, were to monitor Allied and Serbian media output; "Lines" and "Article factory" to generate soundbites and copy for military and political leaders (see box). It was an ambitious project, and it needed staffing. One of those who found himself packing his bags for Brussels at 24 hours' notice told me, "Alastair Campbell put out a call to his counterparts in Bonn, Paris and Washington and said, 'Give me your best and your brightest.' "

The new team pulled down walls at Nato to build themselves an operational centre - to the horror of Brussels bureaucrats - and, with the political clout provided by the backing of Blair and Clinton, forced the military to hand over its most sophisticated communications equipment.

Unsurprisingly, the revolution was bitterly resented in some quarters at Shape. The information team there felt they had been "marginalised" by the way Campbell "turned everything over". Some members of the Media Operations Centre would bypass Shape altogether if they needed to; Colonel P J Crowley, for example, would simply ring a friend at the Pentagon if he wanted to know something quickly.

But it was the intrusion of political professionals that really irked the military. "Alastair Campbell's arrival tainted Nato's credibility," one officer told me. "The same apparatus that can win an election can't win a war." One member of the Downing Street team spent most of the remainder of the war at General Clark's side, even attending the conferences at which Nato's commanders discussed their bomb targets so that he could prepare the press strategy for the following day.

The MOC's work soon acquired a wider political dimension. One of Campbell's innovations was "The Grid". In twice-daily conference calls between Brussels and the key national capitals, the MOC team co-ordinated the diaries of Nato's national leaders to ensure maximum media impact. They also co-ordinated the "message", so that the Alliance's political leadership would speak with one voice. Presidents and prime ministers, generals and foreign secretaries were having the themes of their public pronouncements and the way they organised their time directed from the MOC's offices at Nato.

No one imagined Milosevic would hold out for as long as he did, and as doubts about the air war took root, the MOC team proved its value. When Nato planes made other mistakes, such as bombing the Chinese Embassy, the Nato press machine put the lessons of Djakovica to good use. The relentlessly upbeat bomb-damage assessments pumped out to the press in Brussels also took some of the momentum from the growing campaign for a ground war.

Once Milosevic had capitulated, Nato admitted that its estimates of the number of tanks and artillery pieces destroyed were, to put it politely, optimistic. While the outcome was in the balance the spin doctors were briefing for all they were worth. Mark Laity recalls querying the figures when they "started ramping up the results". "They said, 'Oh, it's different from previous wars. You know, we've got videos, we're doing much more careful examination." Laity was persuaded. By the time the truth came out, it no longer mattered.

General Clark and Alastair Campbell got on well when they first met at the height of the Djakovica convoy crisis. The extent of the general's conversion to the spin doctor's creed may be judged from this astonishing statement: "The right way to fight a propaganda offensive is not with more propaganda," he told me. "It's to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and do it as rapidly as possible. But you need some smart people who can tell you what piece of truth you are looking for." The truth, it seems, is a little like one of those high-tech bombs his pilots were carrying; it simply needs precision engineering to perform properly. Campbell and his team were not, Clark insists, spin doctors, they were "people who understood which pieces of information were important to provide to the public".

On his subsequent trips to Brussels, Alastair Campbell was accorded the singular privilege of staying at Clark's chateau in Belgium.