(How the Pentagon paid a British PR firm $500 million for top
secret Iraq propaganda)
The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a
billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda programme in Iraq, the Bureau of
Investigative Journalism can reveal.
Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in
the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used
to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.
The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking US military
officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged
outside.
Bell Pottinger's former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to
the Sunday Times, which worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had
worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy
agreements.”
Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the
National Security Council on its work in Iraq, he said.
Bell, one of Britain’s most successful public relations
executives, is credited with honing Margaret Thatcher’s steely image and
helping the Conservative party win three elections. The agency he co-founded
has had a roster of clients including repressive regimes and Asma al-Assad, the
wife of the Syrian president.
In the first media interview any Bell Pottinger employee has
given about the work for the US military in Iraq, video editor Martin Wells –
who no longer works for the company – told the Bureau his time in Camp Victory
was "shocking, eye-opening, life-changing.”
The firm’s output was signed off by former General David
Petraeus – then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq – and on occasion by
the White House, Wells said.
Bell Pottinger produced reams of material for the Pentagon,
some of it going far beyond standard communications work.
The Bureau traced the firm's Iraq work through US army
contracting censuses, federal procurement transaction records and reports by
the Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General, as well as Bell Pottinger's
corporate filings and specialist publications on military propaganda. We
interviewed half a dozen former officials and contractors involved in
information operations in Iraq.
There were three types of media operations commonly used in
Iraq at the time, said a military contractor familiar with Bell Pottinger’s
work there.
“White is attributed, it says who produced it on the label,”
the contractor said. “Grey is unattributed and black is falsely attributed.
These types of black ops, used for tracking who is watching a certain thing,
were a pretty standard part of the industry toolkit.”
Bell Pottinger changed ownership after a management buyout
in 2012 and its current structure has no connections with the unit that
operated in Iraq, which closed in 2011. It is understood the key people who
worked in that unit deny any involvement with tracking software as described by
Wells.
Bell Pottinger’s work in Iraq was a huge media operation
which cost over a hundred million dollars a year on average. A document unearthed
by the Bureau shows the company was employing almost 300 British and Iraqi
staff at one point.
The London-based PR agency was brought into Iraq soon after
the US invasion. In March 2004 it was tasked by the country’s temporary
administration with the "promotion of democratic elections" – a
"high-profile activity" which it trumpeted in its annual report.
The firm soon switched to less high-profile activities,
however. The Bureau has identified transactions worth $540 million between the
Pentagon and Bell Pottinger for information operations and psychological
operations on a series of contracts issued from May 2007 to December 2011. A
similar contract at around the same annual rate – $120 million – was in force
in 2006, we have been told.
The bulk of the money was for costs such as production and
distribution, Lord Bell told the Sunday Times, but the firm would have made
around £15 million a year in fees.
Martin Wells, the ex-employee, told the Bureau he had no
idea what he was getting into when he was interviewed for the Bell Pottinger
job in May 2006.
He had been working as a freelance video editor and got a
call from his agency suggesting he go to London for an interview for a
potential new gig. “You’ll be doing new stuff that’ll be coming out of the Middle
East,” he was told.
“I thought ‘That sounds interesting’,” Wells recalled. “So I
go along and go into this building, get escorted up to the sixth floor in a
lift, come out and there’s guards up there. I thought what on earth is going on
here? And it turns out it was a Navy post, basically. So from what I could work
out it was a media intelligence gathering unit.”
After a brief chat Wells asked when he would find out about
the job, and was surprised by the response.
“You’ve already got it,” he was told. “We’ve already done
our background checks into you.”
He would be flying out on Monday, Wells learned. It was
Friday afternoon. He asked where he would be going and got a surprising answer:
Baghdad.
“So I literally had 48 hours to gather everything I needed
to live in a desert,” Wells said.
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