Mindfuck

by Christopher Wylie

  The unfunny punch line, of course, is that, following the supreme reluctance of the Clinton and Obama teams to “interfere” in the election, FBI director James Comey would sashay in and blow everything out of the water with his eleventh-hour decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation. At that point, back in Canada, I felt like I was watching a self-destructive friend finally tip over the edge. You can only stand there in horror, thinking, I tried to tell you! But in this case, the friend wasn’t just burning down his own house. He was burning down the whole neighborhood.

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  IN LATE AUGUST, Senator Harry Reid publicly urged the FBI to investigate Russian interference in the election. But at that time, most people still thought the race was Clinton’s to lose. At the same time, Cambridge Analytica officially announced that it was working with the Trump campaign. This put nerves on edge in Ottawa, because I had been clear about the power and reach of Cambridge Analytica’s data. The firm’s work on behalf of Trump was worrying enough, but when you added the Russian connections into the equation, the whole situation seemed very alarming.

  The possibility of a Trump win was the talk of Trudeau’s office, though it was still mostly a laughing matter. On a scale of unimaginable to unthinkable to terrifying, just how unimaginable was it? We had one meeting where a couple of people were making fun of Trump. God, these Americans! They outdo themselves every time! And everybody laughed. Well, almost everyone. I wasn’t laughing, because I understood the power of psychological warfare at scale.

  The Germans have an expression called Mauer im Kopf, which translates roughly as “the wall in the mind.” After the East and the West reunified in 1990, the legal border between the two Germanys was dissolved. The checkpoints disappeared, the barbed wire was ripped away, and the Berlin Wall was finally taken down. But even fifteen years after reunification, many Germans still overestimated the distances between cities in the East and the West. There was, it seems, a lingering psychological distance that betrayed the nation’s geography, creating a virtual border in people’s minds. Although that wall of concrete and steel had long since crumbled, its shadow lived on, etched into the psyches of the German people. When this new candidate came out of nowhere, demanding that America build the wall, I knew that this was not a literal demand. Democrats and Republicans alike seemed at a loss for how to react to such an absurd campaign platform. But, unlike this new dark horse, they could not peer into what was happening in the minds of America. They could not see that those people were not merely demanding a physical wall. It was not about building a literal wall—the very idea of the wall itself was enough to begin to achieve Bannon’s aims. They were demanding the creation of America’s very own Mauer im Kopf.

  Alan wasn’t laughing, either. In one meeting he said, “I actually think Trump can win.” People looked at him and rolled their eyes, and someone said, “Come on.” Then he looked at me, and I said, “Yeah, I think he can win, too.” That was the moment when I truly grasped, to my utter horror, that the tools I had helped build might play a pivotal role in making Donald Trump the next president of the United States.

  A couple of weeks later, a letter from Facebook arrived at my parents’ house. How Facebook got their address, I had no idea. My mother forwarded the letter to me. It had been sent by a law firm Facebook had hired, Perkins Coie, which was the same firm that the Clinton campaign was using to fund the private investigation into what later became the Trump-Russia dossier. Facebook’s lawyers sought to confirm that the data Cambridge Analytica had obtained was used only for academic purposes, and that it had been deleted. Now that Cambridge Analytica was officially working on the Trump campaign, Facebook had apparently decided it would be bad optics to have millions of its users’ personal profiles raided for political gain, not to mention Cambridge Analytica’s astonishing commercial enrichment. The letter made no mention of using company data to turn the world inside out. And, of course, the letter was preposterous, a feeble gesture, because Facebook had given the data-harvesting application used by Cambridge Analytica express permission to use the data for non-academic purposes—a request I had made specifically to the company while working with Kogan. I was even more confused at Facebook’s feigned pearl-clutching reaction, as in or around November 2015 Facebook hired Kogan’s business partner Joseph Chancellor to work as a “quantitative researcher.” According to Kogan, Facebook’s decision to hire Chancellor came after the company was told about the personality profiling project. Later, when the story became public, Facebook played the role of shocked victim. But what it did not make clear was that it was content to hire someone who had actually worked with Kogan. However, in a statement Facebook later said, “The work that he did previously has no bearing on the work that he does at Facebook.”

  There was no way Cambridge Analytica had deleted the Facebook data, of course. But I had left the firm more than a year earlier, and had been sued by them, and wanted absolutely no part of speaking for them. I replied, saying that I no longer had the data in question, but I had no idea where the data was, who else got ahold of it, or what Cambridge Analytica was doing with it—and neither did Facebook. But I was paranoid enough about being connected to Cambridge Analytica in any way that, instead of just popping the letter into the outgoing mail from the Canadian Parliament, I walked downtown to mail it. I didn’t want the taint of Cambridge Analytica anywhere near my work for Trudeau.

  On September 22, 2016, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Adam Schiff released a statement saying that Russia was attempting to undermine the election. And in the first presidential debate, on September 26, Hillary Clinton sounded the alarm. “I know Donald is very praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin,” she said. Putin had “let loose cyber attackers to hack into government files, to hack into personal files, hack into the Democratic National Committee. And we recently have learned that this is one of their preferred methods of trying to wreak havoc and collect information.”

  “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC,” Trump responded. “She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China, could also be lots of other people. It also could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds, okay?”

  On October 7, less than an hour after the Access Hollywood tape of Trump saying “grab ’em by the pussy” became public, WikiLeaks began publishing emails hacked from the account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. They would continue to release emails, bit by bit, until Election Day, and the fallout for the Democrats was disastrous. Scandals erupted over details of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street, among other revelations, and the lunatic fringe of the alt-right used the emails to fuel the deranged theory that the Clinton campaign, at the highest levels, was involved in a child sex ring being run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. My mind kept returning to the connections among Cambridge Analytica, the Russian government, and Assange. Cambridge Analytica seemed to have its dirty hands in every dirty part of this campaign.

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  ON THE NIGHT OF the election, I was at a watch party in Vancouver. We had CNN on one giant screen, and other news channels on smaller screens, and at the same time I was on the phone with Alistair Carmichael, the MP from the Shetlands, whom I’d grown close to during my time in London. I was getting the U.S., Canadian, and British reactions in real time as the numbers started looking more and more dire for Clinton. The moment CNN projected Trump as the winner, a shocked pall fell over the room.

  My phone started buzzing with text messages from people who knew about my work with Cambridge Analytica. Some bewildered supporters at Hillary Clinton’s victory party began directing their anger toward me. I don’t recall many of the specifics, just an overwhelming tone of rage and despair. There is one comment I do remember, though, because it cut me to the bone. A Democrat I was friendly with wrote, “This may hav
e been just a game to you. But we are the ones who have to live with it.”

  That night and the day after, Trudeau’s advisers were in meltdown, because everything they thought they knew about the elephant to the south had suddenly changed. Was Trump going to cancel NAFTA? Would there be riots? Was Trump a plant for the Russians—an actual Manchurian candidate? People were desperate for answers, and because I was the only guy who knew anything about Steve Bannon, who was now in a position of immense power, they kept asking me what was going to happen. They wanted advice on how to deal with these new alt-right advisers whom they would soon be negotiating with on issues of massive national (and international) importance. All I could think was: Holy fuck. The man I’d met in a hotel room in Cambridge three years earlier now had the ear of the future president of the United States.

  When Carmichael called me the day after the election, it was a relief to hear his calming Scottish brogue. “Let’s think carefully about what you’re going to do,” he said. Over the years, I had confided everything about Cambridge Analytica to Carmichael, who was one of the few people in the world I trusted completely. He knew me well enough to understand that I was unlikely to be able to sit by while Trump and Bannon took control after a tainted election. The stakes had been raised exponentially. The ridiculous reality TV star was no longer just a shameless rabble-rouser. He was going to be the leader of the free world.

  Throughout November and December, I contemplated what I might say, and to whom I might say it. Trump’s election still didn’t seem real, because Obama remained president. It was as if the whole world was holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen after January 20.

  Before the election, friends in the Democratic Party had offered to help get me tickets to Clinton’s inaugural ball. But instead of flying to D.C. to party with deliriously happy Democrats, I watched the sparsely attended Trump inauguration on CNN. And that was when I saw something that was almost hard to believe. There they were: Bannon, looking like a windswept gremlin. Kellyanne Conway, whom I’d met through the Mercers, in full Revolutionary War cosplay. Rebekah Mercer, wearing a fur-lined overcoat and Hollywood-starlet sunglasses. And then I remembered what Nix had said to me a couple of years earlier, at the restaurant where I told him I was quitting Cambridge Analytica. “You’re only going to understand it when we’re all sitting in the White House,” he’d said. “Every one of us, except for you.” Well, Nix wasn’t in Washington, but the rest of them certainly were.

  That January, Bannon was appointed to the National Security Council. Now Carmichael’s warning for me to “be careful” seemed even more apt, as Bannon had the levers of the entire American intelligence and security apparatus at his disposal. If I pissed Bannon off, either by whistleblowing or through some other provocation, he had the capacity to destroy my life.

  Just as worrisome, Bannon was in a position to help arrange for Cambridge Analytica to get contracts with the U.S. government. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, was already working on projects for the U.S. State Department. This meant that CA could access the U.S. government’s data, and vice versa. To my horror, I realized that Bannon could be creating his own private intelligence apparatus. And he was doing it for an administration that didn’t trust the CIA, the FBI, or the NSA. It felt like I was living in a nightmare. Worse, it felt like Richard Nixon’s wet dream. Just imagine if Nixon had had access to that kind of intimate, granular data on every single American citizen. He wouldn’t have just fucked rats, he would have fucked the whole Constitution.

  Government entities normally need a warrant to collect people’s private data. But because Cambridge Analytica was a private company, it wasn’t subject to that check on its power. I started to recall the meetings with Palantir employees, and why some of them were so excited by Cambridge Analytica. There was no privacy law in the United States to stop Cambridge Analytica from collecting as much Facebook data as it could. I realized that a privatized intelligence unit would allow Bannon to bypass the limited protections Americans had from federal intelligence agencies. It occurred to me that the deep state wasn’t just another alt-right narrative; it was Bannon’s self-fulfilling prophecy. He wanted to become the deep state.

  CHAPTER 11

  COMING OUT

  -

  Two months after Trump’s inauguration, on the morning of March 28, 2017, I woke up slightly groggy from another late night working on a briefing. It was just after six in the morning. As I stood in my underwear, waiting for the coffee to brew, I opened up Facebook and saw a private message from an account called “Claire Morrison.” I clicked on the profile, and there was no profile photo.

  Hi Christopher, I hope you don’t mind me getting in touch. I’m actually a journalist…called Carole Cadwalladr. I have been trying to talk to previous employees of Cambridge Analytica/SCL to try and build up a more accurate picture of how the company works etc and you’ve been described to me as the brains of the operation…

  This has to be Cambridge Analytica, I thought. Not again. I just knew it had to be Cambridge Analytica messing with my head. No journalist had ever reached out to me, all of my warnings had been ignored, and this was exactly the kind of shit Nix would pull. I wanted no part of this faceless “Claire Morrison,” absent solid proof of who was behind the profile. So I replied that I needed proof that she was actually a Guardian journalist.

  That same day, Cadwalladr sent me a long message from her Guardian email address about Vote Leave, BeLeave, Darren Grimes, Mark Gettleson, and how everything in those campaigns seemed to be routed through this little company in Canada, AggregateIQ. She had been told that I knew the people and the companies involved. Cadwalladr wrote that she had been investigating AIQ and Brexit and that, one evening in early 2017, a source had tipped her off with a bizarre clue. The telephone number listed on the official expense returns for AIQ appeared on an archived version of SCL’s website as the phone number for “SCL Canada.” At the time, there was almost no public information on SCL, save for a 2005 Slate article Cadwalladr had found about the firm, titled “You Can’t Handle the Truth: Psy-ops Propaganda Goes Mainstream.” The article began with a scenario where a “shadowy media firm steps in to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception.”

  As Cadwalladr kept pulling the threads of this increasingly bizarre story, she found a former SCL employee in London who was willing to talk. The source was insistent that they meet somewhere discreet and that she had to keep everything off the record. The source was afraid of what the firm would do if they found out the two were talking. Cadwalladr listened as the source told her some wild stories about what SCL had done in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—honey traps, bribes, espionage, hackers, strange deaths in hotel rooms. The source told her to find someone by the name of Christopher Wylie, as he was the one who had recruited AIQ into the Cambridge Analytica universe. In examining all the complex relationships between all of these people and entities—Vote Leave, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, the Mercers, Russia, and the Trump campaign—Cadwalladr saw that I was right in the middle of all of them. Seeming to pop up everywhere, I looked like the Zelig of 2016 to her.

  At first, I didn’t want to talk to Cadwalladr. I had no interest in being at the center of some massive Guardian exposé. I was exhausted, I had been burned over and over, and I wished that I could just put the Cambridge Analytica ordeal in the past. On top of that, Cambridge Analytica was no longer just a company. My old boss Steve Bannon was now sitting in the White House and on the National Security Council of the most powerful nation on earth. I had seen what happened to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning when they were at the mercy of the full force of the U.S. government. It was too late to change the outcome of the Brexit vote or the U.S. presidential election. I had tried to warn people, and no one seemed to care. Why would they care now?

  But Cadwalladr cared. When I read what she had alre
ady published, I could see that she was on the trail of Cambridge Analytica and AIQ but had not yet cracked how deep their misdeeds actually went. After hesitating for a couple of days, I emailed back and agreed to talk, but strictly off the record. When it was time for our call, my heart was racing. I fully expected an unpleasant conversation in which she would make accusations and listen half-heartedly to my responses, after which she’d write whatever she wanted.

  Instead I got a woman saying, “Oh, is that Chris? Oh, hi!” I heard barking in the background, and she said, “Sorry, I’ve just taken my dog for a walk, and I’m making some tea.” I started to say something, but I heard her making cooing sounds to her dog. I had intended to give Carole about twenty minutes, but four hours later we were still on the phone. It must have been well past midnight in London, but the conversation just kept going and going. This was the first time I had really talked to anyone about the totality of what had happened. What, she asked me, is Cambridge Analytica?

  “It’s Steve Bannon’s psychological mindfuck tool,” I told her bluntly.

  Even a well-informed journalist like Cadwalladr struggled at first to understand all the layers and connections of the Cambridge Analytica narrative. Was SCL part of Cambridge Analytica, or the other way around? Where did AIQ fit in? And even when she had the basic details nailed down, there was still so much more to share. I told her about psychometric profiling, information warfare, and artificial intelligence. I explained Bannon’s role and how we had used Cambridge Analytica to build psychological warfare tools to fight his culture war. I told her about Ghana, Trinidad, Kenya, and Nigeria and the experiments that shaped Cambridge Analytica’s data targeting arsenal. Finally she began to understand the scope of the company’s wickedness.