John Rendon is a U.S. private-contractor specialist in political and military propaganda, self-described to John Kiriakou as a “professional propagandist.” His best-known operation in Kiriakou’s account is the pre-distribution of small American flags to Kuwaiti citizens before the 1991 Liberation Day — so that the U.S. armored column rolling down central Kuwait City was greeted by a million flag-waving residents in a country that had moments earlier been destroyed by Iraqi occupation.[1][2]
The 2008 Widodo engagement
In 2008 Rendon hired Kiriakou and Karl Rove to work on a campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of Indonesian general Joko Widodo — a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Indonesia who had personally killed six pro-democracy college student protesters by stabbing each in the heart in front of the others, and who was as a result banned from entry to the United States on human-rights grounds. Kiriakou was hired to write op-eds presenting Widodo as misunderstood and to place them in major U.S. newspapers. “He paid me $25 grand to write four op-eds.” No newspaper would publish them. Widodo dropped out of the Indonesian presidential race, was subsequently elected vice president, and never had the U.S. travel ban lifted.[3][4][5][6][7]