After the 60 Minutes story about the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi Libya fell apart, many are still left wondering how CBS correspondent Lara Logan was able to be duped by the now-discredited British security contractor, Dylan Davies.
But Gawker has revealed that the 60 Minutes piece is not Logan’s first mistake when it comes to journalistic judgment, considering her 2008 marriage to Joseph W. Burkett, a defense contractor she met while stationed in Baghdad covering the Iraq war for CBS.
The circumstances surrounding the marriage were well-known (they were both married to other people when they met), but what wasn’t widely-known was that Burkett was employed by the Lincoln Group, a “strategic communications and public relations firm” that was hired by the DOD in 2005 “to plant positive stories written by American soldiers in Baghdad newspapers during the Iraq War.”
“He did information operations,” a of Burkett’s told Gawker. “It was really spooky stuff. We worked with one of those special spooky IO outfits that didn’t even have a unit patch.”
CBS never bothered to disclose the fact that one of its top war correspondents was romantically involved with a man hired by the U.S. government to manipulate civilian public opinion about the downward-spiraling war in Iraq. As a matter of fact, Burkett’s background was never really reported in great detail until the Gawker piece was published.
Logan and Burkett have not responded to Gawker’s request for comment. In addition, CBS declined to comment on the record.
Watch CNN’s coverage of the 60 Minutes retraction in the video below:
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