In March 2015, Joe Cirincione, president of a foundation called the Ploughshares Fund, was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered about the impending nuclear deal with Iran. “President Obama’s political opponents try to block everything he does,” he said. “But I think the center of the American security establishment is solidly behind the deal as it’s been outlined.” The interview was headlined on NPR’s website, “Nuclear Experts Remain Optimistic About Iranian Negotiations.”
Now that the Iranian deal has been finalized, so many discomfiting facts about the campaign to push it through a reluctant Congress have emerged that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. The latest revelations, however, are especially startling. On May 20, the Associated Press reported that Cirincione’s Ploughshares Fund apparently bought and paid for this favorable NPR coverage, giving the news outlet $100,000 last year and $700,000 in grants over a decade. Ploughshares also gave money to the Center for Public Integrity, which supports the influential nonprofit news outlet ProPublica, along with left-leaning publications such as Mother Jones and the Nation to beef-up their Iran coverage.
The AP’s report, taken in conjunction with the revelations in a May 8 New York Times profile of Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, paint a disturbing picture of how the Iran deal was sold. No less than Leon Panetta, former CIA director and defense secretary under President Obama, told the Times that had Obama been honest about his intentions to empower Iran and disengage from the Middle East, Obama’s national security team would have gotten “the [expletive] kicked out of them.” To sell the deal, the White House worked with journalists and outside groups as part of a sophisticated and effective propaganda operation coordinated at the highest levels. Not coincidentally, an overwhelming number of these organizations working with the White House were also being funded by Ploughshares.
Where Cirincione claimed “the American security establishment is solidly behind the deal,” Rhodes admitted the White House created an “echo chamber” to drown out opposing views within that same establishment, which he contemptuously referred to as “the Blob.” Rhodes also boasted of manipulating journalists who are “27 years old and . . . literally know nothing” into “saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” That task was undoubtedly made easier by Cirincione cutting checks to the employers of these same journalists.
The day after the AP report on Ploughshares, Cirincione published an op-ed at the Huffington Post. “It is common practice for foundations to fund media coverage of under-reported stories and perspectives,” he wrote. “For some, this might be global health, poverty or the impact of conflict on civilians. For Ploughshares Fund, this means bringing much-needed attention to the dangers of nuclear weapons.”
Paying news outlets to enhance coverage of polarizing issues the White House is deeply invested in is decidedly not a common practice. For at least five years now, Ploughshares’ main focus has been supporting the Obama administration’s goal of retrenchment in the Middle East. This cause is not a benign public interest issue along the lines of poverty or global health.
Ploughshares also carefully tracked how much influence they were buying. In 2014, the foundation produced a “Cultural Strategy Report,” which had a specific section about the need to “directly fund one or more national journalism positions,” noting that previous “efforts supported by Ploughshares Fund in the past did not generate the desired volume of coverage (funding of reporters at the Nation and Mother Jones and a partnership with the Center for Public Integrity to create a national security desk).” NPR, though not named in the report, presumably did generate the desired volume of pro-Iran-deal coverage. They received a six-figure check from Ploughshares the following year.
NPR insists their ostensibly objective editorial stance wasn’t affected by Ploughshares’ generosity, but facts suggest otherwise. Rep. Mike Pompeo, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and a leading congressional critic of the Iran deal, revealed last week that he had asked multiple times to appear on NPR to provide balance to their discussions of the Iran deal and had been denied an opportunity. NPR responded by saying it “had no record of Pompeo’s requests.” The Washington Free Beacon‘s Adam Kredo subsequently confirmed at least two email discussions between Pompeo’s office and NPR producers.
Kredo had reported on the questionable nature of NPR’s taking Ploughshares grants in 2012. His report detailed numerous instances of NPR coverage of Iran and nuclear issues right in line with the Ploughshares worldview, including Iran commentary from Stephen Walt, the coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a deeply controversial book that claims Jewish interests dictate American foreign policy.
Ploughshares insists it did nothing wrong, but the defensive nature of the response to accusations of purchasing influence is telling. The headline on Cirincione’s Huffington Post piece is “Why the Right Wing Is Angry That We Blocked War With Iran.” But the Associated Press and New York Times are hardly “right wing.” Ploughshares also issued a press release blasting AP reporter Bradley Klapper by name for highlighting their funding arrangements with media organizations, and that same release accused the Times of creating a “fictional narrative.” Ploughshares and affiliated groups launched a similarly desperate bid a year ago to discredit an AP report that the Obama administration had struck a side deal with Iran that would let Iran “self-inspect” one of its own nuclear facilities, a side deal that had not been disclosed to Congress as the law required.
Coordinating rapid responses to problematic media reports is made easier by the fact that Ploughshares gave $75,000 a year for the last six years to Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor and former aide to Jimmy Carter. Sick runs an invite-only listserv for policy experts, academics, and journalists friendly to Ploughshares’ views on Iran and the Middle East. According to the Free Beacon, which again obtained relevant emails, the listserv was riddled with antisemitic conspiracy theories.
“In one post, retired journalist Richard Sale claimed the CIA told him that pro-Israel Christian groups were ‘secretly funded by Mossad,’ ” reports the Free Beacon‘s Alana Goodman. “In another, Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich speculated that the Iranian-backed bombing of the 1994 AMIA Jewish community center was actually a false flag operation by the Argentine government to cover up its complicity with the Nazis.”
It’s clear that Ploughshares played a key role in creating groupthink on Iran. Throughout the negotiations and continuing to this day, everyone in the Ploughshares orbit has insisted on defining the issues according to a dangerously false dichotomy: Either you grant the outrageous concessions afforded to the anti-American regime by the Obama administration’s nuclear deal or America goes to war with Iran.
This talking point was not arrived at accidentally. Bloomberg’s Eli Lake recently reported on a 2011 memo circulated to the Iran Strategy Group—a confederation of pro-Iran-deal groups that were all being funded by Ploughshares. “On a messaging note, it would be best to describe [deal opponents] as ‘pro-war,’ and leave it to them to back off that characterization of their position,” reads the memo.
All of this suspiciously parroted dishonesty would be damnable enough if it were strictly the sub rosa campaign of private interest groups. But it’s hard to tell where Ploughshares’ campaign to sell the Iran deal ends and the White House’s political strategy begins. Last summer, while the deal was still being debated, President Obama struck a familiar refrain in a speech at American University. “Let’s not mince words,” he said. “The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war.”
Like Ploughshares, the Obama White House was very energetic in its efforts to shape messaging—indeed, it appears to have been a pure propaganda operation. Testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on May 17, Michael Doran, a member of the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration, drew attention to the fact that Rhodes’s “echo chamber” bluster was backed by a good deal of substance.
“Rhodes and key members of his staff openly admitted . . . that they built a campaign-style war room manned by approximately two dozen staffers drawn from the State Department, Treasury, and the Department of Defense,” Doran testified. “The war room monitored the discussion of the Iran nuclear deal—in the traditional press, on social media, in Congress, and in the policy world—and supplied sympathetic reporters with stories, official and unofficial, that supported the goals of the Obama administration.”
Doran also reminded Congress that Panetta wasn’t the only member of Obama’s cabinet who sounded the alarm. “Rhodes’s war room is not an isolated problem: It is symptomatic of an NSC that, according to all three of Obama’s former secretaries of defense, has grown imperial in both size and ethos.” Doran proposed that Congress adopt a specific solution: “Cut the size of the NSC by limiting its budget and by putting tight restrictions on the number of detailees that it can borrow from other departments and agencies. This idea is already making its way through the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. The more voices that support this effort, the better,” he told the Oversight Committee.
There may still be much to learn about the secretive Iran deal. Secretary of State John Kerry recently traveled to London in a bid to persuade American allies to invest in Iran, even though this is not a requirement of the Iran deal. This has led many to speculate that the administration may be hiding more secret side deals with Iran.
Compared with the Obama White House, the government of Iran has been relatively honest about its dealings and foreign policy intentions. On May 23, Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, gave a speech summarizing the outcome of the deal. “Iran,” he said, “relied on logic during its confrontation with the U.S. and benefited from its enemies’ mistakes.”
Ploughshares and the White House may brag about the power of their echo chamber, but to hear Suleimani tell it, the Iran deal didn’t prevent a war. Iran is already waging war on America and its other enemies—and it’s winning.
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
A previous version of this story stated that Rep. Mike Pompeo is a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee. It has been corrected.
