LONG EDIT BP VT – AUDIO EDIT

CAM 1

\I got a phone call from my agency who I worked with and got lots of work from, saying would you like to work abroad, quite an interesting role. I said ok – but the interview’s tomorrow, you need to get here for the interview tomorrow – ok, yeah, no problem at all, I’ll come on up. The address I was given was in central London. I

CAM 2

went into the building, up to the sixth floor, and there were guards on the sixth floor, which I thought was quite odd and it turned out to be a military media kind of intelligence unit. And they showed me around, we had a quick chat, and I must have been there for about 20 minutes and that was it, and they said right, great to see you, thanks very much, and I asked ok, so, when will I hear if I’ve got the job? And they said, oh, no, you’ve got it.

12 JPG

I said where am I going, when do I start? They said well, your tickets will be emailed to you later today. You’ll be going out on Monday morning. OK. This is Friday – I’m talking to these guys – where am I going?

15 JPG

Oh, you’re going to Baghdad

I was expecting to be in the Green Zone, but no, we were on a base Called Camp Victory, which surprised me,

4 JPG

So when I first arrived at the building I was going to be working at, it struck me that it was a very secure building – signs outside saying do not come in,

3 JPG

it’s a classified area, if you’re not cleared, you can’t come in.

CAM 1

So when I first started working on it I didn’t know how big a project this was, I just assumed

it was news gathering. But having seen the process and worked in the process I then realised this was a big project, and the budget was large as well, um, for this project it was around about 120 million a year for this project, and that’s a lot of money.

IRAQ VIDEO 2

Whilst I was working there, there were three different types of strand, really. So we would do the news items that would go out on the news and go out on various channels locally.

The kind of stories: a bomb would go off, a car bomb would go off, people would die, we’d have people out there filming it. It would come back, we would then edit it into various stories that would then go out on various channels within the region.

 and we were to make it, as best we could, look as if it was made locally, which it is shot locally and it is edited locally

. It was

 more to make it look like it was Arabic, to make it look like it was shot in the region in which it was. To make it look like it was created by Arabic TV almost.

so it was giving the impression that this was done by an Arabic company, in my view.

And then there were what we called TVCs, which were television commercials,

to say ‘al-Qaeda are bad’

 There would also be things called VCDs, which we would make,

CAM 1

The way I was approached about VCDs was I was asked by my boss, we need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use al Qaeda’s footage and all their propaganda out there to do it, we need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner, and that’s great, and we’re going to track it via Google Analytics.

CAM 2

All the VCDs that were made, and quite a considerable amount, were taken by marines when they were going into various villages or they were doing raids, where they were on patrols they were on, and they were dispersed that way. That was the quickest, easiest and also I guess

he very sensible way of doing it, because if they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd VCD there – then when whoever comes back

BAGHDAD VIDE

they’re going to start checking stuff through, so it kind of made sense to do it that way.

And these were discs that were made to play in a thing called RealPlayer, and what happened with RealPlayer is you get a white screen before anything would happen

They came up with this ingenious idea that within the white flash that RealPlayer does, it actually tracks where the VCD had been played, because RealPlayer has to connect onlineto run. That li

ttle bit of code would then be connected to a Google Analytics account, and so that way you could have a track and know where that VCD has been played.

CAM 1

So, when the VCDs have been delivered, or when they’re watched, and the tracking kicks, it makes a hit with Analytics. When you log into it 24 hours later, it will tell you which IP address and where in the world it’s been looked at. So for instance if one is looked at in the middle of

Baghdad, OK, you know there’s a hit there. If one, 48 hours later or a week later, shows up in another part of the world, then that’s the more interesting one, and that’s what they’re looking for more, because that gives you a trail of OK, someone’s sent it to this person or they’ve been here and they’ve gone elsewhere, so it gives you a track of somebody who could possibly be a threat.

CAM 2

Some of the VCDs ended up in some interesting countries. I think I had a couple in Iran. Obviously in Iraq, in several places. I think there was one in Syria. But the most interesting one was in America. No idea how it got there. But all my job was to do was to collate that data and pass it on. So I would do a print-out for the day and, if anything interesting popped up, hand it over to the bosses and then it would be dealt with from there. 

When we made something,

CAM 1

the process would be: I would show it to my producer, they’d be happy with it, we would then get in the seniors in the office, they’d be happy with it, then we’d get the two colonels in to look at the things we’d done that day, they’d be fine with it, it would then go to General Petraeus, he would then look at it and his team would look at it, and if they’re happy with it it would then go on up the line if it needed to. If he couldn’t sign off on it it would go on up the line to the White House, and it was signed off up there, and the answer would come back down the line.

CAM 2

I was in and out of Baghdad on this contract for over a year or so. I just couldn’t do it any longer. When you’ve got over 500 tapes with more atrocities than you can believe could ever be committed to another human being on, there’s only so much you can take.

JPG 17

And also, you just think flying in and out of a war zone all the time, you are elevating that risk of not being able to come back home.