.

And for the first two or three weeks of that, things seemed to go according to plan. I obviously wasn’t hugely happy about the work I was doing, but I saw it as a very, very interesting insight into how both the U.S. military operate in Iraq and also how contractors operate there. And things started to get slightly more exciting, in that the company was offered a much larger contract to do all sorts of other types of media placement, both on television and radio, and the internet and through posters around Baghdad. And I was involved in setting up some of the budgeting and the execution of this larger contract, which was worth $10 million a month for the company.

AMY GOODMAN: $10 million. According to MSNBC, “In December 2005, Pentagon documents indicate the Lincoln Group […] received a $100 million contract to help produce these favorable articles, translate [them] into Arabic, get them placed in Iraqi newspapers and not reveal the Pentagon’s role.”

WILLEM MARX: I think MSNBC has got it slightly confused. The Lincoln Group was one of three companies also offered—also contracted for up to $100 million for a contract with the Psychological Operations Joint Task Force, I think it’s called, down in Florida. And that $100 million was dependent on pictures they made, ideas they came up with and could then sell to the military. That contract, with Lincoln Group at least, has been canceled, I think as recently as this month. I think I saw a piece in the Washington Post reporting that. So that $100 million, very little of it was ever given to the company, I think, and it was certainly touted by them as one of their major crowning achievements. But these are $20 million over two months, the $10 million a month for media placement in Iraq, was a separate contract with the military in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Willem, talk about how you chose these articles. Talk about the generals you communicated with, what the content of the articles were.

WILLEM MARX: Sure. Well, I’d get about five a day from this unit inside Camp Victory. And they’d vary from profiles of an Iraqi policewoman, maybe, to stories about factories opening, hospitals opening, terrorists being eliminated. And I tried as much as possible to stay away from those that dealt with terrorism and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I thought they were particularly inflammatory, often badly informed about local feelings towards insurgents in Iraq.

And I tried as much as possible to push pieces which talked about reconstruction. I’d pass those ones onto Iraqi employees, that talked about hospitals being rebuilt, and they were very clinical stories. There was not often a lot of art to the writing, but I felt that those were definitely stories that, you know, the mainstream media, both in Iraq and elsewhere, would not be writing about, purely because they would have no access to them. And it was the kind of positive spin on the situation that I felt more comfortable with using.

AMY GOODMAN: And then—

WILLEM MARX: And I’d—sorry, yes?

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about then what you would do once you chose these articles? Who would you transmit them to?

WILLEM MARX: I would send them to an Iraqi in Lincoln Group’s downtown Iraqi office, which was staffed entirely by local Iraqis, and he would choose one of the translators they had there, get it turned into Arabic, send back to me. I unfortunately don’t read Arabic at all well. And I would then send it to the command. I think they had an Iraqi translator there themselves, who would check that it more or less followed the original English. They would rubber stamp it, and I would then send it back to the Iraqi office saying, “This is good to go. Put it in newspaper A, B, or C.”

And from there, the process really was beyond my control, and they would do their best to place it in the newspaper I’d ask them to put it in, and often they didn’t, and I began to grow suspicious about why exactly they weren’t putting it in certain newspapers. And that led to what was, to me, the most shocking episode of my time in Iraq, when I was called upon to question some of the Iraqi employees at the downtown office as to why articles were being placed in newspapers we hadn’t asked them to be put in and also why they were charging these newspapers far more than they had when I’d first arrived, the suspicion being that Iraqi employees were taking a cut of the money they then expensed the company.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t you explain that whole journey, how you left the Green Zone and went to conduct this interrogation?

WILLEM MARX: It was extraordinary. I was asked by my boss at the company to look into—you know, I’d noticed these discrepancies myself in the kind of flow charts we kept, which monitored how many articles were published and where, and I saw there were some very strange goings on in these records, and I was sent to go and investigate, myself. So I took a friend from the Green Zone, an Iraqi guy who lived nearby and worked more or less as a handyman for another American contractor. He agreed to come down as a mutual sort of friend of mine and translator, who the other Iraqi employees wouldn’t know and would not be able to follow or suspect, in case there was any foul play to be experienced.

And he and I drove down to this downtown office through all the checkpoints, sort of mid-afternoon, I would say, arrived at this office, which, of course, is bolted and relatively heavily guarded inside this apartment building. And I went straight to the head of the Iraqi office and said, “I want to speak to such-and-such and such-and-such and ask them about these discrepancies.” And I, at this stage, had no idea who was really involved, who was guilty and, because my Arabic was very rudimentary, I very rarely understood much of what was sort of said in front of me, so it was difficult to know who I should be trusting. And I sat down with one employee after another and really questioned them about their involvement in the publishing of these stories and whether they had been taking kickbacks in connivance with local editors.

And the really startling episode I write about is sitting down with one of these men, who I’d never really trusted, and he very angrily was protesting the accusations I was laying against him. And I carried a gun very often with me when I traveled outside of the Green Zone, a small sort of Glock revolver, and carried it in my belt, and as I sat down to talk to this man, after a few moments, I realized that the revolver was very uncomfortably placed inside my belt. And as I started asking these very accusatory questions, I pulled the gun out of my belt and put it on the table between the two of us and suddenly realized that was a horrifically threatening motion. And I was really quite disgusted with myself, and the man left. He ran away out of the office when I was questioning someone else.

The two men who had been sent to help me put pressure, along with my own translator friend, to help me put pressure on these employees were former Mukhabarat officers, part of Saddam’s intelligence service, and they told me the best approach would be to sort of threaten this guy with a CIA investigation, telling me that those three letters were the most threatening three letters to any Iraqi. And once I had learned that the man I’d probably gone on, as it were, had left the building, I decided, you know, it was getting dark, and I needed to get the hell out of there, and this was not at all the sort of thing I should be spending my time doing if I wanted to be a journalist. And that really precipitated my departure from Baghdad. I decided, you know, that week, I was out of there.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the amounts of money that we’re talking about on both ends? Here you were interrogating these Iraqis about whether they had possibly pocketed some of the money that was supposed to go to the newspapers. And yet, on the other hand, you had the Lincoln Group receiving millions of dollars.

WILLEM MARX: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain?

WILLEM MARX: Well, that was one of the really shocking things to me, is that, you know, I was sent down to talk to these guys, and at most we paid, I think, roughly $2,000 to place an article in the best Iraqi newspapers. And, you know, they were taking half of that. They were pocketing a grand an article, which in Iraq, as I’m sure you’d appreciate, is a huge amount of money and would have helped them and their families quite significantly.

At the same time, items in the contract that the Lincoln Group had with the U.S. military—one such item, a line item, as they would call it, would be placing a TV commercial on Iraqi television, and that would require them to film, edit and then air these 30-second-long or minute-long on-air sort of commercials. And each commercial, they were paid $1 million, just over $1 million. And when I went to try and, you know, get some idea of prices for these things, I was told that you could effectively get one of these on air for about $12,000, and as I’m sure you appreciate, that’s a pretty significant profit margin. And yet, there was I, interrogating people with guns for a mere $1,000.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the U.S. generals involved and also the Iraqi newspapers you had these articles placed in?

WILLEM MARX: Yes. The process by which I passed on these articles often involved a bit of back-and-forth between myself and captains and majors in the U.S. military unit that I dealt with, and my relationship with them was very important to the company. I had to at times be diplomatic, at times be critical. And occasionally I would have to give up my editorial control over which articles were pushed through to the Iraqi media, because they had, themselves, received orders from above, from men like General Casey, who was the top commander in Iraq at the time and, I believe, still is. And General Casey said, “No, sorry. It’s very important we publish this article. You guys make sure the Lincoln Group publishes it.” And lo and behold, we’d publish it, even though it would be something that I felt was, you know, not really suitable and would grate with many Iraqis reading it, who would think this is obviously American propaganda.

And, you know, the newspapers we dealt with, I think on occasions like that, were very, very suspicious, I would imagine, of who was planting these articles, where they were coming from, why freelance Iraqi writers would turn up to their offices and offer them $1,000, $2,000 to publish an article. And there must have been a huge suspicion from some of these editors that the Americans were involved.

And one particular article about the Badr Brigade, which is a Shiite militia, I’m sure you know, which General Casey was very keen to push, basically applauded the Badr Brigade for not retaliating against attacks on the Shia in Baghdad. And he was very keen to get it pushed out, and two newspapers in a row refused to publish it, because it was too inflammatory in a political sense. So that was a very interesting experience, having this senior, senior general getting involved in the nitty-gritty and wanting one particular story to go out, only to discover that no Iraqi newspapers in their right mind were willing to publish it for however much money we offered.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Willem Marx, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Have a safe trip back to the United States. I look forward to meeting you when you come back to New York to get your journalism education.