Lord Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s PR guru, was hired by the United States to run a $540 million covert propaganda campaign after the invasion of Iraq.
Washington was reported to have paid his company Bell Pottinger’s conflict resolution division to produce fake al-Qaeda videos, which were dropped by US forces.
The films could be tracked by “web-based analytics” when they were played on computers, allowing the Americans to track potential terrorists, according to The Sunday Times.
Martin Wells, a video editor from Bath, was recruited by Bell Pottinger to work on a “psychological operations” campaign for the Pentagon in Iraq.
The British company was employed between 2007 and 2011, in one of the world’s most expensive PR contracts.
Coded video files, using al-Qaeda footage, were