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Tom Squitieri, the reporter-turned-KRG flack, giving the commencement address at Indiana University in Pennsylvania, 2003 Photo: TomSquitieri.com

A spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Washington is an ex-USA Today reporter who resigned under pressure amid accusations of plagiarism, DCBureau has learned. The reporter, Tom Squitieri, once covered the Iraqi Kurds, who now pay him $8,000 a month as a registered agent of the KRG.

In 2005, Squitieri, then a Pentagon correspondent with the Gannett-owned USA Today, left the paper after his editors learned that he had lifted quotes from other publications. Several years later, he found himself gainfully employed by the Kurds—a group that has sought to become one of the most powerful foreign lobbies in the United States. Led by their Washington envoy, Qubad Talabani, the son of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, the rulers of Iraqi Kurdistan have garnered widespread support from members of Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House. Enlisting the services of K Street’s boutique PR firms, Talabani has effectively portrayed the autonomous Kurdish region—home to 20 percent of Iraq’s population—as the sole bright spot in a conflict-ridden nation.

“Talabani is having little trouble selling a simple message around town: Kurdistan is a success story,” reported the Washington Monthly in 2007.

The KRG, which recently moved its offices to an elegant, embassy-sized stone townhouse in Washington’s upscale Dupont Circle neighborhood, is soliciting American assistance in pursuit of its political goals—which include reserving the rights to Kurdish oil fields, some of the largest untapped reserves in the world. The increasing clout of the Kurds in the U.S., and the fact that they already employ some of D.C.’s premier lobbying shops, makes their hiring of an alleged plagiarist seem that much more puzzling.

From Pressman to PR Flack

Qubad Talabani, Squitieri's boss and the Kurds' Washington envoy Photo: Kurdistan Regional Government

During his 17-year tenure at USA Today, Squitieri filed over 300 articles on Iraq, including dozens of pieces on the Kurds. He covered them during the 1991 Gulf War and again in 1996 as internal fighting erupted between the KRG’s two main political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Squiteri also covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq up until 2005, when his editors discovered that he used quotes from other newspapers, without attribution, for several stories.

A front-page story Squitieri wrote on the Army lagging behind in ordering equipment for soldiers in Iraq, which ran on March 28, 2005, featured quotes from Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and the father of a slain U.S. soldier. The same quotes appeared, verbatim, in a piece published one year prior by the Indianapolis Star. Squitieri claimed that he had been granted permission to use them by the father and Bayh’s office. But when his superiors found other articles containing recycled statements, Squitieri abruptly resigned.

"When you looked at that pattern in his work, there was no way that Tom could continue to be the Pentagon reporter for USA Today," Ken Paulson, a USA Today senior editor, told the American Journalism Review at the time.

When DCBureau asked Squitieri about his past, he became bizarrely defiant. “I am trying to determine the identity of the ex-USA Today reporter who you have sleuthed out that is going to take over here at the KRG,” he wrote in a terse e-mail. Squitieri’s public profiles list his positions at both USA Today and TS Navigations, the self-owned communications company through which he contracts with the KRG. His Facebook page includes pictures from trips to Kurdistan.

Squitieri did not respond to repeated follow-up messages. Calls to the KRG office, including requests to interview Talabani directly, were routed to Squitieri and not returned.

After leaving his reporting post, Squitieri worked at Dittus Communications, a D.C. public affairs firm. A former Dittus assistant vice president, Jennifer Goodman Horowitz, said in a phone interview that, while she was aware Squitieri had worked for USA Today, she knew nothing about the circumstances surrounding his departure. A company representative declined to discuss Squitieri’s hiring, telling DCBureau that Dittus did not divulge private information about its employees.

In 2007, Squitieri left Dittus and formed TS Navigations, which began contracting with the KRG in 2008, according to Department of Justice filings. TS Navigations specializes in “perceptive writing, engaging research and investigations, deft media training [and] commanding crisis communications,” according to its Web site, which brandishes marketing materials produced for the KRG and a handful of other clients, including Fluor, a global engineering firm that has received billions of dollars in reconstruction projects for Iraq. The KRG paid separate installments to Squitieri and TS Navigations for a total of nearly $90,000 in 2008, and on June 12 of this year, Squitieri registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as providing “public relations consulting” to the Kurdistan government for a monthly retainer of $8,000.

Former Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani (left, standing) receives an honorary degree from Washington & Jefferson College in 2008. Squitieri, despite his controversial background, teaches journalism at W&J Photo: Kurdistan Regional Government

Despite his controversial background, Squitieri also moonlights as a journalism professor at his alma mater, Washington and Jefferson College, a liberal arts school in Western Pennsylvania. Washington and Jefferson gave then-Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani an honorary doctorate degree in 2008. The university’s faculty dean, Jan Czeckwoski, cancelled a scheduled phone call with DCBureau and did not respond to repeated follow-up inquiries.

The Kurdish Connection

When Squitieri first reported on Jalal Talabani, he was the rogue leader of a splinter rebel group, the PUK. “His method is guerrilla warfare, not political dialogue,” Squitieri wrote in 1996. Now the elder Talabani is one of the most powerful men in Iraq, and arguably the most powerful man in Kurdistan.

One of Squitieri’s former supervisors at USA Today, who spoke on condition of anonymity so that she could speak freely, said that she was not aware of him developing any particular sources in Kurdistan “that would lead to these kind of relationships [with the KRG].” She described Squitieri as a “hard worker.”

If Squitieri’s ties to the Kurds were forged during his reporting assignments, he would join a growing coterie of Americans who are benefitting financially from their past associations with the Iraqi Kurds.

A group of retired U.S. military officials, Gen. Jay Garner, Lt. Col. Richard Naab and Lt. Gen. Ron Hite, who developed close relations with Kurdish leaders while deployed to northern Iraq in the early 1990s, have since used these bonds to help broker lucrative investment deals between the KRG and Western oil companies. The companies, in turn, have rewarded Garner, Naab and Hite with positions on their corporate and executive boards. Another U.S. Army veteran, Harry Schute—who back in 2004 worked in the Erbil office of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) transitional government—now operates a handful of local business ventures in Kurdistan, including a private security firm that counts KRG ministers among its clientele.   

Gen. Jay Garner (Ret.) has become an ardent supporter of the Kurds in the United States Photo: R.D. Ward. (Released)

Non-military officials have tried to leverage their connections, too. In 2008, Ray Hunt, head of Hunt Oil and a personal friend of President George W. Bush, signed an exploration deal with the KRG. Later that year the Wall Street Journal revealed that Bush insider and Iraq war architect Richard Perle had approached Qubad Talabani to explore investment opportunities in Kurdistan on behalf of a Turkish oil consortium. And in October, the Financial Times reported that former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, while serving as a constitutional advisor to the KRG in 2004, established a company, Porcupine LP, that maintains a five percent stake in a Kurdish oilfield.

Both Galbraith and Garner—who briefly served as the head of the CPA in 2003—are among the most vocal U.S. supporters of the Kurds. In his 2006 book The End of Iraq, Galbraith advocates strongly for Kurdish independence. Garner, meanwhile, has appeared in various news outlets reminding American policymakers of their “special relationship” with the KRG. "The Kurds were our allies during the war, and the Arabs were not," he told Mother Jones last year.

When reached by phone and asked about Squitieri, Garner said that he remembered meeting him at a KRG function “about a year ago” and had “no idea” how he came to work for Talabani.

Galbraith, who remains locked in a legal dispute with a Norwegian oil company over his Kurdish oil interests, did not respond to telephone and email requests for an interview.   

Read more about DCBureau’s coverage of the Kurdish Lobby here and here.