Mindfuck

by Christopher Wylie

  On the evening of March 17, The Guardian and the Times worked all night to rush through the publication of their stories. The Times headline read: “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions.” The Guardian editors chose a more dramatic headline: “ ‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower.” The stories instantly went viral, and that night Channel 4 began running its series, including the devastating sting exposing Nix. The channel also released an interview with the defeated 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, who described the allegations about Cambridge Analytica as “very disturbing.” In the interview, Clinton said, “When you have a massive propaganda effort to prevent people from thinking straight, because they’re being flooded with false information and…every search engine, every site they go into, is repeating these fabrications, then yes, it affected the thought processes of voters.” Cadwalladr’s story blew up after that. Two other Guardian journalists, Emma Graham-Harrison and Sarah Donaldson, wrote articles explaining how it all connected. Their brilliant storytelling obviously resonated with regular non-tech folk and caused a massive jamboree on social media (save for Facebook, which instead promoted its own press release in its trending news stories section). The Times story focused on the Facebook data breach, identifying it as “one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history.” Reporters Matthew Rosenberg and Nicholas Confessore, bylined with Cadwalladr, also connected the dots between Bannon, Mercer, and Cambridge Analytica and explained in detail how they had used Facebook data to propel Trump to victory.

  In London, the British authorities had already been investigating both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook for months, as I had handed over evidence to them before the story broke. But while the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office was in the process of applying for warrants in the British courts to execute a search of Cambridge Analytica’s offices and seize evidence, Facebook had already hired a “digital forensics firm” to examine Cambridge Analytica’s servers, beating the authorities into CA’s headquarters. Although the ICO required a warrant to enter, Facebook did not, as it had been granted access by CA. When Facebook found out that the story was about to break, it contacted Cambridge Analytica, which agreed to provide Facebook access to its servers and computers while the ICO was still in the process of requesting a warrant. But when the ICO was tipped off that Facebook had entered CA’s headquarters, they were furious. They had never seen a company take such brazen steps to handle evidence that would soon become the subject of a judicial search warrant. What made the situation even worse was that Facebook was not a mere bystander in this affair—Facebook’s data was also a subject of the investigation and the company was inside a potential crime scene handling evidence that could affect its own legal liability. The ICO sent agents to the scene, escorted by the police. Late that night, a dramatic standoff ensued between ICO agents, British police, and Facebook’s “forensic auditors.” Facebook’s auditors were ordered to drop everything and immediately leave Cambridge Analytica’s offices, and they agreed to stand down. Elizabeth Denham, the U.K. information commissioner, was so incensed by Facebook’s actions that she made a rare appearance the next day on British news, issuing a statement that Facebook’s actions would “potentially compromise a regulatory investigation.”

  The reaction on both sides of the Atlantic was instant and explosive. I was called before the parliamentary inquiry into “fake news and disinformation.” It would be the first of many public and secret hearings, covering everything from Cambridge Analytica’s use of hackers and bribes to Facebook’s data breach to Russian intelligence operations. Mark D’Arcy, the BBC’s parliamentary correspondent covering the hearing, said, “I think the [DCMS committee] hearing with Chris Wylie is, by a distance, the most astounding thing I’ve seen in Parliament.”

  In Washington, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched investigations, while lawmakers in the United States and the U.K. began calling for Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify under oath. The Department of Justice and the FBI flew to Britain to meet me in person on a Royal Navy base a few weeks after the story broke. The NCA had borrowed the building from the Royal Navy.

  As Facebook’s stock slid, Zuckerberg remained out of sight. He finally emerged on March 21, with a Facebook post saying he was “working to understand exactly what happened” and saying there had been a “breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.” The hashtag #DeleteFacebook started trending on Twitter, with Elon Musk stoking the fire by tweeting that he’d deleted the Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla. As I prepared for my public testimonies, I listened to Cardi B, the American rapper who had released her debut album only a few weeks after the story broke. The record’s (purely coincidental) title, Invasion of Privacy, quickly prompted memes to circulate on social media with Mark Zuckerberg’s face appended to an edited version of the now-platinum album’s cover. It began to look as if the story was tipping into the zeitgeist, and people who had already been feeling uneasy about how Facebook operates were now having their fears confirmed in the most public fashion. In the throes of this PR nightmare, Zuckerberg bought ad space in major newspapers to publish a letter of apology, only a couple of weeks after Facebook first threatened to sue The Guardian in an attempt to shut down the story, but the letter did little to quell the anger. Just two weeks later, he faced two long days of grilling by U.S. congressional leaders.

  In Britain, there was still more to report. This time it was about Brexit. As the stories were breaking in America, a new tranche of right-to-reply letters were sent out to those involved in Vote Leave. Dom Cummings and Stephen Parkinson were among the recipients. It was only when Sanni arrived at our lawyer’s office that evening after receiving a flurry of calls from former Vote Leave staffers that we realized what Parkinson had done in response. Parkinson had responded in the most cruelly personal way imaginable. At the time, Parkinson was working as a senior adviser to Prime Minister Theresa May, and a day before The Guardian published the story, the Downing Street press office issued an official statement, which we discovered only when The New York Times asked us to comment. In the statement, Parkinson revealed his relationship with Sanni and dismissed the accusations as bitterness over their breakup. Sanni is a Pakistani Muslim, and he had not yet come out to his family as gay, because it would have put his relatives back in Pakistan in physical danger, a fact that Parkinson knew full well. Despite this, he chose to out Sanni to the world’s media and let his former intern deal with the consequences. This was the first time, at least in recent history, that the press office of the prime minister had publicly outed someone in an act of retaliation. When Sanni heard about the statement, he looked solemnly into everyone’s eyes and sat back in his chair. Allen and Cadwalladr would eventually convince Cummings to remove a blog post he had written in response about the affair, but the damage was done. Parkinson had done exactly what he intended to.

  The Vote Leave revelations had to compete with the cover of the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail: “PM’s Aide in Toxic Sex Row Over Pro-Brexit Cash Plot.” Continuing their vilification of LGBTQ people, Britain’s right-wing press had reduced Sanni and his evidence of the largest breach of campaign finance law in British history to nothing more than “toxic sex.” By now, Sanni’s family in Karachi had to take security measures back at home due to the threat of violence that LGBTQ people and their families face in Pakistan. His life and the lives of the people he loved had been upended. I’ll never forget watching Sanni through a window as he sat alone in Allen’s office at half past midnight, dialing his mother to tell her that, yes, he was gay. It was a moment in which the courage and consequences of his decision to come out as a whistleblower were inseparable. In the following days, the violence Sanni faced only worsened as he was followed by people with hidden cameras, and photos of him and me inside a gay bar were later published on Br
itish alt-right sites with incredibly homophobic commentary. In Parliament, Prime Minister Theresa May herself defended the actions of Parkinson. It was heartbreaking to watch, but it made me so proud to call Sanni my friend.

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  ON THE EVENING OF March 20, three days after the Cambridge Analytica story broke, I went to the Frontline Club, in London, with Allen and Sanni for my first public appearance. I was swarmed by photographers as I walked in, and the venue heaved with reporters from around the world. Journalists had grabbed the closest seat they could get. All along the back, there were cameras from more than twenty news channels, and with so many people crammed inside, it was getting hot. The journalist and privacy activist Peter Jukes interviewed me before the crowd, and I then took questions. When I couldn’t take any more attention, I left via a discreet escape route. So as not to make a scene, the plan was for Allen to leave a few minutes later. Outside, I turned right and was headed down Norfolk Place when a man approached me. He held a glowing phone up to my face. I took a step backward, confused and a little alarmed. I asked what he wanted, and he told me to just look at his phone.

  My eyes adjusted, and I could make out a screenshot of a Cambridge Analytica invoice to UKIP. He then swiped to what looked like an email from Andy Wigmore, the communications director of Leave.EU, to someone with a Russian name. I didn’t have long to look at it, but it seemed the message was about gold. “They worked with the Russians,” the man told me. At this point, Allen and the others came out with some of the others. When they saw the man, they were worried for my safety and ran up, trying to grab him. The man shook them off and got away. I was just in a daze from it all. Earlier that day I had been on back-to-back live TV interviews and had been chased down by photographers. It was an overwhelming day. In the car ride back to Allen’s office to collect my bag, I told her that I wasn’t really sure what it was about but that the messages looked real enough: I recognized the bank account details. Later that week, Allen received a cryptic message and called to say she thought that the man who had stopped me on the street was trying to contact me.

  I had thought most of my work as a whistleblower was over by this point, but what transpired next led me to information so sensitive that my meetings with the House Intelligence Committee that day in June 2018 had to be conducted in the SCIF, underneath the United States Capitol. In the two months before that secret hearing, I met the man in several random locations scattered across London, and it became clear that he had access to files belonging to Leave.EU co-founder Arron Banks and communications director Andy Wigmore. The documents constituted a record of extensive communications between Leave.EU, a major alt-right pro-Brexit campaign, and the Russian embassy in London during the Brexit campaign. Once we were assured of their authenticity, Allen and I contacted MI5 and the National Crime Agency.

  In April, Allen met with an NCA officer in one of their unmarked offices inside a major London train station to update them on my behalf, as we couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t being followed. We were both worried because we’d learned that the man was traveling with these documents, which potentially contained evidence of a Russian intelligence operation, throughout Ukraine and Eastern Europe. The NCA notified the British embassy in Kiev about the situation. Then we lost track of him and his phone was disconnected. We were all deeply concerned about his safety.

  Several weeks later, the man reemerged and wanted to meet again. Allen and I decided that I would secretly record my meetings with the man. We handed over copies of the recordings and screenshots of the documents to the British authorities. We also notified the Americans, because we saw evidence that the Russians were speaking with Cambridge Analytica clients immediately before and after the clients met with the Trump campaign. We eventually had a meeting with California congressman Adam Schiff, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, in Nancy Pelosi’s office in the Capitol. Allen and I told Congressman Schiff about the existence of these documents. I agreed to return to D.C. with the documents, which were kept secure in Carmichael’s safe at Parliament.

  Soon after this D.C. meeting, I was contacted by Fusion GPS, the private intelligence firm that had put together the Trump-Russia dossier authored by Christopher Steele. Steele’s firm had learned about the documents and recordings I had through a British source, and Fusion GPS told us they had documents and information of their own that illuminated the same set of connections—between the Russians, Brexit, and Trump’s campaign. We all agreed to meet in the office of DCMS committee chair Damian Collins. Like a jigsaw, Collins, Fusion GPS, and I had each acquired different sets of documents about the same events, and we began piecing everything together. Allen approached the NCA again, but they declined to take action, so we instead handed everything over to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, which agreed to pass it on to the appropriate American intelligence channels. If the U.K. authorities were not going to touch the evidence we had about Brexit and the Russian embassy on their own, we hoped that when the American agencies got access to the documents they would put pressure on their British colleagues to take action.

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  THE DOCUMENTS TELL A remarkable story. In 2015, not long after I left Cambridge Analytica, the U.K. Independence Party–backed Leave.EU campaign retained the firm to, as Leave.EU stated at its campaign launch, “map the British electorate and what they believe in, enabling us to better engage with voters.” The CA-UKIP relationship was one that was fostered by Steve Bannon. Once Banks and Wigmore had been speaking to Bannon about Cambridge Analytica, Nigel Farage introduced them to his friend Robert Mercer. Mercer was keen to help their budding alt-right movement, but the American billionaire, like all foreigners, was legally barred from donating or substantively interfering in British political campaigns. So the Brexiteers were told by the billionaire that the data and services of Cambridge Analytica could be useful, and Bannon offered to help. Farage, Banks, and company accepted Bannon’s offer, consummating the emerging Anglo-American alt-right alliance with databases and algorithms.

  It was this relationship that became a focal point of interest for the House Intelligence Committee, as it appeared that this relationship was exploited by the Russian embassy as a discreet vehicle into the Trump campaign. In November 2015, Leave.EU publicly launched its referendum campaign with Brittany Kaiser, who, in addition to working at Cambridge Analytica, was appointed as Leave.EU’s new director of operations. On the campaign, Kaiser was to have a special focus on deploying CA’s microtargeting algorithms.

  Shortly before the public launch with Cambridge Analytica, the top donors to UKIP and Leave.EU—Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore—began their flirtations with the Russian government. It all started at the 2015 UKIP conference, in Doncaster, with a meeting between the two and Alexander Udod, a Russian diplomat who invited them to meet his ambassador at the Russian embassy. A few weeks later, after what was described in correspondence as a “boozy six-hour lunch” with Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador in London, Banks and Wigmore met the ambassador a second time and were given an enticing offer, which Banks then extended to several associates, including Jim Mellon, a prominent investor and Brexit backer. The Russian embassy was interested in facilitating introductions for some potentially lucrative deals to invest in what Banks referred to in an email as “The Russian Gold Play.” The pitch to the men was made through the ambassador, who introduced them to Siman Povarenkin, a Russian businessman. Povarenkin suggested that several Russian gold and diamond mines were about to be consolidated and partially privatized. The embassy made clear that the deal would be backed by Sberbank, a Russian state bank, subject to U.S. and EU sanctions. The advantage of working through the embassy and Sberbank, the UKIP donors were told, was that it “leads to certain opportunities not available to others.”

  In the time leading up to the announcement that Cambridge Analytica would be working on L
eave.EU’s campaign, the contact with the Russian embassy continued. In an email responding to a meeting invitation from a Russian official, Banks wrote the embassy to say, “Thank you Andy and myself will be delighted to attend lunch to brief the Ambassador on the 6th November. There is massive interest in this referendum in the USA as well, and we are shortly visiting Washington to brief key [sic] on the campaign.” On November 16, 2015, the day after the announcement, Banks and Wigmore were invited back to the embassy for more meetings. We do not know exactly what transpired in the embassy that day, but we do know that the Brexiteers then flew to America to meet with their Republican counterparts and that the Russian embassy was aware of these trips. We also know that Banks and Wigmore were keen on keeping Ambassador Yakovenko updated, saying in one text message to the ambassador in January 2016, “Andy and myself would love to come and update you on the campaign. It’s all happening. All the best, Arron.”

  Why Banks would tell the Russian ambassador about his American political contacts or the Brexit referendum campaign if he was strictly dealing with the Russians on business is unclear, but the meetings certainly had an effect on the Brexiteers. In one chain of correspondence, one of the men discussed helping to create a Brexit-style movement in Ukraine, with the goal of fighting pro-EU narratives in a country Russia has long fought to keep inside its sphere of influence. They later decided against a foray into Ukraine and in one email even discussed whether a sentence in a draft of a press release might be seen as “too overtly Russophile,” but Wigmore nonetheless responded with the suggestion to “send a note of support to the Ambassador.”