Book  Review

Secrets And Lies:

The anatomy of an anti-environmental PR campaign

The North American edition of the book "Secrets & Lies: The anatomy of an anti-environmental PR campaign" has been released, based on hundreds of pages of leaked internal documents from the state-owned Timberlands logging company and its consultant, the New Zealand subsidiary of the giant British-based firm Shandwick.

Secrets & Lies is by Nicky Hager and Bob Burton, the latter a frequent contributor to PR Watch. Because the book is based on leaked documents, the element of surprise was important to its release and there has was no advance publicity.

Background information on the writers

Nicky Hager is best known in New Zealand for his role as a researcher and critic on public issues such as nuclear and military policy and intelligence. However his main work, for the last decade, has been as a writer. In 1998 he was judged fourth in a United States investigative journalism award and his 1996 book, Secret Power, documenting New Zealand’s role in a previously unknown international spy network, was a best seller. It has been published in translation in Europe and a revised version is due to be released in Europe and the US in 2000. World-wide publicity from that book earnt him the description of being the New Zealander who had ‘received the most overseas coverage in 1998’.

During 1997 and 1998, Nicky Hager gave some time to assist the environmental campaign to have all the public native forests of the West Coast reserved. His interest in this subject dates from the early 1980s when he worked for the DSIR Ecology Division studying and writing about these forests.

Nicky Hager was born in Levin and has degrees in physics and philosophy from Victoria University. He lives in Wellington.

Bob Burton is a journalist specialising in environmental issues and the PR industry. He has written extensively about public relations and the use of PR campaigns to counter public movements, including articles for Consuming Interest and US based magazines PR Watch and In These Times. He edits Mining Monitor, a quarterly newsmagazine on the mining industry in Australia, Asia and the Pacific for the Sydney based Mineral Policy Institute.

He was born and educated in Sydney, gaining an Arts degree from Sydney University. He has previously been a researcher for various Australian environment groups, publishing numerous papers on minerals and energy policy. He lives in Canberra.

LOGGING COMPANY WORKED TO "NEUTRALISE" ENVIRONMENTALISTS

The main priority of the Timberlands public relations campaign was to "neutralise" the effect of the environmental groups that threatened its logging plans. The book Secrets and Lies, released today, reveals the anti-environmental agenda behind Timberlands’ "sustainable management" public image.

A secret Timberlands PR strategy states that a "primary objective must be to limit the [environment] movement’s ability to influence public and policies". (see p. 30)

The tactics employed to undermine environmental opponents included:

• monitoring groups (including arranging infiltration of environmental groups);
• targeting their sources of finance (including concerted actions against the Body Shop); and
• making numerous legal threats to deter people from joining conservation protests (these are all detailed in Chapter 2).

"Timberlands followed deliberate strategies to discredit environmentalists. For example, it repeatedly claimed that the groups opposing Timberlands were small, extreme and spreading misinformation," said co-author Nicky Hager, "although the company was aware that almost all the large environment groups opposed the logging, including Forest & Bird, ECO, Greenpeace, Federated Mountain Clubs and Native Forest Action." These claims are familiar to residents of the Slocan Valley. Even with over 80% support for sustainable alternatives - pro-logging groups claim that environmentalists are small, extreme and divided.

The book reveals that Timberlands’ main PR firm, Shandwick New Zealand, was paid to monitor all opposing actions and media statements and devise ways to counter them. Secrets and Lies reproduces dozens of internal papers showing the efforts Shandwick went to counter every critic of its client. It employed tactics as varied as attempting to create problems for critics with their employers, to legal threats, to writing articles and letters to the editor attacking the motives of the critics and their statements.

"The effort to stop criticism of the company even extended to paying contractors to remove graffiti and posters from walls and lamp posts in the capital city (see Chapter 4). The companies showed no respect for freedom of speech," Mr Hager said.

"The nastiest tactics were direct actions against the tree-sitting protesters in Charleston Forest in 1997." Chapter 3 reveals details of "Operation Alien" ("alien" being the term for protesters in the internal papers), in which Timberlands launched an aggressive logging operation suddenly one morning in the middle of the protest area.

Timberlands’ own minutes of the operation record the attempted destruction of a tree-sitter’s platform using a 5-tonne log swinging under the logging helicopter - without checking to find out that one of the tree sitters was under the tree. The action put her life seriously at risk. Later Timberlands denied the potentially lethal event occurred and paid Shandwick to lobby the Civil Aviation Authority informally during the official investigation into the near accident. The final CAA investigation appeared highly inadequate and the helicopter pilot was not prosecuted on a technicality.

"As a state-owned company, Timberlands should be censured for its actions by its shareholder, the government, on behalf of the public of New Zealand.

Shandwick should also be held to account by the public relations industry for its unethical PR practices," said Mr Hager.

"All their tactics, ranging from keeping issues secret to directly attacking critics, were part of an attempt to exclude people from legitimate political activity which is highly questionable in a democracy."

LOGGING COMPANY TARGETS POLITICAL PARTY

For the last year the primary target of Timberlands’ PR campaign has been the Labour Party, owing to management fears that a change of government in November would lead to its native forest logging being stopped. The new book, Secrets and Lies, shows the company worked frantically to reverse the direction of Labour Party policy (chapter 10).

Co-author Nicky Hager said, "Since a state company cannot openly lobby a political party, Timberlands worked through a variety of allies to put pressure on Labour. The main target of this campaign was Helen Clark."

The book cites a confidential PR strategy from December 1998, written by Timberlands communication manager Paula de Roeper, called "Public relations strategy - Where to from here?" The paper stated that a top PR priority was persuading Labour leader Helen Clark to visit the West Coast for a Timberlands PR tour. The pressure on Helen Clark began soon after. Straight after Christmas Timberlands’ front group, Coast Action Network, launched a letter writing campaign to Helen Clark demanding that she visit the West Coast. It distributed hundreds of form letters addressed to Clark and arranged advertisements on local radio stations urging locals to write to her.

Timberlands mobilised other allies too. Its chief so-called "environmental" ally, Guy Salmon of the Ecologic Foundation (formerly the Maruia Society), lobbied individual Labour MPs in favour of Timberlands’ logging plans, challenged Helen Clark in the Society newsletter and was guest speaker at a pro-Timberlands public meeting in Greymouth where his speech concluded with an appeal to the audience to write letters to Helen Clark (pp. 191-192).

Timberlands‘ scientific allies, who had been carefully cultivated by Timberlands according to plans set out in the leaked PR documents, wrote letters to the Labour leader and her colleagues attacking conservationists and her party‘s anti-native logging policies. Other organisations identified as useful allies in the leaked PR plans, such as the New Zealand Furniture Association and other timber organisations, likewise wrote to Labour MPs at key stages in the party‘s internal debate over its policy.

The company cannot claim that it does not lobby. The leaked PR papers contain lobbying plans, with key targets being the relevant ministers, "advisers and government officials" and "caucus leaders/relevant spokespeople". The plans aim to "identify relative influence among key players, their respective portfolios and viewpoints", "scaling up [lobbying] effort for MPs whose opposition is likely to be most damaging, and those whose support is likely to be most influential" (Chapter 11).

JENNY SHIPLEY: BEHIND STATE-OWNED COMPANY‘S POLITICAL LOBBYING

Prime Minister Jenny Shipley needs to explain why she and staff in her office supported and assisted Timberlands‘ politically-motivated multi-million dollar anti-environmental PR campaign but in response to a question in Parliament in July denied there had been any involvement.

Jenny Shipley and her office assisted Timberlands to lobby other MPs and bureaucrats to enable the logging of native forests to continue, say the authors of Secrets and Lies, Nicky Hager and Bob Burton. "Shipley was also aware of and supported the state-owned company‘s efforts to undermine public opinion against their logging of native forests."

Secrets and Lies reveals details of confidential ministerial meetings in which Mrs Shipley argued that the government should not be seen to be giving in to the environmentalists. In 1997 as SOE Minister she successfully stalled former Prime Minister Jim Bolger‘s private plans to stop the logging and conserve the West Coast forests.

"It seems that Jenny Shipley was determined to back Timberlands‘ continued logging of native forests, no matter how much public relations money it cost, no who poor the company‘s financial records were, and no matter how much public opinion was against it," says Nicky Hager.

Chapter 12 of the book goes into the details of Shipley‘s involvement in Timberlands‘ lobbying efforts. Numerous petty incidents show that she knew the company was lobbying other politicians, and supported its efforts.

"Mrs Shipley was abusing her position as SOE minister and as prime minister, by actively supporting expenditure by a state-owned company of millions of dollars on lobbying politicians and on dirty public relations tactics aimed at discrediting genuine public interest groups concerned for the environment," says Nicky Hager.

Leaked minutes of Timberlands PR meetings and other leaked correspondence show that Timberlands and its PR firms made a point of sending details of many of their activities to Mrs Shipley. Other documents record her approval for secret tactics in the anti-environmental campaign.

For example, a 15 September 1997 paper written by Timberlands‘ PR company, Shandwick New Zealand Ltd stated that Mrs Shipley supported Timberlands‘ "graffiti erasure" campaign. Shandwick was paying contractors to paint out all graffiti critical of native logging in the capital city (and at times to paint over posters too).

Mrs Shipley began co-operating in the PR campaign as SOE Minister in 1997. Under the SOE Act, she was required to avoid involvement in day-to-day operations on the state company. But Secrets and Lies shows she made an exception for Timberlands. The book quotes numerous references from the leaked papers of liaison between Timberlands and Mrs Shipley‘s office over the day-to-day details of the Timberlands‘ campaign, and partisan support from her office staff, who under state service rules, should be politically neutral. Mrs Shipley‘s staff assisted Timberlands by sending copies of Native Forest Action‘s latest posters to its Wellington PR firm, Shandwick, advising Timberlands what MPs were thinking, and which MPs and bureaucrats to lobby. They even provided feedback to Timberlands on its "communications" strategy.

Mrs Shipley‘s involvement did not end when she became Prime Minister and ceased being SOE minister. Soon after becoming PM, Mrs Shipley noted graffiti on a wall in Wellington‘s Balaena Bay on the way to the airport and her staff told Shandwick. The wall was painted over in a mural initiated by and covertly sponsored by Timberlands.

LOCAL RESIDENTS MANIPULATED BY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGN

Leaked public relations documents show Timberlands West Coast manipulated West Coast people to drum up local support for its native forest logging plans. Through creating a front-group and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on local sponsorship Timberlands created the impression of independent local support for its logging.

The secret PR documents, quoted in the book Secrets and Lies, reveal that Timberlands PR staff dreamed up and arranged the formation of a purportedly independent local pro-logging group and then used the group to implement its PR strategies as required. (See chapters 9 and 10, pages 158-200.)

The book reveals that the plan to form a pro-Timberlands group came out of a PR strategy meeting between Timberlands and its PR companies held on 1 July 1997 and that the group has been under the company‘s control ever since.

The group, Coast Action Network (CAN), has appeared regularly in the news media. It was the subject of a Holmes feature recently where the group hotly denied any links with Timberlands. CAN dominates West Coast news coverage of local community perspectives on logging issues. But the leaked papers quoted in the book prove that CAN is a front group for the state company which, the authors argue, has no mandate to play politics in this way. The "Wise Use" movement in the US, known as "Share BC" in British Columbia are the local equivalents.

The authors note that some West Coast people who participated in the group were undoubtedly unaware that they were part of the company PR campaign. But the leading CAN members are revealed as working closely with the company, working according to priorities and plans originating from Timberlands and its PR advisers.

This example from the leaked papers shows how the group was used to create the impression of third-party support for Timberlands:

At a 31 October 1997 PR telephone conference, staff from the PR firm Shandwick were given the job of dealing with a proposal, that some Timberlands forests should be conserved and dedicated to Princess Diana, that had appeared in the newspapers. On 4 November, Shandwick consultant Rob McGregor drafted letters to the West Coast papers and the Minister of Conservation, Nick Smith, (in the voice of West Coasters) opposing the proposal and faxed them to Timberlands. In his cover note he wrote:

"Thank you for your help with this and for arranging for the Action Group to dispatch the letters on their letterhead and in the name of their organisation. Better this salvo comes from them than Timberlands." (page 163).

There are other, similar examples in the leaked Timberlands papers.

"The use of front groups as a counter to genuine community campaigns is a well-known PR tactic employed in other countries," says co-author, Bob Burton. "It is an unethical public relations practice that subverts democratic processes."

In early 1999 the leader of CAN was a Timberlands contractor, Barry Nicolle, who met with senior Timberlands staff at the Timberlands headquarters to plan all major CAN activities meetings. Nicolle made the standard denial that CAN was linked to Timberlands to a large public meeting called by CAN in Greymouth in April 1999, even though he himself had spent the afternoon before the forum in a meeting with senior Timberlands staff. The meeting was advertised as being about "the future of the West Coast", but the West Coasters who turned up found that the meeting was focussed entirely on Timberlands.

Timberlands‘ sponsorship of West Coast groups was also a cynical attempt by the state-owned company to ’buy‘ local support for its logging activities. Recent promises to fund an arena in Slocan if stumpage is forgone by the government appears to be a variation on this theme.

Timberlands‘ local sponsorship spending almost doubled, to $150,000 in 1998 after protests began against its native forest logging. The PR strategy papers explain bluntly that a purpose of the sponsorship was to make local groups feel indebted to the company "as a way of assisting local support for the Beech Scheme".

The West Coast Principals Association, for instance, was identified in the PR plans as a target. Timberlands internal documents crudely explained the strategy as:

"Concept: To provide practical assistance to the West Coast Principals Association in return for gaining the opportunity to get the support of local schools for Timberlands and its operations."

Timberlands donated $2,500 for the association‘s annual conference in 1996, 1997 and 1998. In 1998, when Timberlands was secretly trying to orchestrate submissions in favour of its beech logging plans, the Principals Association president duly circulated a letter with a pro-logging submission form to all West Coast schools saying:

"Timberlands have been generous supporters of our Principal‘s Conference and schools on the Coast and I invite you and staff to consider this submission."

An August 1998 meeting between Timberlands and Shandwick PR staff identified the following "opportunities where public relations can be applied to further the interest of Timberlands":

"Community Front: *Thank you TWC letters - from allies who have received TWC sponsorship; Environmental Front: *Anti-NFA letter writing campaign (stock letters); *Thank you TWC for supplying my son‘s football team, etc."

Soon after, anti-Native Forest Action (NFA) letters to the editor began to appear in newspapers, many of them written by Timberlands staff and contractors. Co-ordinated anti-environmental letter writing campaigns are also a feature of the BC political landscape.

"The cynical use of West Coasters deserves to be exposed. It is an insult to local people and an abuse of political processes for a company - and especially a state company - to be manipulating a political debate in this way," Bob Burton said.

• A related book review: Mananaging Activism: A Guide to Dealing with Activists and Pressure Groups which covers the tactics outlined in Secrets and Lies from the point of view of the public relations industry



• Native Forest Action
• Forest and Bird
• Timberlands West Coast - a good example of a "greenwashed" site.
• CLEAR - Clearinghouse for Environmental Advocacy and Research: for research on the anti-environmental movement in the United States. Although no longer updated, this searchable database is the best single source.
• PRwatch website - Public Interest Reporting on the PR/ Public Affairs Industry - a project of the Center for Media & Democracy