Coalition leaders kept in line by Campbell's spin network

A transatlantic "spin" network masterminded by Alastair Campbell, Downing Street's director of strategy, has assumed tight control over presentation of the war against terrorism, reviewing speeches and co-ordinating trips by the war leaders to prevent duplication or disarray.

Three 24-hour "communications centres" – in London, Washington and Islamabad – are about to go into operation. They were set up after Mr Campbell visited the US late last month as it became clear the West was losing the propaganda war with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

Even before they start work, action has been taken to silence the coalition's adversaries. Under Western pressure, Pakistan has ordered the Taliban to close its consulate in Karachi and halted daily press conferences at the Islamabad embassy. US and British networks have been discouraged from broadcasting unedited footage of Mr bin Laden.

The centres are each to be staffed with 20 senior personnel from Britain, the US, Nato and Pakistan and could be extended to include representatives of other countries as the conflict progresses. Their job is to carry out the type of media manipulation techniques that Mr Campbell brought to New Labour and then exported to Nato during the Kosovo conflict.

The first is rapid rebuttal. The West quickly realised that Mr bin Laden's video statements, broadcast on the Arab al-Jazeera station, and Taliban pronouncements in Pakistan could dominate the news agenda for hours before anyone had got up in Britain and America. The Islamabad operation, which is being set up by Alan Percival, a senior civil servant at the Lord Chancellor's department who was number two to Mr Campbell in 1997, will be responsible for monitoring and responding quickly to such broadcasts.

Back in London, the Foreign Office-based team, led by Mr Campbell himself, has brought in Arabic speakers to monitor television, radio and web broadcasts meant for an Islamic audience. A Whitehall source admitted there was still "a sizeable proportion of the Muslim world that thinks this is a Zionist plot".

Daily briefings now take place in London with Muslim journalists, and there is a co-ordinated effort to talk directly to the Muslim world. Tony Blair has done a string of interviews with the Muslim media, including al-Jazeera. General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff – described somewhat haltingly by a State Department official last week as "the best they've got" at the Pentagon to sell the war effort – is among several US figures to give an interview to the station.

The second job of the communications network is to co-ordinate "core messages". Mr Campbell met his opposite number in the White House, Karen Hughes, after it became clear that the Pentagon-White House briefing operation was failing to get the message across.

Contradictory messages have come from the US: General Myers told reporters in Los Angeles that the war could well take not months, but years, but Mr Rumsfeld flatly denied this during a lightning trip to south Asia. Similar mix-ups have emerged over the anthrax investigation. And there are inconsistencies of tone, the president's vision of a necessary war against an implacable evil contrasting starkly with General Myers's admission that "if we can win this through diplomatic efforts, then that's the way to do it".

Mr Campbell is also understood to have been concerned to ensure that speeches in Washington and London contained the same key messages, and that central players did not make keynote speeches or go on high-profile trips at the same time and "steal each other's limelight".

The US is now planning a television advertising campaign specifically aimed at hearts and minds in the Middle East and beyond. The woman behind the new-look propaganda effort is Charlotte Beers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, who was drafted into government from the world of Uncle Ben's Rice and Head and Shoulders shampoo by the Bush administration.

According to Mr Powell, not only is Ms Beers "fluent with this sort of thing, but she is from the advertising business. I wanted one of the world's greatest advertising experts, because what are we doing? We're selling. We're selling a product. That product we are selling is democracy. It's the free enterprise system, the American value system".

Mr Campbell's aim, as it was when he went to Brussels to get a grip on the propaganda machine – fronted by Jamie Shea – during the Nato strikes on Kosovo, is to ensure there is a united front.

But there is not to be one "face" of the war against terror, as there was at Nato. This is to be a multinational, multicultural, global spin machine. As a Whitehall source put it: "It is a recognition that modern warfare is also about communications."