AMY GOODMAN: So you got on a plane and went to Baghdad. Describe your experience there.

WILLEM MARX: Well, I arrived in Baghdad airport and was taken to a villa in the Green Zone via Camp Victory. After about a week of twiddling my thumbs and not really doing a lot, I became rather impatient and emailed people back in D.C., saying, you know, "What am I doing here? I thought I was going to be doing some work." And within a day or two, I was taken to lunch by another employee, and he explained to me in detail what exactly it was the Lincoln Group was doing. And I was going to take over his position, because he was going on holiday, so -- on vacation, I should say.

And what he was doing was receiving English-written articles by soldiers in a certain unit inside Camp Victory, the major U.S. base just south of Baghdad. He was choosing which of those articles would be published in Iraqi newspapers. He was sending them to Iraqi employees, getting them translated into Arabic, getting them okayed by the command back at Camp Victory and then having other Iraqi employees run them down to Iraqi newspapers, where they would pay editors, sub-editors, commissioning editors to run them as news stories in the Iraqi newspapers. And that was the role, you know, after about a week or ten days of me being there, that I took over.

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.