Claire Bernish – According to a new joint investigation by the Sunday Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Pentagon paid a PR firm based in the U.K. over half a billion dollars to make fake terrorist videos in Iraq as part of an enormous propaganda campaign.

PR firm Bell Pottinger fabricated short TV segments designed to imitate Arabic news networks and “fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee,” reports the Bureau.

High-ranking U.S. military officials worked with the firm’s employees at Baghdad Camp Victory to create anti-terrorism propaganda to imitate the real thing, the Bureau claims.

Besides the Pentagon, Bell Pottinger’s list of clientele reads like the who’s who of unsavory characters — Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s foundation, Margaret Thatcher, and the government of Saudi Arabia, for example.

Bell Pottinger’s former chairman, Lord Tim Bell, reportedly confirmed to the Times collaboration on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy agencies” — and reported to the CIA, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council.

According to the report, the firm was brought to Iraq and began working shortly after the United States first invaded, under the condition it negatively portray Al Qaeda — and then track who watched the propaganda.Both the White House and General David Petraeus, then commander of coalition forces in Iraq, signed off on the program — thus the president was almost certainly well aware of its existence.

“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 Bureau reports.

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