I watched in silence as these Russian executives took notes, casually nodding along as if what they were seeing was totally routine. Next, Nix showed them slides about our data assets. But we didn’t have data assets in Russia or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) markets that Lukoil primarily operated in, and our largest data set covered America. Then he started talking about microtargeting and AI, and what Cambridge Analytica was doing with the data in our possession.
I was still at a loss. At the end of the presentation, the executives asked me what I thought, and I fumfered a bit, saying, “Well, we have a diverse set of experiences and data in many places….So why exactly are you interested in all this?”
One of them responded that they were still figuring that out, and we should continue telling them more about what data and capacity CA had. But I was the one who needed answers. Why would a Russian oil company with virtually no presence in the United States want access to our U.S. data assets? And if this was a commercial project, why was Alexander showing them slides about disinformation in Africa?
But it wasn’t simply the internal data assets that were shown to the firm’s clients. The firm was eager to show off to prospective clients how much it knew about internal U.S. military operations. In another meeting, an internal slide deck created by the U.S. Air Force Targeting Center in Langley, Virginia, which the firm somehow had accessed, outlined for some prospective clients how the United States was already “incorporating socio cultural behavior factors into operational planning” in order to gain the “ability to ‘weaponeer’ targets” and amplify non-kinetic force against American adversaries. Nix remained coy about his plans. This struck me as against type—how many times had I seen him banter about the firm bribing ministers or setting up honey traps? But he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain why we kept communicating with this “client.” And during the discussions, he kept telling them, “We’ve already got guys on the ground.”
* * *
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A FEW MONTHS BEFORE the first round of Lukoil meetings, Cambridge Analytica had connected with a man named Sam Patten, who had lived a colorful life as a political operative for hire all over the world. In the 1990s, Patten worked in the oil sector in Kazakhstan before moving into Eastern European politics. When CA hired him, he had just finished a project for pro-Russian political parties in Ukraine. At the time, he was working with a man named Konstantin Kilimnik, a former officer of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (the GRU). Although Patten denies that he gave his Russian partner any data, it was later revealed that Paul Manafort, who was for several months Donald Trump’s campaign manager, did pass along voter polling data to Kilimnik in a separate instance. Patten and Kilimnik had met in Moscow in the early 2000s and later worked in Ukraine for Paul Manafort’s consultancy. The two became formal business partners soon after Patten was brought onto CA.
Patten was a perfect fit to navigate the world of shady international influence operations. He was also well connected among the growing number of Republicans joining Cambridge Analytica, so he was initially assigned to work in the United States. Patten was tasked with managing the logistics of research operations in America, including focus groups and data collection, and writing some of the polling questions. In spring 2014, he started working in Oregon, taking over for some of Gettleson’s projects conducting social and attitudinal research on American citizens.
Soon enough, weird questions began popping up in our research. One day I was in my London office, checking reports from the field, when I noticed a project involving Russia-oriented message testing in America. The U.S. operation was growing rapidly, and several new people had been brought in to manage the surge in assignments, so it was hard to keep track of every research stream. I thought that maybe someone had started exploring Americans’ views on international topics. But when I searched our repository of questions and data, I could only find data being collected on Russia. Our team in Oregon had started asking people, “Is Russia entitled to Crimea?” and “What do you think about Vladimir Putin as a leader?” Focus group leaders were circulating various photos of Putin and asking people to indicate where he looked strongest. I started watching video recordings of some of the focus groups—and they were strange. Photos of Vladimir Putin and Russian narratives were projected on the wall, and the interviewer was asking groups of American voters how it made them feel to see a strong leader.
What was interesting was that even though Russia had been a U.S. adversary for decades, Putin was admired for his strength as a leader.
“He has a right to protect his country and do what he thinks is best for his country,” said one participant as others nodded in agreement. Another told us that Crimea was Russia’s Mexico, but that, unlike Obama, Putin was taking action. As I sat alone in the now dark office, watching bizarre clips of Americans discussing Putin’s claim to Crimea, I wanted answers. Gettleson was in America at the time. When he answered the phone, I asked if he could enlighten me about who had authorized a research stream on Putin. He had no idea. “It just showed up,” he said, “so I assumed it was approved by someone.”
Patten’s interest in Eastern European politics crossed my mind, but I didn’t give it a lot of thought. In August 2014, a Palantir staff member sent an email to the data science team with a link to an article about Russians stealing millions of Internet browsing records. “Talk about acquiring data!” they joked. Two minutes later, one of our engineers responded, “We can exploit similar methods.” Maybe he was joking, maybe he wasn’t, but the firm had already contracted former Russian intelligence officers for other projects, as the memo to Nix highlighted.
Kogan, the project’s lead psychologist since May 2014, was making trips to St. Petersburg and Moscow. He was not forthcoming about his projects in Russia, but I knew he was working on psychometric profiling of social media users. The research Kogan was doing in Russia was focused on identifying disordered people and exploring their potential for trolling behavior on social networks. His research at St. Petersburg State University, funded by a Russian government research grant, examined connections between dark-triad personality traits and engagement in cyberbullying, trolling, and cyber stalking. The research also explored political themes on Facebook, finding that high scorers in psychopathy were most likely to post about authoritarian political issues. In conjunction with clinical and computational psychologists, Kogan worked with the “data of Facebook users from Russia and the USA by means of a special web-application,” according to one of the research briefings from his Russian research team. By late summer, Kogan was delivering lectures in Russia on the potential political applications of social media profiling. I remember him mentioning to me that there was “overlap” between his work in St. Petersburg and at Cambridge Analytica, but this could have been a coincidence. My own personal belief, which I expressed to Congress, was that Kogan was not ill-intentioned, but merely careless and naïve. Objectively, the security for the data was poor.
Even before Kogan came along, CA’s parent company, SCL, had deep experience disseminating propaganda online, but Kogan’s research was well suited to targeting voters with authoritarian personality traits, identifying narratives that would activate their support. After Kogan joined Cambridge Analytica’s project, CA’s internal psychology team started replicating some of his research from Russia: profiling people who were high in neuroticism and dark-triad traits. These targets were more impulsive and more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking, and, with the right kind of nudges, they could be lured into extreme thoughts or behavior.
* * *
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IT TAKES TOXIC LEADERS to create a toxic enterprise, and I think Cambridge Analytica reflected the character of Nix. Along with the obvious delight he took in intimidation, Nix possessed an uncanny gift for finding just the spot where his malice would do the most damage. He wouldn’t stop calling me a “gimp” or “spaz case,” for example,
because he knew it made me feel weak. But he knew it would only make me work harder for him. As much as I resented him, for some reason I became determined to prove him wrong. The constant abuse came with an explanation: Only “the truth” could motivate someone to rise to Nix’s standards. He also made sport of belittling staff, blowing through the office like some irritable tornado, tossing out insults as he passed.
On one occasion we thought Nix was going to hurt someone. I can’t even remember what provoked him this time, but for whatever reason, he flipped out and pushed everything off one of the interns’ desks. Nix was screaming, leaning in so closely that tiny droplets of spit were hitting the intern’s cheek. Tadas Jucikas, who was the largest of us, got up and walked over. “Alexander, it sounds like you need a drink,” he said. “How about you join me at the club.” After Nix left, the intern just sat there, breathing heavily, until another colleague suggested he leave for the day. We all cleaned up the mess Nix had made before he returned in a much more jovial mood, as if nothing had happened.
Sometimes he would blame the victim after losing his temper. “You always make me yell,” he’d say, as if he was not in control of his own voice. What disturbed me most was when he denied a tantrum even as I was still reeling from the effects. There is something quite powerful in being told, flatly, that the thing that upset you never happened; eventually you start to worry that you’ve gone mad. “You need to grow up and be less sensitive,” Nix would say. “I can’t trust you if you keep telling me that I lost my temper.”
We had one huge blowout that ended up having both short-term and long-term consequences. When Cambridge Analytica was officially formed, I kept refusing to sign my contract. Signing could have granted me shares, but I was nervous about making a long commitment to the firm. A voice in the back of my head warned against it.
The delay made Nix furious. Finally he snapped, locking me in a room, where he screamed and berated me. When that didn’t yield the desired result, he flipped over the chair beside me. As soon as he opened the door, I rushed out of the office and didn’t return for two weeks. We both knew that he needed me more than I needed him, because I was the only one who could build what he had promised the Mercers. But he was still too stubborn and haughty to tell me he was sorry, so after a while he asked Jucikas to convey an apology to me. I reluctantly came back to work, but I still refused to sign the contract.
CA’s client list eventually grew into a who’s who of the American right wing. The Trump and Cruz campaigns paid more than $5 million apiece to the firm. The U.S. Senate campaigns of Roy Blunt of Missouri and Tom Cotton of Arkansas became clients. And, of course, there was the losing House bid of Art Robinson, the Oregon Republican who collected piss and church organs. In the autumn of 2014, Jeb Bush paid a visit to the office. Despite having received millions from Mercer, Nix never bothered to learn much about U.S. politics, so he asked Gettleson to join him. Bush, who had come alone, began by telling Nix that if he decided to run for president, he wanted to be able to do it on his terms, without having to “court the crazies” in his party.
“Of course, of course,” Nix answered, signaling his intention to bluff and bullshit his way through the entire meeting. When it was over, he was so excited at the possibility of signing up another big American client, he insisted on immediately calling the Mercers with the good news, having apparently forgotten that the Mercers had told him on countless occasions of their support for Ted Cruz. Nix put Rebekah Mercer on speakerphone so that everyone could hear her reaction to the amazing meeting he’d just had.
“We’ve just had Governor Jeb Bush in the office, and he wants to work with us. What do you think of that?” he said proudly. After a pause, Rebekah replied flatly, “Well, I hope you told him very clearly that that’s never happening.” Then she hung up. Brutal.
And it wasn’t just presidential hopefuls who sought CA’s help. For evangelical leader Ralph Reed, Nix planned a lunch at the grand dining hall of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, on Pall Mall. Reed spent two hours describing his objectives and outlining how CA could help re-instill morality in an America fighting over same-sex marriage and other cultural issues. Nix left the meeting a little drunk. Back at the office, he announced in his typical outrageous fashion to everyone, “Well, there’s a closet case if I’ve ever seen one.”
For most of the time I was at SCL and Cambridge Analytica, none of what we were doing felt real, partly because so many of the people I met seemed almost cartoonish. The job became more of an intellectual adventure, like playing a video game with escalating levels of difficulty. What happens if I do this? Can I make this character turn from blue to red, or red to blue? Sitting in an office, staring at a screen, it was easy to spiral down into a deeper, darker place, to lose sight of what I was actually involved in.
But eventually, I couldn’t ignore what was right in front of my eyes. Weird PACs started showing up. The super PAC of future national security adviser John Bolton paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1 million to explore how to increase militarism in American youth. Bolton was worried that millennials were a “morally weak” generation that would not want to go to war with Iran or other “evil” countries.
Nix wanted us to start using disguised names for any client research in the United States and to state that the research was being conducted for the University of Cambridge. I tried to put a stop to this in an email to staff: “You cannot lie to people,” I wrote, citing possible legal consequences. The warning was ignored.
At this point I was feeling more and more as if I was a part of something that I did not understand and could not control, and that was, at its core, deeply unsavory. But I also felt lost and trapped. I started going out on all-night binges at late-night clubs or raves. A couple of times, I left the office in the evening, went out all night, and ended up coming back in without actually going to bed. My friends in London noticed that I was no longer myself. Gettleson finally said to me, “You don’t look well, Chris. Are you okay?” I wasn’t; I was despondent. There were days when I wanted to scream back at Nix, but something stopped me. I would go out, sometimes alone, and the loud music and constant contact with other dancing bodies made me feel as if I was still here and this wasn’t some dream. And if the music is loud enough, you can scream at the world and no one notices.
* * *
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OUR WORK AT CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA seemed to grow more nefarious every day. One project was described in CA correspondence as a “voter disengagement” (i.e., voter suppression) initiative targeting African Americans. Republican clients were worried about the growing minority vote, especially in relation to their aging white base, and were looking for ways to confuse, demotivate, and disempower people of color. When I found out that CA was beginning a voter suppression project, it really hit home. I thought about all the times I had gone to rallies in 2008, when Barack Obama was running, and I started to ask myself, How in the hell did I end up here? I told one of the new managers that, regardless of what the client wanted, it could be illegal to work on a project with the objective of voter suppression. Once again, I was ignored. I called the firm’s U.S. lawyers in New York and left a message asking them to call me back, but they never did.
* * *
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IN JULY 2014, I was copied on a confidential memo sent to Bannon, Rebekah Mercer, and Nix by Bracewell & Giuliani, the law firm of Rudy Giuliani. Cambridge Analytica had sought advice on U.S. law regarding foreign influence on campaigns. The memo outlined the Foreign Agents Registration Act and was emphatically clear: Foreign nationals are strictly prohibited from managing or influencing an American campaign or PAC at the local, state, or federal level. The memo recommended that Nix immediately recuse himself from substantial management of Cambridge Analytica until “loopholes” could be explored. The Bracewell & Giuliani memo suggested “filtering” the work of CA’s foreign nationals through U.S. citizens. After reading the memo, I pull
ed Nix into a meeting room to urge him to heed the warning.
Instead, Cambridge Analytica started to require foreign staff members to sign a waiver before flying to America, accepting liability for any breach of election law. They were not informed of the advice from Giuliani’s firm. It set me off. I unloaded on Nix.
“What if they get prosecuted, Alexander?” I shouted. “That will be on you.”
“It’s their responsibility, not mine, to know what the rules are,” he replied. “They are adults. They can make decisions for themselves.”
But it was his decisions I was worried about, and I wasn’t alone. Filling me in on some new projects, a colleague on the psychology team shared similar concerns about how this research could be used to amplify, rather than moderate, racism in the populations Cambridge Analytica was focusing on. “I don’t think we should keep doing this research,” he said.
Originally, race was one of many topics the firm began exploring. This in itself was not unusual, as racial conflicts have played a significant role in American culture and history. Psychologists on the projects initially assumed this research would be used either for passive information about the biases of the population or even to help reduce their effects. But, lacking the kind of traditional ethics review that is a prerequisite of academic research, there was never consideration of how this research could be misused—no one thought about how this could go wrong.
I knew Bannon would go on rants about how America was changing too much, his prophetic notion of an impending great conflict, or his misreading of dharma in Hinduism, which bordered on fetishistic Orientalism. But many of us on the CA research teams brushed him off as just another eccentric person we had to placate in the bizarre world we worked in. Many of the CA staff had experience working in far more extreme circumstances on old SCL information operations projects around the world, so by comparison Bannon felt quite tame.
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