This chapter is about some of the powerful tools an individual can use to dig out useful and important information that exposes wrongdoing and empowers the public. Starting with the story of the research behind my book on anti-environmental public relations, Secrets and Lies, I want to decsribe how a sensible person with time, persistence and some investigative ‘tricks of the trade’, can investigate and expose the kinds of subjects that ordinary journalists rarely have time to uncover.
The first steps in my investigation into public relations were based on the vaguest of hunches. The mainstream news media here in New Zealand had been reporting a public conflict between environmental groups and a rainforest logging company, but the more interesting story seemed to be what was going on behind the news. The aggressiveness and persistence of the pro-logging campaign reminded me of stories I had heard about organised anti-environmental tactics in the United States. I wondered if similar tactics might invisibly be at work.
At the end of 1999, after two years of investigating, Bob Burton and I published a book exposing a large-scale anti-environmental campaign, co-ordinated by the US public relations company Shandwick. The truth was much worse than my original suspicions. The PR campaign included infiltration of environmental groups; a systematic effort to discredit and discourage these groups and their supporters; legal threats against critical journalists and cultivation of friendly ones; orchestrating a ‘community’ pro-logging campaign; secret lobbying of the government by PR people on behalf of the government’s own company; and more.
Up until the day the book was published, most journalists uncritically reported press releases arranged by the PR company. The main pro-logging spokesperson quoted in news stories was part of a phony community front group set up as part of the PR strategy. Stories and incidents manufactured to discredit the environmentalists (unflattering personal revelations, a fake bomb etc) were likewise mostly reported uncritically. The journalists were acting as channels for the PR rather than questioning and scrutinising it. Much of the PR campaign was deliberately invisible – and it would undoubtedly have stayed that way unless someone had decided to dig deeper.
I have a personal motto concerning research. It is that nearly every piece of information in the world is accessible – no matter how secret it appears at first – and that they just carry a ‘price tag’ of hours. Some information is quick to find. Other information is much harder to get but, as I learnt in years of studying military and intelligence subjects, there always seems to be a way if you are able and willing to spend long enough. Some information may not be important enough for the time it would take. However, when the information matters, again and again this motto has proved true.
In the case of the rainforest controversy, I put it on my mental list of interesting subjects worth following up sometime. I did some exploratory probing on the subject by asking a Member of Parliament to ask some official questions about the PR activities of the state company (which is called Timberlands). In many countries this is a quick way to access government information. The government provided details of Timberlands’ high level of PR spending and noted that a company called Shandwick (which I had not heard of) was providing ‘communications advice’ to the logging company. But it quickly became clear that they were not going to release any information beyond that.
So it went onto another mental list: a subject that needed an inside source before I could pursue it further. I would keep my ears open for news of someone involved in the PR campaign who might talk to me quietly about it. As I explain in the accompanying ‘Brief Guide of Leaking’, I believe that secrecy is, in many cases, an abuse of power, or cover for activities people would be ashamed to do publicly, and so it can be justified to find unauthorised ways to get the information.
But where do you start? Institutions controlling information often appear hopelessly impregnable. The information is inside the walls and we are on the outside. The more secret the information, the thicker the walls and the tighter the security. But security is always more impression than reality. In every government agency and private company, no matter how strict the security, the secrets walk in and out of the doors every day as people go to and from work.
Finding an insider willing to help you get information is a matter of persistence and, partly, luck. Never assume that organisations are homogeneous, where everyone thinks alike and blindly supports everything the organisation does. Most organisations contain a mixture of people, including people at least as concerned about wrongdoing and ethics and willing to act in the public interest as we are. They may be senoir staff, of very junior. Senior staff often treat the lower paid workers as if they are invisible, or blind and stupid – but they may well know exactly what is going on. The challenge is finding the right person and winning his or her trust.
The most successful way to find people is by word of mouth. Most of my inside sources covering many subjects are people whom some friend of a friend told me about. All it took was asking around. More specific leads can come from someone you know in a related university department (eg. languages, mathematics and computing for intelligence agencies), people elsewhere in the same profession (eg. in another PR company) or someone in the trade union concerned (eg. a public service union). They may well know about someone who recently left the very place you are interested in. The key is to start looking. Rememer too that the particular secret information you are seeking is usually located in several different places, not just the obvious ones, and some of these may be more accessible than others. The first thing I try to get when studying an organisation is an internal phone directory or staff list, providing a window into the organisation and showing which staff work on what (in some cases, I have a series of staff lists covering many years so that I can see staff come and go).
With the Timberlands PR story, it was over a year of casual asking around before I found someone willing to help. I never telephone a potential source the first time, as it is too hard to establish trust and not scare them off. I usually visit the person’s home – turning up on their doorstep – and introduce myself and explain what I am trying to achieve. I’ve only ever had one person annoyed at me for turning up and a few people have politely said no. But I am still amazed at the way most people by far have been willing to help (see the leaking guide for ideas about how to build trust).
I cannot say how I heard about the Timberlands source, but we met the first time in an out-of-the-way, very unfashionable café where we were unlikely to meet anyone we knew. I explained my suspicions about the PR campaign and said I was looking for evidence so I could write about it. It was like a flood gate opened. I was suddenly hearing an outpouring of indignation and stories about activities I had never even imagined were going on. It is often like that. People work in secretive jobs that they don’t feel comfortable about and yet they would probably never take the step of approaching someone like me. But, once approached, there is clearly a relief in having someone to talk to.
On our second meeting, at the person’s home, I started taking more methodical interview notes. It was fascinating and provided lots of leads for further investigation, but it did not solve the problem of proof. There’s not much point in writing a detailed exposé that can simply be dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory’. It is harder to ask someone to take confidential papers away from their work than just to speak to you, but luckily again they were willing to help.
We agreed on an evening to meet. I went out to dinner with a good friend and told him that I would appreciate his help for an unusual evening out. We filled in time going to an early-evening film (Enemies of the State, of all things!), and then, both joking away Hollywood induced paranoia, went to meet my source.
We rendezvoused at a friend’s office where we could use a photocopier without being disturbed. I would have been thrilled with two or three good inside documents In fact my source arrived with two enormous boxes crammed with files. We took turns sorting the files and doing the photocopying. By midnight I felt tired but excited, as I got copies of more and more proof: all the minutes of the weekly PR teleconferences, the detailed PR strategy plans and much more. And we were only part way through the boxes. We were still photocopying the next day as it got light. My body ached from standing up all night. I went home through the bright early morning not quite believing the thousands of pages of photocopying I was carrying.
As I was in the middle of other writing, I hid the leaked papers, told no one about them and spent several weeks wondering what I should do with them. During this period something rather unsettling happened. Out of the blue I received a terse one-line e-mail from the chief executive of Shandwick suggesting that we meet for a cup of coffee. I couldn’t believe I’d been sprung! I replied politely that perhaps we could meet but that I would like to know why first. It turned out that he was feeling indignant about an approach I had made to a former staff member of his company some months earlier asking about Timberlands. He was the brother of a journalist friend, who had worked at Shandwick mass-producing letters to the editor in favour of logging – but he had said he would rather not talk. To my immense relief it was nothing to do with the real leak, which was still smouldering away waiting to be used. I wrote back to the Shandwick boss saying that, since he was a former journalist, I thought he would regard it as perfectly legitimate for me to be pursuing a story. I said that, if I could find the information, I wanted to write about his company’s PR campaign for Timberlands. Confident that they were protected by secrecy, he never suspected that I already had the information.
It was at this stage that I realised there was so much material it should become a book. I invited my Australian journalist friend, Bob Burton, to collaborate as he has far more experience writing about public relations than I have. It was he who had first introduced me to the idea of deliberately anti-democratic public relations – leading to my suspicions years later about the Timberlands campaign. Six months of intense work began.
I would not like to give the impression that investigative research is all about secrets and leaked information. In some cases like this one, there was no other way forward. But most investigative work relies on a much wider set of tools and approaches, usually involving locating non-secret information that otherwise would remain scattered and unpublicised. This detective work can be just as exciting, satisfying and productive as finding secret sources.
Although we had piles of internal Timberlands documents, I suspect that if I had just passed them on to mainstream journalists they would probably not have even seen a story in it. The shocking and incriminating parts were mostly small sections of larger documents – things like ‘Anti-NFA letter writing campaign (stock letters)’. Unless you understood the context and background, they had little immediate significance. Thus we had to use many other investigative tricks of the trade to be able to explain what the papers revealed and tell the story. This job of uncovering stories, explanations and truths that are not obvious is the role of an investigative journalist or writer. I will explain how I see this role and some of the numerous tools available.
I believe that journalists and researchers have a special role in democratic society – far beyond the commercial journalist role of just finding stories that are interesting and help sell the surrounding advertisements. It is the job of uncovering news that those in power would prefer remained secret or unnoticed, alerting the public to important issues and scrutinising the versions of truth that are broadcast by vested interests through the media. I call it being a ‘democratic agent’: helping to enable the public to play a serious role in politics. It is a similar role in society to that played by public interest groups (civil rights groups, environmentalists etc), which also uncover important issues, alert the public and challenge the statements and actions of the powerful. Without people in these roles, anything more than token democratic society is impossible.
The first thing that an investigative journalist brings to the job is asking the right questions: what lies behind this press release? Is this really true? Who arranged for that statement/information/event to happen now and why? As I said, our book Secrets and Lies started merely because of wondering what lay behind some attacks on environmentalists. In the case of a public interest group, I think the members should repeatedly ask themselves: ‘what information, if we had it, would make a huge difference to our campaign?’ That is the information someone should be seeking. Key information includes information that allows a group to make news and set the agenda on an issue (exposing plans, releasing revealing official information, publicising statistics or opinion polls, and so on); tactical information about when and by whom decisions are being made to enable public input; and factual information to reply to the arguments or expose the untruths of political opponents.
Often the breakthrough in research comes when we suddenly realise where we should be probing. In my intelligence research, for instance, I conducted extensive interviews assuming that I understood roughly how the western spy agencies co-operated. In fact I had not really considered that the interception facilities in my country and elsewhere integrated into a global system. I simply had not thought to ask about that, even though I was talking to people who used the system every day, and so I nearly missed the whole thing. Then one day I was talking over a draft section with an intelligence officer who said “that’s not how it works”. That was the day I heard my first description of the Echelon system and realised what I should be investigating.
A more dramatic example of this comes from the Gulf War. News organisations around the world ran a harrowing story quoting testimony before a US congressional caucus by a 15 years old Kuwiti girl. She described watching Iraqi soldiers entering a Kuwait hospital with guns, taking the babies from the incubators and leaving them ‘on the cold floor to die’. This story was repeated many times in the following weeks and had a profound influence on the debate about whether to launch the Gulf War. Although even Amnesty International believed the testimony, an investigative writer called John McArthur, who was researching news manipulation during the Gulf War, decided to check her story. His investigation revealed that the whole story had been invented and that the hearing had been stage-managed to deceive the congressman and swing opinion in favour of war. The fifteen year old, whose full name had supposedly been kept confidential to ‘prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in Kuwait’, had not been working in a hospital. She was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had been coached for the part by the PR company Hill and Knowlton, which arranged the whole event on behalf of its client the Kuwaiti royal family.
I usually find that the best starting point for any new investigation is reading through all the easily available public information. Generally, if you haven’t done the unsecret slog of getting to know a subject from the open sources, you are unable to notice the good stuff when you find it (and more to the point, know what to look for). This is why many “investigative” reporters head for the sensational and cliched: they do not have enough background knowledge to ask themselves more searching questions, know where to look and recognise a good story. This is why many of the more important stories come from people who believe in their work or in the subjects they study – it is a totally different activity then.
These open sources include annual reports, all manner of special reports, parliamentary questions and inquiries, official websites and industry and professional magazines. I regard these boring looking sources – which often almost no one reads or even knows exist – as researcher goldmines. Wherever possible, we should start with these original documents (not other people’s articles or quotations from them), as the secondary sources can miss interesting clues or even get things wrong. One of the key differences between investigative journalists and routine ones is returning to source documents. In a normal newsroom, there are virtually no files apart from the clippings/databases of past stories, information reused from old stories is not checked and so inaccuracies or PR ‘spin’ can be recycled over and over in successive stories, with the journalists giving their own authority to the ‘facts’. This is how the babies-in-incubators story quickly became established fact in the Gulf War coverage.
Some tips. A good way to save time is to ask around to find researchers, campaigners or academics who know the topic you are investigating and who can recommend good sources you can go straight to. With articles or books, often the most valuable part is the footnotes at the end. They may point you to exactly the source you need. And, despite the convenience, don’t assume that you only need to look on the Internet. It’s a wonderful tool but can also waste heaps of time in aimless search. Most information sources on many topics are not on the web. Often specialist libraries and the files of specialist organisations are more useful. Companies, government departments, research institutes and public interest groups often have libraries that we can use if we ask. A day reading old files in the national archives can likewise be productive. No matter what the institution is, librarians are the researcher’s friends.
This first search does not mean weeks of work. It means locating the most promising sources and having a first dig. This is the background that allows you to decide where it might be worth looking next: things that look suspicious, an interesting statistic that we decide to compare with the figures from other years to get a bigger picture and so on. Careful reading of original sources often provides surprises. For instance, while carefully reading the (obviously little read) legal document that authorised the controversial Timberlands logging, I noticed that the much-quoted key phrase that permitted ongoing logging had been hand-written onto the document by an official after it was signed. As was subsequently confirmed in a court case, the supposed authority for the logging was invalid.
Some simple sources were invaluable in researching Secrets and Lies. For example, I read three years of newspapers clippings on the forest controversy (all carefully collected in our Ministry of Forestry library) from beginning to end. This not only allowed me to locate incidents corresponding to things mentioned in the leaked PR papers, but also let me see for instance where officials had changed their stories over time. Likewise reading through the environmental groups’ campaign files provided lots of useful material and questions.
The vital investigative attributes I have described so far can be summarised as curiosity, nosiness and an awareness of the diversity of sources available. The next crucial thing we bring to the job is time.
There are many journalists who would like to pursue stories and probe more deeply but their commerically-motivated news organisations do not allow them the time required. (As a result, many journalists do their most important and rewarding work in their spare time.) Investigative journalists, writers and special interest researchers devote the time it takes to investigate and expose bigger issues and stories.
One of the things that takes time is waiting for answers to letters requesting information. We can seek official documents using freedom of information laws and use parliamentary processes to gather lots of detailed information – but, as it can take weeks or even longer to get replies, these methods obviously have little use to daily news reporters. If we have time, the biggest limitation in what can be found using official questioning is purely our own ability to think up lots of questions.
We can also interview officials and business people to gather non-secret insights into issues. Note also that retired senior politicians, government officials and businesspeople – who might not talk to use while in their jobs – are often very quickly forgotten by their old colleagues once they cease to be powerful and useful and are pleased to be interviewed about their experiences and insights. (Following changes of government and ‘restructuring’ and redundancies in organisations is a good time to find people willing to talk.)
The key to getting information from people is just being brave enough to ask. I find that most people are willing to help. This should be our assumption. Two or three phone calls are often all it takes to locate someone who can help you on the way to the information you are looking for. Once I start asking around, information usually pours in and often does in unexpected ways. During the Secrets and Lies research, for instance, I phoned a woman in a small town who, I had heard, knew about an arson threat against environmentalists. After talking helpfully for a little while she said, ‘it’s really my husband you should be talking to, he’s in Coast Action Network’. I waited apprehensively for him to come to the phone, as Coast Action Network was the pro-logging group that had been set up as part of the PR strategies. He turned out to be one of the real local people who had joined the group. He was soon telling me how he had left in disgust when he realised that all the group activities were being planned at the Timberlands’ headquarters. He became one of my best sources.
Another time, I phoned an environmentalist who had been a victim of anti-environmental violence. He suggested I talk to a woman went to university with, who had told a curious story about the Timberlands issue. This woman, it turned out, was being courted by a young man who had confided in her about an exciting job he had had: infiltrating an environmental group for $50 an hour. When I checked the story I found that had he had indeed joined the group and asked lots of questions during organising meetings, that he had had no involvement in environmental politics before or since that time and that he was son of a senior staff member of the PR company Shandwick New Zealand.
Time allows us to locate helpful people and have bits of luck like this. Time is also what allows us to check whether official facts are true. Sadly, with politicised issues and vested interests, we cannot assume that any supposed facts are true. Many times I have forgotten this and assumed that facts stated plainly be people in positions of authority will be more or less true – only to find later that they were not. While writing Secrets and Lies, we eventually found that nearly all the ‘facts’ in the pro-logging public relations turned out to not be so, or that they told a quite different story when put in context. It is very easy for people to manipulate and deceive; especially since mainstream journalism does not usually question establishment spokespeople.
There is a horribly true saying, from Australian journalist David McKnight, that good PR depends on bad journalism. The other side of the coin is that the best antidote to bad PR is good journalism, and the greater public awareness this allows. Just as effective PR often relies on being able to have its effect invisibly, exposing PR machinations to the public often renders them ineffective and even counter-productive.
Which brings us back to secrecy or inaccessability of information. Much unethical behaviour, violence, lies, manipulation and dirty political tactics only happen (at least in reasonably open societies) because the people concerned think they will not have to answer for their actions publicly – either because they are secret or because the news media fail to scrutinise them effectively. That is what this chapter is about, how we can use research to bring these people to account.
The anti-environmental campaign described in Secrets and Lies might have made depressing reading, showing how relatively easily secret tactics and constant lies could be used to undermine genuine community groups. They were caught out this time, but lots of other times the tactics succeed. This is true, but I believe the lessons from Timberlands case are positive and hopeful.
First, publicity about any examples like this help to raise public awareness. The best defence against these kinds of PR tactics is to know about them. Intimidating legal threats, front groups, systematic attacking of critics: if community groups can recognise the tactics and cry foul when they are used, it helps to reduce their power. There has been more public discussion about public relations in my country (including amongst public relations professionals) in the year since publication than ever before. Also, recognising the tactics is also the first step to exposing them. The Timberlands case turned out to be a spectacular example of how exposing corporate PR activities can undo the strategies. Because of the risk of legal action, Secrets and Lies was written, printed and distributed in complete secrecy, with no publicity until the day it was in the bookshops. I did tell a few journalists, including a TV current affairs reporter who quietly prepared a documentary on the book. The day before it was released, he interviewed the head of Timberlands, who sincerely told the camera that his company had no PR plans and had never tried to interfere with the environmental campaign. The reporter said, “Dave, are you prepared to give viewers your word about that?. He said, I give you my word. The next morning we released the book. The reaction.to it surprised everyone, including us. It quickly became lead news and the Prime Minister, who had been a staunch supporter of Timberlands, found herself in the middle of a controversy over the dirty PR tactics used by the state logging company. She changed her story three times over the period of a week after the book’s launch, looking increasingly exasperated at the bad publicity. The controversy was later cited by journalists as one of the three issues that had dented her credibility and helped her lose the national election later that year. Shandwick was soon in the centre of the largest PR industry ethics investigation in my country’s history (which, a year later at the time of writing, is still going). In the wake of the publicity about Timberlands’ tactics – and especially its covert activities to pressure the opposition Labour Party to support logging – the Labour Party leader personally pushed through a new policy of ending all the controversial rainforest logging. When she became Prime Minister a few months later, one of the first acts by her new government was to begin cancelling logging approvals and preparing for all the forests to become national parks. Perhaps the most powerful lesson coming from this case study is that when companies and governments resort to unethical tactics, they are wielding a double-edged sword. The dirtier the tactics, the more damage it does to those responsible if they are exposed. Timberlands’ reward for using these tactics was that it was seriously discredited. At the time of writing, the government is discussing disestablishing the company. Most investigative work of course does not have quite such dramatic and immediate effects. But it is still fascinating and very satisfying. I wish more people would do it. There is lots of work to be done.
from Battling Big Business, Eveline Lubbers, Common Courage Press, Monroe, 2002