Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a London-based PR agency was hired by the Pentagon to create local news items, television commercials, and fake Al Qaeda recruitment videos. Some of the work was public, but some was covert. A private PR firm allowed the Americans to work in a legal “grey area,” one in which occupying authorities could release propaganda videos that would otherwise be illegal under US law. Bell Pottinger, the firm hired to create the videos, would eventually gain contracts worth over $500m for its work in Iraq.

Influence, a new documentary by directors Diana Neille and Richard Poplak, follows a string of shameful dealings that Bell Pottinger and its founder, Lord Timothy Bell, engaged in as they rubbed along with modern history’s most notorious criminals. Starting out in advertising during the period that Vance Packard in his 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, described as “influencing and manipulating… the patterns of our everyday lives,” Tim Bell soon joined the Saatchi brothers as the “third brother” after they founded their new ad agency.

He became the Saatchi’s liaison with Margaret Thatcher after they won the account to run the Conservative Party’s 1979 general election campaign. He liked her. A lot. “I loved her,” he’d say in his memoirs, “I am a hero-worshipper. I work for my demi-gods.” Bell claims that, as Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, he came up with the “Labour Isn’t Working” slogan, but other accounts suggest it was Andrew Rutherford, then Creative Director. Such contradictorily statements also come up throughout Neille and Poplak’s film, notably when Bell says that he thought of the idea of a faux-Iraqi soap-opera as part of the US information war. Another interviewee dispute this.

Bell claims to have changed Thatcher’s hair, her manner of speaking, her overall “image.” Again, though, this is disputed by other accounts. Gordon Reece, her Director of Communications, is thought to have been the creative mind that changed the image of the Tories. Neille and Poplak’s documentary leaves much of Bell’s claims unchallenged. Instead we watch Bell ride around in a shiny saloon. We watch him smoke and hear him cough. In other words, we seem him create an image of himself that bears little relation to reality. The idea, I suppose, is to show how public images are formed and polished. All the scenes of Bell are stylised, glossy.

The idea must have been to recreate a PR video with Lord Bell as the subject. The endless shots of him smoking (whilst speaking to the camera, from behind as is he looks at his front room, in his car, ad infinitum.) even go so far as to suggest that Bell is susceptible to the powers of corporate advertising too, another person subject to the overbearing influence of PR firms. No doubt he was. But that doesn’t excuse him from working with a shopping-list of scoundrels, murderers, and dictators.

He’s described as a “geopolitical fixer” who goes from country-to-country, working behind-the-scenes, honing narratives, and influencing news cycles. He was responsible for diverting the media away from news that Mark Thatcher profited from the UK-Saudi arms deal. With the help of an introductory letter from Margaret Thatcher he went on to work for Augusto Pinochet; he then helped the Sri Lankan government during their campaign against the Tamils during the civil war; he glossed up the image of London’s Russian oligarchs; he worked for Bashar al-Assad’s wife, Asma. His phone book must have read like the rollcall of a would-be war crimes tribunal.

Bell Pottinger’s work in Iraq is symbolic of the type of strategies they used. There were three types of content produced for the US military during the occupation. “White” signified anything that was attributed, whilst “grey” and “black” were unattributed or falsely attributed respectively. One former employee of Bell Pottinger in Iraq told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism that part of his job involved editing fake Al Qaeda recruitment videos, using genuine footage, that would be encoded in such a manner as to allow the eventual viewer of the videos to be tracked by US intelligence through Google Analytics. These videos would then be dropped by US soldiers during raids on Iraqi properties. It would then be possible to locate the viewer, with some hits being in the US and other countries in the Middle East.

This typifies Bell Pottinger’s work; the production of unattributed or falsely attributed content and the spreading of this within an unknowing population. Things fell apart for Tim Bell after it came to light in 2017 that his firm had been stoking racial violence in South Africa. Bell had worked in South Africa before, again through a contract facilitated by Margaret Thatcher, for F. W. de Klerk, who is interviewed for the film. By bussing in extras to stand in the audience of de Klerk’s campaign rallies, it was made to look like the National Party had more support from Black voters than it did. In the end Mandela’s ANC was unable to gain more than two-thirds majority and so their ability to enact a new constitution was curtailed. De Klerk’s campaign is now thought to have been significantly unfair.

Their work in South Africa, two decades later, for the Gupta brothers, was what would eventually lead to the high-profile downfall of Tim Bell. Bell Pottinger were hired by the Guptas, who had close connections with then South African president Jacob Zuma, to start a campaign against “white monopoly capital.” Although there is, to a significant degree, a monopoly on the economy by white capitalists, the campaign sought to deflect attention away from the Guptas who had undue influence over Zuma and had been involved in state capture of South Africa’s resources. Twitter bots were bought in to flood social media with campaign slogans and journalists critical of the Guptas and Zuma were targeted. Bell Pottinger was eventually found, by the main industry body, to have contributed towards stoking racial tensions.

One of the most striking interviews is with Andile Mngxitama, leader of Black First Land First, an organisation that unknowingly participated in Bell Pottinger’s campaign. “The thing that needs to be explained to me,” he says, “is how a British firm, linked with Margaret Thatcher, thought it was a good idea to put up a campaign against white monopoly capital.” When the interviewer suggests it could be down to the firm’s pursuit of profit, he replies: “This is the big contradiction of capital. Where capital can self-destruct in pursuit of capital.”

As Packard wrote close to seven decades ago, “we move… into the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother as we explore some of the extreme attempts at probing and manipulating now going on.” Diana Neille and Richard Poplak’s film does give this impression. Despite a few omissions in the film, perhaps due to its relatively short length, Influence is a powerful indictment of the power of global public relations firms and our inability to see and understand what they are doing, and doing to us.