Archive for October 6th, 2016
Faked ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos: Pentagon Paid for?
A controversial foreign PR firm known for representing unsavory characters was paid millions by the Pentagon to create fake terrorist videos.
By Crofton Black & Abigail Fielding-Smith of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
The Pentagon gave a controversial U.K. 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.
Andrew Bossone shared this link
Makes me wonder how many fake recordings journalists published.
Will the big outlets go back and review their work?
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 U.S. 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 3 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 5 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 U.S. 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 3 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.”
U.S. 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 U.S. 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 $5.8 million, 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.”
How much your co-workers get paid: You have the right to know
How much do you get paid? How does it compare to the people you work with? You should know, and so should they, says management researcher David Burkus.
In this talk, Burkus questions our cultural assumptions around keeping salaries secret and makes a compelling case for why sharing them could benefit employees, organizations and society.
David Burkus. Management researcher. challenges the traditional and widely accepted principles of business management. Full bio
Now: How much do you think the person sitting next to you gets paid? Again, don’t answer out loud.
0:28 At work, how much do you think the person sitting in the cubicle or the desk next to you gets paid? Do you know? Should you know?
Notice, it’s a little uncomfortable for me to even ask you those questions. But admit it — you kind of want to know. Most of us are uncomfortable with the idea of broadcasting our salary.
We’re not supposed to tell our neighbors, and we’re definitely not supposed to tell our office neighbors.
The assumed reason is that if everybody knew what everybody got paid, then all hell would break loose. There’d be arguments, there’d be fights, there might even be a few people who quit.
But what if secrecy is actually the reason for all that strife?
And what would happen if we removed that secrecy?
What if openness actually increased the sense of fairness and collaboration inside a company?
What would happen if we had total pay transparency?
For the past several years, I’ve been studying the corporate and entrepreneurial leaders who question the conventional wisdom about how to run a company. And the question of pay keeps coming up. And the answers keep surprising.
It turns out that pay transparency — sharing salaries openly across a company — makes for a better workplace for both the employee and for the organization.
When people don’t know how their pay compares to their peers’, they’re more likely to feel underpaid and maybe even discriminated against.
Do you want to work at a place that tolerates the idea that you feel underpaid or discriminated against? But keeping salaries secret does exactly that, and it’s a practice as old as it is common, despite the fact that in the United States, the law protects an employee’s right to discuss their pay.
In one famous example from decades ago, the management of Vanity Fair magazine actually circulated a memo entitled: “Forbidding Discussion Among Employees of Salary Received.”
“Forbidding” discussion among employees of salary received. Now that memo didn’t sit well with everybody. New York literary figures Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, all writers in the Algonquin Round Table, decided to stand up for transparency and showed up for work the next day with their salary written on signs hanging from their neck.
Imagine showing up for work with your salary just written across your chest for all to see.
But why would a company even want to discourage salary discussions? Why do some people go along with it, while others revolt against it?
It turns out that in addition to the assumed reasons, pay secrecy is actually a way to save a lot of money.
You see, keeping salaries secret leads to what economists call “information asymmetry.” This is a situation where, in a negotiation, one party has loads more information than the other.
And in hiring or promotion or annual raise discussions, an employer can use that secrecy to save a lot of money. Imagine how much better you could negotiate for a raise if you knew everybody’s salary.
Economists warn that information asymmetry can cause markets to go awry. Someone leaves a pay stub on the copier, and suddenly everybody is shouting at each other. In fact, they even warn that information asymmetry can lead to a total market failure. And I think we’re almost there. Here’s why: first, most employees have no idea how their pay compares to their peers’. In a 2015 survey of 70,000 employees, two-thirds of everyone who is paid at the market rate said that they felt they were underpaid. And of everybody who felt that they were underpaid, 60 percent said that they intended to quit, regardless of where they were — underpaid, overpaid or right at the market rate. If you were part of this survey, what would you say? Are you underpaid? Well, wait — how do you even know, because you’re not allowed to talk about it?
4:23 Next, information asymmetry, pay secrecy, makes it easier to ignore the discrimination that’s already present in the market today. In a 2011 report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the gender wage gap between men and women was 23 percent. This is where that 77 cents on the dollar comes from. But in the Federal Government, where salaries are pinned to certain levels and everybody knows what those levels are, the gender wage gap shrinks to 11 percent — and this is before controlling for any of the factors that economists argue over whether or not to control for.
4:58 If we really want to close the gender wage gap, maybe we should start by opening up the payroll. If this is what total market failure looks like, then openness remains the only way to ensure fairness.
5:11 Now, I realize that letting people know what you make might feel uncomfortable, but isn’t it less uncomfortable than always wondering if you’re being discriminated against, or if you wife or your daughter or your sister is being paid unfairly? Openness remains the best way to ensure fairness, and pay transparency does that.
5:30 That’s why entrepreneurial leaders and corporate leaders have been experimenting with sharing salaries for years. Like Dane Atkinson. Dane is a serial entrepreneur who started many companies in a pay secrecy condition and even used that condition to pay two equally qualified people dramatically different salaries, depending on how well they could negotiate. And Dane saw the strife that happened as a result of this. So when he started his newest company, SumAll, he committed to salary transparency from the beginning. And the results have been amazing. And in study after study, when people know how they’re being paid and how that pay compares to their peers’, they’re more likely to work hard to improve their performance, more likely to be engaged, and they’re less likely to quit.
6:14 That’s why Dane’s not alone. From technology start-ups like Buffer, to the tens of thousands of employees at Whole Foods, where not only is your salary available for everyone to see, but the performance data for the store and for your department is available on the company intranet for all to see.
6:32 Now, pay transparency takes a lot of forms. It’s not one size fits all. Some post their salaries for all to see. Some only keep it inside the company. Some post the formula for calculating pay, and others post the pay levels and affix everybody to that level. So you don’t have to make signs for all of your employees to wear around the office. And you don’t have to be the only one wearing a sign that you made at home. But we can all take greater steps towards pay transparency. For those of you that have the authority to move forward towards transparency: it’s time to move forward. And for those of you that don’t have that authority: it’s time to stand up for your right to.
7:12 So how much do you get paid? And how does that compare to the people you work with? You should know. And so should they.
Patsy Z and TEDxSKE shared a link.
Adonis Diaries 