The Chicago Tribune has broken a great followup story on the Rendon Group, subject of a must-read in Rolling Stone last month. The Stone story by James Bamford (author of A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies and of Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency) was a profile of John Rendon, "The Man Who Sold the War," a portrayal that the "strategic communications" company disputes, but Bamford still stands by.
The Trib's story, picked up by the KRT wire, reports that within seven months of the Rendon Group's $1.4 million contract "to help Afghan President Hamid Karzai with media relations in early 2004," both Karzai and Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and now the American envoy in Iraq, wanted to dump them. Instead, the Group was awarded a second, $3.9 million contract in Afghanistan at the behest of "Defense Department superiors in Washington."
"It was a rip-off of the U.S taxpayer," the Trib quotes Jeff Raleigh, who helped oversee Rendon in Kabul for the U.S. Embassy.
Rendon departed Afghanistan in early October when its $3.9 million contract expired. But diplomatic sources said it is in line for another multimillion-dollar Afghan contract: a three-year deal to work on counternarcotics public relations.
The company's work in Afghanistan is just a sliver of the more than $56 million the Pentagon has paid Rendon since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became one of the leading media consultants in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. It also is doing work for the Pentagon in Iraq.
....Several U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department officials said in interviews that Rendon's work had been inadequate and that others in the U.S. Embassy ended up doing a large share of media advisory work with Karzai's staff.
"There's been a sense of frustration that a lot of money is being wasted on consultants who, frankly, just aren't worth the money," said a senior U.S. official familiar with Rendon's work in Afghanistan who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were very well-intentioned, but they weren't plugged into what was happening there."
(No official response from the Pentagon. The Trib reports that "Mary Beth Long, who oversaw the contract for the Pentagon, declined to be interviewed.")
The Group is way overpaid, the Trib story says: "Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul estimated that the work the company was hired to do on its second contract in Afghanistan could have been performed for about $200,000 rather than $3.9 million." The Afghans themselves are even less impressed. "I don't think their performance was worth more than $50,000," the Trib quotes Lutfullah Mashal, until recently the spokesman for the Interior Ministry. "It certainly was not worth millions of dollars."