‘I’m not sure if I’m proud’: Meet Phil Elwood, one-time spin doctor for the world’s worst

Phil Elwood was at work one day in 2008 when an email landed in his inbox: it was a comment piece by Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator, who was a client of the PR firm he worked for. Elwood’s job was to sanitise the reputations of people with, shall we say, an image problem, to give them a burnished shine in the West.

The article was a rambling, anti-Western, anti-­Nato screed. Elwood edited it, turning the lunacy into ­something that a person who didn’t believe they were the Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution or the King of Kings of Africa might read. Then he called The Washington Times and persuaded the newspaper to publish it. Readers woke up the next morning to a ­cogently argued, sanitised piece that called any Nato expansion into former Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine “dangerous” and “unjustified”. Headline: “Gaddafi: Provoking Russia”.

Score for Elwood. Score for the Libyan dictator. ­Not-so score for democracy.

This was Elwood’s job: PR for the severely reputationally challenged.

He did it, with varying degrees of success (Gaddafi ended up dead in a ditch in 2011 and no one remembers that comment piece), for more than a decade, working for some of the most unsavoury people in the world. He once took one of Gaddafi’s sons out on a three-day bender in Las Vegas; he secured the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s wife a glowing profile in Vogue magazine and helped the Qataris win their bid to stage the 2022 World Cup. He helped launder the reputation of the Nigerian government after hundreds of girls were kidnapped from a school in the north of the ­country by Boko Haram extremists. And he convinced Antigua to start a trade war against the US after America banned its citizens from gambling in the ­island’s online casinos.

“My buddy, who was working on the case with me at one point, turned to me and said, ‘Phil, this is just like Model United Nations,’ ” he says of his Antiguan venture, laughing, when we meet in New York. “And I was, like, ‘Yeah, with real f---ing countries.’  ” Now Elwood has written a book about it, called All the Worst Humans, a title that shows at least a degree of self-awareness. It is part gung-ho tale of American PR execs sitting in Washington playing with world events like little boys with their Action Man dolls, part insight into the dark arts of PR, and part memoir about how the whole thing drove him to ­attempt suicide.

He wrote it, he says, because two investigative ­reporters he knew got in touch and asked to include him in a chapter in a book they were writing about “scumbags in DC”. Elwood politely declined and they gave him the same advice he gives to clients all the time: “Your story is too interesting. It’s gonna get out there. And you should be the one to tell it.”

As well as a tour through his Machiavellian ­adventures, the book serves as a sort of mea culpa – though not a convincing one. He appears strangely separated from the consequences of his actions. “I’m not sure if I’m proud of what I’ve pulled off or scared of what I’m capable of,” he writes. “It’s unsettling, like watching someone get mugged in broad daylight and doing nothing to stop it.”

We meet at a diner in Manhattan. Elwood, 45, ­balding and wearing a pale blue T-shirt, grew up in Idaho, New York and the other Washington, the rainy state on America’s western seaboard. His dad was a church minister, and as a kid Elwood was paid to help officiate at funerals: $US50 a body. The churchyard was close to a river that often overflowed with sewage when it rained. Sometimes a coffin, surrounded by grieving relatives, would start to float and Elwood, with his ­father’s stern eye on him, would tread down on it, stopping it from washing away in an actual river of shit.

It was a skill set that would serve him well in DC, where he moved as a 20-year-old college dropout in the late 1990s. He quickly found his people: fast-talking, power-hungry, looking for any angle to gain influence. Success in DC, he soon discovered, came not from merit, but from who you knew. He worked for a senator, refilling his drinks cart and holding tables for his team at happy hour until they finished work. “When I worked there I was, like, ‘Wait a minute, there are no adults here,’ ” he says. “Even the adults are not adults.”

He returned to his studies, graduating from Georgetown University in Washington in 2003, and went to the London School of Economics for a year to do a master’s degree. Then he went back to DC to ­figure out where to go next. “I knew I wanted to do kind of DC influence, but really didn’t know what ­public relations was until I was working at a public ­relations firm,” he says.

In 2005, he got his first PR job: by wrangling TV time for filmmakers who had made a documentary about the Iraq war in which the word f--- featured 42 times. His job was to drum up media coverage to ­convince the US ratings board that it should be classified PG-13. He did it by arguing that it was important that US ­audiences saw the reality of the war their country was involved in. Morphing reality to his ­client’s desire was a buzz.

“I’d been partially responsible for the most profane PG-13 movie in history,” he tells me. “It’s something I’m proud of.”

Soon he was offered a job with the firm Brown Lloyd James, led by Peter Brown, who is British and used to ­manage the Beatles before ­moving into PR in the 1980s. Brown, now 87, told Elwood he solved “ornate problems for extra-ordinary clients” – anyone from John Lennon to Gaddafi, who was one of the firm’s “exotic” clients. Brown’s motto was “everyone deserves representation”.

By 2008, Elwood was drinking with the most ­powerful people in DC, knee-deep in gossip, trading information for coverage with journalists. One day he took Margarita Simonyan, then the bright young ­editor-in-chief of Russia Today, now one of Vladimir Putin’s most voluble propagandists, to lunch and
appointments around the US capital (they got absolutely legless). That was the year the Gaddafi comment piece landed in his inbox. “I think that’s when I made the choice,” he says. “That I was, like, ‘OK, do I keep doing this or do I seek employment elsewhere?’ ”

He stayed. Then, in the summer of 2009, he was given an assignment by his bosses at Brown Lloyd James, babysitting the Libyan leader’s son Mutassim in a hotel suite in Las Vegas. Mutassim, in the mould of dictators’ kids everywhere, wanted to party, ideally with a model (this one’s name was Natasha), and spend money on casinos, nightclubs and industrial amounts of cocaine. Elwood’s job was to make sure that none of this got into the news.

By way of a briefing, a colleague wrote him a list of things Mutassim was interested in doing, “and that you may need to help line up: visiting the Harley-Davidson showroom, looking into buying a Cadillac Escalade with limo-style rear seats, buying a telescope, buying jean shorts (seriously) and seeing Cher perform on Saturday night (also seriously)”.

Hours after Elwood arrived they were at the Bellagio, gambling away the money of the Libyan people, then leaving a Cirque du Soleil show halfway through the performance because Mutassim got bored. Sent to get cash for the roulette tables from Gaddafi Jr’s suite, Elwood saw a nickel-plated 9mm Beretta handgun hidden in a briefcase of crisp $100 bills. He called a friend for advice, who told him to get out of there because Mutassim could kill him on a whim and the crime would be covered up. “I know,” Elwood told him. “I’m one of the people who’d help cover it up.”

He was told Mutassim could kill on a whim. “I know,” he replied. “I’m one of the people who’d help cover it up.”

After three days with little sleep, he walked into Brown’s office. “The whole trip was just so f---ed up,” Elwood told him. “But there were no news articles published about it,” Brown replied. “And that was your job.”

Elwood’s job isn’t new. In 1933, the German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, furious at his negative ­portrayal in the American press, hired a PR firm to polish his image. According to an exposé by The Nation ­magazine, Carl Byoir & Associates worked to push Hitler’s ­narrative in pieces in well-regarded news­papers. The subsequent outcry contributed to the ­establishment of a 1938 act requiring people working for foreign countries to register with the US government.

That didn’t stop anyone. From 2006 to 2015, Elwood writes, Ketchum, a large American PR ­company that has been awarded Campaign of the Year six times by the trade magazine PR Week, was ­contracted to the Russian government. In 2013, it placed a comment piece from President Putin in The New York Times critiquing “American exception­alism”. Elwood points out the firm simultaneously held contracts with the US government.

In the spring of 2011, when ­anyone with even a glancing ­knowledge of world affairs knew that Bashar al-Assad was a ­dictator whose prisons were bywords for torture and ­murder, Brown Lloyd James worked to send a Vogue journalist to Damascus to write about the Syrian first lady, Asma al-Assad. The piece, since removed from the Vogue website, was headlined “A Rose in the Desert” and featured gushing descriptions of the Syrian first family as “wildly democratic” and the country as “the safest” in the Middle East. “The piece reads like the reporter spent a few days with Gwyneth Paltrow,” Elwood writes. “It’s rare that you send a journalist on a propaganda tour and they actually print the propaganda.”

Elwood’s fingerprints were all over it. The company had been paid $5000 a month by the Syrian government to set it up. Weeks later, Assad’s forces were murdering unarmed protesters in the streets, the beginning of an uprising and a civil war that has killed more than half a million people.

Also in 2010, the company was working for Qatar, which was trying to win a bid to host the World Cup. Part of Brown Lloyd James’s job for the Qataris was to smear an American effort to do the same, in the American press (a fact revealed by The Sunday Times in 2018). The answer, Elwood realised, was fat kids. Pretending he was working on behalf of something called the Healthy Kids Coalition, he paid a lobbyist $10,000 to get a draft resolution written by a US senator for America not to host the World Cup because it should be focusing funds on ending childhood obesity instead. He managed to get a tiny piece about it in Politico in November 2010. The resolution was never formally introduced, but Elwood’s job was done. Partly because of discussion over the draft, Fifa expressed concern about the seriousness of the US government in its desire to host the event.

“One of the things I feel worst about is the World Cup,” Elwood says, adding that he had no idea about human rights abuses in Qatar. I tell him I struggle to believe this. “You’ve got to put yourself in my shoes. I mean, what started off as a prank – like, my boss called me up and said, ‘Get a resolution introduced into the US Congress opposing their own bid to host the World Cup’ – that’s a f---ing prank. And then I figured out a way to do it, and it didn’t cost very much money, and we got it done in time. But in no point in that chain – I wasn’t asking the right questions. I didn’t know they were going to use slave labour, or whatever you want to call it. I should have known that. This is not an excuse. All I knew was that they were the richest nation per capita in the world. I ­figured they paid minimum wage at least.”

Was he being wilfully naive? He mulls the question for a while: “I hate to, but I’m inclined to agree with the characterisation.” The nearest he came to a Damascene moment was in 2010, in Bosnia, 15 years after the war ended there. He was on a trip with a US Congressional staff delegation, brought there by Turkish clients of Brown Lloyd James to “raise awareness” of the genocide that happened there. One day he walked onto the football field at Srebrenica, where more than 7000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) boys and men were murdered by the Bosnian Serb army. “This was a river of blood,” his guide said. The truth finally struck him: that he was propping up dictatorships and authoritarian regimes like the ones who did this, by “laundering the sins of dictators through the press”. Soon, he realised, people would be touring sites like this in Libya and Syria. “I’d just never been confronted with it first-hand,” he tells me. “Like, I’d seen news coverage of it. But I’d never been to a place where a genocide had taken place.”

In about May 2011, Brown called him for a mid-­afternoon meeting at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington. Elwood ordered a $200 glass of whisky and drank it while Brown fired him for vague reasons, including the Arab Spring being “bad for our business model”. Elwood immediately started calling reporters to smear Brown’s name. “I think at the time I was just hurt, and I don’t harbour any ill will,” he says.

Soon he was working for the prominent Washington-based crisis-management expert Richard Levick – “I didn’t know how to do anything else,” he says – and on a plane to the Caribbean. He had been hired by the government of Antigua to undo the damage after the US government banned gambling in the island’s online casinos, wiping out a reputed $US3.4 billion from the country’s economy. Nearly 4000 people had lost their jobs and the prime minister was up for re-election. As he came in to land, Elwood realised what they had to do. To solve a small problem, he told the Antiguan prime minister, you sometimes need to make it much, much bigger. To get America’s attention, this tiny ­nation needed to start a trade war with its most powerful ally. Or at least threaten to do so, through the press.

Brown fired him for vague reasons, including the Arab Spring being “bad for our business model”.

Elwood called a reporter at the Associated Press and told him that the prime minister was considering ­refusing to honour American intellectual property laws, putting pirated versions of films, music and computer programs for sale online at a huge ­discount. By doing so, he was ­putting a gun to America’s head and forcing them to listen.

“Every once in a while, you do have to sit back and realise what you’re doing,” Elwood says. “And take it in for a second. ‘OK, I’m going to start a trade war against my country. I don’t know how this is gonna work out.’ ”

His final dodgy job was for an Israeli outfit called Psy-Group, which was run by former Mossad and IDF operatives and specialised in “influence operations”, including one called Project Madison, which used fake online avatars as honeytraps to trick prominent ISIS fighters into giving information about themselves. Psy-Group’s clients would rather pay a US entity than an Israeli one; Elwood was to be their “bag man” in DC. In 2016, they gave him a laptop that they told him to plug in and never touch. Nearly a ­million dollars were sent around the world through Elwood’s bank account.

Then the FBI turned up on his doorstep – part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into former president Donald Trump. They had found ­evidence that Psy-Group had met Trump’s team and pitched them an election interference campaign ­involving fake social media accounts, although it ­appears that Trump campaign officials declined to move forward with any of the proposals.

Elwood wasn’t targeted for prosecution over his work for Psy-Group, but eventually all the stress caught up with him. He was diagnosed with bipolar syndrome and PTSD, had a breakdown and tried to take his own life, though was stopped by a phone call from a friend. His wife, Lindsay, came and saved him. “If she didn’t get there in time I wouldn’t have made it,” he tells me. “She’s the most important person in my life.”

I tell him she’s the only person who comes out well from this book, and he laughs weakly.

Now he’s on ketamine therapy and working for less obviously evil PR clients. “Swear to God, no more ­dictators, won’t work against democracy and won’t break the law.” He proudly says he’d never work for the Saudis. “But the Assads and the Gaddafis were fine?” He looks uncomfortable.

Only now has he taken the role of Cassandra, ­warning of the evils of PR black arts and calling for more funding for journalists. “I think it’s important for people in these positions to ask, ‘Should we do things?’ Not just, ‘Can we do things?’ ” he says. “In the era of disinformation and manipulation, I thought this was information people should have.”

The PR industry, he says, is a parasite that lives off its host, the media. Today there are seven times more PRs in America than journalists, and the industry is worth more than $100 billion. And, as he points out, PRs “will do anything to earn those billions”.

Does he view his book as an apology?

“I view it as my story,” he replies. “It’s what happened. And if it’s taken as an apology then that’s one of the things I’ll have to leave up to the reader.”

He texts me later: “I know you don’t buy the ­apology, but maybe look at it like I’m trying to buy my soul back?”

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine/News Licensing

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