of USIA and helped create content in support of policy. Staff escorted me to a large conference room to proudly show me … magazines. Spread across an enormous rectangular table were all the print magazines they produced and distributed around the world. I guess they thought that I, as a former magazine editor, would be pleased to see all the wonderful magazines they produced. In fact, I was horrified. I had just sent out a message about focusing on social media, and here they were showing me glossy legacy products from the 1970s. Heck, didn’t they know the magazine business was dying? I eventually killed about half the titles.
Silos, Silos, Everywhere
A couple of weeks after my confirmation, I got my State Department email address—with the domain state.gov—but there was very little in my inbox every morning. I was still getting more State Department email at my Gmail address than at my government one. I noticed that while my inbox sat empty, my staff received all kinds of internally produced news summaries and lists of clips and press releases. It was strange that there was no process to get you set up digitally—no set of lists or schedules. In fact, it took months to get on the lists I needed to be on to get news articles about the State Department, to get opeds and editorials about foreign policy, to get the rundown of weekly meetings—and even then, I’m sure I wasn’t on nearly all the lists I needed to be on. Occasionally, a longtime State Department hand would say, Hey, what’s that list? I didn’t even know about that one.
The truth was, few people at State knew what was going on in a 360-degree way. I was stunned, for example, to find that people at the State Department didn’t seem to know when the Secretary of State was giving a speech. Or what it was about. Or where it was taking place. In those first few months, when I’d mention to other Under Secretaries that the Secretary was giving a speech on, say, arms control or countering violent extremism, they would say, Really! How did you know about that?
This siloification extended far beyond the Secretary’s speeches. When the European bureau made a statement about some action of Putin’s or the Africa bureau condemned an action by a terrorist group in Mali, almost no one knew about it. There was no cross-promotion. Statements were issued from their silos and then not amplified. Public Affairs was often quite reticent about chiming in on such statements. They didn’t see their role as amplifying other statements—after all, they had their own statements to make! They thought it was the Secretary’s job to make speeches and the press’s job to report on them, and that’s how our policies got out to the public. Very 20th century. We literally didn’t have a single person assigned to tweet or be on social media while the Secretary was speaking.
One of the first ideas I had was to form a digital hub in PD that would not originate content but rather share, amplify, and coordinate it. Nobody seemed to be doing this. It would take only a handful of people—three or four—who could retweet and repost what the department had done that day. It would essentially be an aggregator of content for the department. But it could also refute false information about U.S. foreign policy. It would be a hub, and that’s what I called it. I thought it was a no-brainer. But the no-brainer was me, it turned out. Everyone objected. Public Affairs didn’t like the idea and said it was their function. International Information Programs thought this was their function. The seventh floor was skeptical and didn’t really understand the purpose.
I talked about it all the time. I wrote an action memo to the Secretary. And nothing happened. S did not sign the action memo. I didn’t get the go-ahead from management to hire people. I was frustrated and didn’t understand what was happening. It was my first experience with how ideas get blocked within the department. Ideas died at State because people saw them as violating their turf, not because they weren’t good. They died not because anyone overtly objected—they died from a kind of aggressive passivity. It took me a while to understand Colin Powell’s dictum that in government no idea on its own is good enough to rise; every idea needs a coalition to succeed.
The Birth of Counter-Messaging
When I first looked at the structure of R and the bureaus underneath it, one piece didn’t seem to fit: CSCC, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications. All the other parts—Public Affairs, Educational and Cultural Affairs, International Information Programs—had been cobbled together from the 1999 legislation that created the office of public diplomacy, but CSCC was new. It had been created in 2010 by Secretary Hillary Clinton in collaboration with CIA chief Leon Panetta to combat the communications of a radical terrorist group that was using revolutionary new techniques to get out its message: al-Qaeda. Remember, this was 2010. Al-Qaeda had shot videos of Ayman al-Zawahiri sitting on a hillside in Pakistan giving a jihadist lecture directly to the camera for 54 minutes. They then uploaded that video to YouTube, where it got a few thousand views. That was cutting-edge back then.
The genesis of CSCC occurred at a Situation Room meeting in 2010. The U.S.’s drone war against terrorists was having success on the ground but wounding the image of America abroad. At that meeting, State’s coordinator for counterterrorism pitched the idea of an information war room to combat terrorist messaging and help America’s image in the process. According to observers, Obama replied, “Why haven’t we been doing that already?”
That was enough to launch the idea, and Secretary Clinton came up with a plan for a small, nimble entity that could coordinate across the government to counter al-Qaeda’s media in real time. It would live at the State Department but essentially be an interagency group staffed from across the government. Executive Order 13584, issued on September 15, 2011—about a year after that first Situation Room discussion—established the CSCC “to coordinate, orient, and inform government-wide foreign communications activities targeted against terrorism and violent extremism, particular al-Qaida and its affiliates.”3
From the moment of its birth, CSCC was a problem child. It was underfunded, its mission was poorly understood, and it became an orphan within the State Department. The National Security Council sought to manage it. The Department of Defense resented it. And Foreign Service officers avoided it. It was originally seen not as an entity that created content, but one that helped coordinate and inform other entities in government about what al-Qaeda was up to on social media. At the time, there was also a fight about where it would be situated at State. Counterterrorism wanted it, so did R. R won, but it was never a perfect fit.
Within the first year, CSCC had grown to about 40 people, with its most visible part something called the Digital Outreach Team (DOT—another awful acronym), which engaged in online debate about violent extremism. About 20 people worked on the team and created content in three languages: Arabic, Urdu, and Somali. Their motto was “Contest the space,” and the idea was to target so-called fence-sitters, young men who might be considering joining al-Qaeda. The messaging tried to create doubt in these young men by telling them that al-Qaeda was killing Muslims and that if they went to fight, they were likely to be killed themselves.
The head of CSCC was Alberto Fernandez, a former ambassador to Equatorial Guinea who had also been a U.S. spokesperson in Iraq during the Iraq War. Alberto had fluent Arabic, a dark mustache, and a crafty manner. He was an expert in the history of violent extremist organizations and could tell you how al-Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra disagreed about toothbrushing hadiths.
I had first met with Alberto before I was confirmed, to better understand CSCC. He walked me through what they were doing. They seemed very focused on the inside baseball of al-Qaeda politics. He proudly showed me examples of how al-Qaeda’s own messengers attacked CSCC online and tried to take down CSCC’s Twitter handle. It was clear he thought that being attacked by al-Qaeda was a sign of CSCC’s effectiveness. I wasn’t so sure.
Alberto mentioned that in spring 2012, they had noticed another organization that had formed in the area, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which was fighting Bashar al-Assad. (The Levant was the historical region of Syria and the
