Submitted by Laura Miller on
The Rendon Group received close to $100-million dollars from the CIA for work it did in Iraq in the five years following the Gulf War according to reporter Seymour Hersh in a New Yorker article. Between 1991-96, The Rendon Group did "media relations" work for the Iraqi National Congress, a coalition opposition group supported at the time by the CIA. Hersh also reports that CIA clandestine service veteran Linda Flohr, who had worked for the "top-secret" Iraqi Operations Group, went to work for the Rendon Group in 1994 after her retirement from the CIA. "Recently, Flohr was named director of security for the Office of Homeland Security and director of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council," O'Dwyer's PR reports. In October 2001, The Rendon Group received a $100,000-a-month, no-bid contract from the Pentagon for assistance with the "war on terror." The Rendon Group also was to work for the Department of Defense's Office of Strategic Influence, until the Pentagon, responding to criticism about the possibility of OSI planting false news stories, said the office would be scrapped.