Press Action ::: Barry McCaffrey's good relations with Fleishman-Hillard

Friday, December 13, 2002

Barry McCaffrey's good relations with Fleishman-Hillard

Barry McCaffrey, former drug czar and Gulf War hero, has joined Fleishman-Hillard as chairman of its homeland security practice. The practice, launched last week, will seek to foster communication between clients and the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. It will also offer strategic counsel on issues of terrorism and national security, the PR firm said.

“A lot of companies are looking to sell their services and position themselves” with the new agency, Fleishman-Hillard regional director Paul Johnson told PR Week as reported in its Dec. 9 issue.

McCaffrey also has his own consulting practice, B.R. McCaffrey Associates of Alexandria, Va., teaches at West Point, and is a national security analyst for NBC News.

As drug czar, McCaffrey oversaw the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s huge advertising budget, which included a five-year, $48 million contract with Fleishman-Hillard.

The ONDCP operates a website, created by Fleishman-Hillard, called the Straight Scoop News Bureau. Its mission statement reads: “The goal of SSNB is to increase the frequency of anti-drug themes and drug realities portrayed through youth-to-youth communication in school-based media.”

A U.S. General Accounting Office report into allegations that public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather was overcharging the ONDCP also put the spotlight on a link between McCaffrey and Fleishman-Hillard. Here’s what the Oct. 4, 2000 GAO report said: “Ogilvy did not provide any services to Director McCaffrey involving his response to an article in the New Yorker magazine that was critical of Director McCaffrey’s actions when he was in the military. Director McCaffrey denied to us that anyone had assisted him in his response to this article. However, we found that an official of another ONDCP contractor, Fleishman-Hillard, spent three to four hours advising Director McCaffrey on this matter. This time was not charged to the ONDCP contract. We were told that this time was considered a personal favor to Director McCaffrey.”

The New Yorker article that Fleishman helped McCaffrey respond to was Seymour Hersh’s May 22, 2000, 34-page investigative piece alleging that McCaffrey orchestrated a 1991 massacre of hundreds of Iraqi troops, two days after a cease-fire went into effect at the end of the Gulf War. Hersh quoted numerous combat veterans, both senior officers and enlisted men, describing the “systematic destruction” of a 5-mile-long column of Iraqi armor, vehicles and personnel making what was described as an orderly, U.S.-sanctioned retreat.

After apparently consulting with Fleishman-Hillard, McCaffrey issued his response, which included the statement that Hersh’s article “is nothing more than a revisionist history of the war. He, in effect, faults our troops for defeating the Iraqi threat with so little loss of American lives.”

-- Mark Hand

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