THE PEOPLE WHO SELL FOREIGN POLICIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504870051-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 51
• Publication Date: October 15, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504870051-5
WASHINGTON POST
15 October 1985
THE FEDERAL REPORT
Inside: the State Department
The People Who Sell Foreign Policies:.,
The State Department's Office of
Public Diplomacy for Latin Amer-
ica and the Caribbean is the closest
thing to a collection of traveling
foreign policy salesmen that Foggy
Bottom has ever had.
Set up in July 1983 with two peo-
ple chartered to "educate the pub-
lic" about the Reagan administra-
tion's Latin policy; the office now
has 19 people who spent $935,000
last year, preparing documents,
traveling around the world and de-
livering hundreds of speeches,
among other things. Top State De-
partment officials say the effort has
made a big contribution toward
building popular support for U.S.
actions in Central America, and as
such, it could prove to be the model
for building support for other sticky
U.S. involvements in other parts of
the world.
The budget figure does, not in-
clude the salaries of the office's
eight professional staff members,
who are on loan from the Defense
Department, the U.S. Information
Agency and the Agency for Inter-
national Development as well as
State, according to deputy director
John D. Blacken. Neither does it
include travel expenses for many of
the speeches, which are often paid
by the group that requested a
speaker-for a college teach-in, a
civic club meeting or a local debate,
for example.
Instead, the money went for cler-
ical help, for a Wang computer sys-
tem to keep track of available peo-
ple and publications, for other trav-
el and for the cost of printing and
distributing the mountain of paper
the office produces, Blacken said.
Army Col. Larry Tracy, who says
he has made 200 speeches in the
past 20 months, said the idea for
the office grew out of the lessons
learned from the U.S. experience in
Vietnam. "It was a serious error in
Vietnam to have no effort to build
popular support for the war," he
said. "We could have worked better
with the press to produce a more
realistic view,
"Public diplomacy is basically a
new concept in the way foreign pol-
icy is made," he said. "The 'public
affairs office' is traditionally reac-
tive to the news. There's never
been an office that tries to educate
the public the way we do .... I
would Eke to see an office like this
become a permanent part of the
diplomatic process, one for each
area of the world."
The office. is not subject to the
law barring the USIA from dissem-
inating information to Americans.
Blacken, who directed the State
Department's Central America of-
fice from 1980 to mid-1981, said
people misunderstood the region
and the policy from the beginning.
"It was a real frustration ....
There was no organized way we
were trying to explain to people the
basic concepts of what Central
America was to us and what we
were basing our policy on."
Director Otto J. Reich, 39, a
Cuban-American who was ormerly
assistant administrator of AID for
Latin America, sees his task as
making the best possible case for
the administration's Central Amer-
ica policy to reporters, foreign of-
ficials and local opinion leaders. He
travels frequently to Europe and
Central America to meet with of-
ficials, sounding them out on their
views and arguing in favor of the
U.S. position.
Tracy said he prefers to speak to
audiences that are hostile or made
up of students in order to get a de-
bate going and to find out what peo-
ple's concerns are. As a result of
such listening, he said, the office
has given new emphasis to "moral
issues" such as why it is proper to
back military assaults by rebels
against the leftist Sandinista gov-
ernment of Nicaragua. "Nobody's
asking any more which side we're
on in El Salvador," he said.
A daily intelligence briefing gives
Reich the latest information On
Central merican developments,
and the staffers keep in close touc
with the re ional desk officers in
their respective agencies and-with
the White House. Reich says he
works hard to make public as much
of his information as possible.
lot of stuff is classified that
doesn't need to be. We are really
pushing to get it out," he said in a
telephone conversation earlier this
year.
Reich and Tracy take pains to
deny published reports that their
office selectively leaks documents
boosting the administration's view
to chosen reporters. But sometimes
the office will provide documents t4'
friendly organizations, which thed'
leak the papers themselves. One
example was a frankly-worded set'
cret report from the Cuban govern-
ment to its international creditors;`
which Reich acknowledged he had
provided to the Cuban-Americaii'
National Foundation last May. The
foundation "leaked" the documeril '
to reporters in June, citing a Eu
pean banker as its source.
The office's publications are ofl'
ten the product of interagency co"
operation engineered by Reich'k..
-
COW
STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504870051-5
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504870051-5
144.
team and monitored for political''
accuracy. A September report
called "Revolution Beyond Our Bot'-
ders," for example, quotes SandiP11
nista leader Tomas Borge as saying
in a 1981 speech: "This revolution
goes beyond our borders." But jr
ignores his next sentence: "This"
does not mean we export our rev:*
olution. It is sufficient that they fol-
low our example .....
A glossy-covered report, "The
Soviet-Cuban Connection," is at thtr'
top of the office's popularity charts"'
so far, with 60,000 copies in circu-
lation, Tracy said. He plans an up-"
dated second edition soon.
Asked how his office differs froi &?
a lobbying group, Tracy said it fo
cuses on factual information. "Whatl'
we provide does, of course, have
the imprimatur of the U.S. govern
ment," he said. "But there's nothing
the matter with attempting to gen-
erate support for a policy as long as
you're truthful."
-Joanne Omang,
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504870051-5