At a time when public relations firms have been under fire for obscuring their affiliations, the incident with Rock Creek stands as a cautionary tale of saying too much at the wrong time, particularly in an era of instant global communication.
"The policy is do the work and don't talk about it," said Robert Chlopak, a partner with Washington crisis management firm Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates. "There is no such thing as a local audience anymore."
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The company apparently knew the sensitivities involved when it was hired in 2003 by the Global Fairness Initiative, a Washington nonprofit affiliated with former president Bill Clinton, to develop a Web site and strategy for a February 2004 conference in Kiev called "Ukraine in Europe and the World." The company, which says it has led branding campaigns for such U.S. agencies as the CIA and for NATO and the French aerospace company Thales S.A., was paid $15,000 for its work.
In its news release last month, the company said that in taking on the contract, it realized the challenge was to create a site that was not only secure from hackers "but that would also not be seen as a vehicle for any U.S.-driven political message."
"Which," the company added, "it was not."
At least not until the company's news release was distributed Feb. 8 over the PR Newswire, a publicly accessible Internet service.
"US supporters of 'Orange Revolution' coming out of shadow," read the headline one day later on ITAR-Tass, the Russian news agency. The Tass story said the company provided "propaganda support" for the 2004 conference and made much of the fact that Rock Creek had done work for the CIA and NATO.
Rock Creek once helped develop marketing material for the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, according to Johnson. It also created an 18-language summit agenda for the NATO 2002 Prague Summit Host Committee.
But in the Tass story, the affiliations took on a more sinister light. The article said it had interviewed one of the company's employees, who told them that money was "transferred . . . through several intermediary organizations, so that no one would suspect . . . the improper interference in the political process."
In response to the Tass story, Rock Creek issued a "clarification."
