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{
"from": "system",
"value": "Carry on with the narrative as the plot partner.\nTags: sci-fi, dystopian, dark humor, societal critique, human nature\nAuthor: Phil Elwood\nTitle: All the Worst Humans\nChapter: 3"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Start Chapter"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "AUTHOR'S NOTE\n\nThis is my story, as I remember it. Some names and a few details have been changed to protect the many guilty and the few innocents."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Start Chapter"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "PROLOGUE\n\nFEBRUARY 8,2018\n\nWhen the FBI knocks, you are going to lose. It's just a question of what. And how much of it. Money. Love. Freedom. Friends. Jobs. If they knock, you have been gambling. And you do not have the high card in this hand.\n\nAt 6:30 a. m., my phone rings. I mute CNN's Chris Cuomo discussing the latest in Robert Mueller's election interference inquiry and answer to make the ringing stop.\n\n\"Phil Elwood?\" a woman's voice says. \"This is Special Agent Logan with the FBI.\"\n\n\"Good morning?\"\n\n\"Do you still live at apartment one-zero-zero-eight?\"\n\n\"Not anymore,\" I say, struggling to process. \"We've moved within the building.\"\n\n\"What apartment are you in right now?\"\n\nI look at my wife, Lindsay. She is still in her pajamas, answering emails from a higher education reporter. Fighting the good fight. \"Can you give mean hour?\" I ask Agent Logan.\n\nFight-or-flight kicks in. Protect what matters. \"Lindsay, the FBI is downstairs,\" I say. \"They will be up in one hour. You need to leave.\"\n\nMy wife speaks with the lyrical precision, and efficiency, of a machine gun. When her adrenaline spikes, the words get really fast. So, I can't repeat with any accuracy the chain of concern, profanity, and fear that comes out of her. She is out the door in record time.\n\nI have thirty minutes before the agents are due to knock. Normally, the FBI doesn't call ahead, so I believe I am unique in my ability to describe how one waits for them. How would you spend your time? I read their Wikipedia entry. Thirty-five thousand employees, $ 9.8 billion annual budget, thirteen thousand Special Agents, many of whom carry the Glock 19 Gen5, a 9mm with a fifteen-round magazine. Atop priority of today's Federal Bureau of Investigation: \"Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations, espionage, and cyber operations.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "At this moment, there is a bag in my closet full of promotional material for an Israel-based organization that advertises that it is a'foreign intelligence operation\" that engages in'online operations.\" The word espionage is not in the brochure, but it is strongly implied.\n\nTen minutes to go. I think about the million dollars the Israelis have moved through my bank account. The wire transfers to the Seychelles, Cyprus, Switzerland, the Caribbean, Palestine, and who knows where else. About the laptop whirring away under the desk in my office, which the Israelis told me never to touch. Five minutes. I worry about the reach of the Wire Fraud Act, and of the Espionage Act of 1917. My pajama bottoms peek out from under the legs of my cargo pants.\n\nThen comes the knock.\n\nI open the door to a man and a woman wearing pistols on their hips. The woman steps forward and hands me her business card: \"Special Agent Logan, Counterproliferation.\" It is my understanding that this division works to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I also understand that my life is about to change. Until this morning, I've been a ghost. My name has never even appeared in a Politico'Spotted\" blurb. Google'Phil Elwood,\" and you'll find a dead jazz reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle.\n\nI offer the agents coffee. They decline. I walk them to my dining room table. They sit down across from me. Their body language telegraphs: the government versus you.\n\n\"Mr. Elwood,\" Agent Logan begins. \"Do you know why we're here?\"\n\nSeveral things come to mind. It could be the Israelis. Or Muammar Gaddafi. Or Bashar al-Assad. Or the Iranians. Or because of what I pulled in Antigua. Or the bank transfers to accounts in tax havens allover the world. Or Project Rome. Probably not the ounce of cannabis in my kitchen drawer."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "They could be knocking on my door about so many things I've done over the last two decades in public relations."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Start Chapter"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "CHAPTER 1\n\nOf Marble and Giants\n\nEIGHTEEN YEARS EARLIER, JULY 2000\n\nThe halls of the Capitol Building are empty this morning. The clinks of the liquor bottles in the hand truck I'm pushing are the only sound. I love being alone here, marveling at marble columns propping up carved ceilings. Under the massive dome of the Rotunda, paintings tell the mythology of early America. In Statuary Hall, I nod to a bronze statue of Huey Long, an assassinated senator who some consider a hero, others a criminal, and then enter a wood-paneled corridor. Spiral staircases of iron and marble materialize out of dark corners.\n\nI maneuver the bottles past unmarked doors that lead to the hideaway offices of Senators Trent Lott, Mitch McConnell, and Ted Kennedy. Senators steal away to these coveted havens to host meetings they'd rather not have eyeballed by reporters or to nap after marathon debates. The booze is heavy, and I'm out of breath when I reach Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's hideaway. Vodka soda sweat leaks through my cheap, white collared shirt. We interns were out late at Politiki bar last night.\n\nI let myself in and head for the brass bar cart. Fifths of whiskey, gin, scotch, and Tio Pepe sherry, Moynihan's favorite, get loaded in and lined up. When I'm finished, I sit on a leather couch dyed the same dark mahogany as the regal desk and spark up a Camel. Moynihan is a fellow smoker. His hideaway reeks of tobacco.\n\nThe hundred or so hideaways in the Capitol are passed down through handshake deals. Seniority rules, and sitting on the Finance Committee doesn't hurt. Junior senators fight over windowless basement rooms the size of utility closets and furnished with cots. Moynihan has earned a view of Pennsylvania Avenue and space for ten people to sip cocktails. Standing under an oil painting, I pullback the cream-colored curtains and take it all in. I imagine the senator from New York inhere, lighting up, pouring a tumbler of Tio Pepe, and telling stories about the presidents he has advised."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sitting in the private office of a Senate demigod still doesn't feel real. I'm a twenty-year-old college dropout whose only credentials area job at a Mexican restaurant and a cocaine problem. The rest of my intern class are the kids of campaign donors and New York City's financial glitterati. My dad is a pastor in the other Washington. He preaches to a congregation in Olympia.\n\nSix months ago, I was a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh on a debate scholarship. Debate is about speed. Being able to talk fast was the prerequisite for entry. On weekends, I traveled to universities around the nation to argue about what policies would lead to nuclear war. Rapid-fire reading of news clippings scored points in around. So did biting insults lodged at your opponent in an attempt to trap them in a rhetorical mishap. You won by manipulating the news and calling it'evidence\" to advance your argument. I won a lot.\n\nMy grades were nearly perfect until I started working nights as a cook at Mad Mex. The waiters survived on a diet of wings and cocaine. One night, one of them noticed that I seemed a bit down and he offered me a pick-me-up from his bag. It worked. For fifteen minutes. Three months later, I was failing five out of five courses. I don't believe I attended one.\n\nThe week before finals, I called my older brother in a panic. He jumped on a plane to Pittsburgh. We debated my options. I tried to advance the argument for my brother taking my finals. It was raining when we went to the registrar's office and filled out the forms. The first Elwood to dropout of college.\n\nMy parents collected meat SeaTac airport. I deplaned drunk on whiskey and clutching a plush toy of Opus the Penguin, from Berkeley Breathed's comic strip. My father shook his head and made me see a shrink. I snowballed my way through the sessions. Left out the cocaine use. The shrink informed me that I was suffering from'situational depression.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Since you are removed from the situation,\" she explained. \"The problem must be resolved.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" I said.\n\nIt didn't. And the depression didn't lift. A childhood friend, who I'll call Preston, worried that I had no prospects after dropping out of school, threw me a lifeline. His college classmate Eric, a trust fund kid, worked in Washington, DC, as Senator Moynihan's aide. If he liked me, Eric could get mean internship on the Hill.\n\nI called Eric, and he told me to meet him the next Tuesday, at 10 p. m., at 1823 M Street. \"Northwest M Street, the one near the White House,\" he said. \"Do you have a fake ID?\"\n\n\"Indeed I do.\"\n\n\"Bring it. You'll need it in DC,\" Eric said. \"Your official interview will be on the Hill the next day. But this one is more important. I vet the interns for the staff.\"\n\nMy parents bought me a suit at the mall, and I flew to Washington. Résumé in hand, I cabbed it to a redbrick building with blacked-out windows on M Street. My fake ID fooled the bouncer. Inside, Ice Cube's'You Can Do It\" played as a dancer sprayed Windex on the pole before taking off her underwear. A topless woman asked if I wanted some singles.\n\nEric wasn't hard to spot. He was the only other guy wearing a suit in the strip club on a Tuesday night. He chugged a Bud Light at a table with a clear view of the stage. I handed him my résumé. He gave it to a dancer in a neon-yellow G-string.\n\n\"Relax,\" he said, sliding me a beer. \"You met meat Camelot on a Tuesday night. You passed the test.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "In Moynihan's hideaway, I kill my cigarette and flush it down the toilet. I lockup, push the empty hand truck past Minority Leader Tom Daschle's office, and ride an elevator down to the basement. I flash my badge to a guard, cut through the crypt under the Rotunda, and head into the Capitol Hill Tunnels. I love these underground passageways, that feeling of special access.\n\nI walk the pedestrian pathway alongside a miniature subway trolley modeled after the Disney World Monorail. A group of congressional aides are taking the two-minute ride, briefcases on their laps. To my right, I spot Sen. Fred Thompson.\n\n\"Good afternoon, Senator,\" I say. \"Die Hard Two was on TNT last night.\"\n\n\"Was it really?\" he replies in the deep southern drawl that was so out of place when he played a New York district attorney on NBC's Law& Order. \"Walk me back to my office.\"\n\nOn the twenty-minute trip to the Hart Building, Thompson asks whether I think DC or Hollywood is the more terrifying place. I argue in favor of Hollywood. The Capitol doesn't frighten me. Just the opposite. From the moment I set foot in DC, I knew I was home. The Hill is areal-world version of debate team. Everyone talks fast, and there are winners, losers, and nukes. Last week, I had a drink with Sen. Russ Feingold, who told me stories of working with John McCain and Carl Levin on trying to pass campaign finance reform. I've gone from bussing tables at a Mexican restaurant in Pittsburgh to rubbing elbows with senators. I never want to leave.\n\nI weave through redbrick-walled tunnels back toward Moynihan's staff office in the Russell Building. Discarded and broken office furniture lines the bowels of the Capitol Hill office buildings. I pass the Senate barbershop, where I recently got a bad haircut sitting next to Majority Leader Lott. A quick elevator ride up from the basement takes me to Russell's fourth floor, where I drop off the hand truck and head down a flight of stairs to a private parking lot."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Two interns are already out here smoking. The senior senator from Michigan Carl Levin's beaten-up blue Oldsmobile sticks out among the rows of luxury sedans. I smoke another Camel and watch Kit Bond of Missouri climb out of a black town car. Kay Bailey Hutchison struts by, followed by her'purse boys,\" two young, attractive male aides who carry her luxury bags around Capitol Hill. When senators bum a smoke before hustling to their next meeting, I feel like a young Henry Hill parking cars for Paulie's crew in Goodfellas.\n\nIt's almost four o'clock. In this town, the most important houris happy hour. I head back out into the muggy city, down First Street, passing the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, where 3,700 boxes of Moynihan's personal papers have been kept for posterity. It's the largest one-man collection in the library, Moynihan's legislative director recently told me over whiskey and Cokes at the Capitol Lounge.\n\nAt Pennsylvania Avenue, a helicopter buzzes across the sky. The pilot shadows a motorcade of black SUVs careening downtown, lights flashing and sirens blaring. When the street clears, I duck into the Hawk \"n\" Dove. I nurse a vodka soda, holding a good table with a view of the TVs, tuned to CNN. Just like the hideaway office system, this place runs on dibs. Soon the bar will be teaming with staffers from both sides of the aisle. They will drink, party, date, and sometimes put together bipartisan legislation. Tables are valuable currency. As an intern, I take it as my sacred duty to make sure the staff doesn't have to stand at the bar.\n\nAt five o'clock, Moynihan's staff trickles into Hawk \"n\" Dove in ascending order of the food chain. Legislative correspondents arrive first, along with the rest of the interns. An hour later, the legislative assistants claim their seats. Then come the legislative director and, finally, around seven, Moynihan's chief of staff. His blue suit is rumpled, and he looks exhausted. In his hand is today's\"clip sheet,\" a binder compiling daily press filings that mention our boss. The interns create it each morning by cutting apart the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the hyper-local weeklies and meticulously underlining Moynihan's name."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "\"Thanks for holding down the fort, Phil,\" the chief of staff says."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Look at this. Hillary Clinton is going to walk into Moynihan's seat. Rick Lazio doesn't stand a chance.\"\n\nI've landed in Moynihan's office just in time. He's about to retire after twenty-four years in the Senate. The alumni list from his office reads like a who's who of Washington, DC-and they help each other out. I spent the rest of the summer helping them out by following the legislative director's instructions: \"Do anything we ask. And do it with a smile. Even if it's not part of your job. Even if it's weird.\" I take his words to heart. Moynihan's staff takes a shine tome because I volunteer to huff cartloads of Tio Pepe and get menial intern tasks done at my restaurant pace.\n\nThere are two ways to go about a career here: get in deeper or get out. I know one thing: I'm never leaving Washington. But a college dropout's trajectory is limited; I need a degree. Before my internship ends, I apply to George Washington University. I draft my own letter of recommendation, and Moynihan's chief of staff, for whom I've held tables all summer at half the bars in town, signs it. \"Motivated and gifted with his words, Phil Elwood will make a valuable addition to your storied university.\"\n\nI wake up in a holding cell. Two cops yank me into an interrogation room and slam me with the accusation that I drunkenly crashed through a window at GWU's Gelman Library. I can't remember last night, but my throbbing head and the cuts on my body indicate that the police are telling the truth. I'm frog-marched into a sheriff's van and handcuffed to the floor.\n\nI stand in front of a judge, who tells me he knows I'm very sorry for what I've done and that I will never do it again. He slaps me on the wrist with twenty hours of community service. Later, I hear that Moynihan's office made a call. A few days after I get home from central booking, a thin letter arrives from George Washington. I am no longer welcome on campus."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I'm certain I'll be excommunicated from DC. I'll have to return to Olympia. My parents will once again watch their son emerge at the Arrivals gate holding his plush toy Opus the Penguin, like a deadbeat Sisyphus. Instead, I'm promoted. Moynihan's office makes one call, and I'm hired as a legislative correspondent for the senior senator from Michigan, Carl Levin. The happy hours continue. It's amazing I get anything done with all the booze. Toward the end of my first year, the chief of staff hauls me into his office.\n\n\"I strongly suggest you get a college degree,\" he says. \"George Washington is off the table, clearly. What about Georgetown?\"\n\nGiven my high school C average, Georgetown should be off the table, too. But it turns out Levin has considerable influence with the university. One letter from the senator and I'm accepted as a transfer student. I realize this is how the world works, or at least how this world does. It is not a meritocracy.\n\nIn the basement office of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, staffers drop off crates of documents. \"Go through these. Look for anything suspicious,\" they instruct. They leave to fetch more boxes. Levin is leading an inquiry into the malfeasance of Enron's board of directors. Enron's spectacular implosion has been a lead story on CNN for months. Now Levin is making it his mission to codify the company's wrongdoing into the national record.\n\nI drink coffee with a team of lawyers who haven't seen the light of day in weeks and sift through thousands of pages of emails with a highlighter. Most of the material is banal talk about steakhouse lunches and corporate retreats. Every few pages, I notice the obscene dollar amounts of Enron's transactions. Villains get paid in numbers with extra zeros."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "On the day of the Enron hearings, I go watch the fireworks at the Hart Building. A homeless man stands at the front of along line stretching down Constitution Avenue. I watch a sharky-looking guy in a jet-black suit hand the homeless man a ten-dollar bill and slide into his place. Lobbyists have probably been pulling this trick since the Grant administration. I flash my staff ID and follow the lobbyist past security and into the Senate hearing room, where I stand against the back wall.\n\nLevin strides up to the dais in a baggy suit, the last of his hair combed over a sun-spotted scalp. In 2013, BuzzFeed News will publish a list of the'23 Most Important Comb-overs of Congress.\" Levin will come in second place. A man of the people. He's the hardest-working member of his staff. I watch, rapt, as he rakes Herbert Winokur Jr., Enron's Finance Committee chair, over the coals about a half-billion-dollar loan.\n\n\"Now, when you met with my staff, did you also tell my staff you did not have much recollection of that transaction?\" Levin asks, peering down his glasses, pushed far down the bridge of his nose.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Now that you have refreshed your recollections. Enron was borrowing a half a billion dollars from Citibank, but it did not show upon the balance sheet of Enron as debt but rather as preferred shares, which looked more like equity than debt. It was a loan disguised as equity in order to avoid showing debt on the books.\"\n\n\"Sir, I believe it was accounted for as a consolidated subsidiary with a-\"\n\nLevin cuts him off. \"Was it shown as a loan?\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"It was shown as-the entity was consolidated and the$ 500 million of Citibank was a minority interest.\"\n\n\"But was it shown as a loan?\"\n\nLevin's got him dead to rights. I watch Winokur break. \"No, sir.\"\n\nAn exchange worthy of a headline. I spot a gaggle of reporters taking notes at the side of the chamber. As in a debate, they've got their evidence. Now they'll print it in tomorrow's paper. And some college debater will use the article as evidence in around where the topic is'fiscal regulation.\" It's codified into the record. The truth, as far as anyone is concerned.\n\nI'm fascinated by this bloodbath, particularly by the criminals on the witness stand. Who helps them? Who prepped them for this massacre? Whoever it was, they aren't good enough at their job. Where's the consistent messaging? Why weren't they expecting these questions? Why aren't they repeating the same five lines over and over and over? Why are they just giving easy soundbites to the senator and the media?\n\nI realize I'm probably the only person in the world who has this reaction to the Enron scandal.\n\nI lean out into K Street, hailing a cab. It's the first week of summer. School is out. I've been barhopping with Hill staffers. A yellow cab pulls up, and I attempt to hop over a Jersey barrier. My foot catches the edge. I spin as I fall to the curb.\n\nI can't walk. I crawl into the cab's backseat and tell the driver to take me to the nearest trauma center. When we arrive at George Washington University's ER, nurses put me in a wheelchair. Three hours later, a tech looks at my X-ray, says, \"Oh shit,\" and starts to run out of the room. I grab his arm. Make him show me the image. The ball of my hip is floating, completely separated from my femur."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I wake up sucking oxygen from a tube. My mother is sitting in a chair next to the bed. My mother lives on the other side of the country, so I figure something is probably wrong. I don't remember anything after looking at the X-ray.\n\nI'm on crutches fora month. Then I graduate to a cane. For the rest of my life, I'll walk with a slight limp. And the three titanium screws in my hip will ache when the temperature dips below forty degrees. A few months later, I skydive out of an airplane for the first time. At a checkup, I inform my surgeon that he must have done some good work. He is not pleased.\n\nMy parents fly in for Georgetown's graduation ceremony. They seem relieved that I made it to the finish line. Levin writes yet another letter, and I'm accepted into the London School of Economics. I live in a flat in Notting Hill, attending lectures on trade wars with the kids of prime ministers and international diplomats.\n\nOne day, I'm walking on campus when I pass a balding young man with hard eyes flanked by massive bodyguards. I've heard about Saif Gaddafi. The students whisper that he's a dictator's son. I've heard we share a weed dealer.\n\nIna few years, he'll be one of my clients. Long after I've been on his family's payroll, the world will find out that Saif allegedly bought his PhD in philosophy from LSE with millions of pounds in bribes. Howard Davies, the distinguished institution's director, whose signature is on my diploma, will resign, disgraced.\n\nBut I'm getting ahead of myself.\n\nI walk through the doors of Venture, which feels like the smallest public relations shop in DC. I've been back in town fora few weeks, applying for any job that will keep me close to the action on the Hill. I've missed this city. Missed working on projects that I'd read about in the newspapers the next day. Missed the happy hours spent trading gossip about senators and feeling like a master of the universe."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Venture's office isn't much more than a few desks scattered in the basement of a lobbying firm. A young woman shakes my hand and tells me to sit down. She scans my résumé, catching an item that makes her pause.\n\n\"Mr. Elwood,\" she says, smiling. \"I see you've worked on the Hill.\"\n\nI'm riding in a black SUV heading down First Street toward CNN Studios. Beside me sits Jon Powers, an army officer fresh off a tour in Iraq, and Michael Tucker, a filmmaker. \"When you get onset, remember to emphasize that young audiences need to watch this film,\" I coach them. \"Putting an R-rating on it is limiting the exact people who should see what war is like firsthand. The kids who might enlist.\"\n\nPowers nods, mouthing my words to himself. I walk him through his talking points one more time as the SUV pulls up to the tan-and-glass building housing CNN's DC bureau.\n\n\"If this film gets rated R, it hurts the youth of America,\" I repeat when we step into the lobby and receive our security badges.\n\nPowers is a subject of the documentary Gunner Palace, directed by Tucker, about soldiers living in Saddam Hussein's son Uday's pleasure palace during the second Iraq War. Venture has been tasked with keeping a PG-13 rating on a film in which the word fuck is uttered more than forty-two times. MPAA rules state if the word fuck is said in a movie more than once, the film receives an automatic R. And an R means fewer ticket sales.\n\nIt's my first PR campaign. My strategy has been to flood the zone. Make as much noise as we could. I've called television bookers and producers from a landline in Venture's basement office. \"The Iraq War is a killing field right now,\" I spitballed. \"Teenagers being recruited by the army need to see this film.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"I don't have time for this,\" beleaguered bookers said before hanging up.\n\n\"This isn't my beat,\" I heard again and again. \"Take me off your list.\"\n\nI'm twenty-four years old-my'save the children\" pitch was born out of instinct. I didn't train in a press shop on the Hill. Venture has two other employees and pays me$ 35,000 a year, but my gut told me I was onto something. After a barrage of calls, I got through to a segment producer at CNN. In passing, I mentioned that Powers was from Buffalo, New York.\n\n\"Lucky break,\" the producer said. \"Wolf Blitzer is from Buffalo. We'll help your guy out.\"\n\nThe CNN set is smaller than I imagined. The studio looks like a toy replica of what you see on-screen. The idea that this tiny room is responsible for so much influence seems incongruous, like ants carrying an apple. Aline producer walks Powers from the greenroom to his mark. We have four minutes of camera time. Powers is calm. He has faced down RPG fire in Baghdad; he can handle a few questions from a cable news anchor.\n\nI watch the segment on the TV in the greenroom, imagining the audience watching at home. Powers and Tucker stick to our script, repeating my talking points about the film educating America's youth about the harsh realities of war.\n\nAs the anchor nods like a concerned parent, I watch as Powers's words-my words-become legitimate in real time because he's saying them on cable news. In an instant, ideas I thought up in a windowless office appear to become reality, certified by CNN itself. The audience doesn't see me building the machine that creates this illusion. They don't even know I exist. If a PR person appears on TV, it usually means we've fucked up."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "As CNN broadcasts my message to millions of Americans, I realize my job isn't to manipulate public opinion."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "My job is to get gatekeepers like CNN to do it for me. Once you have ink, your story becomes real. A conversation starts that didn't exist moments before, a conversation nobody would think to have if you hadn't started it. The public begins to accept something you created out of nothing.\n\nAnd I have something reporters will always need: access to inside information. Information is the only commodity I control, but in this world it's valuable currency. The media demand constant fuel. I can feed information to reporters and toggle how much they see. I feel as if I've put on a pair of night-vision goggles that reveal the hidden machines powering the world. I begin to see levers I can pull. The adrenaline that spikes feels stronger than any line of cocaine.\n\nThe press pickup our message and run with it. We secure a sympathetic review by A. O. Scott in the New York Times. \"The raw inconclusiveness of \"Gunner Palace\" is the truest measure of its authenticity as an artifact of our time and of its value for future attempts to understand what the United States is doing in Iraq,\" he writes. Fox News's Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes bring on Powers fora five-minute segment. MSNBC also does a segment with Powers and the director. My first timeout, I secure a cable news'hat trick.\"\n\nA few weeks later, I attend the premiere of Gunner Palace. Sen. Ted Kennedy shows face on the red carpet. The houselights go down, and the screen lights up: \"This film is rated PG-13.\"\n\nI've just sunk a body.\n\nLet me explain. I sank my first body when I was twelve. My father was the minister of an East Coast church, an easy walk to the ocean. Our house stood behind the church, and our front yard was the parish graveyard. Heavy metal bands tried to rent the property for record release parties. Aging, failing septic systems upstream yielded fecal counts in the hundreds of thousands in the creek running through the graveyard. A river of shit."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "When a parishioner expired, I would get to spend time with my father, and I would be compensated for my time. Fifty dollars per body. All I had to do was hold the cross and look sad for an hour. Workers brought in earth-moving machines to dig the grave. When the casket was in place, we stacked flowerpots between the hole and the bereaved.\n\nDuring one burial, my father and I stood behind the flowerpots. I could see down into the hole. \"Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...\" my father began. Then, over the mourners' bellowing, crying, and sniffling, I heard clods of earth falling and... splashing. Brown liquid was pooling up from the dark earth. I gave my father an elbow and nodded toward the bottom of the grave.\n\nHe picked up his pace. \"I will fear no evil.\"\n\nI watched shit-colored water swirl around the coffin. The coffin broke free from the dirt, floating, rising. I elbowed my father again.\n\n\"Steady the casket,\" he whispered.\n\nAngling the cross just so, I was able to place one foot on terra firma and the other on today's Jane Doe.\n\n\"For thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.\"\n\nBy the closing prayer, my shoe was soaked through.\n\n\"Handle this. I'll be back soon,\" my father told me and then led the mourners to the parish hall. They were none the wiser. I worried that the coffin was going to float up and out of the hole. I was twelve, so I also worried that the body inside would comeback to life. I jumped on the coffin, trying to submerge it. I slipped on its slick surface and fell into the grave."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "It was the first time I helped create a false narrative."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Cover up the truth when the wheels have fallen completely off the wagon. Remain calm and sink the body. The body is the truth. With Gunner Palace, the truth was that we wanted a PG-13 rating to sell more tickets. So, you sink the body. You make the public believe you want to keep vulnerable teenagers safe from the Iraq War. And with this body, I've made much more than fifty bucks.\n\nI need to create this illusion again. All around me, I see power and more power. I'm low in DC's pecking order. Even Moynihan's aide Eric has more pull than me. But for the first time in my life, I've discovered a trick that makes people clap. A trick that I'm apparently good at. I need to master it. I need to see how far it can take me."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Start Chapter"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "CHAPTER 2\n\nEveryone Deserves Representation\n\nI'm sweating through my best suit at the Garden Terrace at the Four Seasons in Georgetown. My table sits below a trellis of manicured ivy. Peter Brown is due to arrive in five minutes.\n\nEarlier this afternoon, I got a call from a woman who said she was Peter Brown's assistant. \"Can you meet Mr. Brown fora drink this afternoon?\" she asked. \"He's thinking about hiring you.\"\n\nI agreed. Then I googled'Peter Brown.\"\n\nBrown rose from running the record department at a store in Liverpool to managing the Beatles and sitting on the board of Apple Corps. He is mentioned by name in a Beatles song. He helps Robert De Niro promote the Tribeca Film Festival and takes Barbara Walters as his date to events. In the early 1980s, Brown moved to the PR game and now heads up Brown Lloyd James, a boutique firm based in New York.\n\nBrown strides into the Garden Terrace wearing a tailored blue suit accented with a pink silk tie. His silver hair matches his cuff links. When we shake hands, he feels frail but somehow in charge of even this small physical interaction-which is incredibly disarming. A waiter materializes, asking, \"Campari and soda, Mr. Brown?\" I order a glass of Malbec. Our drinks arrive nearly instantaneously.\n\n\"So,\" I say, \"tell me about the firm.\"\n\n\"Imagine Brown Lloyd James as a relationship brokerage,\" Brown says in an elegant English accent. \"We solve ornate problems for extraordinary clients. Used to do it ages ago for John.\"\n\nIt takes me a moment to realize he's referring to John Lennon.\n\n\"John once called me in a pinch. He needed to get married immediately without the media hounding the ceremony. I found the one place on the bloody globe that fit the ticket. He and Yoko tied the knot in Gibraltar.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Coming out of a less remarkable man's mouth, this story would sound like shameless name-dropping."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "But Brown speaks softly, nonchalantly. He can afford to: Lennon canonized him in'The Ballad of John and Yoko\": \"Peter Brown called to say'You can make it okay, \"\" Lennon sang. \"\"You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain. '\" A Beatle singing about your cocktail stories is better than being knighted. And Brown will later almost be knighted. The Crown will appoint him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.\n\n\"My uncle Phil is a big Beatles fan,\" I say. \"I'm named after him.\"\n\n\"John and Yoko bought an apartment in the building next to mine because they liked my view of Central Park. Yoko still lives there. Mick Jagger once sublet my apartment. When the term was up, he wouldn't give it back. We got into quite a dustup over it.\"\n\n\"Happens.\"\n\n\"We need someone in New York,\" Brown says. \"To run a couple of accounts.\"\n\n\"What sort of accounts?\"\n\n\"BLJ represents exotic clients. Countries. High-net-worth individuals.\"\n\nBrown doesn't get specific, and I'm too impressed to pry. He isn't selling his firm. Rather, anew life that his demeanor telegraphs I'd be lucky to accept. I'm in the market fora new life. After Venture, I was hired away by the PR mega firm Burson-Marsteller. My biggest client was the U. S. Tuna Foundation, which tried to get pregnant women to eat, you guessed it, more tuna. We paid off academics to argue that a certain form of molecular mercury was too large to cross the blood– brain barrier. The National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition maintained that women of childbearing age should eat at least twelve ounces of seafood per week. We were caught by none other than the New York Times: \"Industry Money Fans Debate on Fish,\" read the headline that exposed the whole nasty affair."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Everyone deserves representation,\" Brown opines. \"And anything is possible with the right amount of money.\"\n\n\"I have some references you can call.\"\n\nBrown takes a slow sip of his Campari and soda. \"What do I care what someone else thinks?\"\n\n\"You need to sign this,\" Peter Brown's assistant tells me, sliding a form across the desk.\n\nI don't recognize the name'Tatanaki,\" but I sign the form without a second thought. I walk back out into the Brown Lloyd James offices. A dozen PR pros pace around gray laminate cubicles, firing pitches into phone lines. I hear conversations in Chinese and Arabic. I can't wait to get my hands dirty.\n\nPeter Brown takes me to meet my new manager, BLJ's second-in-command and my direct boss. We go to lunch at Michael's, on West Fifty-Fifth Street, where we are ushered to the best table in the house. \"Phil,\" Brown tells my new manager, \"is our new operative.\"\n\nOperative. The word lets me know I'm home.\n\nPR firms employ two types of people: bureaucrats and operatives. Bureaucrats are the accountants. The conference call leaders. The digital paper pushers. Operatives infect newsrooms. Call reporters. Do whatever it takes to get ink. I have always been and will always bean operative. Put it on my tombstone.\n\nNinety percent of mega PR firms'staff are bureaucrats. These firms claim to be experts in media relations, adept at securing coverage. Most of them don't achieve results for their clients. They don't know how to start fires. They understand their job is to create paper. PowerPoint presentations. Spreadsheets. Revise website copy. At Burson-Marsteller, the weekly email we received with the roundup of coverage secured by the entire firm was embarrassing. Publicists pushed paper for years without placing a single story in a major paper."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "But mega firms still charge clients millions for their services. It's a giant money suck. British conglomerate WPP earned£ 12.8 billion in 2021. But, hey, at least WPP's website has a charming tagline: \"We use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people, planet, clients and communities.\" Here's a good rule of thumb: More jargon equals more bullshit. More bullshit equals more billable hours. More billable hours does not mean more coverage.\n\nThese firms don't know what to do with an operative. An operative at a mega firm is like a Navy SEAL working at the post office. During my tenure at Burson-Marsteller, I secured only one story, and not for lack of pitching. The bureaucrats shot down my wilder ideas, the ones that would actually have translated into coverage. They worried that by going after one client's enemies, they would anger another client. Ora potential client. By having such a large clientele, the megas ensure that all their clients get the most inoffensive, ineffective, and likely useless campaigns possible.\n\nAt Brown Lloyd James, I am hindered by no such constraints. Here, I can be myself. Here, I am among my own. (Okay, I stole those last two lines from Thank You for Smoking, a book I worshipped in high school. I imagine Nick Naylor would consider being plagiarized a professional honor.) Peter Brown has assembled a team comprised exclusively of operatives and has instructed them to start fires.\n\nAfter Hurricane Katrina, one of BLJ's vice presidents arranged for the Qatari royal family to flyover New Orleans in Black Hawk helicopters to survey the devastation. Only after, of course, the Qataris pledged one hundred million dollars toward relief efforts. My manager has contacts in every newsroom from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times. And then there's the interns. Just like on the Hill, they have a direct line to the elite."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Peter Brown moves through the world as a distinguished executive, with immaculately tailored suits fresh from Savile Row and a requirement that he sit in seat 1A when he must fly commercial. But he's a rock-and-roller at heart. Within weeks of my starting at the firm, Brown calls me and says, \"Our client has a job for you. You're going to Chile. If you get into any trouble, I know the president.\"\n\n\"I hope I won't get into enough trouble that you have to call the president,\" I reply.\n\nForty-eight hours later, I'm riding above the streets of Santiago in a rickety cable car. In Chilean wineries, I source contacts fora nongovernmental organization that needs international voices to criticize a legislative proposal before the U. S. Congress. What feels like days later, I'm answering an email on a rooftop bar in Istanbul with a view of both the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. My once seldom-used passport is suddenly full of stamps.\n\nBest of all, I convince Brown that I'm a more useful operative in DC than in New York. At BLJ's New York headquarters, agents dress in Armani suits. I have two suits from Jos. A. Bank and prefer to work from my rooftop in cargo pants. I sign a lease on an apartment on Logan Circle, ten blocks from the White House.\n\nThe day I move in, I meander into a neighborhood bar called Commissary. It's discreet, and the drinks are cheap. I sit at the bar and order an old-fashioned. Commissary becomes my base of operations. It's the perfect hideout for lunches with Wall Street Journal scribes. Politico rarely'spots\" people at Commissary.\n\nI'm having breakfast at Commissary, sipping a mega mimosa, when an email comes through from one of BLJ's clients, a wealthy Turkish American industrialist. He's received intel that a Turkish barber named Sabri Bogday has been sentenced to death by religious authorities in Saudi Arabia for blasphemy. Bogday's crime? Someone getting a haircut overheard him say, \"Goddamn it.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Get the English-speaking press to cover this, my client implores.\n\nWhen you're trying to apply pressure through the press, you must know and exploit your enemies\" weak spots. The Saudis don't have many. They are rich. They don't give a shit about political hits. But they don't like religious shame. So, it's time to play the shame game. The pitch writes itself: barbarism.\n\nI calla DC friend and Huffington Post political blogger named Peter Slutsky. \"The Saudis are going to kill this guy for saying \"goddamn it,\"\" I tell Slutsky. \"Something we do every minute.\"\n\n\"Goddamn,\" Slutsky replies.\n\nSlutsky and his twin brother Matthew write 750 words on Bogday's case. I win all 750 for my client. The piece is bleeding-heart perfection. \"This situation is completely nuts and no reporters are stepping up to the plate to tell this man's story,\" the Slutskys write. \"This case, and cases like it, have occurred and will continue to occur as long as international voices remain silent.\" The Slutskys also write in defense of a jailed Saudi Arabian blogger facing five years in prison for posting about the incident. I can use that. Reporters will come running to protect one of their own. I've got what I need: first ink. Once you create one moment out of nothing, you can create more. You have started afire.\n\nA few days later, Saudi Arabia is hosting a summit at the United Nations to discuss, of all things, religious freedom. I send the HuffPo piece to reporters from Reuters and the New York Times. \"If you want a story, get down to the UN and ask questions about Bogday,\" I tell them. \"You've got a rare chance to confront a brutal regime about a religious prisoner.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "At the summit, reporters pepper Saudi officials with probing questions. Caught off guard, the officials stumble over their answers. A week later, the Saudis buy Bogday a one-way ticket to Istanbul and tell him never to comeback to their kingdom.\n\nI celebrate over a few rounds with Peter Slutsky at Commissary. \"Bogday owes this Jew free haircuts for life,\" he says, raising a glass.\n\nHe's so jovial, I try to match it. \"The best part is he'll never know I exist,\" I say.\n\n\"Phil, we just saved a man's life,\" Slutsky says, suddenly serious. Suddenly proud.\n\nInstead of feeling satisfaction, I am unsettled. Low when I should be riding a high. I think about my college therapist's diagnosis of'situational depression.\" But this heavy, shaky feeling follows me around regardless of the situation. There is a wide gap between how I should feel and how I actually do.\n\nThe next night, I go back to Commissary alone. Then the next. And then back the next day fora mega mimosa breakfast. When I'm low, it's easier to make small talk with reporters after I've had a few old-fashioneds. No matter how many stories I place, I still feel that something is wrong with me. Another drink, another joint. The bar tabs add up, then add up some more. Within six months of starting at BLJ I'm twenty grand in credit card debt.\n\nMargarita likes to drink martinis at lunch. And after lunch. After a few extra-dirty ones at a dive bar in Hell's Kitchen, Margarita still looks poised in her tight red dress. She can still walk a straight line in her high heels. In my wingtips, I cannot."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I'm five rounds into one of Peter Brown's exotic assignments."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I'm to escort Russia Today's editor in chief through New York's newsrooms and introduce her to Brown's contacts. Margarita Simonyan got the job at Russia Today at the ripe old age of twenty-five. She knows Vladimir Putin personally. In 2022, a State Department report will call her'adept at serving up lies as truths-and with a smile.\" Along with Al Jazeera, Russia Today is one of two foreign media entities represented by BLJ. Our goal is to legitimize it in the American news market.\n\nIn polls, the news media's popularity hovers around 10 percent, the same rating enjoyed by Congress and baby seal clubbers. The press need PR pros more than anyone. All the major networks have us flaks on staff in case of a crisis. A good friend of mine was one of CNN's PR people in 2004. One Friday, the storied program Crossfire booked a comedian as its guest. What could possibly go wrong? The comedian was Jon Stewart. The hosts of Crossfire that evening were Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson. Ina now-infamous segment, Stewart ripped cable news to shreds on air, calling Carlson a'dick\" and a'failure.\" And he looked like a hero for it. It was probably the worst day of my friend's career. She had to try to clear up the fiasco for Page Six and the other news-starved gossip columns that had pounced on the story. Whenever the news organization becomes the story, you are about to have a nightmare news cycle. Stewart caught lightning in a bottle: he got Crossfire canceled. I'm quite sure each host has his version of revisionist history, but in the Wikipedia entry for Crossfire, the heading'Jon Stewart's appearance\" appears just before'Cancellation.\"\n\nIn New York, Simonyan and I use Brown's limitless Rolodex to careen through offices of the city's media luminaries. We end up, very drunk, at the office of the Nation with the magazine's publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel. The Nation prides itself on being one of the country's most liberal publications. I have never been to a meeting of the Communist Party, but I imagine its talking points could have been generated from Simonyan and vanden Heuvel's back-and-forth."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Today, I'm acting as a double agent."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Every reporter I introduce Simonyan to also becomes one of my contacts. Weeks later, I will ask vanden Heuvel for an introduction to a journalist at the Nation. She connects us immediately. If you make one friend inside a newsroom, you can get them to introduce you to their colleagues. You can infect that newsroom.\n\nBack in DC, I continue my viral outbreak. I have drinks with a young new Wall Street Journal reporter. I feed her some intel. She invites me to a journalists'poker game. I build from one reporter to the next until I've got a network across the Journal. It's a slow process. But now, when I scan through my dozen contacts at the paper, I can trace them all back to my first meeting with the up-and-comer who liked to play poker.\n\nSoon, my Rolodex of reporters balloons: Ken Vogel at Politico, Dan Wagner at the Associated Press, and Reuters bureau chiefs based in Istanbul and Ankara, who prove useful for my Turkish American client. When I call, they pickup. I can send a message to a well-respected reporter at any number of the top-tier journalism outfits and get a response from them in minutes. They know I have something juicy, an exclusive. They build their careers, and I do my job to spin a story fora client. I'm understanding better everyday how influence works, and my own influence is growing.\n\nInfluence-wasta in Arabic-means many things to many people, but my life's work is best encapsulated by the word's seventeenth-century etymology: \"unobservable forces that produce effects by insensible or invisible means.\" PR people like me hide in plain sight, influencing news coverage. Like most PR pros, I get journalists to tell stories about our clients or about our clients' enemies. These clients range from individuals to companies to entire countries, who pay, at a minimum, tens of thousands of dollars a month to engage our services. Sometimes hundreds of thousands a month."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sounds innocent enough, right? Right.\n\nMy industry is worth approximately$ 129 billion. We will do anything to earn those billions. The best journalists in the world aren't always breaking stories because of their dogged reporting skills; they're breaking them because they rely on people like me to feed them exclusive scoops. We use journalists to do our clients' bidding. And then the public reads their stories and believes them because they are coming from a trusted news source and not a corporate bagman.\n\nSadly, we have the journalists outnumbered. Three hundred thousand people are employed by the PR industry in the United States, compared to an estimated forty thousand journalists. There are seven and a half PR pros for every journalist. Would you take those odds in a fight? We also have journalists outgunned. The average salary fora PR professional is a multiple of what a journalist of comparable experience can make. And we have them on our side. They need us because we're a main source of information feeding today's nonstop hunger for media content. Media relations practitioners operate between the source and the journalist. We will always find a news outlet to make our clients' stories appear legitimate.\n\nSeven hundred fifty words. That's how long your average print news story is. To manage their expectations, I tell my clients that we want to win 50.1% of a story. That's 376 words. That is what I am fighting for. \"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...\" The first words of the First Amendment give me the rights I need to fight for my 376 words, my clients provide me with the resources. Sometimes you can game the system and get 80 or 90 percent of the story placed. Embargo dates, background and off-the-record conversations, access to clients, access to proprietary information, a look at a lawsuit before it's filed, an internal email from a CEO, a surreptitiously recorded Zoom call, an internal memo, or a full-fledged whistleblower-all are weapons in the arsenal that allows a person in my position to control where and when a news event will occur."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "But calling the journalist would, normally, be starting in the middle of the story.\n\nWhen I am trying to place a story, I plan for it to take at least a month. Twenty phone calls. Ina 2024 world, I send hundreds of Signal messages. And only one or two emails. Email is the easiest to subpoena, so I limit my work over that platform. The process generally goes something like this. A client calls the firm and presents us with a problem. We do an intake call to understand the scope of the damage. I take the allowed incubation time to consider our options. This can range from thirty minutes in the worst case to a day or two in the best.\n\nI am about to admit to a trade secret here, one that might piss off a few people: I engage in the equivalent of'insider trading\" with the media on a regular basis. I don't just talk to myself during this period. I use a group of a dozen journalists to field-test ideas. During my incubation period, I'll call one or two of them and float a strategy by them that has not been given to the client. It's always positioned as'What if, hypothetically, my client decided to do X... Would that be newsworthy?\" And I make sure that all these calls are off the record. I'm not sure what a journalism school ethics professor would think of this practice.\n\nI then present the plan to an internal audience at the firm. Because what I come up with is normally a bit crazy, it then gets modified. After this, the firm presents the strategy to the client. Then we convince them to take our advice.\n\nThis is where a reporter would normally get involved. If we are lucky, I'll know a reporter who will take the story immediately. However, normally, I need to ask someone at the target publication fora recommendation of a reporter who covers the issue in question. For the most part, reporter friends will send an email introducing me to a colleague. I then switch the conversation to Signal as quickly as possible and send some version of the following message: \"I have apiece of information that no one else has. Do you want it?\" Generally, reporters will give you a call after that. Then you move into the'discovery\" phase."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "The discovery phase is when I spend my currency."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I have never bribed a journalist. I have heard of it happening in other countries. Clients have asked me to do it. I have worked with a former foreign journalist who had a penchant for taking bribes. But I have never bribed one myself. When I refer to spending my currency, I mean the proprietary information my client has given me to dole out to the media. Once I no longer have any new information to give a journalist, I become irrelevant to the story. More important, I have lost all leverage in the conversation.\n\nRemember, this conversation takes place over a month. I can add my own editorial spin at each point in the conversation. If my client's opponent is a rival company, I can (off the record) impugn its credibility to my heart's content. If the opponent is another country, I can pick any negative item from that country's daily news and send it to the reporter or reporters I am working with on the issue. I am a bug in their ear, and 95 percent of what I say never sees its way into print (thank God). But there is that pesky 5 percent. I'm paid to disseminate information. I tell the truth from a monetized point of view.\n\nA few weeks before Christmas 2008, I get a call from my manager. \"I have a draft op-ed I need you to take a look at,\" he says.\n\nI open the attachment and read the byline: \"Muammar Gaddafi.\"\n\nThe form I signed on my first day at BLJ tumbles out of my memory. The word Libya was right therein black and white. Our client Hassan Tatanaki is a surrogate for Colonel Gaddafi. I'd agreed to represent the dictator of Libya.\n\nThe form, called a Foreign Agents Registration Act (or FARA) Statement, exists only because of another dictator, Adolf Hitler. In 1933, Hitler wanted to create positive spin for Nazi Germany in the minds of U. S. citizens. How did he do it? He hired American PR firms. The firms pushed Nazi propaganda to the American public through op-eds in newspapers. Congress thought this was beyond the pale and, in 1938, passed an act requiring all firms working for foreign powers to register with the Department of Justice."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Foreign dictators hiring American PR firms is still common practice. Take Ketchum, a public relations outfit owned by the holding company Omnicom Group, one of the mega PR firms. Vladimir Putin's Russia was one of Ketchum's largest clients. From 2006 to 2015, one of America's greatest adversaries paid tens of millions in fees to an American public relations firm. In 2013, Ketchum placed an op-ed from Putin in the New York Times about the Syrian civil war. Ketchum also does work for the American government: the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service, and the U. S. Army. If you work for Russia, you should not have a U. S. government contract.\n\nIn 2004, Ketchum was accused of'covert propaganda\" when it used actors to play journalists in videos shot fora client. In this case, the U. S. Government Accountability Office found the firm in violation of the federal propaganda ban. But Ketchum's campaigns have been awarded'Campaign of the Year\" at least six times by PRWeek, so they've got that going for them.\n\nAnd while we are telling tales out of school, let's have a look atone of my favorites: Qorvis. Qorvis has the distinction of being the go-to PR firm for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the events of September 11,2001, the kingdom hired Qorvis fora cool$ 14.7 million, paid between March and September 2002. One of the tactics deployed was to use an astroturf (or front) organization called the Alliance for Peace and Justice to run radio ads promoting Saudi messaging in the United States mere months after 9/11. When, in 2004, the FBI raided Qorvis's offices, the firm called the raid a'compliance inquiry\" regarding the Foreign Agents Registration Act."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Inflation hit the kingdom after Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post, was abducted, tortured, murdered, and dismembered on October 2,2018, at the direction of the Saudi Arabian government. It cost the Saudis$ 18.8 million in PR cleanup fees for killing just one person. Qorvis gobbled that money up between October 2018 and July 2019.\n\nForeign governments hire American PR firms because they've seen how skillfully we protect American politicians and corporations. In October 2004, prior to New York State governor Eliot Spitzer's self-immolation, he looked into the American International Group (aka AIG), a massive finance and insurance company that in 2008 would need a significant bailout from the U. S. taxpayer for misbehavior. AIG did not care for the inquiry and hired Qorvis to ameliorate the situation. You know what's easier than crisis communications? Paying people off to say nice things about your client. Twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainers and ten-thousand-dollar television appearance fees were offered to former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officials and think tank staffers. When they were caught, Qorvis called it'research.\" Qorvis perfected its bag of tricks with American conglomerates and then sold it to the Saudis fora multiple of the price. Not a bad business model.\n\nAt BLJ, we're in the same business. We prove our skills in DC and New York and then export the strategies to the highest foreign bidder.\n\nGaddafi's op-ed is a rambling, pro-Russia, anti– NATO expansion screed. I edit the piece, wordsmithing long-winded paragraphs into buzzy soundbites designed to catch an editor's attention. When placing an op-ed, you need to hit a specific audience. If you're pitching a conservative argument, you shoot for the Wall Street Journal. If you're pitching six hundred words of crazy from a North African dictator, you enlist a second-tier publication like the Washington Times."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I call up the latter's op-ed editor.\n\n\"You're full of shit,\" she says when I tell her my client's name.\n\nI have to spend an hour convincing her I'm a legitimate representative of Libya's\"Brother Leader.\"\n\nA few days later, I pickup a copy of the Washington Times on my way to Commissary. The headline reads, \"Gaddafi: Provoking Russia.\" I join a small group of people who can say their words have appeared under the byline'Muammar Gaddafi.\" I'm not sure if I'm proud of what I've pulled off or scared of what I'm capable of. It's unsettling, like watching someone get mugged in broad daylight and doing nothing to stop it.\n\nAt BLJ's Christmas party, Peter Brown asks me to come to his apartment an hour before the other guests. I'm awed by his views of Central Park, his double living rooms, and his museum-chic furniture. In one bathroom hang pictures of Peter with the Queen of England, Peter with John Lennon, Peter with Ronald Reagan. Every time someone uses his toilet, Brown lets them know he has access to influence. Linking undeniable impulses is part of his genius. He understands that everyone is seduced by fame and that everyone needs to defecate.\n\n\"Are you seeing anyone, Phil?\" Brown asks when I join him beside his piano. It's his first hint at an interest in my personal life.\n\n\"Not at the moment,\" I say.\n\n\"Who's your favorite actress?\"\n\nI've recently watched Layer Cake, so I say Sienna Miller's not bad.\n\n\"She's a friend. I could introduce you.\"\n\n\"Maybe she's a little out of my league. But thanks for the offer.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "A who's who of the media trickles through the door. Michael Elliott, the editor of Time, walks in with senior executives at the Wall Street Journal. Not far behind them are Barbara Walters, Yoko Ono, and Donald Trump.\n\n\"Don't shake Trump's hand. He's a germaphobe,\" Peter whispers in my ear.\n\nI've invited my childhood friend Preston, an East Coast, elite university– educated investment banker. When I need the right-wing take on a PR campaign, I tap Preston. Ashe says, \"Nobody who doesn't have a generator and two years' worth of food in their garage outflanks me to the right.\" I describe him as'authoritarian-curious.\"\n\nWhen I call Preston for his take on a story, it's not unusual to find him cleaning his'wireless hole punchers,\" his loving nickname for his AR-15s. Plural. Punch a code into a keypad in his den, and a false bookcase swings open to reveal his gun locker, which is filled with short-barreled AR-15s, some loaded with. 30-caliber subsonic rounds'almost as quiet as you see in the movies.\" Preston says he's big believer in the importance of'diversity,\" so he also has shotguns, pistols, and precision long-range rifles. The locker is stocked with more than enough ammunition to keep his suburban home, in one of the lowest-crime zip codes in the country, safe indefinitely from... no one exactly knows. Bonuses from Preston's current investment bank finance this arsenal. I've had friends arm themselves because they are worried there is going to be another civil war. Preston arms himself because he's hoping fora civil war.\n\n\"Al Jazeera had a birthday party fora terrorist live on air,\" I recently told Preston, crowd-testing ideas for the network to break into the American news market. \"How do we get around that?\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"There is no getting around that in the American states,\" Preston replied.\n\n\"You mean the red states?\"\n\n\"Said what I said. Just because you're a U. S. citizen, it doesn't mean you're an American. Americans aren't going to watch the Terrorist News Network.\"\n\n\"Fuck,\" I said.\n\n\"Barack Hussein Obama,\" Preston finished.\n\nWhen Preston arrives at the party, he is mystified by a huge vase filled with bananas. He glowers at the cornucopia of public relations professionals, celebrities, and BLJ clients. \"All the worst humans,\" he says, \"gathered in one place.\"\n\n\"Play nice,\" I say.\n\nI make small talk with Barbara Walters and watch Donald Trump avoid handshakes. I've heard Trump is showing face because he wants to ink deals with Gaddafi. Libya has a multibillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund. Peter Brown might be able to provide access. I grab another flute of champagne and overhear Preston berating a New York Times journalist.\n\n\"Your profession has disgraced itself,\" he says. \"You people have no pride. No shame.\"\n\nI sip my bubbly and spot Peter Brown across the room, making Barbara Walters laugh. Brown is completely comfortable with how the world works and his place in it. He understands the hidden machinery behind it all. He knows how to operate it. And he understands that the most important thing of all is how you look while you're doing it. How you appear. He once told me, \"We can't just do a good job. We also have to appear to do a good job.\"\n\nAnd that's public relations. If you can do that, then you can do whatever you want, and there won't be any consequences. You can represent a dictator, and everyone still comes to your Christmas party."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "My cab heads across the underside of Foggy Bottom and stops in front of the Watergate Hotel. The driver hands me a blank receipt. Blank cab receipts are the joy of every expense-accounted staffer in DC. An eight-dollar cab ride can transform into a fifty-dollar trip to the airport. I go to the airport a lot.\n\nThe Watergate's exterior looks like ribbons flowing in the wind. Once a posh address, the Watergate is slowly dying. Bob Dole used to live here; now the highlight is the Safeway in the basement. DC's zone-based taxi fare system was influenced by Dole, who wanted to ensure that he could ride from his residence in the Watergate complex to his Senate office in a one-zone ride.\n\nI'm stressed because Peter Brown called mean hour ago and said, \"You need to get down to the Libyan embassy.\" Lately, Brown has developed a penchant for calling at all hours with orders. Orders to jump on the next plane out of town. Orders to putout afire. Or to light a match.\n\n\"What happened?\" I asked.\n\n\"Our client is very happy,\" Brown said. \"But the world will be very displeased.\"\n\nInside the Watergate's office building, I head through a nondescript door into a suite full of Libyan flags and portraits of Muammar Gaddafi. The embassy's décor is tacky, stuck in the 1980s. Everything about the Gaddafis is stuck in the '80s-and covered in layers of cigarette smoke.\n\nAmbassador Ali Suleiman Aujali invites me to sit down at an oval desk. Last time I was here, we had Donald Trump on speakerphone setting up a game of golf for the Libyan ambassador."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"I gotta ask. Why did you pick the Watergate?\" I say once I'm seated.\n\n\"It was available,\" Aujali replies.\n\n\"I'd imagine,\" I say. \"Nothing shady has ever happened here.\"\n\n\"Today is a great day for our country,\" Aujali says, beaming.\n\nHe fills me in. Tomorrow, Scotland will release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the terrorist responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. Apparently because he has cancer and the Scots believe in compassion toward terrorists. Al-Megrahi is set to receive a hero's welcome back home in Libya.\n\n\"The Brother Leader doesn't want the press to spoil his moment of triumph,\" Aujali explains.\n\n\"Oh, they are going to try.\"\n\nWe're in a fiery-red space beyond crisis. The world will find out about al-Megrahi's release in less than twenty-four hours. Then comes the storm of negative coverage. Al-Megrahi murdered Americans. Men, women, children. A lot of them. There is nothing I can do to stop this runaway train. But I can create a counternarrative. I think it up before I leave the Watergate: Libya is America's ally in the war on terror. We have bigger fish to fry than one asshole who blew up a plane in the eighties. I need one story. One headline to say that there is some dissent in the international outcry against Libya. Anything counts.\n\nBack at my apartment, I scan old Google Alerts for'Libya.\" Four members of Congress traveled therein 2004, before the United States restored diplomatic relations. They tried to open the door to the West. I smile when I see that one of them was Solomon Ortiz. I know Congressman Ortiz from a recent operation in Mexico. When an earthquake rocked Turkey in 1999, the Mexican government sent dogs trained to locate survivors in the rubble. Saved a lot of lives. After a flood hit Mexico's Tabasco region in 2007, BLJ's Turkish American client decided it was time to repay the debt and donated ambulances to the relief effort. Ortiz facilitated the transfer."
}
]
|
[
{
"from": "system",
"value": "As the writer's co-author, extend the plot.\nTags: sci-fi, dystopian, dark humor, societal critique, human nature\nAuthor: Phil Elwood\nTitle: All the Worst Humans\nChapter: 9"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "\"It could throw sand in their gears,\" my manager says."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"But we need to get the resolution introduced, like, yesterday.\"\n\nHe's right. The vote is in two weeks. We are running out of time.\n\n\"How much money do I have to play with here?\" I ask.\n\n\"Can you make ten thousand work?\"\n\n\"I can try.\"\n\nWhen you need quick access to Congress, you need a lobbyist. When you need to charm a lobbyist, you take them to the Palm. I arrive at the steakhouse a half hour early. A maître d'who reminds me of the concierge at the Bellagio guides me past walls decorated with cartoon portraits of DC luminaries. Above my table, a cartoon Tom Brokaw stares down at me. I doubt he approves of today's journalistic ethics. I fidget under Brokaw's gaze, craving a cigarette, but Morton's is the only steakhouse in DC where you can still smoke.\n\nThe lobbyist arrives, an aging guy in a black suit. We connected through a friend who specializes in third-party outreach and whom I'll call Joe. Actually, his real name is Joe, so let's call him Frank. Lobbyists sell access to politicians; Frank sells access to lobbyists. I'm sure someone farther down the food chain sells access to Frank.\n\nThe lobbyist orders a bowl of bone marrow soup and a rib eye. \"Should we get a bottle of the Super Tuscan?\" he asks, testing the waters of my budget with the wine list.\n\n\"Order two,\" I say.\n\nWe're a bottle and a half deep before I make my ask. \"I need a resolution introduced about physical education funding,\" I say.\n\n\"Resolutions aren't too tough. Has to be someone aligned with the message. Usually, a bit of back-and-forth on the language.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "\"Here's the thing."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "We need it done fast.\"\n\nThe lobbyist studies my face and narrows his eyes, perhaps detecting the scent of duplicity. Or he's raising his price in his head. \"What's the rush?\" he asks.\n\n\"Ink. We need to galvanize the press.\"\n\n\"Who's your client?\"\n\n\"The Healthy Kids Coalition,\" I say. \"A children's advocacy organization fighting childhood obesity. It's Michelle Obama's big cause.\"\n\nTechnically, I'm not lying. But only technically. The Healthy Kids Coalition doesn't exist. It's a dormant astroturf organization created by some company years ago to advance a completely unrelated legislative agenda. In reality, it is just a website with a tax filing in Delaware. Astroturf organizations are shell nonprofits used to create the illusion of grassroots support fora cause. PR pros use them as shields for our clients. I'm borrowing the Healthy Kids Coalition fora week.\n\n\"So, who are you thinking about?\" I ask.\n\n\"Kilpatrick might do it.\"\n\nI know all about Detroit representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick and her family. My parents live just outside Detroit, and Kilpatrick's son, Kwame, was the city's mayor until he was convicted of obstruction of justice. Kwame charged a city-issued credit card$ 210,000 for massages at spas and for wines as pricey as the one the lobbyist and I are drinking tonight. In 2003, he was connected to the unsolved murder of a stripper who allegedly danced at his mansion, a story that has since become Detroit urban legend. His mother, Representative Kilpatrick, has just lost her primary. She's a lame duck in a lame-duck session. Double lame duck. You can get them to do anything."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Perfect,\" I say.\n\n\"Me taking this to Kilpatrick costs twenty-five.\"\n\n\"Listen,\" I say. \"I'm working on behalf of these kids. Their mothers don't have a lot of money. All they have is ten K.\"\n\nThere are greater sins than deceiving a lobbyist. Although, this particular sin may cause a sitting congresswoman to unknowingly introduce legislation on behalf of a foreign government.\n\n\"The rate is twenty-five.\"\n\nI take a check for ten thousand dollars out of my pocket and slide it across the linen tablecloth. The lobbyist stares at it while chewing a bite of steak. Ten thousand birds in the hand are better than twenty-five thousand in the bush. He swallows his meat and pockets the check.\n\nI can't attest to whether money changed hands between Kilpatrick and the lobbyist, but a few days later, a draft of the resolution is circulating in the U. S. House of Representatives. My idea has gone from a cocktail napkin to Congress in less than a month.\n\nI don't have time to wait for the resolution to get introduced, so I offer Politico's Ben Smith a leaked copy; I know he's a soccer fan. This is well before Ben Smith became the first editor in chief of BuzzFeed News and broke stories for the New York Times. At this point, he's an influential reporter always eager to land a scoop.\n\n\"How would you like an exclusive on a resolution that opposes the U. S. bid to host the World Cup?\" I ask.\n\n\"That's a weird story,\" he says.\n\n\"Weird enough to interest you?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"One thing. Would you mind printing most of the resolution in your article? I think it's important for people to read.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Smith confirms with Kilpatrick's office that my leak is the real thing. His piece is published forty-eight hours before the vote in Zurich. The headline reads, \"World Cup vs. Gym Class?\" Smith prints the entire resolution. \"Therefore, in order to help realize the goals of First Lady Michelle Obama's vision for reducing childhood obesity the US will place a higher priority on physical education programs in public schools,\" I read. I remember writing those words while ordering my second vodka soda at the Fox and Hounds. Now everyone reading Politico thinks the words came from the mouth of a congresswoman and that Michelle Obama is on our side.\n\nI've got a solid hit piece in my black-ops campaign against the United States\" World Cup bid. PR pros invest a great deal of time and effort to bring hit pieces to fruition. Most often, clients want to see a hit piece on their primary competitor. Early on in my time working for Peter Brown, I needed to hit one of my clients'political enemies. My adversary did not exactly follow the letter of the law. Their tax status and a few other legal t's and i 's were not crossed and dotted. I knew this because my client knew this; he had the resources needed to obtain this information. All I needed was the appropriate messenger.\n\nWashington is littered with nonprofit organizations founded with the ideal of changing the world for the better. But ideals don't keep the lights on. Money does. My client knew this. A significant private donation yielded a press release from a legitimate nonprofit and a letter of inquiry to the Department of Justice. Suddenly, my client's enemy was less concerned with my client and more concerned with their own growing legal bills.\n\nOne afternoon over cocktails, I told Peter Brown this story.\n\n\"You're an arsonist,\" he pronounced. \"Let me seethe picture of you and the First Lady of Mexico.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I passed my phone to Brown and took another drink of wine.\n\n\"What are you telling her to make her laugh?\" he asked.\n\n\"Don't remember,\" I said. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"I have a guess or two.\"\n\nClients ask for hit pieces all the time. Walmart likes to see negative articles about Amazon. So, in 2018, it hired PR pros to create the Free and Fair Markets Initiative (FFMI), which described itself as a'nonprofit watchdog committed to scrutinizing Amazon's harmful practices and promoting a fair, modern marketplace that works for all Americans.\" Don't be shocked: FFMI was another astroturf organization. PR pros get well paid for creating these shell nonprofits-in this case, $ 250,000. FFMI putout a stream of content hitting Amazon: Labor issues. Controversial items being sold on Amazon. Scandals in the C-Suite. All highlighted in tweets, press releases, and media statements by the FFMI.\n\nNormally, this would have been a win. There's a catch. Often, clients don't understand what they are getting themselves into when they commission hit pieces. You must look at every story you pitch as a potential Pandora's box. You won't find out exactly what's inside until you open it. These are the risks when you play this game. Unintended consequences are to be expected. When a good journalist begins to look at the industry writ large, controversies about the client can come into play. Sometimes, the investigation spirals out of control. The hit piece against a competitor can turn on the client. If that happens, you have lost control of the narrative. \"Be careful he who hunts monsters, lest ye become a monster yourself.\" Or whatever Nietzsche said. If you play with fire, there is a better-than-even chance you will get burned."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Sometimes, the ensuing headline can hit the wrong target-which is exactly what happened when Walmart tried to burn Amazon. The Wall Street Journal's headline read, \"A'Grass Roots'Campaign to Take Down Amazon Is Funded by Amazon's Biggest Rivals.\" The subhead was worse: \"Walmart, Oracle, and Mall Owner Simon Property Group Are Secret Funders Behind a Nonprofit that Has Been Highly Critical of the E-Commerce Giant.\" The reporter had done his job and sniffed out the astroturf organization, including the pesky little detail that one of the'grassroots advocates\" had been dead for months. Walmart got hit by its own hit piece, and so did its allies.\n\nLuckily, my hit piece against the United States'World Cup bid is a clean shot, and the Healthy Kids Coalition provides adequate cover. The astroturf nonprofit issues a press release lauding Kilpatrick's vital work on behalf of young arteries. The release appears to come from childhood obesity experts instead of, say, the Qatari royal family.\n\nMy manager at BLJ prints dozens of copies of the article and flies to Zurich. The Qatari delegation brings the article to their final meetings with FIFA. They tell the voters that, in America, funding for the World Cup has become apolitical football. In Qatar, the emir decides how money gets spent.\n\nI watch the announcement broadcast alone on a dirty couch in my apartment on Logan Circle. FIFA president Sepp Blatter announces the 2018 winner first: Russia.\n\nIt's a bit of a shock and dashes my hopes for the Qataris. If FIFA awarded a bid to Russia, surely the next one will be for the United States. The balance of power, so to speak.\n\nThen Blatter opens the second envelope. When the name'Qatar\" appears, I'm as shocked as the rest of the world. A camera pans over the celebrating Qataris, and I spot Bill Clinton in the shot, whispering something in his aide's ear. Later, Peter Brown tells me that Clinton threw a tchotchke through a mirror in his hotel room that evening."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I don't blame him."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The 2010 World Cup vote will be largely regarded as the most corrupt in the history of soccer. The Department of Justice will goon to conduct a multiyear investigation and indict three FIFA officials who received cash to vote for Qatar.\n\nA few days after the announcement, I get a call from one of BLJ's vice presidents. \"Did you hear about the seven-figure win bonus in the contract?\" she asks.\n\n\"I had not. Are we all getting raises?\"\n\n\"Ha. When Peter tried to collect, the Qataris told him, \"You should read your contracts.\" When the Qataris sent back the contract, they had redlined the bonus. Nobody checked.\"\n\nBLJ has just helped Qatar secure a World Cup bid for the firm's monthly retainer of$ 80,000. Eventually, Qatar will spend$ 220 billion on the games. Our fee was a hell of a bargain, if you ask me.\n\nIt doesn't matter what happens on the soccer pitch in 2022; Qatar has already won the World Cup. This is about so much more than sports. The Qatar monarchy has been legitimatized in the eyes of the world. As many as 1.5 billion people will watch the 2022 World Cup final. When, in 2023, Qatar's sovereign wealth fund buys a stake in the ownership group of the NBA's Washington Wizards and the NHL's Capitals, nobody bats an eye. Sportswashing works.\n\nThe Syrian embassy is a redbrick colonial-style building with white trim. It's not in the Watergate. So that's an upgrade. I fold three hundred dollars into a reporter's passport and hand it to the visa officer. I've gotten to know this officer quite well over the last few months. He's a soccer fanatic."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"What do you think of Doha hosting the World Cup?\" I ask him.\n\n\"We are proud our region will host the games,\" he says and hands me back the passport with a visa installed and the hundred-dollar bills gone.\n\nBLJ is sending Vogue journalist Joan Juliet Buck to Damascus. The magazine is going to feature our client Asma al-Assad in its March 2011 issue, thanks to Peter Brown calling up his old friend Anna Wintour. The theme of the issue is'Power.\" We're using the wife of Syrian president (read: dictator) Bashar al-Assad to try to strengthen the relationship between the United States and Syria. It's an American tactic: the First Lady is always more popular than the president, and she makes her husband look good by association.\n\nThe Vogue story runs under the title'A Rose in the Desert.\" When I pickup a copy of the glossy magazine, I'm gobsmacked by the first line of the piece: \"Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic-the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies,\" the writer gushes. In the first few paragraphs alone, the piece describes Mrs. al-Assad as'breezy\" and'fun\" and calls Syria'a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark.\"\n\nThe piece reads like the reporter spent a few days with Gwyneth Paltrow: \"Asma al-Assad empties a box of fondue mix into a saucepan for lunch,\" Buck writes. \"The household is run on wildly democratic principles. \"We all vote on what we want, and where,\" she[Asma] says.\" (For example, her children voted to make the chandelier over the dining table out of cut-up comic books.) It's rare that you send a journalist on a propaganda tour and they actually print the propaganda. But you won't find any complaints from the flaks who set it all up."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The Vogue writer says Mrs. al-Assad likely has a'killer IQ.\" Poor choice of words when describing a dictator's wife. The article is chock-full of questionable journalistic choices. It quotes Bashar al-Assad himself saying he became an eye surgeon because there is'very little blood.\" Vogue publishes photos of Assad playing with his children: he is dressed like an American president in jeans and a gray fleece.\n\nA few days after the Vogue issue hits magazine stands, the Arab Spring revolution erupts in Syria. Thousands of protesters soon fill the streets of Damascus, calling for Assad's head. When his troops beat them bloody, the world reacts live on Twitter. Later, Vogue tries to scrub any record of the article's existence from the internet, and Anna Wintour has to defend herself in the pages of the New York Times.\n\nIn Libya, the Arab Spring escalates to civil war after Gaddafi's army opens fire on protesters in Benghazi, killing hundreds. I think back to Srebrenica, to standing on the blood-soaked soccer pitch. That day, I wondered how long it would be before similar scenes played out in Libya and Syria. It took less than a year. The nature of these conflicts was different; the results were the same. Blood on the soccer pitch. Blood in the desert. It's still blood.\n\nOnce again, I'm faced with the business end of my business.\n\nUnfazed, BLJ will goon to advise the Assad regime on how to spin the Arab Spring. Brown wants me to work on the Assad account, but after I find out that the Syrian government is shooting its own people, I refuse to sign the FARA form. In an internal document leaked by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, BLJ later advises Assad, \"If hard power is necessary to quell rebellion, soft power is needed to reassure the Syrian people and outside audiences that reform is proceeding apace, legitimate grievances are being addressed and taken seriously, and that Syria's actions are ultimately aimed at creating an environment in which change and progress can take place.\" BLJ wants to spearhead media efforts to'create a reform'echo-chamber'by developing media coverage outside of Syria that points to the President's difficult task of wanting reform, but conducted in anon-chaotic, rational way.\" All this during a revolution that is quickly becoming a civil war."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Peter Brown wants to meet meat the bar at the Mandarin Oriental. In the middle of a workday. Atypical request coming from me. A strange one coming from Peter. On my way to the bar, I see a junior BLJ staffer. Brian is a few years younger than me, hired about a year after I came aboard. We pass in the marble hallway. I catch his eye.\n\n\"Peter's firing me, isn't he?\" I ask.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" Brian says.\n\nWe shake hands, and Brian heads for the exit. I walk through the gilded doors of the bar to face the music. Peter isn't at the bar. It's empty. A waiter comes up tome and asks if I'd like a drink.\n\n\"Yes, I think I would,\" I say. \"I'll take a double Pappy Van Winkle. On the rocks.\"\n\nI sip my two-hundred-dollar glass of bourbon and stare at the ice cubes bobbing in the amber liquor. Peter arrives ten minutes later. He waves the waiter away. I wait for him to speak.\n\n\"The Arab Spring has been bad for our business model,\" he says.\n\n\"I agree.\"\n\n\"And as you know, I haven't been happy with your performance for sometime.\"\n\n\"I didn't know that, Peter,\" I say. \"I didn't know that at all.\"\n\n\"So, you're out.\"\n\nPeter Brown gave me anew life the day we met at the Four Seasons. Now he's taking that life away at the Mandarin Oriental. He knows I won't make a scene here.\n\nWhile Brown explains that he wants me to stay on for two weeks to smooth out the transition, I am thinking, This man describes me to clients as a hit man. A guy who can punch hard in the media. I want to turn to him and say, \"For years, you've called mean arsonist. What do you think I'm about to do?\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I hold my tongue."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Even now, even as he's casting me out into the cold, I'm still in awe of Peter Brown.\n\nI cab it home and head down to the computer lab in the basement of my apartment building. I enter the password to my BLJ email account. I need to get it all before they lock me out. I start forwarding documents to my personal email account. I'm looking for anything with an attachment. Anything from Peter. Thirty minutes later, I've forwarded 1,500 communications that Peter would never want to seethe light of day.\n\nThen I start printing. Invoices paid by the Gaddafis, Assad, Gabon. The printer hums and clicks. Soon, I've got a stack fifty pages thick. I slip it into a manila envelope and lick the seal.\n\nI ask Lindsay to meet meat Commissary the next day for lunch. I arrive an hour early and start drinking. By the time she arrives, I'm in a gray area between tipsy and buzzed.\n\nLindsay and I have been seeing a lot of each other. We've talked about my moving into her place when her roommate moves out. Lindsay looks happy to see me. Then she notices the graveyard of glasses.\n\n\"You okay?\" she asks.\n\n\"I'm going to do something,\" I say.\n\n\"Oh... Phil.\"\n\n\"Burn a few bridges.\"\n\n\"You're going to inform on BLJ?\"\n\n\"To every reporter who'll take my call. At the biggest papers I can.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to tell you how to run your life,\" Lindsay says. \"But it's generally a good rule to avoid leaving a trail of destruction in your wake.\"\n\n\"Peter is doing something wrong. I mean look at the Middle East right now. Blood on the streets. Assad is shooting civilians.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Didn't you rep Assad as of, like, last Tuesday?\"\n\n\"It's the right thing to do to hold Peter accountable.\"\n\n\"That's why you're doing this? Accountability?\"\n\n\"Bingo.\"\n\n\"You want to know what I think?\"\n\n\"By all means,\" I say.\n\n\"I think you're pissed at Peter. I think you're doing this out of spite.\"\n\n\"It's the right thing to do,\" I repeat.\n\n\"Phil, this could hurt your future. Move on. Let go.\"\n\nLindsay is right, of course. About everything. Here's the thing about good advice: sometimes, you just can't take it. I start dialing reporters later that afternoon.\n\nThe first reporter I meet with has rules. Rule number one: If there is alcohol on the table, the conversation is off the record. Better than fine by me. We've met at the Bottom Line, a dive bar where I used to pickup an occasional shift while at Georgetown. There is most certainly alcohol on the table.\n\n\"Gaddafi and Assad's PR guy, the former manager of the Beatles, selectively registered their accounts with the Department of Justice,\" I say. \"This is a problem.\"\n\n\"Why are you telling me this?\"\n\n\"Because he just fired me.\"\n\nPart of my strategy in dealing with reporters is to express my agenda upfront. I'm honest about my conflicts of interest. I often tell reporters, \"This is the headline I'd like to read. This is the reason I'm talking to you. This is my motivation. And yes, someone is paying me to say this. But here's the story.\" Why not be upfront about my motives? It gives me immediate credibility. It gets dirty laundry out in the open so they don't find it later. Playing hide the football with someone who investigates people like me fora living is a bad idea. And what comes after'But here's the story\" is usually newsworthy. I'm never trying to sell toothpaste or bananas."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I tell the reporter how much Gaddafi paid BLJ."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I tell them about babysitting the Doctor in Las Vegas. And I tell them that we didn't register any of this with the Department of Justice. I go through, in detail, each of the questionable things I have been asked to do while working at Brown Lloyd James. The payments in cash. The mysterious emails. The'nontraditional business practices.\" Peter Brown is an eccentric man, one who firmly believes there are two sets of rules: one for those with money and another for the rest of the world. Neither set of rules really applies to him.\n\n\"Are you sure you want to do this?\" the reporter asks. \"These are scary people.\"\n\n\"The real question is, Do you want the story?\"\n\nPeople always ask for my motives. They want to know why. Here's the truth, a truth I have trouble admitting and explaining: I do it for the story. My time with Brown Lloyd James cannot end with the whimper of my making Peter Brown pay for my two-hundred-dollar glass of whiskey. I need it to end with a bomb. It's not that I'm upset about being fired. Rather, it's about who fired me. The caliber of the person who fires you matters. Later in life, I will be terminated by a bureaucrat atone of the mega firms. I had so little respect for this person that I thanked him for firing me. But for some reason, being dismissed by a rock-and-roll icon has set something off in me. This story needs a proper ending.\n\n\"You didn't answer the question,\" the reporter says.\n\n\"My safety is not my first concern.\"\n\n\"Well, regardless of your motivation, there is a story here. BLJ is flouting the law. And they are unlikely to get caught.\"\n\nI push the manila envelope across the table. \"Everything you need is inhere.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The article goes live on September 9,2011. \"The public-relations firm Brown Lloyd James posts an extensive client roster on its website, including composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the charity Autism Speaks, Carnegie Mellon University and the state of Qatar,\" it begins. \"Unacknowledged on its website client list is its work for the regime of Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi and the wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.\" The work BLJ does, the piece reads, \"carries a risk to a firm's reputation, especially if a firm's client battles its citizens, as happened in both Syria and Libya this year.\" The reporter got Tony Fratto, a Treasury and White House spokesman during the Bush administration, to comment on Peter Brown's business practices. \"Tome the job of diplomatic relations with foreign governments, even troubled ones, is the job of the State Department,\" Fratto says.\n\nPeter liked to call mean arsonist. Now he's got afire.\n\nThe Department of Justice refuses to confirm if Brown Lloyd James will face sanctions or penalties due to its failure to properly register clients. I hear rumors over the next weeks that the U. S. government has called BLJ with some questions. Staffers there are frantically emailing to get all their records updated for the DOJ. But in the end, Brown files the appropriate forms, apparently having convinced the DOJ that there was no intentional evasion of the law. All crimes are forgiven. And the system will keep turning. Influence will be purchased. Governments will topple. And the people living under dictatorships will continue to suffer and die.\n\nMy career as a bagman for dictators is over. But I can't get out of public relations. I'm still in debt. This is the only way I know how to make money. Who else will employ me after what I've done? The Hill won't have me back, but the PR industry embraces me. And that's what happens when I walk through the doors of Levick Strategic Communications, the premier crisis communications shop in DC. I tell the firm's CEO Richard Levick, about my work on the Qatari World Cup bid. He's impressed."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "On May 13,2011, while I'm filling out new-hire paperwork with Levick, NATO aircraft strike Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli. Gaddafi responds by taunting NATO. \"I tell the cowardly crusader[NATO] that I live in a place they cannot reach and where you cannot kill me,\" he says in an audio recording played on Libyan state-run TV.\n\nTurns out, he was right. For about three months.\n\nTripoli falls in August. Gaddafi and Mutassim flee to the desert city of Sirte. At approximately 8:30 a. m. local time on October 20, NATO forces intercept a satellite phone call made by the Brother Leader. At the same time, a Royal Air Force reconnaissance mission spots an ever-so-subtle seventy-five-car motorcade blasting through the desert. An American Predator drone circling the skies over Libya, operated by someone in Las Vegas, fires at the convoy first. It is the middle of the night in Sin City, where I spent my terrifying weekend with Mutassim. Moments later, French fighter jets bomb the convoy. Gaddafi hides in a drainage pipe before being captured by rebels.\n\nThe next day, I follow the news. The networks show a photo of the Doctor's dead body, shot in the chest and the neck. I wonder what's become of Ali and the two Muhammads. I have a feeling most of the people on our Las Vegas trip are now dead. Al Jazeera cuts to footage of Muammar Gaddafi being beaten by rebels, blood pouring down his face and clumped in his hair. A pistol is put to his head.\n\nHis last words are, \"Do you know right from wrong?\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Start Chapter"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "CHAPTER 6\n\nThe Government v. the Internet\n\nA call from a Wall Street Journal reporter wakes meat 5 a. m.\n\n\"Phil, I wanted to give you the chance to comment on a story that's about to go live,\" he says. \"Here's our lead: \"After months of planning, New Zealand police swooped on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's home as guests arrived to celebrate his birthday. '\"\n\n\"Let me get some people awake,\" I croak.\n\nDotcom's lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, former counsel to President Bill Clinton, fills me in. Counterterrorism agents have raided the Web baron's 25,000-square-foot Auckland mansion using military helicopters, canine units, and SWAT vehicles in an operation coordinated with the FBI. My client barricaded himself in his panic room, clutching a sawed-off shotgun. He faces extradition to the United States on charges of copyright infringement, racketeering, money laundering, and wire fraud.\n\nWhen you work in crisis communications, you expect the phone to ring with a crisis. Just not this many of them at once.\n\nSix weeks earlier, on a Monday morning in December, I enter Levick Strategic Communications. Our building sits on the corner of Nineteenth and M Streets NW in Washington, DC. Richard Levick's corner office is lined with bookcases stuffed with legal treatises. That day, I join Levick, who is smoothing the lapels of his three-piece suit, and four executives huddled around the speakerphone. A senior vice president gives me the once-over.\n\n\"So, you're Richard's new black-ops guy?\"\n\nBefore I can respond, the speakerphone connects and a German accent punctures the room. Kim Dotcom's voice throws me-not what I'd expected from an obese hacker. I'd assumed he'd sound like Neo from The Matrix, not Christoph Waltz from Inglourious Basterds."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"I vant to box this little vorm,\" Kim Dotcom booms.\n\n\"Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Dotcom,\" Levick says.\n\n\"Mr. Dotcom's subsidiary Megaporn has been sued by Perfect Ten, a porn company looking to create anew revenue stream as a copyright troll. He's being forced to pay a large settlement,\" adds Dotcom's tech lawyer, a fast-talking attorney from San Francisco. \"Perfect Ten's CEO is on the older side.\"\n\n\"I vill fight him on television for the exact amount of the settlement,\" Dotcom says through the speakerphone.\n\nThe suits around the table exchange frowns. I immediately like the guy. I've finally meta client whose ideas are crazier than mine. As the junior man on this intake call, I remain mute, watching how Levick handles the situation.\n\n\"Sounds a tad... splashy,\" says Levick. \"What if we got some third-party allies to say good things about you?\"\n\n\"Put a good face on the settlement while still maintaining a viable business,\" a VP in the room interjects.\n\n\"I am not a criminal,\" says Dotcom.\n\n\"Paying the settlement is not dispositive of guilt,\" says Levick.\n\n\"I have a legitimate business. Forbes vants to put me on the cover. I see a vorld where big content and internet freedom can exist together.\"\n\n\"I see that world, too,\" Levick says. \"And we can help the public see it. Let's hold off talking to reporters until the settlement news cycles through the papers. Is there anything else we should know?\"\n\nIt's a good question. All PR crises start with an intake call. It's an exercise in extracting as much information as we can from the client and their lawyer. Usually your client, or more often their lawyer who is always on an intake call, doesn't tell you the whole truth or neglects to tell you something very important. (Casein point: At the time of this meeting, the FBI is six weeks away from taking down Dotcom, and he's already hired a criminal defense team.) Or they straight-up lie to you, trying to play the PR pro with PR pros. Sometimes, I say to lawyers, \"Do you see me getting up in the courtroom and making objections? Tell me the truth and let me talk to the media.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"That's where things stand,\" says Dotcom's lawyer.\n\n\"So, nothing else?\" asks Levick.\n\n\"I vant to move fast,\" Dotcom says.\n\n\"We will turnaround a proposal for you in twenty-four hours,\" Levick says, shooting his finger in my direction.\n\nProposals are the responsibility of the most junior agent. Twenty-four hours is actually a large window within which to come up with a crisis strategy. I've been through fire drills where a client had to talk to reporters within thirty minutes.\n\n\"Start with the crazy on this proposal. I'll rein you in,\" Levick tells me after the call, over a glass of bourbon. He keeps the good stuff hidden inside a false globe. \"I love the way your brain works.\"\n\n\"I can do that.\"\n\n\"Stop by HR on your way out. Tell them you'll need to look at some... blocked sites on the company laptop. I don't think Perfect Tenor Megaporn are whitelisted.\"\n\nI order takeout from Commissary and browse dozens of articles about my new client. Kim Dotcom is my kind of criminal: a six-foot-seven, three-hundred-pound computer nerd who likes chartering model-laden yachts, driving vintage Cadillacs on golf courses, and playing games with the American entertainment industry. In 2005, he started the file-sharing service Megaupload, through which users could access copyrighted content like Hollywood films free of charge. At its peak, Megaupload claimed to have sixty million users, to generate twice as much Web traffic as Facebook, and to have turbocharged Dotcom's net worth to two hundred million. He sometimes travels with a life-size statue of the alien from Predator.\n\nOut of all my clients, Kim Dotcom has the longest rap sheet. The man born Kim Schmitz was first convicted in 1998 for trafficking stolen phonecard codes, computer fraud, and data espionage. He milked the arrest for hacker cred, telling the press he was the head of an international cybercrime team called Dope. He bragged that he had breached Citibank's digital vaults and sent twenty million dollars to Greenpeace. A 2001 piece in the German newspaper Die Welt says he hacked NASA and the Pentagon, accessing classified military intel on Saddam Hussein. The Guardian claims he sabotaged the credit rating of former German chancellor Helmut Kohl. In 2002, he was convicted of manipulating the stock of a Dutch internet company. German authorities extradited him from Thailand. He met them at the Munich airport introducing himself as the'Royal Highness Kimble the First.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Kim parlayed exploits into hacker fame. According to Wired, \"He promoted his new bad-boy rich hacker genius image through a bizarre Flash movie called Kimble, Special Agent, in which his cartoon alter-ego drives a \"Megacar\" and then a \"Megaboat\" before breaking into Bill Gates's compound and riddling the wall behind Gates with a machine gun (spelling out'Linux' with bullet holes).\"\n\nPeter Brown taught me that'anything is possible with the right amount of money.\" Dotcom has exponentially more money than Peter Brown, and his fortune has allowed him to stay one step ahead of the law since the Clinton administration. We're now well into the Obama administration. Dotcom had successfully skirted the law for three presidents while enjoying wine, women, and song. And he found the time to become the number one– ranked player in the world in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. \"Don't hate me because I beat you,\" goes his gamer motto. \"Respect me because I can teach you.\"\n\nA 2001 article in the Telegraph calls Dotcom'a PR man's nightmare and a journalist's dream.\" Conventional PR wisdom says the public should hate him. Not so. He's mostly beloved, even by people who should really hate him like Kanye West and Apple's Steve Wozniak, who had money taken out of their pockets by Megaupload. Of course, Dotcom is reviled by the entertainment companies and their lobbyists, like the Motion Picture Association of America, and they have really good reasons to detest him. The MPAA estimates that online piracy costs the U. S. film industry around$ 29.2 billion per year. (Typical of the MPAA, this figure seems like a bit of hyperbole.) But millions of fans on the internet can't get enough of this obese geek who lives like Richie Rich while gleefully flipping the bird to the powers that be."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I, too, am smitten."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Dotcom is a PR genius. He breaks every rule of public relations and gets away with it.\n\nRule 1. Don't believe the lie that'any press is good press.\"\n\n\"There is no such thing as bad press\" is the most flawed statement in public relations. Just ask Gaddafi. Except if you are Kim Dotcom. There is noway fora journalist to write about this cartoon character that he won't find flattering. Dotcom lets it all hangout and flips bad stories into irreverent jokes on his Twitter account.\n\nRule 2. Don't repeat the negative.\n\nTell me the first Richard Nixon quote that pops into your head. \"I am not a crook,\" right? You remember the line even if you weren't born yet when Nixon said it. Everyone remembers the line. Those five words are perhaps the single greatest PR blunder in American history. Nixon repeated the negative, the first thing in media training we teach clients to avoid doing. If someone asks how long you've been beating your wife, you don't say, \"I'm not a wife beater.\" You say, \"I'm a good man.\" Why deny when you can obfuscate?\n\nDotcom is often asked if Megaupload is legal. He doesn't say, I run a legitimate business and donate to charity. He says, The law is wrong. Everything that comes out of Kim Dotcom's mouth is worthy of indictment. Because he tells the truth, he's guilty of most crimes except perjury.\n\nRule 3. Never wrestle with a pig in shit. *\n\nTwo things will happen. You'll be covered in shit. And the pig will like it. Never get down and fight with an opponent who is beneath you. Dotcom wants to challenge a copyright troll to fisticuffs. He'd probably stream it live on Twitter. And people would root for him."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Rule 4. Don't kick someone when they are up.\n\nAn old saying in Washington. It's too much work to attack a strong opponent. Know your place. Dotcom kicks whomever he wants: beloved CEOs, the entertainment industry, powerful lobbies like the MPAA. These are people who hire shadow men like me and tell us, \"Do your worst.\" Even Dotcom's ridiculous surname kicks up at authority. Knowing that his line of work would bring him up against lawsuits and investigations, he legally changed it so the header of any case against him essentially reads, \"the Government v. the Internet.\" He's a complete 180 from humorless dictators sequestered in their bloodstained, oil money palaces.\n\nI can't wait to get started.\n\nAt the Willard Hotel's Round Robin Bar, DC bartending legend Jim Hewes serves me one of his gorgeous old-fashioneds. Hewes lives by the motto'Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.\" I'll drink to that.\n\nI haven't been back to the Willard since BLJ threw Gaddafi the'Hooray, Forty Years as a Dictator!\" bash. Fifteen minutes later, the rapper Swizz Beatz enters, wearing the type of suit NBA players wear courtside after they've torn their Achilles'.\n\n\"You Phil?\" he asks.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I say.\n\n\"I'm excited for the multitude of opportunities presented by this opportunity to grow my personal brand.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I say.\n\nIt's been a busy few weeks. Dotcom settled with Perfect 10. Under Levick's advisement, he did not box its aging, balding CEO. It would have been cruel. Funny. But cruel. Dotcom has bigger plans for Megaupload."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"We're going legit,\" he announced on a recent conference call. \"Mainstream. We're going to install someone with music industry credibility as CEO.\"\n\nEnter Swizz Beatz. I'm handling the media rollout for Beatz's upcoming announcement as Megaupload's CEO. Swizz Beatz and his nine Grammy nominations are the face of a well-crafted narrative. We're using him as a shield from music industry criticism, creating the narrative that Dotcom is entering the lawful fold. Mega, Kim, and Swizz aren't destroying the music industry; they are the well-meaning stewards of its future. Dotcom's next move is to partner with a record label and major industry figures to release music through his file-sharing platform.\n\nHe's off to a hot start. A few days ago, on December 17, Dotcom released the'Megaupload Song\" music video to YouTube. The video stars Kim Kardashian; musical artists Kanye West, will. i. am, P. Diddy, and Chris Brown; actor Jamie Foxx; boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.; and tennis champ Serena Williams. After the parade of A-listers, Dotcom appears in it dressed in a black hoodie, sporting a neckbeard, and boasting'Four percent of the internet.... It's a hit, it's a hit!\"\n\nOnce again, Dotcom breaks all the rules of PR. He kicks up at the music labels and literally repeats the (potentially criminal) negative in song: \"M-E-G-A! Upload tome today!\" Artists who have contracts with major record labels are advertising the very company bending those labels over a barrel. I imagine the horrified faces of the United Talent Agency suits logging on and seeing their biggest clients shilling fora pro-piracy website.\n\nOnce again, Dotcom gets away with it. The music video racks up millions of views on YouTube. The press covers it as a fun oddity. And the song is an earworm, as if an AI program mixed a commercial jingle with a song by the Black Eyed Peas. Yesterday, I caught Lindsay singing it while she cooked breakfast. \"Meeegggaaaa,\" she hummed. \"Me-ga-up-load. Send me a file.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"This launch is going to be massive,\" Swizz Beatz tells meat the Round Robin.\n\n\"Don't talk to Page Six,\" I tell him. \"They're sniffing. We'll break the news soon. Thinking of the Wall Street Journal. Only right fora CEO.\"\n\n\"I like the sound of that.\"\n\nI leave the Willard and head to Rumors, a sticky-floored bar with a patio near Levick's office. I work late, emailing with a tech reporter named Ernesto who writes for TorrentFreak and with a Forbes writer who wants to put Dotcom on the magazine's February cover. If all goes according to plan, I'll be on a plane to New Zealand in a few weeks.\n\nAll does not go according to plan.\n\nNow, a few days later, I get the call that Kim Dotcom has been arrested. When Dotcom hired Levick, I suspected he didn't need us to deal with just a copyright troll. His lawyers didn't give us the straight dope. Dotcom knew the FBI was trying to take him down. Now that day has come. The day of his arrest, the press runs photos of Dotcom brandishing a shotgun in front of a black Mercedes with a vanity license plate reading, \"GUILTY.\" The music newsletter Complex declares it possibly the first case of confession via license plate.\n\nI doubt antics will save him this time. Dotcom threatens multibillion-dollar entertainment companies with deep connections to the White House. Chris Dodd, the chairman and chief lobbyist for the MPAA, was a senator from Connecticut when President Obama was a senator from Illinois. Vice President Joe Biden has called Dodd one of his best friends. Dotcom's lawyer will claim that White House logs show Obama and Dodd meeting in the Oval Office on December 9, just a month before Dotcom's takedown."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Then, around the time of the raid, Dodd went on Fox News. \"Those who count on, quote, Hollywood for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,\" he said. \"Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk, and then don't pay any attention tome when my job is at stake.\"\n\nIs it too far into the weeds of conspiracy to think Dodd threatened to yank financial support for the Democrats unless Obama sanctioned the raid? I call Preston to run my theory by him.\n\n\"Communist Hollywood and leftist politicians coordinating to destroy an armed sovereign citizen? I don't believe you,\" he says dryly. \"Are you a cognizant freethinking individual? Is this not obvious to you already?\"\n\n\"What's that noise?\" I ask, hearing a pop-pop-pop in the background.\n\n\"I'm on a range in Upstate New York. Marine snipers are teaching me to be more effective with long-range rifles. We shoot with silencers, but you can still hear it.\"\n\n\"Sounds accurate.\"\n\n\"We're hitting kill shots at a thousand yards,\" Preston says. \"Hate to tell you, Phil, but you're getting beat at your own game. \"Public relations\" is just the genteel name for propaganda. You went up against Hollywood propagandists. They areas rich as Croesus. And they have a bigger army.\"\n\n\"I don't have an army.\"\n\n\"Get one. They've got the FBI. You don't even own a gun, for some reason that I cannot fathom and will not attempt to.\"\n\n\"I'll work on my army. Right now, I'm scrambling. The press keeps harping on the detail that Kim was arrested holding a sawed-off shotgun. He's like a Bond villain.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"A villain?\" Preston says. \"He's standing up to the state in an armed fashion. He speaks tome on a deep level. But a sawed-off is a rookie move. It's too fucking loud. And ninety-five percent of people load with bird shot. Nonlethal at twenty-five yards. A longer barrel is better for putting warheads through foreheads.\"\n\n\"For my purposes, it'd be better if Kim didn't brandish a gun at all.\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous,\" he says. \"I've got to run. If you're ever in New York and feel like shooting shit at great distances, please let me know.\"\n\nI manage the crisis through the weeklong news cycle immediately following Dotcom's arrest and garner positive news coverage on his behalf. But there is only so much a PR firm can do when its client is an FBI target. The DOJ instructs us to stop working for Dotcom and freezes his assets. I'm frustrated that my hands are tied. I hate that the justice system does the bidding of media conglomerates.\n\nIf I'm being really honest, I'm mostly disappointed that Dotcom and I never had a chance to get started. When I think about the media games we could have played, it's like pining fora long-lost love. I want revenge for my PR white whale. But it's a dumb idea to go after the FBI. And Levick's phone keeps ringing with intake calls from clients in crisis whose assets are not frozen.\n\nLindsay leads me down a dark linoleum hallway lined with stacks of Plexiglas doors. Scores of desperate-looking cats and tiny kittens lookout at us.\n\n\"Our guy doesn't do the cute and fuzzy thing,\" Lindsay says. \"He's more gangly and mangy.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Look at these little guys,\" I say, stopping in front of two orange tabby brothers licking each other's ears.\n\n\"Don't look in their eyes,\" Lindsay says, yanking my arm. \"It's a trap. Besides, they have each other. Our guy doesn't have anyone left. His siblings and mom have been adopted. He's been here for months.\"\n\nLindsay has been volunteering at the Washington Animal Rescue League, on a secret mission to find the best cat to adopt. She watches the cats interact with visitors, eavesdrops on the staff discussing the hard-luck cases, and recaps the details tome, cat by cat, at dinner. This is one of the things I love most about Lindsay: her idea of a conspiracy has her embedded in an animal shelter petting stray cats. If I were a double agent, I'd probably windup working for an Afghan warlord.\n\nLindsay approaches a cage. A pair of yellow eyes open, staring skeptically. Lindsay unlocks the cage and fishes out a scraggly kitten who can't weigh more than a couple of pounds. He's jet black, all except those eyes.\n\n\"I saw him make a kid cry earlier today,\" Lindsay says, scooping the kitten onto her shoulder and heading to aside room where we can let him loose. \"His name is Humerus, like the bone, but I was thinking we'd call him Darth Vader.\"\n\nI lean down and reach out. Darth Vader considers me fora moment, then stabs me in the leg with a razor-sharp claw. A trail of blood runs down my shin. A volunteer rushes to bring me a Band-Aid.\n\n\"You probably want to meet some other cats,\" the volunteer says.\n\n\"No, this one is an excellent judge of character,\" I say. \"We'll take him.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "They put Darth Vader inside a box with holes, and Lindsay and I head home with him.\n\nI moved into Lindsay's place two weeks ago. My Bloom County posters have finally found frames. Lindsay leaves me and Darth in the back bedroom. \"I'm going to Petco. We need supplies,\" and she bounds out the door.\n\nI peek through the holes in the box. A yellow eye stares back. I open the box, and Darth Vader beelines it under the couch, which in Lindsay's place is stain-free and not concealed by old sheets.\n\n\"I find your lack of faith disturbing,\" I tell him.\n\nI lie on the bed. The pillowcases smell like Lindsay, clean and fresh and of another scent that makes me feel calm and happy. They smell like home. After fifteen minutes, a dark flash creeps into my peripheral vision. Darth Vader studies me. He approaches, one paw at time. I don't move an eyelash, and he hops onto the bedspread, still keeping his distance. I resist the overwhelming urge to pet.\n\n\"You have emotional problems,\" I tell Darth Vader. \"That's cool with me. I do, too.\"\n\nLindsay busts through the front door carrying bags of kitty litter, anew litter box filled with toys, food, brushes, and treats. \"I spent way too much money, Phil,\" she shouts, putting things into cabinets. \"We now have a Petco credit card.\"\n\n\"Come see,\" I call out from the bedroom.\n\nLindsay appears in the doorway and sees Darth Vader lying at my feet. \"I think he likes you,\" she says. \"So maybe he won't stab you anymore.\"\n\n\"You're going to be fine. It's going to be fine,\" Lindsay says."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I sit upon the stretcher, anesthesia already coursing through my veins. But I'm ready. I've been practicing a joke just for this moment. \"Next time you see me, they'll be double Ds,\" I say, grabbing my chest. Lindsay cracks up as orderlies wheel me into the operating room. Then everything goes darker than black.\n\nWhen I come to, I am hugging my Opus plush toy. Lindsay leans over the hospital bed and snaps a selfie. She tells me the surgery went well; they shaved down the bone spur jamming into the labrum of my hip. This operation will buy me two years until I need a total hip replacement.\n\n\"In the waiting room, I read four hundred pages of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,\" Lindsay says. \"I have so much to tell you. And Preston snuck in a bottle of bourbon.\"\n\n\"Bourbon,\" I repeat, like an alcoholic infant learning his first word.\n\n\"Later,\" she says. \"Bourbon later.\"\n\n\"Don't leave,\" I say. \"I don't want to be alone.\"\n\nLindsay pulls up old episodes of Law& Order on her laptop. She stays with me in the recovery unit all night and falls asleep in her chair with her face pressed into a stack of blankets at the foot of my bed.\n\nA pharmacist hands me a bottle of OxyContin. Forty pills. Then a bottle of Percocet. Ninety pills. Each with two refills. Take one or two every six hours for hip pain. Sure.\n\nI start taking client calls after popping Percocet. I rub the extended-release coating off the Oxys with a wet paper towel and use a spoon to crush the pills into a fine powder that I swallow with water. In this way, the drug rushes into my bloodstream. I grow accustomed to the warm opiate bath running down my spinal cord."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I'm back at the pharmacy the day my bottles run out. I like Percocet. I like Oxy even more. Too much. When my last refill runs dry, I stop cold turkey. I shake. I sweat. I vomit. Four days into my detox, Richard Levick notices me hunched over my desk, my fists clenched into white balls.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" he asks.\n\n\"Just going through withdrawal,\" I say.\n\nI don't realize it at the time, but I am one of millions of Americans who were overprescribed opioids by doctors. I get lucky. My parachute opens before I fall headlong into opioid addiction. Now called the first wave of the opioid crisis, the overprescribing began in the late 1990s. Guess what Purdue Pharma debuted in 1996? If you guessed OxyContin, you've won a free Purdue Pharma hat! (Legal disclaimer: Purdue Pharma LP does not sanction the views of Mr. Philip Elwood, nor is the company liable for any headwear-related giveaways Mr. Elwood promises in his memoir.)\n\nKarl Marx said religion was the opium of the people. You know what's a lot more like the opium of the people? Opiates. Like every other drug dealer I have ever met, Purdue, and the Sackler family who owned the company, sold a product that people wanted. Turns out the market for legal heroin is huge. But you can't very well takeout an advert in the New York Times to sell heroin, can you? So, Purdue hired McKinsey and Company and a little-known PR firm called Dezenhall Resources. And Dezenhall Resources helped commandeer the credibility of the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. Think tanks are research and advisory nonprofits, and they litter the streets of downtown DC. There is a think tank for most things you can think about or shoot with a tank. Many think tanks are wonderful resources for scholarship and potential legislation. But they can be corrupted. Some take money for'directed research.\" In these relationships, there is often a financial stake in the conclusions of the research-a very polite way of saying that a donor is funding the conclusions. Sometimes the donor is a high-net-worth individual with an agenda. Ora corporation with an agenda. Ora foreign nation with an agenda. Nothing is free. Not even fora nonprofit."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "For Purdue, the price tag was$ 800,000."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Remember my saying that you can't very well takeout an ad in the New York Times to sell heroin? Well, not unless that ad is penned by psychiatrist Sally Satel, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Satel's 2004 New York Times piece was titled, \"Doctors Behind Bars: Treating Pain Is Now Risky Business.\" How is this for shifting the narrative? \"Pain treatment itself is an area ripe for misinterpretation. Many patients who seek doctors' help have already tried nonsteroid anti-inflammatory drugs, conventional opiates like codeine and even surgery, yet they are still in severe pain from cancer, degenerative arthritis, nerve damage or other conditions,\" Satel wrote. \"Large doses of medicines like hydrocodone (Vicodin), oxycodone (OxyContin), morphine or methadone maybe required.\" Satel actually plugged Oxy by name, and quoted a Purdue shill claiming that one in ten Americans in pain could benefit from along-term, high-dose treatment with the drug. All I can say is well done.\n\nThe overprescribing peaked in 2010. When people ran out of pills, they turned to heroin. Then fentanyl. At least 645,000 people died from opioid overdoses from 1999 through 2021. In the end, McKinsey and Company had to pay over$ 640 million for its role in the opioid epidemic. Books, news articles, magazine exposés, and even 60 Minutes have covered the epidemic and the PR machine behind it. I could name more names and shame more people, but I'm a PR guy, so I'd rather look at two press releases: the first one ever written and the one drafted by the Sacklers in 2021."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "On Sunday, October 28,1906, at 2:20 p. m., a West Jersey and Seashore Railroad train derailed and plunged into the Thoroughfare, the creek separating Atlantic City from the mainland, at nearly forty miles per hour. Fifty-three people drowned.\n\nThis is where Ivy Lee enters the story.\n\nIn the wake of the derailment, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, now regarded as a'father of modern public relations,\" drafted the first-ever press release. His client was the Pennsylvania Railroad, which owned the West Jersey and Seashore Railroad. The press praised Lee's release for being so transparent and straightforward. So much so that the New York Times printed it in its entirety.\n\nThings have changed since then.\n\nOn December 9,2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Sackler family jointly issued a press release. One might call it the final release of the Sackler era. For fifty years, the Sackler family donated millions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But now the Sacklers'evils had come to light, and the time had arrived to announce the removal of the Sackler name from the museum's walls. The Met could have issued a scathing press release, calling the Sacklers drug dealers and murderers. Both accurate statements. Instead, the Sacklers and the Metropolitan Museum of Art apparently negotiated the language of the release. Museum president and CEO Daniel Weiss stated, \"The Met has been built by the philanthropy of generations of donors-and the Sacklers have been among our most generous supporters.\" Weiss called the Sacklers'gracious.\" Mention of the opiate deaths, or any reason for the museum's stripping the Sackler name from its walls, was conspicuously absent from the text. Compared to the first press release ever drafted, the Met's release shows just how much my industry has changed. Ivy Lee got it right the first time. Now even museums launder the truth and offer their own spin."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The PR industry is a parasite. It lives off its host, the media. But what happens when the parasite becomes bigger than the host? Now, in 2024, the host is evolving. Salaries in some newsrooms are going up. Private equity is buying up media companies left and right. Foreign nations are investing heavily, too. Lines of ethics are blurring. Social media companies are becoming news agencies. Their rosters of investors include some of the most blood-soaked money in the world.\n\nAnd the PR industry has also begun to publicly invest in new media properties. In 2023, the news media site the Messenger launched, while simultaneously acquiring another news media company called Grid News. Grid News debuted with a great deal of fanfare and some boldface names in reporters, but later it was revealed that one of its principal backers was the UAE-based International Media Investments, which will now be a minority investor in the Messenger. The company's majority investors-they brought in fifty million dollars-were led by the Stagwell Group, a DC-based holding company controlled by former Burson-Marsteller CEO Mark Penn. Stagwell in turn owns PR companies, most notably, SKDK, a DC firm with close ties to the Biden White House. It's one thing when media corporations are beholden to sponsors, but quite another when they are beholden to governments. This adds another layer of conflict. You have to wonder if the Messenger would ever run critical stories of the UAE or of SKDK's extensive client list. Their paymasters call their objectivity into question. And SKDK executives do not divest themselves from the firm when they do government service for the Biden administration, including prepping Joe Biden for national debates. It's akin to an SEC regulator giving out stock tips.\n\nThis is the battlefield where we play our game. Understanding rivalries between media companies, between PR firms, between former clients and potential clients. Not to mention trying to do work for actual clients."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Nearly a year after his arrest, I'm still thinking about Kim Dotcom. I want to avenge my former client. I'm daydreaming of ways to do this when I get a phone call from a DC operative who's a friend. He tells me the United States has banned Americans from gambling in Antigua's online casinos, annihilating$ 3.4 billion of the tiny Caribbean nation's economy. Nearly four thousand people (4 percent of the country's population) have lost their jobs, and Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer is up for reelection.\n\n\"I told the prime minister my friend Phil solves exotic problems,\" the operative says.\n\nI see an opportunity to exact revenge on the entertainment industry and to help a hopelessly outgunned underdog. Richard Levick and I are on the next flight to Antigua."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Start Chapter"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "CHAPTER 7\n\nThe Internet v. the Government\n\nMy pen moves fast, scribbling bullet points onto a yellow legal pad. In the seat next to mine, Richard Levick fidgets with his laptop, anxious to hear my pitch. In ninety minutes, our flight will land on the island of Antigua. Prime Minister Spencer is expecting us-and a solution. I need to present him with one perfect idea.\n\nThe only problem is I have no idea what I'm going to propose. Articles on international trade law are spread out across my tray table. The phrase cross retaliation jumps off one page. If someone takes away something dear, you don't just fightback, you take something bigger from them. In chess, when your opponent moves into take your piece, you don't retreat. You move to take one of their bigger pieces. You go from defense to offense.\n\nIn one of the magazines, I read about how, in 1999, American companies were dumping huge quantities of cotton into the Brazilian market, undercutting Brazil's producers. Brazil fought back by manufacturing U. S.-patented AIDS medicine and giving it away for free in Africa. Suddenly, pharmaceutical giants were complaining to American officials about cotton subsidies, and Brazil had restored its market share. All this was sanctioned by the World Trade Organization.\n\nI think about borrowing from Brazil's playbook for Antigua. My strategy has to be adapted to the island's limited resources. And modernized. I leaf through a fat binder of media coverage. By the time we touchdown I have a plan.\n\nLevick sees my pen stop scratching and gives me the guarded stare of a veteran PR executive about to field a pitch. It's a look I know well. And my cue to start talking.\n\n\"We're going to start a trade war between Antigua and the United States.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Levick huffs like he's caught an elbow to the stomach, but he doesn't kill the idea."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "My knack for starting fires is the reason he hired me. He wants to hear the rest.\n\nIn the current standoff, I tell him, the United States holds the bigger gun. Antigua, by comparison, holds a water gun. We need a third gun. \"We create it,\" I say, \"by blackmailing the American entertainment industry.\"\n\n\"Phil, you know we sometimes do business with those people.\"\n\n\"And I hope you don't have aspirations to work for Microsoft.\"\n\nI go through immigration dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts so the official stamping my passport will believe me when I say I'm on vacation. Levick is still wearing a business suit and gets questioned by immigration officials for fifteen minutes. We walkout of the airport and into a balmy tropical December. We hail a cab, and I calla reporter I know at the Caribbean desk of the Associated Press. If Antigua were about to start a trade war with the United States, I ask him hypothetically, would he be interested in an exclusive? Naturally, I have some terms.\n\nLevick and I face Prime Minister Spencer in a drab conference room. I've pitched presidents, royal families, and dictators inversions of this room allover the world. Spencer is a large man, his hair the shade of white you often see on heads of state.\n\n\"Gentlemen, you are aware of our problem,\" the prime minister says. \"What do you propose?\"\n\n\"I want you to blackmail the United States of America,\" I tell him.\n\nSpencer grimaces and glares skeptically at Levick. This is par for the course. When presenting a wild idea to a client, you want to give the crazy part first. Then you work backward, and everything else seems reasonable by comparison."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Levick leans forward. \"The strategy is more nuanced than that,\" he says. \"Let Phil expand a bit.\"\n\nI explain to Spencer that in a crisis, sometimes the best strategy isn't to solve the problem. Sometimes it's to make the problem much, much bigger. So big that someone else has to fix it. I tell him that his tiny Caribbean nation has the power to threaten the balance of global economic stability. All they need to do is refuse to honor American intellectual property laws. I tell him about Kim Dotcom's Megaupload, which trades pirated American movies, music, and software and how Antigua could build a similar platform. All the IP from Mickey Mouse to Microsoft Office available for sale at a massive discount on Antigua's national website. The chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America will dial President Obama's office two minutes after the news hits the wire, asking why a gaming dispute in the Caribbean is about to cost his industry billions.\n\n\"The U. S. only negotiates with a gun to their head,\" I say. \"I'm giving you that gun.\"\n\n\"And what if America issues a travel advisory on my country?\" Spencer asks.\n\n\"You were making billions of dollars a year from online gambling. Tourism doesn't bring in that kind of money.\"\n\nI've got Spencer's attention now. I can see him considering it. \"What would my office have to do?\"\n\n\"You don't have to do anything,\" I say. \"You just have to threaten to do it. I'll leak it to the press. Once we have ink, it's real.\"\n\n\"And you can do this with the blessing of the World Trade Organization,\" Levick adds. \"They have already ruled several times in your favor and will approve any sanctions plan you put forward. I'm a lawyer. I'll be able to help navigate the legal weeds on this.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "\"I know a wire reporter who will want this story as an exclusive,\" I say."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"If I give him the scoop, he'll run the piece before the U. S. trade representative has a chance to comment.\"\n\nSpencer leans back in his chair, considers apiece of slate-gray wall above my head. Then he stands and holds out his hand.\n\nI call the AP reporter before I hit the hallway.\n\nLevick and I meet Vincent at the St. James's Club. Vincent adjusts his wide-brimmed hat against the glare of a pink sunset, considering a pair of women doing handstands in the oceanfront pool. An island-hopping political consultant who runs elections in the Caribbean, he has been tasked with making sure our plan doesn't explode Spencer's reelection bid. Vincent's Caribbean-chic wardrobe looks Miles Davis cool next to my cargo shorts, which end halfway down my sunburned shins.\n\n\"You're about to set off some big fireworks on a tiny island,\" Vincent says.\n\n\"How else would you threaten the United States?\" I ask.\n\n\"We need to talk somewhere private,\" Vincent says. \"Not here. Lots of ears listening. I know a place.\"\n\nThe next morning, we push out into the Caribbean Sea on a vessel more raft than boat. Aquamarine water sloshes through the boards of the wooden hull. A bottle of rum rattles around the oars. It's strange to see Richard Levick, a storied constitutional lawyer always dressed for the courtroom, in swim trunks. The ocean eases Vincent's paranoia. Out here, the only ears that can hear us are those on the red-billed tropical birds and the skipper, who is chain-smoking joints.\n\n\"Caribbean politics are hyper local,\" Vincent says. \"Anew road is front-page news. If your plan doesn't work, then we're stuck like a fishing boat in a hurricane.\""
}
]
|
[
{
"from": "system",
"value": "Continue the story as the author's writing assistant.\nTags: sci-fi, dystopian, dark humor, societal critique, human nature\nAuthor: Phil Elwood\nTitle: All the Worst Humans\nChapter: 13"
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Nix, in turn, is obsessed with Psy's cloak-and-dagger tactics. Royi says Psy-Group has the capacity to create a large number of highly credible avatars. Enough to man a human resources or staffing agency. Psy's staffing agency creates hundreds of fictional job postings tailored to targets of an intelligence operation. They advertise the job postings over LinkedIn.\n\n\"Creates less suspicion if the target comes to you,\" Royi says, rolling his r 's, a feature of his thick Israeli accent.\n\nWhen the target applies for the job, the intelligence gathering begins. Dangle a high salary and good benefits in front of someone, and they are often willing to discuss their former and current employers. Sometimes, they'll even send proprietary information from their company. Sometimes they accept free travel to a foreign country-ideal fora covert recording of them being'interviewed\" by the avatar. During this interview, areal-world operative extracts more information from the target.\n\nLinkedIn is Psy-Group's first line of offense. The fastest way into the living rooms and lives of their targets. If LinkedIn is Psy's first stop, governments are doing this too. Be careful who you accept on LinkedIn.\n\nNix can't get enough of Royi's tales of espionage.\n\n\"Black Cube rented a hotel room to spy on the chief prosecutor at Romania's National Anticorruption Directorate,\" Royi says, eager to bad-mouth a rival outfit. \"Armed agents caught them red-handed. Everyone went to jail. Idiots! We'd never get caught doing that.\"\n\nRoyi doesn't say Psy-Group wouldn't try to hack a government, just that it wouldn't get caught.\n\nGood enough for Nix. Psy-Group and Cambridge Analytica sign a memorandum of understanding and pitch Project Madison to the U. S. State Department. They want the United States to sponsor a larger version of Madison to dig into anti-American propaganda sponsored by China, Iran, and Russia."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Over the next months, I will introduce Psy-Group to my entire network, conducting well over one hundred introductory meetings with PR, lobbying, law, and security firms. I handout Psy's brochure to every political consultant with an expense account. Almost every segment of the DC influence infrastructure meets with Psy-Group.\n\nRoyi wants to meet in the underground dining room hidden behind a false wall at PJ Clarke's in DC. He orders a steak and fills me in on his latest intelligence op, \"Project Butterfly.\" Psy has been gathering kompromat on university activists backing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and leaking it to social media through avatars. Objective: defame, fracture, plant seeds of conflict.\n\n\"Anyone can gather intelligence,\" Royi tells me, neatly slicing chunks of beef. \"We want to influence the way people think. Place thoughts we want them to have in their minds.\"\n\n\"Sounds like my job.\"\n\n\"We have fewer limitations.\"\n\nRoyi and I have grown close. Not quite friends. Rather, we have mutual respect based on each one's fear of the other. I fear Royi's ability to manipulate reality in the shadows; Royi fears my ability to make anything public to the world at a moment's notice. We talk almost everyday over WhatsApp. Though he's a spy, he's one of the most disarming clients I've ever had.\n\nWhen the bill comes, Royi hands me a silver laptop. \"Keep this locked in a drawer and running at all times in your office,\" he says.\n\nI don't ask questions. Royi operates on a need-to-know basis, telling me just enough information to let me do my job.\n\nI head to the DC WeWork office of Chester Creek Consulting, the boutique PR firm I founded eight months ago. Chester Creek Consulting has two clients on retainer: a polling firm and Psy-Group. I plugin the laptop, and it whirs to life. I lock it in the bottom drawer of my desk and try to forget it exists."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "A few days after Royi gives me the laptop, I throw Psy-Group a networking party at Old Ebbitt Grill, a classic DC haunt just steps from the White House, to announce the opening of its new office-which is really just my WeWork."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Friends from the Middle East Institute sip cocktails with international spies and reporters from BuzzFeed and the Hill. Politico's newsletter Influence writes up the party in its Spotted section and poof, Psy-Group has officially arrived in Washington.\n\nThen things take a turn.\n\nRoyi has begun to move Psy-Group's money through my bank account. \"It's easier for clients to pay an American account. Just generate an invoice from Chester Creek for one hundred fifty thousand,\" he explains, and he WhatsApps me a routing number fora bank in Cyprus, where Psy-Group is apparently headquartered-at least on paper.\n\n\"Why are you based in Cyprus?\" I ask.\n\n\"We have clients in the Gulf States,\" he says. \"They really don't like wiring money to Israel.\"\n\nAnother request comes in short order. This time, tens of thousands bound for an account in the Seychelles. I'm told to generate an invoice fora consulting company. When the money appears in my account, I feel like I'm back in Vegas, handling Mutassim Gaddafi's shrink-wrapped cash. Once again, I'm dealing with very serious people capable of doing very serious things, so I don't ask questions.\n\nI make so many trips to the bank that I become chummy with my banker Greg, a living incarnation of a Ken doll. You can see his delts bulging under the shoulder pads of his suit. \"You are by far my most interesting client,\" Greg comments, but he seems otherwise incurious about the fortunes I'm moving to tax havens around the world.\n\nOne day, I come in wearing a stained button-down and cargo shorts. Seventy-five thousand dollars has been freshly deposited into my account. \"I need to send a wire to the West Bank,\" I tell Greg."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Can we do that?\"\n\n\"Check for the West Bank in your system. If it's there, it must be okay.\"\n\n\"That sounds right,\" Greg says, flashing a gigawatt smile. \"I'm not seeing a West Bank, but Palestine is an option.\"\n\n\"That'll work.\"\n\n\"All set,\" Greg says. \"Seventy-five thousand dollars sent to Palestine. Anything else I can help you with?\"\n\n\"You need to be careful,\" Lindsay warns when I come home.\n\nIn July 2017, Royi pops up in DC without warning. Lately, he's just started to appear, like a jump scare in a horror flick. Royi wants to meetup at an Italian restaurant on K Street. As always, I'm twenty minutes early. Royi is already waiting.\n\n\"Do you have your laptop with you?\"\n\n\"Right here.\"\n\n\"Get it out.\"\n\nRoyi tells me to generate three hundred thousand dollars in invoices to an entity with an almost comically shell company– sounding name. I'm to transfer the funds to an account number that he will WhatsApp tome after the invoices clear. When he gets up from the table to use the restroom, I text my accountant.\n\n\"Danger, Will Robinson,\" she replies. \"Don't do this.\"\n\nI inform Royi that I can't move his three hundred large. It would tip the funds that Psy-Group has run through my account to over a million dollars, a threshold that would alert regulators.\n\n\"Smart,\" Royi says. \"We'll find another way.\"\n\nLater that month, I get an email from Royi. I open the attached PDF, titled'Project Rome.\" The document explains that if Psy-Group had been engaged by the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election, this is how the firm would have done it. It would have covered its tracks better; and it wouldn't have gotten caught."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I remember that in December 2016, shortly after Trump won the election, Royi asked me to setup meetings with both the Republican and Democratic National Committees to pitch them on swaying elections. Lindsay vetoed the idea, citing, among other things, its likely illegality, and I declined.\n\nI archive the Project Rome email, but I don't setup any meetings.\n\nA week later, I get a WhatsApp message from one of Royi's minions. He has many of them. \"A package is going to arrive for you,\" he says. \"Bring it to Nine-two-three Sixteenth Street. Give it to a man named Joel Zamel.\"\n\nLike clockwork, my phone bings. My apartment building's front desk has a FedEx package for me. Big enough to contain a hard drive. I smoke a joint on my roof before hitting the streets of DC. I could do this walk blindfolded, under the influence or sober. I know the pace I need to keep to hit each traffic signal as it changes to'Walk.\" DC is like a giant park lined by office buildings. The architecture is a mix of beautifully constructed neoclassical and modern works of stone and concrete. Other buildings, constructed during grimmer architectural eras, are ugly eyesores that will one day be replaced in the District's constant reconstruction. I pass Archibald's, a strip club where Hunter Biden was once a frequent guest.\n\nOn Sixteenth Street, I enter the St. Regis hotel, the effects of the joint still working. It dawns on me that I don't know what Zamel looks like. I do a Google Image search for'Joel Zamel\" on my cell. Nothing. Guy is a ghost. I fidget with my phone, looking up the history of the St. Regis. Just as I thought. In 2015, the St. Regis hotel was sold to Al Rayyan Tourism Investment Company, based in Qatar, for an undisclosed amount of money."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I'm quite stoned. Ina hotel owned by interests aligned with my former client Qatar. Waiting on an Israeli spook. Holding a package I haven't opened.\n\nI jump when I hear someone say my name. Behind me stands a balding middle-aged man with a dark beard. I handover the package. He nods and disappears into a bank of elevators.\n\nIna library on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, I look over my shoulder. Behind me, an old man in a bowling shirt reads a large-print Jeffrey Archer novel called Be Careful What You Wish For. On a weekday at noon, we are the only patrons. Good.\n\nThe old Dell computer in front of me chugs to life. I create the Gmail address 733X@ gmail. com and WhatsApp it to a Psy-Group agent. A document pings through. I print it out. The cover sheet is written in Hebrew. Or Arabic. I try not to look too closely before sealing the document in a manila envelope. The less I know, the better.\n\nThis isn't my first time doing this. Or even my fourth. Royi and I have a system. He WhatsApps a cryptic note, and I leave DC. I drive ninety minutes out to a little town in Maryland with a farmers\" market and sandwich shops that brine their own pickles. In the public library, I fire up one of their'white\" (but rather dirty) computers to generate a burner email address. I use my old phone numbers, changing one digit. I message Psy-Group the email address. They send a document. I print it out. Or I save the file to a flash drive fresh out of the packaging. One use only. Then I close the email, clear the cache, delete the history. I'm instructed not to write down the log-in credentials for these email accounts. Forget they happened. This works. Under penalty of perjury, I could not tell you a single one of those email addresses or passwords. Then I deliver the package to wherever Royi needs it to go."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Today, as I head for the library's exit with the most recent printout in an envelope, my phone buzzes with a WhatsApp message."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "An address in Foggy Bottom. I drive east, doing the speed limit. As I cross the bridge over the Chesapeake Bay, the landscape opens into giant, flat prairies of blue water. A waddle of waterfowl beat their wings, flying south toward the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge.\n\nDriving, I think about the old man at the library reading his novel. My father loves Jeffrey Archer and gave me his books to read when I was a teenager. Archer chronicles the follies of media barons and he once hosted Peter Brown– style parties at his penthouse, giving journalists instructions on how to find the bathroom: \"Go past the Picasso, left at the Matisse.\" Archer has had a life worthy of his own pen. His father was a bigamist conman who hoodwinked New York City's upper crust. In his youth, Archer was a world-class runner, winning the highest honors at Oxford. Later on, he served as a member of Parliament and as a confidant to then prime minister Margaret Thatcher. After leaving government service, he fell on hard times and published his first bestseller just after he was declared bankrupt. When one international bestseller followed another, he became quite wealthy and involved himself with a charitable organization investigated by authorities. In the witness box, Archer denied an allegation that turned out to be true. He has lived a life of highs and lows. A life, like Peter Brown's, that I lionized in my youth. Then I remember that the court sentenced Archer to four years in prison for perjury. And that I'm thirty-nine.\n\nAn hour later, I pull up to an office building made of steel. I've never been here, which is unusual. When you've been in DC as long as I have, you've been in every building. Envelope in hand, I'm buzzed through a locked door. Then a second door. A fellow with a gun on his hip approaches."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Are you Phil?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then that's for me.\"\n\nHe takes the envelope. I head back out into the street and try to put the errand out of my mind.\n\nLindsay is still in her pajamas when the FBI calls. It's February 8. Six thirty in the morning. As I listen to the agent on the other end of the line, I look at my wife. I've just brought her coffee, as I do every morning. She likes it with a splash of cream. Her face is focused, her fingers shooting off the morning's emails. This is the last image I'll have of her before I have to tell her that our lives are about to change forever. I savor it fora moment before I speak.\n\n\"Lindsay, the FBI is downstairs,\" I say. \"They will be up in one hour. You need to leave.\"\n\nLindsay looks at meas if I'm joking. It's the kind of joke I would tell. But it's real.\n\nKnock.\n\nKnock.\n\nI'm standing in my kitchen, staring at the door. I know what's on the other side of it.\n\nKnock.\n\nKnock.\n\nKnock.\n\nI open up to find a man and a woman wearing pistols on their hips. The woman steps forward.\n\n\"Mr. Elwood, I'm Agent Logan from the FBI,\" she says. \"Is now a good time?\"\n\nIn February, night falls early. I'm sitting in the dark when Lindsay comes home. She switches on a lamp, casting our bedroom in dim orange, and sits cross legged on our bed. Tries to take a breath but comes up short. She concentrates hard on breathing, trying to get enough air into her lungs."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "\"It's been happening all day,\" she tells me."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Every time you messaged, I had to run to the bathroom to try to breathe. It's not like I could tell my boss about the situation.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" I say. Seems like a good place to start.\n\n\"Phil, we always tell each other everything,\" Lindsay says. I watch her throat muscles constrict. \"Tell me everything.\"\n\nThe FBI agents divulged nothing tome. They weren't thereto provide information; they were thereto extract it. I had a pretty good idea which client the FBI was interested in. Agent Logan did most of the talking. She asked ninety minutes of questions.\n\nWho owns the Psy-Group?\n\nRoyi Burstien.\n\nWhere was the Psy-Group incorporated?\n\nCyprus, for geopolitical reasons, as far as I knew at the time.\n\n\"Do you know any of that for certain?\" Lindsay interjects.\n\n\"They acted like I was giving a lot of wrong answers. I only know what Royi tells me. He speaks in puffs of smoke.\"\n\n\"Right, because you work with...\"\n\n\"Spooks who don't exactly read me in. The FBI were really interested in something called Project Rome. I said I had no clue. And they asked about someone named Joel Zamel. I don't know a Joel Zamel.\"\n\n\"No, no, no,\" Lindsay says. \"You do. His name was on a package in our house. That you delivered...\"\n\n\"To the St. Regis,\" I say, suddenly recalling the shadowy figure disappearing into the elevator bank. A firecracker of anxiety crackles in my stomach.\n\n\"Holy shit,\" Lindsay says. \"You told the FBI you didn't know him?\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"I told them what I remembered.\"\n\nFora split second, Lindsay laughs, taking her first full breath of air. \"Yeah, because that's something normal people forget, Phil.\"\n\n\"They asked for the last two and a half years of my emails. Phone records. Bank records. Text messages. WhatsApp messages.\"\n\n\"Oh God, the bank records.\"\n\n\"That's when I said I needed to talk to a lawyer.\"\n\n\"That's how you should have opened the meeting.\"\n\n\"Right,\" I say, because she is right, a fact that has become stunningly obvious.\n\n\"You need to calla lawyer now.\"\n\nI'm dialing before Lindsay finishes her sentence. David Saltzman picks upon the first ring. I've been friends with Saltzman for ten years. He received my first-ever subpoena, when I worked fora very misunderstood organization. I explain the current situation. He gives me some advice as a friend.\n\n\"You need more than friendly advice right now,\" Lindsay says as soon as I hangup.\n\nSixty seconds later my phone rings.\n\n\"You don't need a friend,\" Saltzman says. \"You need a lawyer.\"\n\nIndeed I do.\n\nThe prosecutor assigned to my case is Zainab N. Ahmad, a counterterrorism specialist. I read a New Yorker profile on her with the subhead'Zainab Ahmad Has Prosecuted Thirteen International Terrorist Suspects for the American Government. She Hasn't Lost Yet.\" According to the piece, Ahmad has spent more hours questioning al-Qaeda than any other American prosecutor.\n\n\"Do they think you're a terrorist?\" Lindsay asks.\n\n\"This is not good,\" I say, visions of black bags and Guantanamo Bay dancing in my head."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"No, this can't be right,\" Lindsay says, and does a deep dive into Google. \"Hold on,\" she says. \"She's one of Robert Mueller's new senior prosecutors.\"\n\nFora very brief moment, we are relieved. I've been caught up in the Mueller investigation. At least I'm not the target of a counterterrorism unit.\n\nThen reality hits. Lindsay is working as the chief spokesperson fora leading university. She is terrified that her colleagues or friends from the Clinton world think tank she has just left will discover any connection with Mueller. Her credibility could be in peril by association.\n\n\"You need to fix this,\" Lindsay says."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Start Chapter"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "CHAPTER 10\n\nTarget or Source\n\nAgent Logan escorts me through the halls of WeWork. I flashback to being frog-marched into the back of a police van and handcuffed to the floor at twenty-one years old. Today, I suspect I am in much, much more trouble. A drunken indiscretion is easier to forgive than being a bagman fora cadre of foreign spies caught up in the Mueller investigation.\n\nWe reach my office, a single desk behind a glass door. I keep nothing at this desk. No photos of Lindsay or Darth Vader. No personal effects of any kind. I open the desk drawer and show the FBI agent the silver laptop, still whirring away. Agent Logan unplugs it and places it in an evidence bag. She hands me a receipt as if I've just bought a cup of coffee, rather than handed over contraband likely brimming with evidence useful to the FBI. This is the last time I'll ever set foot in this office.\n\n\"Come on,\" Logan says, \"I'll drive you home.\"\n\n\"Do I get in the front seat or the back?\"\n\n\"Upfront. You're not under arrest, and this is not an Uber.\"\n\n\"At least you got to ride upfront,\" Lindsay offers when she arrives home from work. She looks exhausted. Hasn't been sleeping through the night. \"Did Agent Logan ask why you made them wait an hour the morning they showed up?\"\n\n\"She was kind enough not to bring it up,\" I say. \"But we're not exactly chummy. Today we had a three-hour meeting previewing my evidence at Saltzman's office. She wasn't happy when I mentioned the Psy-Group gave me a laptop.\"\n\nLindsay looks shocked. \"You hadn't told her this before?\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "\"Two-plus years of Royi's weird shit."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I'm going to forget some details,\" I say.\n\nLindsay has a point. When I recalled the laptop, Agent Logan had the same look on her face as Lindsay does now. Her demeanor changed, as if she believed I had been hiding something-the last thing I want her or Lindsay to suspect.\n\n\"I am giving them everything,\" I say. \"We spent all day dissecting every email, WhatsApp, and bank transfer.\"\n\n\"Sometimes the story you tell isn't quite the whole story,\" Lindsay says. \"This time, make sure it is.\"\n\nI feel like my testimony in front of Lindsay is a dry run for Mueller's people. I've been subpoenaed by the Office of Special Counsel and will soon have to explain myself in a formal interview. But it's more important than anything I will tell the government. I can stomach jail, maybe. I can't stomach losing Lindsay.\n\nA week later, my lawyer, David Saltzman, and I arrive at a concrete-colored Department of Justice office at 395 E Street Southwest. We surrender our phones at security and are ushered into a small interview room by Zainab N. Ahmad herself. Ahmad has dark hair cropped at her shoulders and brown eyes that cut right through you.\n\nWhile prepping for this interview, Saltzman told me, \"Phil, you make a much better witness than a target.\" I'm only too eager to heed his advice and have supplied the FBI with the last two and a half years of my emails, phone records, and text messages. It's the same strategy I've used to keep my name out of the news. Whenever a reporter threatens to include me in a story, I become a source, offering new information in exchange for anonymity. Prove your worth, and you stay invisible. Today, I'm doing it to stay out of federal prison."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "Ahmad questions me for four hours about Psy-Group."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The trip to Israel. The hundreds of thousands of dollars moved through my account to Cyprus. She has questions about the laptop, which likely generated avatars from a server protected by a virtual private network.\n\n\"Did Royi Burstien ever tell you about pitching Trump's camp an election influence campaign called Project Rome?\" Ahmad asks.\n\nI have the'If We Did It\" email about Project Rome, a PDF marketing brochure that was essentially Psy-Group's explaining how it could have swung the election for Trump if he had hired them. But a meeting with the Trump Organization is news tome, and I fear it will be newsworthy to reporters. Saltzman lawyers me through the interrogation, ensuring I don't perjure myself. Ahmad wants to know if I'm still working with Psy-Group. I answer truthfully, telling her that I terminated our agreement the day the FBI knocked on my door.\n\nI walkout of the Department of Justice's makeshift offices a freeman, thanks to Saltzman's lawyering. But the ramifications of being a Mueller witness extend far beyond the justice system. I've introduced Psy-Group to my entire DC network, every reporter and government contact I spent a lifetime cultivating. Now I'm clientless, and gossip about my connection to the Mueller investigation has hit my business prospects. I've become radioactive in Washington. No new business is coming into Chester Creek until this blows over. And that's not happening anytime soon. Mueller's investigation is a black cloud of suspicion swirling over DC, darkening every aspect of my life.\n\n\"I don't have anyone to talk to about this,\" Lindsay vents that night while furiously constructing a cat tree for Darth Vader in our living room. \"I haven't told any of my friends. I haven't even told my parents. I'm texting cat GIFs to the Ladies' Lounge like nothing is wrong.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "The'Ladies'Lounge\" is a group chat for Lindsay's excessively high-performing female friends, all liberal communications professionals with ties to DC. They discuss everything. New gadgets, locations for happy hour, and the ups and downs of their lives. Nothing is spared. Except this.\n\n\"It's not like I can text,\"Guess what? My husband might have helped spies overthrow democracy, \"\" Lindsay says, stacking the cat tree's parts into neat piles. \"They won't find it charming. People are scared of what's happening to our government, Phil. And angry. I'm not like you. I can't bottle up my secrets and drink them down at Commissary.\"\n\n\"Hey.\"\n\n\"Sorry. That wasn't nice,\" she says, sitting on the floor. \"I'm just-ugh, why are these fucking instructions written in pictures?\"\n\n\"Did the thing where you can't catch your breath happen at work again today?\" I ask.\n\n\"Phil, it happens everyday,\" Lindsay says. \"When I can breathe normally, I'll let you know.\"\n\nI try to stick artificial leaves onto the cat tree's plastic trunk. The Xanax I've been taking blurs my coordination, and I fumble, snapping one of the branches.\n\n\"Just let me do it,\" Lindsay says. She stares up at me from among the parts of the half-constructed cat tree, giving me a suspicious look I've come to know too well. \"Did you know anything about the Psy-Group meeting with the Trump campaign?\" she asks, built-up anxieties tumbling out into the open.\n\n\"I swear to you I didn't.\"\n\nIt's the truth. But that doesn't make things any easier on Lindsay. Every target of the Mueller investigation gets washed out in the press a few months later. If my name appears in print, it will blowtorch the smoldering remains of my career."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Everything will be fine,\" I tell her.\n\nBut I have no idea how any of this can, or ever will, be fine. I'm profoundly sad that my risky behavior has made Lindsay feel she's in jeopardy. FBI agents knocking on the door before breakfast is not a normal marital hiccup.\n\nLindsay tries to think of ways to solve or at least control the situation while I lie on the couch, paralyzed by anxiety. I'm waiting fora story with my name in it to drop on the front page of the Washington Post. A headline runs through my mind: \"Former Gaddafi Flak Helps Israeli Intelligence Firm Manipulate American Democracy.\" \"Phil Elwood\" will no longer be a dead jazz reviewer from San Francisco. I'll be one Google search away from my worst mistake and forever unemployable. In my line of work, anonymity is priceless. PR people operate in the shadows by design. I'm paid to be the man behind the curtain, not the sideshow on the stage. If that happens, I'll become a problem not even Lindsay can solve.\n\nMueller's subpoena strongly suggests that I tell no one about this investigation. But anonymity is earned. Not given. My connection to Psy-Group is a bomb that will go off at some point. If I provide valuable intel to reporters, I could keep my name out of the press and control, to some extent, whether the ensuing explosion kills me or someone else.\n\nThe sign on the door of Morton's reads, \"Proper Attire Required.\" I haven't shaved, showered, or changed my cargo pants in a week. The maître d' is kind enough to give me a table on the enclosed patio, the only place in DC where you can smoke with your steak. I start filling the ashtray. In the smoking section, the TVs are tuned to Fox News for the lobbyists chewing on cigars; inside the restaurant, MSNBC plays for the think tank set. Both networks have tunnel vision: Mueller, Mueller, Mueller."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "I'm a nervous wreck. Lindsay and I argued last night, and I got up at 4 a. m. I've been pacing a circuit between my roof, the marijuana dispensary, and my bed. I suck up half a pack of Camels before Byron Tau arrives. Tau, a reporter, covers the Hill from across the street at the Wall Street Journal.\n\n\"This one is really bad,\" I say.\n\n\"Figured. Haven't heard from you lately.\"\n\nI've given Tau lots of leads over the years. He knows I don't waste reporters'time. We met when he worked as Ben Smith's assistant. It was Tau who ghost-wrote the'World Cup vs. Gym Class?\" piece under Smith's byline.\n\n\"Everything I'm about to tell you is off the record,\" I tell Tau and make sure he affirmatively agrees.\n\n\"Off the record\" is a two-way contract. On September 16,2021, Politico's newsletter West Wing Playbook had the lede'Before Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin became one of the most reliable defenders of the Biden administration, she was one of the Obama administration's most reactionary critics.\" The piece described how when Politico reached out to Rubin and her employer, the Washington Post, for comment on this headline, Rubin fired off one of those emails you should save to Drafts. The subject line: \"OFF THE RECORD.\" Politico stated: \"Since we never agreed to conduct such an off-the-record conversation, we are publishing[Rubin's email] below in full.\" I won't restate what you are free to google yourself, but it was not the columnist's finest hour. If a reporter doesn't affirmatively agree that a conversation is off the record, it isn't.\n\nAfter Tau orders the truffle fries, I push my phone across the table and let him read my subpoena from the Special Counsel's Office."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Holy shit,\" he says.\n\nI fill him in on the last two years of spy games. He licks his reportorial chops when Mueller enters the story. The special counsel's investigation is the biggest news story in Washington. Tau's editors are breathing down his neck for any incremental development in the Mueller investigation, and frankly, the Journal is getting beaten everyday by its crosstown rivals at the Washington Post and the New York Times. Tau is under heavy pressure, and the opportunity to reveal more about the strange path Mueller is treading is tantalizing.\n\n\"I've been spending eighteen hours a day standing in the hall outside Hill meetings in the hope of getting some House Intelligence Committee member alone for five minutes to try to get them to give me a tidbit of information,\" Tau says. \"I want to be ahead of this story.\"\n\nMy next meeting with Tau is at Joe's Stone Crab. I'm glad to have a meal on the Journal, given that I haven't worked in two months. Tau has been doing his homework. He knows who owns the Psy-Group: Joel Zamel, the man to whom I handed a package at the St. Regis. Tau has spoken to Zamel's lawyer. He is in reporter mode, ready to grill me for hours. He wants to harvest primary source documents from my laptop.\n\n\"If we do this,\" I say, \"I've got to remain anonymous.\"\n\n\"I figured as much,\" Tau says.\n\n\"My reasoning here is clear,\" I say. \"I'm informing on former Israeli spies. I fear many things from them, including reprisals. Keeping my name secret is paramount to my safety.\"\n\n\"Fair.\"\n\nTo structure an anonymity deal, you need a monopoly on the information a journalist wants. Check. Or you can position yourself as the second source confirming information they already have but cannot print without confirmation. I'll also be helpful to Tau in this regard, as Psy's spooks won't be going on the record. And as shocking as this is, I am a reliable source. I have never given information to a reporter that I knew was false. Providing good information to Tau for years has earned me points with his editor, who also has to sign off on my anonymity."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Next"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Journalism would die without anonymous sources. They take risks to leak stories that check the power of the rich and powerful. But the sword has two edges. Anonymous sourcing is used by the powerful to advance their agendas. It is incumbent on the news organization, the reporter, the editors, and their corporate counsel to determine the veracity of the information and the informant's motives. The majority of this responsibility falls on the reporter. While gathering information, they must understand how it fits into a broader agenda, should one exist. It almost always does.\n\nTau is a seasoned reporter who understands this game. I once pitched him some Psy-Group bullshit about Ukraine that he realized pretty fast was fake news. (It was literal fake news: Psy-Group was trying to manufacture something, and the version of the story that ultimately ran was a fake news broadcast.) Reporters don't just print whatever I want them to, unfortunately. Tau and I both understand the unspoken agreement: I have to dish everything, and misleading him will only cause my anonymity to evaporate.\n\n\"Okay,\" he says, taking a pen and notebook from his messenger bag. \"Let's begin. I hope you brought your laptop.\"\n\nTau can't be the only reporter chasing after the Psy– Mueller connection. I need to cover my bases. I drop a line to a reporter from Bloomberg and start feeding him intel off the record. Every time I pitch this story, I'm gambling. Going all in. Every hand. It is a binary equation: I will either win or lose. And the result will be very, very public. There's no hiding a mistake on the front page of a newspaper.\n\nPR operatives gamble every time we pitch a story. Sometimes we lose. Just like any good gambler, we try to minimize our losses. To do that, we must know what can go wrong. The editor could blow the headline. The paper could break the embargo date. It could misquote your client. It could accidentally quote you. An off-the-record statement could bleed into the story. Your adversary might have the goods on your client. A regulator or government might step in and skew the story. Other news might eclipse your story. The reporter you are working with might get scooped. Your source could get cold feet. And finally, it might turnout that your client has been lying to you the whole time."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "You might think these things don't happen."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "They do. All of them have happened tome. We don't have room in this book for all the stories that have gone sideways in my career. Trust me, there area lot.\n\nGood PR operatives learn how to minimize the chance of damage. Fora story to go my way, I need two things: time and information. In this instance, time is against me. I don't know which other reporters are on this story. They might be calling me soon. And I don't know if the Office of Special Counsel is going to leak my connection to the Psy-Group to the media. So I'll have to rely on information. I know which items resonate with which publications. Bloomberg eyes the money angle, so I reference the large transfers made through my bank account as being of great interest to the authorities.\n\nThe articles run in quick succession. Tau and his colleagues at the Journal publish in April, exposing Mueller's probe into foreign influence in Washington. The Bloomberg piece hits in May, naming the Psy-Group for the first time. My money angle works: \"Mueller Asked About Money Flows to Israeli Social-Media Firm, Source Says,\" the headline reports. The Wall Street Journal follows up the next day with apiece on Psy-Group's partnership with Cambridge Analytica. I appear in the articles not as Phil Elwood, but as a person familiar with the work of Psy-Group.\n\nMy relief is short-lived. In May 2018, I get the call I've been dreading. It's from an investigative journalist with the New York Times. If there is one publication I'm afraid of in my situation, it's the Times. They are scooping everyone on Mueller.\n\n\"I'm writing a story on the connection between Psy-Group and Trump,\" the reporter says. \"You're in it.\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Keep going"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Slowdown,\" I say. \"Can we meet?\"\n\nThe reporter agrees to have a drink with meat Commissary. Right now, I'm the target. I need to turn myself into the source. \"If my name is in your piece, my career is fucked,\" I say. I explain that I am a minor player in this story. I would be nothing more than collateral damage. And that if the Times names me, I will not be a source, and the paper's story may have factual errors. It's a Faustian deal with a twist. I am the devil this reporter knows.\n\n\"Okay,\" the reporter says. \"Tell me everything you know.\"\n\nI cough it all up. I tell the reporter how the Psy-Group works and the names of the major players. I handover client lists. I let the Times reporter look through my laptop and forward documents from my email account. It's the most access I've ever granted a journalist, but I'm the most desperate I've ever been.\n\nThis is the wrong way to leak documents. I should have taken a page from Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for one of the biggest leaks in U. S. government history. Sure, he got charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, but in the end he won a medal for it.\n\nAs a researcher with the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg had access to classified documents at the Pentagon. It was 1971. America was utterly disaffected by the conflict in Vietnam. The government was pushing the message that things were going just fine in Southeast Asia. Ellsberg knew the Pentagon's internal documents told another story. At a copy machine, he duplicated what he could. He then covertly met with members of Congress.\n\nEllsberg's strategy here was quite cunning: under the Speech and Debate Clause of the U. S. Constitution, no member of Congress can be prosecuted for what they say on the floor. That's right: a member of Congress could introduce the leaked information into the Congressional Record, making the whole thing public, and not face charges. This eventually happened, but congresspeople have never been known for having much of a spine. They need cover before acting."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Proceed"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "Here comes the need for the Fourth Estate. Whistleblowers often use the press to give members of Congress cover-or'air support,\" as some practitioners call it. Ellsberg went to the New York Times. This was before email and Snapchat, so he leaked the Pentagon Papers the way it should be done today. If you are going to leak a document, do it in person. Print the thing off and physically hand it to a reporter. So many people leak documents via email. Email is forever. Once you hit Send, you have created what will someday be a public document.\n\nOn June 13,1971, the New York Times printed its first story on the leak. The government sued the paper. For fifteen days, the courts sorted out how the Constitution and the needs of the government should be balanced. During that time, Ellsberg went to the Washington Post while eluding an FBI manhunt. Two days prior to the Supreme Court's decision, Ellsberg outed himself as the source. The Court ruled in favor of the New York Times. Ellsberg was arrested and charged, but all charges against him were dismissed in May 1973.\n\nThat is how you leak a document. Stop emailing. Don't create a digital footprint. Go old-school, and do it in person. Otherwise, you will get caught. I'm being careless, using email, because my back is against the wall and I've already been caught by the FBI.\n\nWhile I bite my nails waiting for the New York Times to publish, some more of my old sins come out of the past and into the press. The Times, Great Britain's oldest national daily newspaper, publishes an exclusive that reads, \"Qatar Sabotaged 2022 World Cup Rivals with'Black Ops': Whistleblower Reveals Ex-CIA Agents and PR Firm Were Hired in Dirty Tricks Campaign that Broke FIFA Rules.\" Somehow, the press is blaming all my activities relating to the Qatar bid on a retired CIA agent."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"I dodged a bullet,\" I tell Lindsay.\n\n\"You got lucky. Again,\" she says. \"But when will this end?\"\n\nI have to stop this news cycle. Get the definitive piece written on the Psy-Group into along-form publication.\n\nAdam Entous agrees to meet meat Commissary. He's one of the best investigative journalists in the country and has the perfect background to do the definitive ten-thousand-word, no-one-will-ever-ask-questions-again treatise on Psy-Group in the New Yorker.\n\nI drink mega mimosas while Entous sips water. I let him do keyword searches through my old emails to access Psy-Group documents. The Psy files have comically lax security; guessing the passwords is easy once you know the code names. When Entous types in'Mockingjay,\" he discovers that Psy-Group tried to influence a local hospital board election in Tulare, in California's San Joaquin Valley.\n\n\"They were so desperate to break into the American market that they were willing to rig a hospital board election,\" Entous says.\n\n\"They were willing to do a lot of things.\"\n\n\"They were basically bottom feeders,\" Entous says. \"I'm picturing these ex-Mossad agents running around central California. This is a dark comedy.\"\n\nOver the next few months, Entous and I exchange intel at Commissary. He travels to Israel to meet Royi Burstien. \"He wanted to meet in a crowded place,\" says Entous when we debrief the trip. \"He seemed quite nervous.\"\n\n\"Sounds like Royi,\" I say.\n\nEntous is fascinated by Royi's career arc. \"It starts with good intentions: counterterrorism and security,\" he muses. \"If Psy had stopped after Project Madison, they'd be heroes who infiltrated terrorist cells. But once they realize there's a broader market, it morphs, takes on a life of its own, because of the influence of money. And eventually that temptation lures you to do things that you're not that comfortable with, you know?\""
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Yes, I know,\" I say, remembering my first days in PR, when I brought awareness to the war in Iraq by getting more people to see an antiwar documentary.\n\n\"It's not so different from your occupation.\"\n\n\"Not at all.\"\n\n\"In Psy's other operations, like the hospital board election, there's no reason for them to intervene except for money,\" Entous continues. \"But sometimes you have to make these choices. We all make choices to support our families. We make compromises to get what we want. When I look at it from a human angle, I don't think they are such terrible people. Right?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" I say.\n\nBut this digs at a question in my head: Who is worse? The people I represent, doing things I know to be wrong? Or the person representing them? As a former student of ethics in undergraduate courses, I am not sure where Kant would comedown on my question. But I know who the worst human is.\n\nThe New York Times story runs on October 8,2018. The headline reads, \"Rick Gates Sought Online Manipulation Plans from Israeli Intelligence Firm for Trump Campaign.\" I read all 1,800 words while holding my breath. My name doesn't appear. I learn that Psy-Group is now in liquidation.\n\n\"I feel like I can breathe,\" I say.\n\n\"I wouldn't go that far,\" Lindsay says. \"But it's a win. We'll take it. By the way, I transferred you money for this month.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\n\"You'll pay it back,\" she says. \"You'll figure something out soon.\"\n\nLindsay has been giving mean allowance. Keeping your name out of the press doesn't put food on the table. She's had to start cutting costs to account for our being a single-income household. Every time Lindsay's money hits my account, I feel like a deadbeat. I'm meant to be a partner, not a dependent. My father, a minister, always said we make our own heavens and hells hereon earth. My world is looking more and more like a hellish Hieronymus Bosch painting everyday. This time, it's one I painted with my own hand."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "\"Let's get out of DC this weekend,\" Lindsay suggests."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"It's been a lot. Let's go hideout.\"\n\n\"Sounds nice.\"\n\n\"But you've got to shower before we get in the car,\" she says.\n\nWe head out to the Eastern Shore. During the drive, as we pass over the Chesapeake Bay, my mind manufactures the idea that Lindsay is going to leave me. I'm damaged. APR guy who can't work in PR. By the time we pull up to our little house, I've convinced myself I've already lost her. When I think about what life will look like after she's gone, I see nothing but black, empty space. How do I begin to ask for forgiveness for being so reckless? So selfish?\n\nI've spent my whole life creating narratives. In PR, a good narrative has a beginning, middle, and end. Truly effective narratives become invasive thoughts we plant in the public's mind. The machinery of PR twists truth to whichever way we want the wind to blow. It's the same game Royi Burstien played: influence how people think by putting your ideas into their heads. Suicidal ideation works the same way. My disordered mind constructs a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is the idea that I need to end my own life. The middle is planning how to do it. The end is the execution. And like the best narratives I've created in PR, this idea is invasive. It changes the way I think. And it won't leave me alone.\n\nWe need lightbulbs for the back porch. I drive to a little hardware store full of items you use to build a life. A young couple inquires about the price of new grill for their back patio. They are giddy, swept up in plans for next summer. I drift up and down the aisles, examining hammers and saws. A length of rope calls tome. I could loop it around the stairs leading to the attic. I read labels on yellow bags of rodent poison: \"Guaranteed to Kill.\" One aisle over, a clerk stacks bottles of bleach and cleaning products mothers warn their children never to drink. The thought of poison bubbling in my stomach brings on an acute panic attack. My throat nearly closes up before I can swallow a Xanax. I relax and wonder if Xanax is lethal. My phone tells me yes, especially if you mix it with alcohol."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "> Continue"
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "\"Where are the lightbulbs?\" Lindsay inquires when I return home empty-handed.\n\nBack in DC, I stop taking Xanax. Not because the dark feeling is gone, but because I've decided to start saving the pills up. I stockpile thirty and run the empty bottle through the washing machine, set to'Hot.\" At the pharmacy, I show the warped plastic to a woman in a white coat and tell her the pills have been ruined. She hands over another sixty.\n\nThe next Friday morning, I bring Lindsay coffee as she gets ready for work. \"I'm going to take the car out to the shore today,\" I say. \"Work on my résumé.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a plan,\" she answers, her mind preoccupied with end-of-week deadlines. She will be busy with the Ladies' Lounge all weekend.\n\n\"I love you,\" I call when she's halfway out the door. \"See you soon.\"\n\n\"Lahvya!\" I hear her disembodied voice shout.\n\nWhen I grab the car keys, Darth Vader hides under the bed. I try to get his attention, but he won't come tome. I just want to say goodbye.\n\nI cry twice on the drive out to Maryland.\n\nFirst when I reach the city limits of DC, the place where I've lived my entire adult life. Most people are taught from a very young age to hate Washington. It's the focal point for Americans'distrust in their government. But it doesn't have to be that way. After twenty years in this city, I have met so many people who want to make the world a better place. Idealism drives so much of this town. It gives it life and a character far removed from the popular imagination. I'm crying because I can't say I ever had that character. I'm mourning an idealism that I only ever truly held with a sense of envy, not conviction."
},
{
"from": "human",
"value": "I cry again when I cross the Bay Bridge."
},
{
"from": "gpt",
"value": "In my rearview mirror, I seethe sun is setting over the bay, but I'm not moved by the beauty of the fall light on the horizon. It's the dark water below that stirs my chest. When I think about what's next, what happens after, my mind can only conjure that endless, empty water.\n\nI pull into town just after sunset. At Al's Pizza, I talk to Al. I've gotten him hooked on Jeffrey Archer novels. He's just finished As the Crow Flies, which chronicles the life of a fruit seller who built an empire only to have it taken from him in the end. \"In the last scene of the book, he's back hawking fruit and vegetables,\" Al says. \"He ends upright where he started.\"\n\nAfter a few beers at Al's, I go to our house and do some writing of my own. A note titled'For Lindsay.\" I add pages until I fall asleep on the couch. The next evening, I smoke a joint and look at the stars in the country sky. Turkey vultures, bigger than eagles, perch on our roof. I go to my favorite restaurant in town and have a steak with a good bottle of red wine. I chew the steak slowly and drink the wine fast.\n\nAfter dinner, I sit on the couch, open my laptop, and delete every file except the one titled'For Lindsay.\" I write my password on a Post-it note and stick it to the screen. Then I put on a movie. I don't remember which one, but I know it's not Star Wars. I take a Xanax, then a few more, and then pour the rest of the pills into a pile on the coffee table. The film begins to shimmer, then blur. I close my eyes and picture the earth just before skydiving out of an airplane. See how it curves. Seethe ground that will rush up to meet me. All that's left to do is fall."
}
]
|
[{"from":"system","value":"Carry on with the narrative as the plot partner.\nTags: fantasy, historic(...TRUNCATED) |
[{"from":"system","value":"Assist in storytelling, proceed with the tale.\nTags: fantasy, historical(...TRUNCATED) |
[{"from":"system","value":"Co-write with the author and continue the story.\nTags: fantasy, historic(...TRUNCATED) |
[{"from":"system","value":"As the author's co-writer, advance the plot.\nTags: fantasy, historical, (...TRUNCATED) |
[{"from":"system","value":"Help keep the tale going for the author.\nTags: fantasy, historical, myth(...TRUNCATED) |
[{"from":"system","value":"As the author's co-writer, advance the plot.\nTags: fantasy, historical, (...TRUNCATED) |
[{"from":"system","value":"Serve as the author's scribe, continue the tale.\nTags: fantasy, historic(...TRUNCATED) |
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