‘I have done evil’: He spent years working for dictators and killers. Has he changed?

Healfromzero.com – The doors to the Las Vegas-bound plane cranked shut, and an email hit Phil Elwood’s inbox. Instructions. Elwood scanned the bullet points, a scattershot list of demands.

His client wanted his girlfriend flown from LA to Vegas. He wanted to see Cher at Caesars Palace. He wanted to gamble.

He needed to go shopping for Harley Davidsons, and for jean shorts. And at the top of the email, the client’s name: Mr. Gadhafi.

It was too late to disembark. The airplane lurched skyward, and Elwood was strapped in for the ride. For the next several days, he accompanied the son of Libya’s dictator on a raging Vegas bender.

There were moments where he wondered whether it would cost him his life. Then he’d return to work, bleary-eyed and exhausted, and find another dictator to help. Elwood’s job was to make the worst people in the world look good.

He was a political PR operative for some of the most brutal dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in recent history, quietly advancing their interests in Washington, D.C., and ensuring the world saw them in the rosiest possible light. He did it while some of those clients sponsored terrorism abroad and killed their own citizens. Elwood helped minimize bad press for a Moammar Gadhafi regime that was responsible for thousands of deaths; he helped soften outrage over the release of a Libyan terrorist convicted of bombing Pan Am 103, a US-bound plane that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland; and he worked for Syria’s Assad family as it led a violent campaign against pro-democracy protesters — a crackdown that began just days after Elwood secured the Assads a flattering story in Vogue.

“I have done evil,” Elwood tells CNN now. “I definitely think that I helped make the world a more dangerous place.” And most of the world never knew his name. For years, Elwood operated from the shadows.

He says he knew his work was wrong, but he did it anyway. And then, one morning in 2018, the FBI knocked on his door – and the precarious life he had built for himself came crashing down. CNN interviewed Elwood several times this month as he reflected on his dubious role in history and his message now to his fellow Americans.

He is not always a faultless narrator — even of his own story — but his life is a cautionary testament to the ways dictatorships are built and to the shady tactics some operatives use. “Some of my clients were just evil. They didn’t really have to cross a line to do evil things — they just started off that way,” he says.

“I had to cross a line.” “I absolutely knew what I was doing was wrong. And the allure of that was pretty amazing.” Most of his unsavory work was done more than a decade ago, but it feels suddenly pertinent again. A Syrian court this month sentenced former president Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia for war crimes, and an accused Libyan terrorist faces a trial in Washington for his alleged role in the Lockerbie bombing.

The regimes that employed Elwood gave rise to a decade of violence and instability in the Middle East, the aftershocks of which are still being felt. And his cynical dealings in Washington foreshadowed a toxification of US politics that now runs rampant. Elwood’s conversations with CNN were peppered with alarming stories and punctuated by his broad, disarming laugh.

At times, when pressed to consider the consequences of his work, Elwood sounded deeply uncomfortable. Still, Elwood insisted he’s changed. Now 47, he’s working these days for better people – including the family of a former US Marine missing in Syria who, the US believes, was kidnapped by Elwood’s old clients, the Assads.

“I think I’m a different person,” he says. But one glaring question hangs over him like a cloud: Should we buy it? Elwood practically shudders as he recalls Mutassim Gadhafi’s sunken face and spine-chilling glare.

The wiry son of strongman Moammar Gadhafi had a Bond-villain quality, he says. “In all the time I spent with (him), I didn’t see an ounce of goodness,” Elwood says. “He was just a harsh, brutal person.” Elwood’s assignment in Vegas in September 2009 was to keep the younger Gadhafi’s name out of the headlines.

By then, he’d been working for the Gadhafis for months, and they trusted him. A few weeks earlier, he’d successfully talked a US congressman into urging the Obama administration to “Knock off the Libya-bashing” amid a storm of outrage over the early release of a Libyan intelligence officer convicted of the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie. The attack killed all 259 people aboard the plane and another 11 on the ground.

But Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the only person convicted in connection to the bombing, was released from prison by Scottish authorities two decades later because he was battling terminal prostate cancer. He received a hero’s welcome on his return to Libya – and Elwood was tasked to quell the outrage in the US. Shifting the narrative had seemed an impossible task.

But Elwood said he quickly got to work, convincing a congressman that the US needed Libya’s support in the War on Terror and then leaking the lawmaker’s position to Politico. “I kind of divorced myself from the ethical consequences,” he says. And then came the Vegas trip.

In Elwood’s telling, it was fueled by drugs, alcohol and Gadhafi’s sense of entitlement. “There was one point where I thought he was going to hit a bouncer. There were times where he was screaming at the roulette table,” Elwood says.

“I didn’t see him smile except when he thought he was gonna get to hit somebody.” Elwood was sent several times up to Gadhafi’s block of hotel suites to retrieve cash, because the dictator’s son was a “terrible” roulette player. Once, he found a snakeskin briefcase filled with $100 notes – and a handgun. He called a friend for advice, and the advice was unequivocal: Get out of there.

If Gadhafi had Elwood killed, he reasoned, nobody would ever know. “I felt afraid most of the time,” he says of his time in Vegas. “It was not a safe place to be.” And it was not the kind of place a younger Elwood ever expected to find himself.

Elwood’s father was an Episcopal pastor, and his mother worked for non-profits, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I went to church every Sunday and heard my father preach,” Elwood says. It’s where he learned the power of a good story.

“That’s really what I’ve made my entire career about.” It was an attribute he sharpened through competitive debating in high school and college, and then in DC, where he interned for the legendary New York senator and diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was drawn to risk, developing a passion for skydiving. But Elwood remembers the sliding-door moment when he chose a darker path.

It was when he joined Brown Lloyd James, a firm specializing in international PR, and was told to sign forms registering as a foreign agent for authoritarian regimes like Libya and Syria. (The firm, now named BLJ Worldwide, did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.) Those strokes of his pen led him to a series of experiences that few other people have lived to describe. Like in Vegas, where Elwood was babysitting the son of a despot.

He stuck to the task: putting out fires, calming down his client, paying off a Bellagio concierge to ensure Gadhafi would be left alone. “None of it made any sense,” he says now. But Elwood did his job: He kept Gadhafi’s name out of the news.

And in the process, he’d gotten a taste of terrifying, alluring danger. The following year, Elwood was given a far-fetched assignment that spiraled out of control: Help Qatar host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. “It was a crazy idea,” he tells CNN.

Qatar, a tiny nation, had little footballing history, little infrastructure, and oppressive summer heat. But Elwood was well-placed to help, because Qatar’s opponent in the race was one he knew well: the United States. “We assumed the United States was going to win,” Elwood admits.

The American bid was backed by vast resources and ready-made NFL stadiums. Elwood told his boss – Peter Brown, a former member of the Beatles’ inner circle and the founder of Brown Lloyd James – that the assignment was impossible. “He said, ‘I said it, you make it true,’” recalls Elwood.

(Neither Brown nor his former firm responded to CNN’s requests for comment.) In a bar that afternoon, grasping for ideas, he glanced out to the street. “This group of school kids walked by, and they were all morbidly obese. And I was like: There’s my answer.” Posing as an advocate for the “Healthy Kids Coalition” – a shell company – Elwood scribbled a congressional resolution on a napkin, urging the US to withdraw from hosting any major sporting events until it had fully funded grassroots physical education.

He found an outgoing Democratic Representative, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, to take up the cause. Then, he says, he leaked her draft resolution to a soccer-loving journalist at Politico. It ran in late 2010 under the headline “World Cup vs.

gym class?”, undermining the US bid. Two days later, the unthinkable happened: FIFA awarded Qatar the 2022 World Cup. Elwood doesn’t believe he single-handedly shifted votes, but he says his involvement gave FIFA officials cover to vote against the American bid.

As he watched the announcement, pride and disbelief and embarrassment all swirled in his mind, as they so often would after another successful job. But then things soured. Elwood set up a news alert to track Qatar’s progress in prepping for the tournament; for almost 12 years, it delivered doses of dread to his inbox.

Among them were allegations from the US Department of Justice, long denied by Qatar and FIFA, that bribes were delivered to top FIFA officials; fury from human-rights groups about the safety of LGBTQ+ fans in a country where sex between men is punishable by prison time; and a years-long scandal involving migrant workers who died while building the country’s new soccer stadiums. Qatar eventually admitted that between 400 and 500 migrant workers died during the project. “Something that kind of started off as a prank turned into …” Elwood pauses, searching for the right admonishment.

“…what could nicely be called a human-rights issue,” he says. “And I feel incredible guilt about that.” There is plenty more that Elwood feels guilty about. He did many, many bad things, he says now, and he rattles them off with a hint of satisfaction.

He was very good at his job, he says, and it’s clear he wants the record to reflect that, too. He worked mostly from DC but made numerous trips to the authoritarian nations he represented. The work wasn’t lucrative – he claims to have earned less than $100,000 a year while repping dictators.

“It was about the rush of the work,” he says. In 2011, Elwood achieved what he calls “one of the shortest-lived PR wins of all time”: landing Asma al-Assad, the first lady of Syria, a fawning profile in Vogue just days before the country’s civil war broke out. The story’s infamous headline called Asma al-Assad “A Rose in the Desert.” It described Syria as “a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings,” and al-Assad as “glamorous, young, and very chic – the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.” As Elwood leafed through the magazine at a DC newsstand, his stomach turned.

“It was a kind of propaganda,” he says. Later that week, the Arab Spring reached Syria. Unlike in Libya, where Moammar Gadhafi and his son Mutassim were captured and killed by rebels within months, the Assad regime retained its grip on power for years, brutally crushing protesters in the process.

The United Nations reported that over the ensuing decade, more than 300,000 civilians were killed. Vogue pulled the story from its website. In 2024, Assad was overthrown and fled with his wife to Russia.

Elwood insists he is deeply patriotic. “I just show my patriotism in a different way,” he says. But the Qatar assignment wasn’t the only time he’d squared off against his own government.

Two years later, he convinced the tiny nation of Antigua to start a David-vs.-Goliath trade skirmish with the US over a gambling dispute. There are limits to Elwood’s self-flagellation. He rejects the suggestion that by boosting the soft power of America’s rivals, he was harming his country’s standing in the world.

“I don’t know if anything I’ve done has been against America’s interests,” he says. But a drumbeat of doubt began in Elwood’s head in 2010 on a tour of Sarajevo, where Bosnian-Serb forces had committed atrocities during the war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. “They took us to a soccer stadium where people were penned in and gunned down with machine guns,” he says.

Something shifted inside Elwood. “I was wondering when people would be taking tours of similar sites in Libya and Syria. And I was actively working for them at the time,” he says.

“It was horrible.” And it could have been the moment he left this life behind. But it wasn’t. Eight years later, Elwood got a phone call.

The FBI had agents in the lobby of his apartment building. And they wanted to talk to him. By this point, Elwood’s darkest clients had dried up.

The Arab Spring was “bad for our business,” he says. And Elwood was battling his own demons, having become addicted to opioids prescribed after a hip operation. Now Elwood was about to discover that his most recent client, the private Israeli intelligence firm Psy-Group, was being investigated as part of former FBI director Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

Elwood was subpoenaed but ultimately faced no further action. Still, his association with the Mueller probe made him a pariah in DC. The extent of his former client list was unearthed through whispers and gossip.

At one gathering, a journalist called him a “monster.” Elwood began to spend more time in Washington’s bars, where so many of his stories begin or end. He eventually realized he was drinking for the same reason he repped dictators and jumped out of planes: “(I) was chasing a high.” His addictions would, eventually, come within minutes of costing him everything. When the stress of his situation overwhelmed him, he drove to his vacation home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with the intention of ending his life.

A phone call from a friend stopped him, and after his wife rushed to his aid, he decided to get help. But Elwood still knew how the DC machine worked. His story was interesting, and it was slowly slipping away from his control, tantalizing journalists and enraging staffers on the Hill.

So he decided to be the one to tell it. Today, Elwood insists he’s changed. He’s spent time in rehab after his suicide attempt and says he will be two years’ sober this September.

He burned some bridges by writing a cathartic memoir, “All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians,” published in 2024. Today he works for himself, and he says his PR clients are uncontroversial. They include the family of Austin Tice, the American Marine-turned-journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012.

Tice was a longtime friend of his; the night before he went to Syria, Elwood says he tried desperately to talk him out of it. He calls his efforts for the Tices the “best work of my career.” But how does he square the fact that he also worked for the Assads, the regime that almost certainly killed Austin Tice? There’s a long, uncomfortable pause.

“Debra Tice always says: You can’t fix yesterday,” Elwood says at last, referring to Austin’s mother. “You can only fix tomorrow.” Elwood, weary of what he considers today’s performative American politics, also has an unlikely message for his own country: “The Hill that I worked on does not exist anymore,” he says. “Without a functioning democracy, we’re all in trouble.” He’s either the best or the worst possible messenger for the cause, depending on one’s perspective.

Today, Elwood is cautious about his privacy and security. He says he spends his free time with his wife, cooking on his grill or looking after his cat, Darth Vader. Elwood’s choice of pet mirrors his penchant for murderous clients: “Nobody wanted him, because he was hostile towards children,” he says of the cat.

And he still goes skydiving. “It’s terrifying. It’s exhilarating.

You’re not sure if you’re going to die,” he says. “It’s a perfect analogy for my career.” At least, it’s the analogy Elwood wants to present. But it has a flaw: When you’re strapped to an instructor and the plane door opens, all you can do is surrender to gravity.

“You don’t have a lot of choice in the matter,” Elwood says. Throughout his career, Elwood had choices. Would he make the same ones again?

“I think that I would,” he says. “I think that I would have regretted not knowing what that door led to.” A conversation with Elwood is a mess of contradictions. He loves democracy, but he spent a career undermining it.

He’s a patriot, but he repeatedly worked against his own country’s interests. He regrets what he did, but he’d do it again. Elwood says he’s simply a flawed human being who made some bad decisions.

A skeptic might suggest his redemption story is a convenient narrative for a man who simply ran out of options. When it’s suggested that he’s still running the PR playbook that he once utilized for his clients, he responds immediately: “Of course. Absolutely.” He spent years sanitizing the reputations of some of the world’s worst people.

It’s hardly a stretch to imagine that his newest, most difficult client may be himself. “So, am I a reliable narrator?” he ponders aloud. “That’s something that should be left up to the reader to decide.”