The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program 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 U.S. 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 has worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a "covert" military operation "covered by various secrecy documents."
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 U.S. military in Iraq, video editor Martin Wells 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, he 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, reports by the Defense Department's Inspector General and federal procurement transaction records, 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'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 U.S. 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 £15m 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 was told. 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.
Days later, Wells's plane executed a corkscrew landing to avoid insurgent fire at Baghdad airport. He assumed he would be taken to somewhere in the Green Zone, from which coalition officials were administering Iraq. Instead he found himself in Camp Victory, a military base.
It turned out that the British PR firm which had hired him was working at the heart of a U.S. military intelligence operation.
A tide of violence was engulfing the Iraqi capital as Wells began his contract. The same month he arrived there were five suicide bomb attacks in the city, including one a suicide car bomb attack near Camp Victory which killed 14 people and wounded six others.
Describing his first impressions, Wells said he was struck by a working environment very unlike what he was used to. "It was a very secure building," he recalled, with "signs outside saying 'Do not come in, it's a classified area, if you're not cleared, you can't come in.'"
Inside were two or three rooms with lots of desks in, said Wells, with one section for Bell Pottinger staff and the other for the US military.
"I made the mistake of walking into one of the [U.S. military] areas, and having a very stern American military guy basically drag me out saying you are not allowed in here under any circumstances, this is highly classified, get out-whilst his hand was on his gun, which was a nice introduction," said Wells.
It soon became apparent he would be doing much more than just editing news footage.
The work consisted of three types of products. The first was television commercials portraying al Qaeda in a negative light. The second was news items which were made to look as if they had been "created by Arabic TV", Wells said. Bell Pottinger would send teams out to film low-definition video of al Qaeda bombings and then edit it like a piece of news footage. It would be voiced in Arabic and distributed to TV stations across the region, according to Wells.
The American origins of the news items were sometimes kept hidden. Revelations in 2005 that PR contractor the Lincoln Group had helped the Pentagon place articles in Iraqi newspapers, sometimes presented as unbiased news, led to a Department of Defense investigation.
The third and most sensitive program described by Wells was the production of fake al Qaeda propaganda films. He told the Bureau how the videos were made. He was given precise instructions: "We need to make this style of video and we've got to use al Qaeda's footage," he was told. "We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner."
US marines would take the CDs on patrol and drop them in the chaos when they raided targets. Wells said: "If they're raiding a house and they're going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they'd just drop an odd CD there."
The CDs were set up to use Real Player, a popular media streaming application which connects to the internet to run. Wells explained how the team embedded a code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played.
The tracking account had a very restricted circulation list, according to Wells: the data went to him, a senior member of the Bell Pottinger management team, and one of the U.S. military commanders.
Wells explained their intelligence value. "If one is looked at in the middle of Baghdad...you know there's a hit there," he said. "If one, 48 hours or a week later shows up in another part of the world, then that's the more interesting one, and that's what they're looking for more, because that gives you a trail."
The CDs turned up in some interesting places, Wells recalled, including Iran, Syria, and even America.
"I would do a print-out for the day and, if anything interesting popped up, hand it over to the bosses and then it would be
dealt with from there," he said.
The Pentagon confirmed that Bell Pottinger did work for them as a contractor in Iraq under the Information Operations Task Force (IOTF), producing some material that was openly sourced to coalition forces, and some which was not. They insisted that all material put out by IOTF was "truthful".
IOTF was not the only mission Bell Pottinger worked on however. Wells said some Bell Pottinger work was carried out under the Joint Psychological Operations Task Force (JPOTF), which a US defense official confirmed.
The official said he could not comment in detail on JPOTF activities, adding "We do not discuss intelligence gathering methods for operations past and present."
Lord Bell, who stood down as chairman of Bell Pottinger earlier this year, told the Sunday Times that the deployment of tracking devices described by Wells was "perfectly possible", but he was personally unaware of it.
Bell Pottinger's output was signed off by the commander of coalition forces in Iraq. Wells recalled: "We'd get the two colonels in to look at the things we'd done that day, they'd be fine with it, it would then go to General Petraeus".
Some of the projects went even higher up the chain of command. "If [Petraeus] couldn't sign off on it, it would go on up the line to the White House, and it was signed off up there, and the answer would come back down the line'.
Petraeus went on to become director of the CIA in 2011 before resigning in the wake of an affair with a journalist.
The awarding of such a large contract to a British company created resentment among the American communications firms jostling for Iraq work, according to a former employee of one of Bell Pottinger's rivals.
"Nobody could work out how a British company could get hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. funding when there were equally capable U.S. companies who could have done it," said Andrew Garfield, an ex-employee of the Lincoln Group who is now a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. "The American companies were pissed."
Ian Tunnicliffe, a former British soldier, was the head of a three person panel from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)-the transitional government in Iraq following the 2003 invasion-which awarded Bell Pottinger their 2004 contract to promote democratic elections.
According to Tunnicliffe, the contract, which totaled $5.8m, was awarded after the CPA realized its own in-house efforts to make people aware of the transitional legal framework ahead of elections were not working.
"We held a relatively hasty but still competitive bid for communications companies to come in," recalls Tunnicliffe.
Tunnicliffe said that Bell Pottinger's consortium was one of three bidders for the contract, and simply put in a more convincing proposal than their rivals.
Iraq was a lucrative opportunity for many communications firms. The Bureau has discovered that between 2006 and 2008 more than 40 companies were being paid for services such as TV and radio placement, video production, billboards, advertising and opinion polls. These included US companies like Lincoln Group, Leonie Industries and SOS International as well as Iraq-based firms such as Cradle of New Civilization Media, Babylon Media and Iraqi Dream.
But the largest sums the Bureau was able to trace went to Bell Pottinger.
According to Glen Segell, who worked in an information operations task force in Iraq in 2006, contractors were used partly because the military didn't have the in-house expertise, and partly because they were operating in a legal "grey area".
In his 2011 article Covert Intelligence Provision in Iraq, Segell notes that U.S. law prevented the government from using propaganda on the domestic population of the U.S. In a globalized media environment, the Iraq operations could theoretically have been seen back home, therefore "it was prudent legally for the military not to undertake all the...activities," Segell
wrote.
Segell maintains that information operations programs did make a difference on the ground in Iraq. Some experts question this however.
A 2015 study by the Rand Corporation, a military think tank, concluded that "generating assessments of efforts to inform, influence, and persuade has proven to be challenging across the government and DoD."
Bell Pottinger's operations on behalf of the U.S. government stopped in 2011 as American troops withdrew from Iraq.
Bell Pottinger changed ownership after a management buyout in 2012 and its current structure has no connections with the unit Wells worked for, which closed in 2011. It is understood the key principals who were involved in this unit deny any involvement with tracking software as described by Wells.
Wells left Iraq after less than two years, having had enough of the stress of working in a war zone and having to watch graphic videos of atrocities day after day.
Looking back at his time creating propaganda for the US military, Wells is ambivalent. The aim of Bell Pottinger's work in Iraq was to highlight al Qaeda's senseless violence, he said-publicity which at the time he thought must be doing some good. "But then, somewhere in my conscience I wondered whether this was the right thing to do," he added.
Lord Bell told the Sunday Times he was "proud" of Bell Pottinger's work in Iraq. "We did a lot to help resolve the situation," he said. "Not enough. We did not stop the mess which emerged, but it was part of the American propaganda machinery."
Whether the material achieved its goals, no one would ever really know, said Wells. "I mean if you look at the situation now, it wouldn't appear to have worked. But at the time, who knows, if it saved one life it [was] a good thing to do."
. . . in much the way that interest in horse racing picks up on Kentucky Derby Day, interest in presidential elections picks up when the candidates “debate.” The scare-quotes are appropriate because their debates aren’t much like the genuine article; they are more like joint campaign appearances.
There have been a lot of them this electoral season.
Republican aspirants for their party’s nomination debated over and over again. Towards the beginning, more than a dozen or so of those dunces would be on display at the same time – with yet more of them, those who didn’t make the cut, waiting, as it were, in the wings.
Were the contenders not so well groomed, it would be apt to call the result a series of freak shows; or, were their debates better executed, to refer now to "The Goon Show" or the "Three Stooges." The sensibility was much the same.
Trump “won” the debates by stealing the show each time. But his hectoring got old fast. Before long, all but diehard Trump diehards therefore lost interest. There wasn’t even a Sarah Palin around to lighten the mood; there was only Trump.
The Democrats’ debates were different because, on the Bernie Sanders side, there was some genuine political organizing and consciousness-raising going on; and the debates were part of the process. It would have been more satisfying had Sanders gone, Trump-style, for Hillary’s jugular, but at least he did oppose her for some of the right reasons.
For an audience accustomed to hearing only the hard right’s case against the Clintons, this was eye opening.
But the fix was in. The Democratic Party tolerated Sandernismo for a while, thinking, rightly, that it would keep younger voters and progressives of all ages, genders, and hues on board long enough for the Party to coopt them back into its fold, should any of them take a notion to try thinking or acting outside the duopoly party system box.
But when the spirit of rebellion threatened to slip out of their control, the grandees, with Sanders’ cooperation, pulled the plug. Perhaps he was with them all along; perhaps he turned cowardly in the end. Either way, he who made millions of people “feel the Bern” forfeited an opportunity to make history.
While the Sanders insurgency was on, debates in which he participated were enlightening, and also effectual enough to force Hillary and her co-thinkers off their rightward trajectory. But it was a flash in the pan. The Party stood its ground and prevailed.
From that moment on, Democrats again had nothing more positive to offer than sound and fury, and no candidate less noxious than Bill Clinton’s official wife.
In her race against Trump, the fix is in too.
Barring an act of God, Hillary will win – the only question is by how much. The smart money says – by a lot.
Why, then, waste a moment’s thought on that horse race? The only reason I can think of is the hope that, playing to his strength, Trump, an inveterate entertainer, will make the spectacle interesting by going dirty.
He could have done that in the first debate, had he followed through with his threat to seat Gennifer Flowers in the front row. Monica Lewinsky would be better, but Gennifer will do.
He didn’t, though, – to be “nice,” he said, to the Madam Secretary. Don’t despair yet, however; unless the orange-maned boogeyman wigs out, there are two more debates ahead.
Clinton’s handlers and their media flacks, desperate to generate enthusiasm for their lackluster client, want people to think that Trump could win. With Hillary and the Donald still some way away from the final stretch, their machinations, along with the ebb and flow of events, did combine for a while to create the illusion of a real contest underway.
This was enough to make some eighty-five million people tune in to the first debate. “The Apprentice” never had an audience like that.
But the illusion cannot last – not with the entirety of the American power elite doing all it can to assure a Hillary victory; and not with Trump being Trump.
There is a lot of work to be done, even so, persuading voters, that there really is no work to do – that, thanks to the demographics of the electorate, anti-Trump hysteria is and always has been irrational; and therefore that even people who believe that Trump is, by far, the greater evil should feel no need to pile on votes for Hillary, when their time and energy would be better spent working, say, to assure that the Green Party does well enough to gain ballot access and federal funding in future elections.
Don’t count on anything like that happening, however; not with corporate media pulling out all the stops building up the Trump menace, and doing everything they can, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to make Hillary look good.
***
The debate last Monday night – or rather the consensus narrative about it that began to emerge even before it was over – turned the tide back decisively in Hillary’s favor.
During the first half hour or so, when the Donald was fairly restrained, it was, we are told, a tie. Then Hillary started pushing Trump’s buttons, and the Donald, predictably, lost his cool. Hillary soared ahead.
That is the story, and the talking heads of the corporate media world are sticking with it. Why wouldn’t they; it serves their purpose, and it seems right.
Before long, the polls should start reflecting this understanding.
In a slightly less irrational world, the rising tide for Hillary would also be reflected in a diminution in anti-Trump hysteria, and therefore in a non-negligible up-tick in the numbers of people determined to do something constructive with their votes.
Even disorganized protest votes would be useful – for impressing upon our next President that not only is there “a vast rightwing conspiracy” out to get her, but also that everyone to the left of, say, Donna Brazile, who is not already against her, soon will be — once the consequences of her fondness for war and her servility to corporate interests and to Wall Street start to sink in.
Voting for Jill Stein, the Green candidate, would be even more constructive.
Stein could still get enough votes to help move the Greens out of the margins. But most voters are not about to put their votes to this or any other constructive use. The duopoly’s stranglehold over peoples’ minds is still too strong; and Trump still scares too many liberals.
And so, the farce goes on.
Because she is a Cold Warrior at heart, who seems undaunted by the prospect of hostilities with Russia, Hillary Clinton is a very dangerous woman. This is one of many reasons why the outcome of the farce now unfolding, a Clinton presidency, is dreadful to contemplate.
The process that has brought us to this point is dreadful too – for the many ways it offends democratic values and principles.
Forget about discovering the general will through collective deliberation and debate; forget even about aggregating preferences. The Clinton v. Trump contest has nothing to do with any of that.
This is not exactly news; presidential elections in the United States have never been particularly (small-d) democratic.
Our elections are marketing campaigns; they are about selling candidates to voters, in the way that advertisers sell goods and services to consumers.
But even this description doesn’t quite capture what is going on now.
In normal marketing campaigns, the idea is not to sell the public on the idea that the competition’s wares are too horrible for anyone to consider buying. It is to promote the virtues of the products or services that the advertisers they are peddling.
In fairness, it must be said that both the Clinton and Trump campaigns do try to conform to this model. But because they are selling defective goods, neither campaign has enough to work with to “accentuate the positive.” And so, there is nothing for either of them to do except deride the opposition.
How could it be otherwise when the best, perhaps the only, compelling argument for Hillary Clinton is Donald Trump.
Conventional wisdom has it that Hillary knows her way around Washington and in the corridors of power throughout the world, and that she is adept at getting things done. Well, yes, if knowing her way around means having been there and having had a lot of power for most of her adult life; and if getting things done means making a mess whenever she undertakes to use it.
If it means getting worthwhile things done, the kindest thing that can be said is that examples are hard to find. No matter how many times it is repeated in liberal print, broadcast and cable media, the idea that Hillary is a “progressive pragmatist” is a confabulation.
As for views on issues and general ideas about governance, Hillary has even less to offer. Her neoliberal, liberal imperialist and recklessly bellicose views and ideas are the very ones that, day by day, more and more people are coming to reject, with ever increasing militancy.
And so, only Trump is left. He is the only compelling reason Hillary and her supporters can advance for voting for her.
For them, though, making Trump’s views and ideas, as best they can be ascertained, the problem is problematic. Much that comes out of Trump’s mouth truly is horrendous, but some of his ideas are more progressive than Hillary’s.
Trump’s awful ideas pertain mainly to Muslims and Latinos; but also, in one way or another, to everyone who is not male, white, and long in the tooth.
His more progressive ideas have mainly to do with matters of war and peace, trade policy, jobs creation, and infrastructure development.
These are matters that voters care about; it would hardly do therefore to dwell on them insofar as Trump, not Clinton, occupies the high ground.
No wonder, then, that, as the campaign has unfolded, Hillary and her people have decided to focus mainly on the Donald’s temperament.
This is one of those rare instances where the line Clintonites push tracks reality tolerably well. Trump really is an adolescent in a septuagenarian’s body. It is easy to get under his skin, if you know what buttons to push; and he is inclined to act out.
These character traits bring out the inner fascist in large swathes of the American population; this is not a virtue in a leader of a highly fractious and racially divided country.
More importantly, they are not qualities one would want in the Commander-in-Chief of a country with a huge military presence all over the world, and with enough nuclear weapons to destroy civilization many times over.
Similarly, the best argument for Trump is Hillary – because he too doesn’t have much going for him. Needless to say, this is not Trump’s view of himself, but it is true nevertheless.
Having started out with a lot of money, Trump acquired a whole lot more. Americans are taught from birth to worship at the altar of business success, so this counts for something, even though governments are not businesses, and even though the skills required for succeeding or just getting by in the one hardly transfer to the other.
In any case, it would be fair to say that, even more than Clinton, Trump has accomplished nothing worthwhile – unless making truckloads of money by catering to gamblers and to the luxury needs of the nouveau riche counts as worthwhile.
Moreover, his business successes depend almost entirely on dealings with sleazy operators and bought and paid for politicians. His is hardly a Horatio Alger story.
Trump does have a defiant attitude, though; one that people suffering from politics as usual, Clintonite politics, can identify with.
No matter that many of his “solutions” would only make the problems worse or that there are more constructive alternatives readily at hand.
Sanders was an exponent of some of them. Elements of his solutions have found their way into the Democratic Party platform — where they remain dead on arrival. No surprise there: it was all just a consolation price for Bernie, and a sop to his supporters.
Jill Stein has better solutions, but the leaders of the Democratic and Republican Parties, working though their corporate media flacks and the Commission on Presidential Debates, have seen to it that most voters don’t even know who she is.
That leaves just Hillary as the argument for Trump.
There we have it: if you fear and loathe Trump, vote for Hillary; if you hate Hillary, vote for Trump.
This is what democracy in America has come to – a tragedy and a farce all in one.
The truly sad part is that, once it is over, and we are left with Hillary at the helm, not only will President Drone look good in comparison, but this putrid electoral season, with its ridiculous, mind-numbing debates will be looked back upon nostalgically – as a time when Hillary wasn’t yet quite so much in peoples’ faces or doing quite so much harm.
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U.S. court has sided with the Pentagon that it does not have to publicly release the names of attendees from the training school, formerly known as the School of the Americas, on Friday.
2 comments:
'A putrid election'. Succinctly nailed.
Yes.
Berned memories.
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