Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado

Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, best known for her role in the Hill & Knowlton PR firm's deceptive PR campaign to promote Operation Desert Storm on behalf of the government of Kuwait, has a long history of ties to work for government and corporate elites.

A graduate of Vassar College and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Fitz-Pegado worked as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Information Agency. In 1982, she went to work for Gray and Co., a PR firm owned by prominent Republican PR executive Robert Keith Gray. After Gray and Co. was sold to the Hill and Knowlton PR firm in 1986, Fitz-Pegado became a vice president at H&K. Following the invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Iraq in August 1990, the Kuwaiti government-in-exile hired Hill & Knowlton to lead a PR campaign in support of military action by the United States aimed at recapturing the country. H&K established Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a front group for the government-in-exile. Over the next six months, the Kuwaiti government channeled $11.9 million dollars to Citizens for a Free Kuwait, whose only other funding totalled $17,861 from 78 individuals. Virtually all of CFK's budget - $10.8 million - went to Hill & Knowlton in the form of fees.

John MacArthur, the author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, describes some of the activities of this PR campaign: "The H&K team, headed by former U.S. Information Agency officer Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, organized a Kuwait Information Day on 20 college campuses on September 12. On Sunday, September 23, churches nationwide observed a national day of prayer for Kuwait. The next day, 13 state governors declared a national Free Kuwait Day. H&K distributed tens of thousands of Free Kuwait bumper stickers and T-shirts, as well as thousands of media kits extolling the alleged virtues of Kuwaiti society and history. Fitz-Pegado's crack press agents put together media events featuring Kuwaiti 'resistance fighters' and businessmen and arranged meetings with newspaper editorial boards. H&K's Lew Allison, a former CBS and NBC News producer, created 24 video news releases from the Middle East, some of which purported to depict life in Kuwait under the Iraqi boot. The Wirthlin Group was engaged by H&K to study TV audience reaction to statements on the Gulf crisis by President Bush and Kuwaiti officials."

The most notorious event in the PR campaign occurred when a 15-year-old girl named Nayirah gave testimony before an unofficial group of congressmen called the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, claiming that Iraqi troops had murdered scores of premature infants in Kuwait hospitals by removing them from incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floor. At the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm, journalists and human rights investigators interviewed medical staff in Kuwaiti hospitals and concluded that this testimony was false.

Following the Bush Administration's electoral loss to Bill Clinton in 1992, Fitz-Pegado became Director for Public Liaison for the Clinton/Gore Presidential Inaugural Committee and then became an advisor on international issues to Ron Brown, Clinton's commerce secretary, followed by a stint as Assistant Secretary and Director General of the US and Foreign Commercial Service at the Department of Commerce.

Upon leaving her government post, Fitz-Pegado became a vice president at Iridium LLC, a satellite phone company that went bankrupt a few years later. She now owns her own consulting/PR firm, Fitz-Pegado International, with clients including the government of Egypt, the Pan African New Agency Press and the American Business Women's Alliance. Fitz-Pegado is also available as a public speaker through Podium Prose[1], a speakers' bureau with ties to Monsanto[2] and the libertarian Cato Institute.

Contact information

Fitz-Pegado International
1620 L Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-721-9137
Mobile: 240-381-3294
Fax: 202-785-8131
Email: ljfitzp@aol.com
http://www.fitzpinternational.com/