‘I have done evil’: He worked for dictators, despots and killers. Has he changed? | CNN

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 m