Copyright

The names of some characters have been changed to protect their privacy.

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Brittany Kaiser 2019

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Dedication

To the Truth:

May it set us all free.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1 A Late Lunch

2 Crossing Over

3 Power in Nigeria

4 Davos

5 Terms and Conditions

6 Meetings and Reunions

7 The Face of Brexit

8 Facebook

9 Persuasion

10 Under the Influence

11 Brexit Brittany

12 Straitjacket

13 Postmortem

14 Bombs

15 Quake

16 Breakup

17 Inquiry

18 Restart

19 Of Truth and Consequences

20 The Road to Redemption

Epilogue

Picture Section

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Publisher

Prologue

There’s nothing like a car ride with federal agents to make you question your life choices. That was exactly where I found myself the morning of July 18, 2018, winding through the streets of Washington, DC, heading toward an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.

My trip that morning consisted of riding in two cars, actually—the first took me to a coffee shop that the Department of Justice had randomly selected. This had been the driver’s instructions when I initially slid into the backseat: they had chosen a place unexpectedly, without planning it out or telling anyone beforehand. Then, once we were on our way, he was to radio in our destination. At the coffee shop, the second driver was waiting. Like the first driver, he was wearing a dark suit and dark glasses, but there was a second man with him as well. From the second car—outfitted like the first with tinted windows—I watched as the city’s gleaming monuments, bright and sudden and very white, flashed by us like camera bulbs.

When I was settled in the backseat between my two attorneys, it was hard not to consider just how I’d ended up here, on my way to talk to federal prosecutors about my role with the now-infamous political communications firm, Cambridge Analytica. How a situation that I’d entered with the best of intentions for me and my family had ended up so horribly and irrevocably twisted. How in the process of wanting to learn how to use data for good, and while helping my parents through a difficult financial moment, I’d ended up compromising my political and personal values. How a mixture of naïveté and ambition had landed me squarely and disturbingly on the wrong side of history.

A little more than three and a half years earlier, I’d joined Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, the SCL Group—specifically, their humanitarian division, SCL Social—working on projects under the company’s CEO, a man named Alexander Nix. In the years since that leap of faith, nothing had gone as I’d envisioned it. As a lifelong Democrat and devoted activist who had worked for years in support of progressive causes, I had started my work with Cambridge Analytica under the pretense that I would be separate from the company’s Republican client base and outreach. It didn’t take long, though, to find myself gradually pulled away from my principles by the difficulty of securing funding for humanitarian projects and the allure of success on the other side. At Cambridge Analytica there was the promise of real money for the first time in my career, and a way to buy into the vision that I was helping to build a revolutionary political communications company from the ground up.

In the process, I had been exposed to the vast sweep of Cambridge’s efforts, both to acquire data on as many U.S. citizens as possible and to leverage that data to influence Americans’ voting behavior. I’d also come to see how Facebook’s negligent privacy policies and the federal government’s total lack of oversight about personal data had enabled all of Cambridge’s efforts. But, most of all, I understood how Cambridge had taken advantage of all these forces to help elect Donald Trump.

As the car drove, my lawyers and I sat quietly, each of us preparing for what was to come. We all knew I would share any part of my story in full; the question now was what everyone else wanted to know. Mostly people seemed to want answers, both professional and personal, about how this could happen. There was a variety of reasons why I’d allowed my values to become so warped—from my family’s financial situation to the fallacy that Hillary would win regardless of my efforts or those of the company I worked for. But each of those was only part of the story. Perhaps the truest reason of all was the fact that somewhere along the way I’d lost my compass, and then myself. I’d entered this job believing I was a professional who knew how cynical and messy the business of politics was, only to learn time and again how naïve I’d been.

And now, it was on me to make it right.

The car drifted smoothly through the streets of the capital and I began to sense that we were closing in on our destination. I had been warned by the special counsel’s team not to be afraid or surprised if, upon arriving at the secure building where I was to be questioned, throngs of press awaited me. The location, it was said, was no longer secure. Reporters had caught on that the site was being used for the interviewing of witnesses.

A reporter, the driver said, was hiding behind a mailbox. He recognized her from CNN. He had seen her loitering around the building for eight hours at a time. In heels, he said. “What they wouldn’t do!” He exclaimed.

As we neared the place and turned a corner into a garage in the back, the driver told me to turn my face away from the windows, even though they were tinted. In preparation for my conversation with the special counsel, I had been told to clear my day. Completely. I had been told that no one knew how long I would testify or for how long I would then be cross-examined. However long it would be, I was ready. After all, my presence there had been my own doing.

A year earlier, I’d made the decision to come forward, to shine a light in the dark places that I had come to know and to become a whistleblower. I did this because, as I’d come face-to-face with the realities of what Cambridge Analytica had done, I saw all too clearly just how misguided I’d been. I did this because it was the only way to try to make up for what I’d been a part of. But, for more than any other reason, I did this because telling my story to anyone who would listen was the only way we could learn, and hopefully prepare for, what comes next. That was my mission now—to raise the alarm about how Cambridge Analytica had operated and about the dangers that Big Data posed, so that next time voters on both sides would understand the full stakes of the data wars that our democracy is up against.

The driver took us deeper and deeper into the garage, circling, circling farther down.

Why so deep? I wondered. But of course, I already knew: Privacy is a hard thing to come by these days.

1

A Late Lunch

EARLY 2014

The first time I saw Alexander Nix, it was through a thick pane of glass, which is perhaps the best way to view a man like him.

I had shown up late for a business lunch that had been hastily arranged by my close friend Chester Freeman, who was acting, as he often did, as my guardian angel. I was there to meet with three associates of Chester’s, two men I knew and one I didn’t, all of whom were looking for talent at the intersection of politics and social media. I counted this area as part of my political expertise, having worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign; though I was still busy researching my dissertation for my PhD, I was also on the market for a well-paying job. I had kept the fact secret from nearly everyone except Chester, but I was in urgent need of a stable source of income, to take care of myself and help out my family back in Chicago. This lunch was a way for me to obtain a potentially short-term and lucrative consultancy, and I was grateful to Chester for the well-timed assist.

By the time I arrived, however, lunch was nearly over. I’d had appointments that morning, and though I’d hustled to get there, I was late, and I found Chester and the two friends of his I already knew huddled together in the cold outside the Mayfair sushi restaurant, smoking post-meal cigarettes in view of the neighborhood’s Georgian mansions, stately hotels, and expensive shops. The two men were from a country in Central Asia, and like Chester, they, too, were passing through London on business. They had reached out to him for help in connecting with someone who could aid them with digital communications (email and social media campaigns) in an important upcoming election in their country. Though I knew neither of them well, both were powerful men I’d met before and liked, and by gathering us there for the lunch, Chester intended only to do all of us a favor.

Now, in welcome, he rolled me my own cigarette and leaned in to light it for me. Chester, his two friends, and I caught up with one another, chatting brightly and shielding ourselves from the rising wind. As Chester stood there in the afternoon light, ruddy cheeked and happy, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his journey. He’d recently been appointed as a diplomat for business and trade relations by the prime minister of a small island nation, but back when I’d first met him, at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, he’d been an idealistic, shaggy-haired nineteen-year-old wearing a blue dashiki. The convention had been in Denver that year, and Chester and I had both been standing in a long line outside Broncos Stadium, waiting to see Hillary Clinton endorse Barack Obama as the party’s nominee, when we bumped into each other and started talking.

We had come a long way since then, and each of us now had a hodgepodge of political experience under our proverbial belts. He and I had long shared the dream of “growing up” to do international political work and diplomacy, and recently he’d proudly sent me a picture of the certificate he received upon his diplomatic appointment. And while the Chester who now stood before me outside the restaurant looked the part of a newly minted diplomat, I still recognized him as the genius chatterbox friend I’d known from the beginning, as close to me as a brother.

As we smoked, Chester apologized to me for the last-minute, cobbled-together lunch. And by way of acknowledging what a motley crew he’d assembled there, he gestured to the plate glass window, through which I glimpsed the third person he’d invited—the man, still seated inside, who would change my life and, later, the world.

The fellow appeared to be an average, cut-from-the-cloth Mayfair business type, cell phone held tightly to his ear, but as Chester explained, he was not just any businessman. His name was Alexander Nix and he was the CEO of a British-based elections company. The company, Chester went on, was called the SCL Group, short for Strategic Communications Laboratories, which struck me as the sort of name a board of directors would give a glorified advertising firm it wanted to sound vaguely scientific. In point of fact, Chester said, SCL was a wildly successful company. Over a span of twenty-five years, it had procured defense contracts worldwide and run elections in countries across the globe. Its basic function, he said, was putting into power presidents and prime ministers and, in many cases, ensuring that they stayed there. Most recently, the SCL Group had been working on the reelection campaign of the prime minister for whom Chester now worked, which was how I presumed Chester had come to know this Nix character.

It took me a moment to digest it all. Chester’s intention in putting us all together that afternoon was certainly a tangle of potentially conflicting interests. I was there to pitch my services to the two friends, but it now seemed clear that the elections CEO was there to do so as well. And it occurred to me that in addition to my lateness, my youth and lack of experience no doubt meant that, instead, the CEO would likely already have secured the business I wished to have with Chester’s two friends.

I peered through the window at the man. I saw him now as someone more than average. With his phone still to his ear, he suddenly looked terribly serious and consummately professional. Clearly, I was outclassed and outdone. I was disappointed, but I tried hard not to let it show.

“I thought you might like to meet him,” Chester offered. “You know,” he went on, “he’s a good connection and all that,” meaning, perhaps, future paying work. “Or,” Chester suggested, alternatively, “at least interesting fodder for your dissertation.”

I nodded. He was probably right. As disappointed as I might be about what I presumed was already a lost business opportunity, I was academically curious. What did the CEO of such a company actually do? I’d never heard of an elections company.

From my time with Obama and from my recent volunteer work in London with the Democratic Party expat organization Democrats Abroad and with the super PAC Ready for Hillary, my own experience was that campaign managers ran campaigns, working in their own country with, of course, the support of a small but elite group of highly paid experts and an army of underpaid staff, volunteers, and unpaid interns, as I had been. After the 2008 Obama campaign, I’d certainly come across a few people who later became professional campaign consultants, such as David Axelrod, who had been chief strategist for Obama and had gone on to advise the British Labour Party; and Jim Messina, once called “the most powerful person in Washington that you haven’t heard of,”¹ who had helmed Obama’s 2012 campaign, had become Obama’s White House chief of staff, and would go on to advise foreign leaders ranging from David Cameron to Theresa May. Still, it had never occurred to me that there existed entire companies dedicated to the goal of getting people elected to political office abroad.

I regarded the figure through the restaurant’s plate glass window with equal parts curiosity and puzzlement. Chester was right. I might not get any work at the moment, but maybe I would in the future. And I certainly could use the afternoon as research.

The restaurant was pleasant enough, brightly lit from above, with pale wooden floors and cream-colored walls along which Japanese artwork had been tidily hung. Approaching the table, I surveyed the man whom I had been watching from outside. He’d finished his phone call, and Chester made the introductions.

At closer range now, I could see that Nix wasn’t your typical Mayfair business type after all. He was what the British call “posh.” Immaculate and traditional, he was dressed in a dark, bespoke navy suit and a woven silk tie knotted at the neck of a starched button-down—pure Savile Row, right down to his shoes, which had been shined to a blinding polish. He had beside him a well-worn-in leather briefcase with an old-fashioned brass lock; it looked like it could have been his grandfather’s. Though I was a full-blooded American, I had lived in the United Kingdom ever since I graduated from high school, and I knew a member of the British upper crust when I saw one.

Alexander Nix, though, was what I’d call upper-upper crust. He was handsome in a British boarding school sort of way—Eton, as it turned out—and he was trim, with a sharp, arrow-like chin and the slightly bony build of someone who doesn’t spend any time at the gym. His eyes were a striking, opaque bright blue, and his complexion was smooth and unwrinkled, as though he’d never known a moment of worry in his life. In other words, it was the face of utter privilege. And as he stood before me in that West End London restaurant, I could easily have imagined him helmeted astride a galloping polo pony with a custom-made wooden mallet in hand.

I tried to guess his age. If he were as successful as Chester had claimed, he was likely older than I was by at least a decade, and his posture, equal parts upright and confident, yet somehow also relaxed, suggested an early middle-aged life, one that was aristocratic with a pinch of meritocracy thrown in. He looked as though he’d come into the world with a pretty good leg up, but that he’d used those legs, if Chester was right, in order to stand on his own two feet.

Nix greeted me warmly, as if I were an old friend, shaking my hand with vigor. As we took our seats at a large table tucked away from most of the others in the restaurant, he quickly, though not impolitely, turned his attention to Chester’s other two friends and effortlessly picked up the thread of what must have been the conversation they were having before I arrived.

With little revving up, Nix entered full-pitch mode. I recognized what that was because I knew how to do it myself. In order to support myself through all my studies, I’d taught myself how to pitch clients for consulting work, although I could see how skilled Nix was at it. I had neither half his charm nor his experience, and I certainly didn’t have his polish. His delivery was as bright as the shine on his expensive shoes.

I listened as he laid out the long history of the company for which he worked. The SCL Group had been established in 1993. Since then, it had run more than two hundred elections and had carried out defense, political, and humanitarian projects in some fifty countries worldwide; when Nix listed them, it sounded like the roster of countries on a United Nations subcommittee: Afghanistan, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Latvia, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago, and more. Nix himself had been with SCL for eleven years at that point.

The sheer accumulation of experience and the volume of his work was astonishing to me, and humbling. I couldn’t help but note that I was six years old the year of SCL’s founding, and in the period of time when I was in kindergarten, grade school, and high school, Nix had been part of building a small but powerful empire. While next to those of my peers, my résumé looked pretty good—I’d done a great deal of international work while living abroad and since my time interning on the Obama campaign—but I couldn’t compete with Nix.

“So, we’re in America now,” Nix was saying, with barely contained enthusiasm.

Just recently, SCL had established a nascent presence there, and Nix’s short-term aim was to run as many of the upcoming American midterms in November 2014 as he could, and then go on and corner the elections business in the United States as a whole, including a presidential campaign if he could get his hands on it.

It was an audacious thing to say. But he had already secured the midterm campaigns of some notable candidates and causes. He’d signed the likes of a congressman from Arkansas by the name of Tom Cotton, a wunderkind Harvard grad and Iraq War veteran who was running for a seat in the Senate. He’d signed the entire slate of GOP candidates across all the races in the state of North Carolina. And he’d snagged the business of a powerful and deep-pocketed political action committee, or super PAC, belonging to UN ambassador John Bolton, a controversial figure on the right with whom I was all too familiar.

I had lived in the United Kingdom for years, but I knew at least some of the American neoconservative standouts such as Bolton. He was the kind of figure it was hard to ignore: a hawkish lightning rod who, along with a host of other neocons, had recently been revealed to be the brains and cash behind a shadowy organization called Groundswell, the intention of which, among other things, was to undermine the Obama presidency and hype the Hillary Clinton Benghazi controversy,² the latter issue with which I was personally familiar. I had worked in Libya and had known Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who died there due in part to the poor decision making of the U.S. State Department, I thought.

I sat sipping my tea and took careful note of Nix’s list of clients. At a glance, they may have sounded like many other Republicans, but the politics of each was so profoundly the opposite of my own beliefs that they formed a veritable rogues’ gallery of nemeses to most of my heroes, such as Obama and Hillary. The people Nix named were, to my mind, political pariahs—or even better, piranhas, fish in whose pond I could never have imagined myself taking a safe swim.

Never mind that the special interest groups Nix was working for, with causes ranging from gun rights to pro-life advocacy, were anathema to me. For all my life, I had supported causes that leaned distinctly to the left.

Nix was thrilled with himself, with his company, and with the people and groups he’d managed to lasso. You could see it in his eyes. He was terribly busy, he said, so busy and so hopeful for the future that the SCL Group had had to spin off an entirely new company just to manage the work in the United States alone.

That new company was called Cambridge Analytica.

It had been in business for just under a year, but the world had best pay attention to it, Nix said. Cambridge Analytica was about to cause a revolution.

The revolution Nix had in mind had to do with Big Data and analytics.

In the digital age, data was “the new oil.” Data collection was an “arms race,” he said. Cambridge Analytica had amassed an arsenal of data on the American public of unprecedented size and scope, the largest, as far as he knew, anyone had ever assembled. The company’s monster databases held between two thousand and five thousand individual data points (pieces of personal information) on every individual in the United States over the age of eighteen. That amounted to some 240 million people.

Nix paused and looked at Chester’s friends and at me, as if to let the number sink in.

But merely having Big Data wasn’t the solution, he said. Knowing what to do with it was the key. That involved more scientific and precise ways of putting people into categories: “Democrat,” “environmentalist,” “optimist,” “activist,” and the like. And for years, the SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, had been identifying and sorting people using the most sophisticated method in behavioral psychology, which gave it the capability of turning what was otherwise just a mountain of information about the American populace into a gold mine.

Nix told us about his in-house army of data scientists and psychologists who had learned precisely how to know whom they wanted to message, what messaging to send them, and exactly where to reach them. He had hired the most brilliant data scientists in the world, people who could laser in on individuals wherever they were to be found (on their cell phones, computers, tablets, on television) and through any kind of medium you could imagine (from audio to social media), using “microtargeting.” Cambridge Analytica could isolate individuals and literally cause them to think, vote, and act differently from how they had before. It spent its clients’ money on communications that really worked, with measurable results, Nix said.

That, he said, is how Cambridge Analytica was going to win elections in America.

While Nix spoke, I glanced over at Chester, hoping to make eye contact in order to figure out what opinion he might have formed of Nix, but I wasn’t able to catch his attention. As for Chester’s friends, I could see from the looks on their faces that they were duly wowed as Nix went on about his American company.

Cambridge Analytica was filling an important niche in the market. It had been formed to meet pent-up, unmet demand. The Obama Democrats had dominated the digital communications space since 2007. The Republicans lagged sorely behind in technology innovation. After their crushing defeat in 2012, Cambridge Analytica had come along to level the playing field in a representative democracy by giving the Republicans the technology they lacked.

As for what Nix could do for Chester’s friends, whose country didn’t have Big Data, due to lack of internet penetration, SCL could get that started for them, and it could use social media to get their message out. Meanwhile, it could also do more traditional campaigning, everything from writing policy platforms and political manifestos to canvassing door-to-door to analyzing target audiences.

The men complimented Nix. I was well enough acquainted with the two by now, though, to see how his pitch had overwhelmed them. I knew their country hadn’t the infrastructure to carry out what Nix was planning to do in America, and his strategy didn’t sound particularly affordable, even to two men with reasonably deep pockets.

For my part, I was shocked at what Nix had shared—stunned, in fact. I’d never heard anything like it before. He’d described nothing less than using people’s personal information to influence them and, hence, to change economies and political systems around the world. He’d made it sound easy to sway voters to make irreversible decisions not against their will but, at the very least, against their usual judgment, and to change their habitual behavior.

At the same time, I admitted, if only to myself, that I was gobsmacked by his company’s capabilities. Since my first days in political campaigning, I had developed a special interest in the subject of Big Data analytics. I wasn’t a developer or a data scientist, but like other Millennials, I had been an early adopter of all sorts of technology and had lived a digital life from my earliest years. I was predisposed to see data as an integral part of my world, a given, at its worst benign and utilitarian, and at its best possibly transformative.

I myself had used data, even rudimentarily in elections. Aside from being an unpaid intern on Obama’s New Media team, I had volunteered for Howard Dean’s primary race four years earlier, and then both John Kerry’s presidential campaign, as well for both the DNC itself and Obama’s senatorial run. Even basic use of data to write emails to undecided voters on what they cared about was “revolutionary” at the time. Howard Dean’s campaign broke all existing fund-raising records by reaching people online for the first time.

My interest in data was coupled with my firsthand knowledge of revolutions. A lifelong bookworm, I’d been a student forever but had always engaged in the wider world. In fact, I had always felt that it was imperative for academics to find ways to spin the threads of the high-minded ideas they came up with in the ivory tower into cloth that was of real use to others.

Even though it involved a peaceful transfer of power, you could say that the Obama election was my first experience of a revolution. I had been a part of the spirited celebration in Chicago on the night Obama won his first presidential election, and that street party of millions felt like a political coup.

I’d also had the privilege, and had sometimes experienced the danger, of being on the ground in countries where revolutions were happening silently, had just broken out, or were about to. As an undergraduate, I studied for a year in Hong Kong, where I volunteered with activists shuttling refugees from North Korea via an underground railroad through China and out to safety. Immediately upon graduating from college, I spent time in parts of South Africa, where I worked on projects with former guerrilla strategists who’d helped overthrow apartheid. And in the aftermath of the Arab spring, I worked in post-Gaddafi Libya, and have continued to be interested and involved in independent diplomacy for that country for many years. I guess you could say I had the uncanny habit of putting myself in the middle of places during their most turbulent times.

I had also studied how data could be used for good, looking at how people empowered by it had used it to seek social justice, in some cases to expose corruption and bad actors. In 2011, I had written my master’s thesis using leaked government data from Wikileaks as my primary source material. The data showed what had happened during the Iraq War, exposing numerous cases of crimes against humanity.

From 2010 onward the “hacktivist” (i.e., activist hacker) Julian Assange, founder of the organization, had declared virtual war on those that had waged literal war on humanity by widely disseminating top secret and classified files that proved damning to the American government and the U.S. military. The data dump, called “The Iraq War Files,” prompted public discourse on protection of civil liberties and international human rights from abuses of power.

Now, as part of my PhD dissertation in diplomacy and human rights, and a continuation of my earlier work, I was going to combine my interest in Big Data with my experience of political turbulence, looking at how data could save lives. I was particularly interested in something called “preventive diplomacy.” The United Nations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) across the globe were looking for ways to use real-time data to prevent atrocities such as the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994, where earlier action could have been taken if the data had been available to decision makers. “Preventive” data monitoring—of everything from the price of bread to the increased use of racial slurs on Twitter—could give peacekeeping organizations the information they needed to identify, monitor, and peacefully intervene in high-risk societies before conflicts escalated. The proper gathering and analysis of data could prevent human rights violations, war crimes, and even war itself.

Needless to say, I understood the implications of the capabilities Nix was alleging the SCL Group possessed. His talk of data, combined with his words about revolutions, left me unsettled about his intentions and the risks his methods might pose. This made me reluctant to share what I knew about data or what my experience with it was, and I was grateful that day in London to see that he was already wrapping up with Chester’s friends and preparing to leave.

Fortunately, Nix had paid me little attention. When he wasn’t talking about his company, we had chatted in general about my work on campaigns, but I was relieved he hadn’t picked my brain about anything specific to do with Obama’s New Media campaign, any of my work on prevention and exposure of war crimes and criminal justice, or my passion for the use of data in preventive diplomacy. I saw Nix for what he was: someone who used data as a means to an end and who worked, it was clear, for many people in the United States whom I considered my opposition. I seemed to have dodged a bullet.

I thought Chester’s friends wouldn’t choose to work with Nix. His presence and presentation were too large and extravagant, too big for them and for the room. His ebullience had been charming and persuasive; he had even tempered his immodesty with exquisitely honed British manners, but his bluster and ambition were out of proportion with their needs. Nix, though, seemed oblivious to the men’s reserve. As he packed up to leave the restaurant, he prattled on about how he could help them with specially segmented audiences.

When Nix got up from the table, I realized I’d still have time to pitch Chester’s friends. Once Nix was out the door, I intended to approach them now privately, with a simple and modest proposal. But as Nix began to go, Chester gestured to me that I ought to join him in saying a proper good-bye.

Outside in the cold, with the afternoon light waning, Chester and I stood with Nix in a few long seconds of awkward silence. But for as long as I had known him, Chester had never been able to tolerate silence of any length.

“Hey, my Democrat consultant friend, you should hang out with my Republican consultant friend!” he blurted out.

Nix flashed Chester a sudden and strange look, a combination of alarm and annoyance. He clearly didn’t like being caught off guard or told what to do. Still, he reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a messy stack of business cards and began shuffling through them. The cards he’d taken out clearly weren’t his. They were of varied sizes and colors, likely from businessmen and potential clients like Chester’s visiting friends, other men to whom he must have pitched his wares on similar Mayfair afternoons.

Finally, when he fished out one of his own cards, he handed it to me with a flourish, waiting while I paused to take it in.

“Alexander James Ashburner Nix,” the card read. From the weight of the paper stock on which it was printed to its serif typeface, it screamed royalty.

“Let me get you drunk and steal your secrets,” Alexander Nix said, and laughed, but I could tell he was only half joking.

2

Crossing Over

OCTOBER–DECEMBER 2014

In the months after I first met Alexander Nix, I still wasn’t able to secure any work that would substantially improve my family’s current financial situation. In October 2014, I reached out again to Chester for help in finding the right kind of part-time job, and he responded by arranging a meeting for me with his prime minister.

It was a rare opportunity for me to offer digital and social media strategy to a nation’s leader. The prime minister was a multiterm incumbent running for reelection, but this time he was facing strong opposition in his country and was concerned about losing. Chester wanted to introduce me to him to see how I might be of help.

This was how, quite inadvertently, I ran into Alexander Nix a second time.

I was in the lounge of a private jet hangar at Gatwick Airport, waiting for a morning meeting with the prime minister, when the door of the lounge flew open and Nix burst in. I was early for my meeting; his was the first one of the day, and of course it had to have been scheduled before mine. My poor luck again.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, his expression both threatening and threatened. He clutched his beaten-up briefcase to his chest and leaned backward in mock horror. “Are you stalking me?”

I laughed.

When I told him what I was doing there, he let me know that he had been working with the prime minister on the past few elections. He was fascinated to hear that I was there “hoping” to do the same thing.

We exchanged some small talk. And when he was called in to his meeting, he tossed an invitation over his shoulder. “You should come to the SCL office sometime and learn more about what we do,” he said, and then he was gone.

Although I was still wary of him, I would indeed choose to visit Alexander Nix at the SCL office. A few days after our chance encounter at Gatwick, Chester called to say that “Alexander” had been in touch, and could the three of us get together and perhaps chat about what we all might be thinking about the prime minister’s upcoming election?

I found myself strangely and pleasantly surprised at the idea. Something about running into me at the hangar must have caught Alexander’s attention. Perhaps he wasn’t used to boldness in someone of my age and gender. Whatever his reason, the proposed meeting was about working together, which struck me as far more positive than working against each other, given that he obviously had the upper hand and especially because I truly needed work.

In mid-October, Chester and I visited the SCL office together. It was tucked away off Green Park, near Shepherd Market, down an alley and off a road called Yarmouth Place, and it occupied a worn-looking building that appeared not to have been rehabbed since the 1960s. The building was filled with offices of unknown small start-ups, such as the drinkable-vitamins company SCL shared a hallway with. Wooden crates filled with tiny bottles nearly blocked our way into the ground-floor conference room, which was shared among all tenants and needed to be rented by the hour—not exactly what I expected of such a seemingly-posh crew of political consultants.

But it was that room where Chester and I met with Alexander and Kieran Ward, whom Alexander introduced to us as his director of communications. Alexander said Kieran had been on the ground for SCL in many foreign elections; he appeared to be only in his mid-thirties, but the expression in his eyes told me they had seen a lot.

There was a great deal at stake in the election of the prime minister, Alexander told us. The PM had “an inflated ego,” he said. Chester nodded in assent. This was the PM’s fifth bid for office, and amid dissatisfaction, his people were calling for him to step down. In his meeting with him at Gatwick, Alexander had warned the PM that if he “didn’t batten down the hatches,” he was certain to lose, but there was little time left. The election was coming up in a few months, after the turn of the New Year.

What SCL was hoping to do, Alexander began, and then he stopped himself. He looked at Chester and me. “But you don’t even know what we do, do you?” and before we knew it, he’d slipped out the door and slipped back in again, laptop in hand. He turned down the lights and pulled up a PowerPoint presentation that he projected onto a big screen on the wall.

“Our children,” he began, clicker in hand, “won’t live in a world with ‘blanket advertising,’” he said, referring to the messaging intended for a broad audience and sent out in a giant, homogenous blast. “Blanket advertising is just too imprecise.”

He pulled up a slide that read, “Traditional Advertising Builds Brands and Provides Social Proof but Doesn’t Change Behavior.” On the left-hand side of the slide was an advertisement for Harrods department store that read 50% OFF SALE in large type. On the right were the McDonald’s and Burger King logos, arches and a crown.

These kinds of ads, he explained, either were simply informational or, if they even worked, merely “proved” an existing customer’s loyalty to a brand. The approach was antiquated.

“The SCL Group offers messaging built for a twenty-first-century world,” Alexander said. Traditional marketing like these ads would never work.

If a client wanted to reach new customers, “What you have to do,” he explained, was not just reach them but “convert” them. “How can McDonald’s get somebody to eat one of their burgers when they’ve never done so before?”

He shrugged and clicked to the next slide.

“The Holy Grail of communications,” he said, “is when you can actually start to change behavior.”

The next slide read, “Behavioral Communications.” On the left was an image of a beach with a square, white sign that read, “Public Beach Ends Here.” On the right was a bright yellow, triangular placard resembling a railroad crossing sign. It read, “Warning. Shark Sighted.”

Which one was more effective? The difference was almost comical.

“Using your knowledge of people’s fear of being eaten by a shark, you know that the second would stop people from swimming in your piece of sea,” Alexander said. Your piece of sea? I thought. I suppose he’s used to pitching to those that have their own.

He continued without pause: SCL wasn’t an ad agency. It was a “behavior change agency,” he explained.

In elections, campaigns lost billions of dollars using messages like the Private Beach sign, messages that didn’t really work.

In the next slide was an embedded video and an image, both campaign ads. The video was composed of a series of stills of Mitt Romney’s face and clips of audiences applauding over a soundtrack of a Romney speech. It concluded with the phrase “Strong New Leadership.” The image was of a parched front lawn littered with signs on which candidates’ names had been printed. Romney, Santorum, Gingrich—it almost didn’t matter who it was. It was so clear how static the signs were, how easy to ignore.

Alexander let out a little chuckle. You see, he said. None of these signs “converts” anyone. He held out his arms. “If you’re a Democrat and you see a Romney yard sign, you don’t suddenly have this ‘Road to Damascus’ moment and change party.”

We laughed.

I sat there amazed. Here I’d been in communications for many years, and I’d never thought to examine the messaging this way. I’d never heard anyone talk about the flatness of contemporary advertising. And until this moment, I had seen the Obama New Media campaign of 2008, for which I’d been a dedicated intern, as so sophisticated and savvy.

That campaign had been the first to use social media to communicate with voters. We’d promoted Senator Obama on Myspace, YouTube, Pinterest, and Flickr. I’d even created the then-senator’s first Facebook page, and I’d always treasured the memory of the day Obama came into the Chicago office, pointed at his profile photo on my computer screen, and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s me!”

Now I saw that, however cutting-edge we’d been at the time, in Alexander’s terms, we had been information-heavy, repetitive, and negligible. We hadn’t converted anyone, really. Most of our audience consisted of self-identified Obama supporters. They’d sent us their contact information or we gathered it from them with their permission once they posted messages on our sites. We hadn’t reached them; they had reached us.

Our ads had been based on “social proof,” Alexander explained; they had merely reinforced preexisting “brand” loyalty. We had posted endlessly on social media Obama content just like the Private Beach sign, the repetitive Romney video, and the lame lawn signs that didn’t cause “behavioral change” but were “information-heavy” and provided mere “social proof” that our audience loved Barack Obama. And once we had Obama lovers’ attention, we sent them even more information-heavy and detailed messaging. Our intention might have been to keep them interested or to make sure they voted, but according to Alexander’s paradigm, we had merely flooded them with data they didn’t need.

“Dear so-and-so,” I remembered writing. “Thank you so much for writing to Senator Obama. Barack’s out on the campaign trail. I’m Brittany, and I’m responding on his behalf. Here are some policy links for you on blah, blah, blah, blah blah.”

As enthusiastic as we had been—and our New Media team was hundreds strong and the campaign occupied two full floors of a skyscraper in downtown Chicago that summer—I saw now that our messaging was simple, perhaps even crude.

Alexander pulled up another slide, one with charts and graphs showing how his company did much more than create effective messaging. It sent that messaging to the right people based on scientific methods. Before campaigns even started, SCL conducted research and employed data scientists who analyzed data and precisely identified the client’s target audiences. The emphasis here, of course, was on the heterogeneity of the audience.

I had been particularly proud that the Obama campaign was known for how it segmented its audience, separating them according to the issues they cared about, the states in which they lived, and whether they were male or female. But seven years had elapsed since then. Alexander’s company now went far beyond traditional demographics.

He pulled up a slide that read, “Audience Targeting Is Changing.” On the left was a picture of the actor Jon Hamm as Don Draper, the 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executive from the AMC series Mad Men.

“Old-school advertising in the 1960s,” Alexander said, “is just loads of smart people like us, sitting around a table like this, coming up with ideas like ‘Coca-Cola Is It’ and ‘Beans Means Heinz’ and spending all our clients’ money pushing that out into the world, hoping that it works.”

But whereas 1960s communication was all “top down,” 2014 advertising was “bottom up.” With all the advances in data science and predictive analytics, we could know so much more about people than we ever imagined, and Alexander’s company looked at people to determine what they needed to hear in order to be influenced in the direction you, the client, wanted them to go.

He clicked over to yet another slide. It read, “Data Analytics, Social Sciences, Behavior and Psychology.”

Cambridge Analytica had grown out of the SCL Group, which itself had evolved from something called the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, or BDI, a consortium of some sixty academic institutions and hundreds of psychologists. Cambridge Analytica now employed in-house psychologists who, instead of pollsters, designed political surveys and used the results to segment people. They used “psychographics” to understand people’s complex personalities and devise ways to trigger their behavior.

Then, through “data modeling,” the team’s data gurus created algorithms that could accurately predict those people’s behavior when they received certain messages that had been carefully crafted precisely for them.

“What message does Brittany need to hear?” Alexander asked me, and clicked over to another slide. We need to create “adverts just for Brittany,” he said, looked at me again, and smiled. “Just for the things she cares about and not for anything else.”

At the end of his presentation, he pulled up an image of Nelson Mandela.

Mandela was in my pantheon of superheroes. I had worked with one of his best friends in South Africa, someone who had been imprisoned with him on Robben Island. I had even helped run a Women’s Day event in South Africa for Mandela’s longtime partner, Winnie, but I’d never gotten the chance to shake the hand of the man himself. Now, here he was, right before me.

Alexander said that in 1994, the work SCL did with Mandela and the African National Congress had stopped election violence at the polls. That had affected the outcome of one of the most important elections in the history of South Africa. On the screen was a ringing endorsement from Mandela himself.

How could I not have been impressed?

Alexander had to jump out of the meeting abruptly—something had come up—but he left us in the capable hands of Kieran Ward, who walked us through more of what SCL did.

It had started out running elections in South Africa, and now it ran nine or ten elections each year in places such as Kenya, Saint Kitts, Santa Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago. Kieran had been on the ground in some of those countries.

In 1998, SCL had expanded into the corporate and commercial world, and after September 11, 2001, it had begun to work in defense, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NATO, the CIA, the FBI, and the State Department. The company had also sent experts to the Pentagon to train others in its techniques.

SCL had a social division as well. It provided public health communications, in case studies where he explained they persuaded people in African nations to use condoms and people in India to drink clean water. It had had contracts with UN agencies and with ministries of health worldwide.

The more I heard about SCL, the more I was taken with it. And when we regrouped and Alexander joined us for dinner at a nearby restaurant, I learned more about him and warmed to him as well.

He had a much broader view of the world than I’d initially thought. He had a degree in art history from Manchester University. After graduating, he had worked in finance at a century-old securities merchant bank in Mexico, a country I loved dearly. He’d gone on to work also in Argentina, then had returned to England, thinking he could make much more of the SCL Group than it currently was—which was more a loose collection of projects than a company, really. He had built it from almost scratch into a mini-empire in just over a decade.

Alexander had loved running elections in the Caribbean and Kenya. And when he mentioned that he had overseen the company’s work in West Africa, I was moved. In Ghana, SCL had undertaken the largest research project on health in that country, and since my own most recent work had been on health care reform in North Africa, we found common ground.

I shared with him what I had been working on, and I told him about some of my work in South Africa, Hong Kong, The Hague, the European Parliament, and for NGOs such as Amnesty International. I still said nothing about my campaign work, and I suppose that hung in the air between us, but I wasn’t ready. Cambridge Analytica was working for the opposition.

Still, I enjoyed the conversation, and next to me, all evening long, Chester boasted so much about my accomplishments that he was a veritable walking, talking recommendation letter.

“Well,” Alexander said when he heard all that I’d done. “A person like you doesn’t wait around for new opportunities, does she?”

I was only half surprised when Chester called the next morning and said that Alexander had gotten in touch with him and asked if he thought I’d be willing to come back in for a formal interview. I knew that Alexander likely had few occasions to meet a young woman like me, not because I was so rare a bird but because of the world in which he lived.

I was a twenty-six-year-old American woman who seemed unafraid to have entered high-stakes, high-testosterone arenas. He had emerged from a closed society of young, privileged men destined to operate in a world of others who looked just like him.

I was of a mixed mind, though, about a job at Cambridge Analytica.

It was exhilarating to understand how such a small company in Britain could be so bold and have such an impact on political systems, cultures, and economies. I was intrigued by the sophisticated technology and its potential to be used for social good. But I was concerned about the company’s current clients in America. How could I not be? I was who I was: a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat.

But I needed a job. A scrappy self-starter, I wasn’t afraid of doing things that might make me money, even if they weren’t my first choice. I’d pushed myself out of my comfort zone at an early age, volunteering on Howard Dean’s 2003 primary campaign bid for the presidency and then on John Kerry’s run when I was only fifteen years old. To support the unpaid work I was passionate about, throughout university in the UK, I’d taken odd jobs, such as training in wine as an in-house sommelier, and less glamorously waited tables—and when really stuck for money, I’d taken bartending and cleaning shifts to remove vomit from the floors of gritty local pubs.

Then, when I was beginning my MPhil/PhD studies in 2012, I leapt to more entrepreneurial endeavors. I started up an events company that put government officials and businesses in conversation with Libyans to discuss how to help stabilize that country in the wake of the Arab Spring. I had gone on to work on a part-time basis as director of operations for a UK trade and investment association that specialized in fostering relationships between the United Kingdom and nations, such as Ethiopia, where it was difficult to do business or easily engage in diplomacy.

Earlier in 2014, while I was still working on my doctorate, I had aspired to find a plum job with the Ready for Hillary (RFH) super PAC and with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign itself, working all the connections I had cultivated over the years in the DNC and, more recently, in Democrats Abroad in London. But none of my recent efforts to work with the Democrats or with liberal or humanitarian causes had led to opportunities that would truly pay the bills. All the (poorly paid) positions at the small RFH super PAC were already filled, and the Hillary campaign wasn’t up and running yet.

I’d then pursued a dream job working for my friend John Jones QC, a barrister at the Doughty Street Chambers and one of the world’s most prominent human rights attorneys. (On his team was the equally formidable Amal Clooney, née Alamuddin.)

John was an unparalleled champion of global civil liberties. He’d defended some of the world’s most controversial bad actors, from Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, second son of Muammar Gaddafi, to Liberian president Charles Taylor. At tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, and Cambodia, he’d confronted thorny issues such as counterterrorism, war crimes, and extraditions, and he did this in the service of upholding international human rights law. More recently, he had taken on the case of WikiLeaks founder (and the source of primary material for one of my master’s theses) Julian Assange, who was evading extradition to Sweden and had sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

John and I had become friends. We talked about and bonded over our admiration for the infamous whistleblower, and we joked about the rivalry between the prep schools we’d attended; he was British but had attended Phillips Exeter Academy, the rival school to my own, Phillips Academy Andover, both started in the late eighteenth century by two members of the Phillips family. I didn’t yet have my credentials as a barrister, but John had kindly seen in me keenness and the potential to do good work, and he’d been trying to find funding for a position he wanted me to fill in The Hague, where he aimed to open a new branch of Doughty Street called Doughty Street International.

But the money hadn’t come through yet. Even if it had, it wouldn’t have been the type of money commercial lawyers make. That was the world of human rights work. John and his small family sacrificed for their belief in the law, living much more modestly than other world-famous lawyers, as John did pro bono work most of the time. As much out of principle as practicality, he was a no-frills vegetarian who rode his bicycle everywhere.

While I had imagined a close-to-the-bone and ethically authentic life like John’s someday, that didn’t seem in the cards right now. Back home, my parents were on the verge of poverty, the culmination of events over a decade in the making.

For many years, my father’s family owned commercial real estate and a string of upscale health clubs and spas; my mother had been able to stay home to raise her children herself; and my younger sister, Natalie, and I had grown up in a privileged upper-middle-class household, enjoying a private school education, dance and music lessons, and family trips to Disney World and Caribbean beaches.

But when the subprime mortgage crisis hit in 2008, my father’s family businesses suffered. A number of other problems occurred, and these, too, had been out of my parents’ control. Soon, we had no savings left. Years before, my mother had been an employee at Enron, and when that Houston house of cards collapsed in 2001, she lost all her retirement money.

My father was now jobless; my mother, who hadn’t worked in twenty-six years, had to retrain herself to reenter the workforce. In the meantime, my parents refinanced our family home and sold off their assets until, when the bank came calling, they had literally nothing at all but the belongings in our house.

During all this, something deeply troubling was happening to my father’s state of mind. He was strangely emotionless. When we tried to speak to him about what was going on, he wasn’t really all there. His eyes were eerily vacant. He spent his days in bed or in front of the television, and if anyone asked him how things were, he answered flatly, saying that things were fine. We assumed it was clinical depression, but he refused to seek therapy or take medication. He refused even to be seen by a doctor. We wanted to shake him, to wake him up, but we felt helpless to reach him.

By the time Alexander Nix called Chester to invite me in for a job interview at SCL, in October 2014, my mother had found a job as a flight attendant. She’d had to move to Ohio, where the airline was based, and she was living in hotels with her coworkers. Back home, my father was surviving on food stamps. My mother, who had grown up with limited resources on American military bases, never thought she’d go back to struggling. But here it was, staring us in the face.

As much as I had my reservations about SCL, I couldn’t afford to be picky. I would somehow try to balance finishing my PhD with working as a consultant. I needed a job that could help sustain me and my family. I was thinking not only of the present, but of the long term as well.

Alexander was landed gentry. In the eighteenth century, his family had its hand in the famed East India Company. He was married to a Norwegian shipping heiress.

Although I had been raised with plenty of privilege, there wasn’t anything left to draw on. I was now a poor student who had a habit of overdrawing my already meager bank account, with nothing in the way of savings. My home was a ramshackle flat in East London. I had plenty of work bona fides, but I knew if I wanted to run around with Alexander, I needed to spruce myself up.

I researched new developments in digital campaigning and data analysis. I brushed up on nonprofit marketing and campaigning techniques. Then I pressed my best suit, a hand-me-down from my mother’s Enron days.

When I arrived for my interview, Alexander was in the middle of an urgent phone call. He thrust into my hands an oversized, nearly sixty-page document and told me to read it while I waited. It was a mock-up for a new SCL brochure, and it was a veritable encyclopedia. I thumbed through it, knowing I’d get to the rest of it later, but I zeroed in on a section about how the company used “psyops” in defense and humanitarian campaigns.

I was familiar with the term, and it intrigued rather than troubled me. Short for “psychological operations,” which itself was a euphemism for “psychological warfare,” psyops can be used in war, but its applications for peacekeeping appealed to me. Influencing “hostile” audiences can sound terrifying, but psyops, for example, can be used to help shift young men in Islamic nations away from joining Al-Qaeda or to de-escalate conflict between tribal factions on Election Day.

I was still gobbling up the information in the brochure when Alexander invited me into his office. I expected the inner sanctum of a man who presented as so worldly to bear evidence of the universe in which he lived, but the room was little more than an unadorned glass box. There were no personal photos, no mementos. Its furnishings consisted of a desk, two chairs, a computer monitor, and a narrow shelf of books.

Alexander sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. Why, he asked me, was I interested in working for the SCL Group?

I joked that he was the one who had asked me to come see him.

He laughed. But, really, he pressed, kindly.

I told him that I had just organized an enormous international health care conference with the British government, MENA Health, and I knew another was coming up soon, this one on security. As exciting as the work was, it had also been exhausting.

As I talked, he listened carefully, and as he spoke more about the company, I found it ever more interesting. At one point, I sneaked a glance at his bookshelf, and when he caught me doing it, he burst out laughing.

“That’s just my collection of fascist literature,” he said, and he waved a hand in the air dismissively. I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I laughed, too. Clearly there was something on that shelf about which he was embarrassed, and it put me at ease to know that some of those conservative titles I noticed, and shunned, might not be quite his cup of tea, either.

We talked for a while longer, and when we came to my work in public health in East Africa, he jumped out of his chair and said, “I have some people here that you must meet.” He then took me into the larger office and introduced me to three women, each more interesting and vibrant than the next.

One had worked for over a decade in preventive diplomacy for the Commonwealth Secretariat, protecting people in Kenya and Somalia caught in tribal disputes by negotiating with warlords. Her name was Sabhita Raju. She had held my dream job and was now at SCL.

Another staff member had been the former director of operations for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and had been dedicated to saving lives for more than fifteen years. She was Ceris Bailes.

And the third had won awards from the United Nations for her work on the environment. Back home in her native Lithuania, she had worked for the liberal political party. Her name was Laura Hanning-Scarborough.

I liked all of them, and I was cheered to hear that they had strong backgrounds in humanitarian work and yet were employed at SCL. Clearly, there had been a good reason for each to choose it.

They seemed as interested in my work as I was in theirs. I shared with them my time in eastern South Africa, when I brought seventy-six volunteers out to Pienaar, a poverty-stricken township, to work for a charity called Tenteleni, tutoring children in math, science, and English. I also shared with them a lobbying project I had done at the European Parliament, when I had the privilege of briefing members on how to pressure European countries to include North Korea in their foreign policy priorities. And I expressed a deep interest in doing work in post-Ebola Africa, particularly Sierra Leone and Liberia.

They seemed excited about the possibility of my bringing these kinds of projects to SCL.

Shortly after the interview, Alexander called and made me an offer. I could work for the company as a consultant, just as I wished.

Wouldn’t it be great, he said, to have the logistics and expenses for my projects covered by the SCL Group? It employed smart, effective people; used cutting-edge technologies and methodologies; and had a supportive infrastructure—and, not to mention, it would offer me an opportunity to learn how to use data-driven communications in practical applications such as preventive diplomacy. I’d see up close and personal how it worked and where it needed improvement, and all that would enable me to write my dissertation and finish up my PhD.

And the job was niche work. I could use it as a springboard for fulfilling any number of dreams: becoming a diplomat, an international human rights activist, or even a political adviser like David Axelrod or Jim Messina.

It was tempting, but I still had reservations.

I had no desire to work for the Republicans. Cambridge Analytica had just signed the Ted Cruz campaign and Alexander had made it very clear that he was out to conquer the Republican Party in the United States.

Also, as much as I desperately needed the money, I didn’t want to commit to staying at Cambridge forever. I wanted to come on as a consultant at a good rate, but be able to move on when I wanted to.

Alexander must have read my mind. He told me my work at the company would only ever be under the SCL Group. No need to work on the American side, he said.

He offered me a part-time consultancy and what seemed at the time a decent wage, with the promise of more if I performed well.

“Let’s date before we get married, yuh?” he said. “So, what do you want to do?”

In my early grassroots work, I had been surrounded by others who looked like me and thought the way I did—young, progressive activists on a shoestring budget. I first encountered people unlike me when I began working in human rights. In that arena, I met members of Parliament, top thought leaders, and successful businesspeople across the globe. Some were wealthy, but all had power. I was face-to-face with those on “the other side,” and I was always ambivalent about how I felt about them and what it meant to engage with them.

I remember the moment I realized I had to find some way to marry my grassroots beliefs with an efficacy in the wider world. It was April 20, 2009. I was standing outside the United Nations building in Geneva. I was there with others to protest the appearance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then the president of Iran. He had been invited to give the opening keynote address at the Durban II World Conference Against Racism and Intolerance.

Ahmadinejad, a religious hardliner, had been in power for nearly four years, and in that time, he had breached civil liberties and violated human rights. Among other things, he had punished women appearing in public in what he called “improper hijab.” In his view, and under his rule, homosexuality simply didn’t “exist”; the HIV virus had been created by Westerners to disrupt developing nations like his; the State of Israel ought to be wiped off the map; and the Holocaust was a Zionist invention.

In short, he was a man I, and much of the educated world, had come to despise.

As I stood that day outside the UN building with members of an organization called UN Watch—as one man after another, ambassadors and princes, kings and businessmen, passed through its doors—I thought about these men: whether they agreed with him or not, they had the power and the clout to be in the room with Ahmadinejad, to hear him speak, and to engage with one another in dialogue about it.

I looked at the crowd of protesters of which I was a part. Many looked just like me—some were graduate students, young, in torn jeans and worn sneakers and rugged boots. I respected these people, I believed in what they did, and I believed in myself.

But that day, I put down my protest sign and slipped through the glass doors without anyone noticing I had entered. At the registration desk, I obtained a badge, the kind of pass students can get in order to use the library there: white with a blue stripe at the top, but almost identical to the badges diplomats wore on their lapels.

And wearing my finest hand-me-down power suit, adorned with that badge, I made my way to the auditorium without being questioned.

When Ahmadinejad began his anti-Israel rant, I watched as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and other European leaders walked out. These were powerful people, and their act of protest made headlines that day. It put pressure on the United Nations to reconsider Iran’s position in the global conversation. My friends outside and their protest had gone nearly unnoticed. To make a bigger difference, it seemed, one had to be on the inside, no matter how much compromise that took, and you couldn’t be afraid to be in a room with people who disagreed with your beliefs or even offended you.

For most of my life, I’d been a staunch, intense, and even angry and oppositional activist, refusing to engage with those who disagreed with me or whom I judged to be in some way corrupt. I was more pragmatic now. I had come around to the realization that I could do a lot more good in the world if I stopped being mad at the other side. I began to learn this when Barack Obama, in the early days of his first term, announced that he would sit at the table with anyone willing to meet with him. There needn’t be any conditions, even for those considered “rogue leaders.” And the older I got, the more I understood why he’d said that.

I knew that working for Cambridge Analytica was going to cause a sea change in my life. At the time, I believed that what I was about to do would give me a chance to see up close how the other side worked, to have greater compassion for people, and the ability to work with those with whom I disagreed.

This was what was in my head when I said yes to Alexander Nix. Those were my hopes when I crossed over to investigate the other side.

3

Power in Nigeria

DECEMBER 2014

SCL was made up of ten to fifteen full-time employees—some British, some Canadian, an Australian, three Lithuanians, and an Israeli among them—and I made my rounds to meet them and learn a little more. Each was my age or a bit older, most with master’s degrees, but also many with PhDs. All had already amassed impressive experience working in the for-profit and nonprofit worlds, in everything from banking to high-tech to the oil and gas industry to running humanitarian programs across Africa.

They had come to the company because it offered them the unique opportunity to work at a place in Europe that had the feel of a Silicon Valley start-up. They were supremely hardworking and serious. Their tone was subdued and professional, with an undercurrent of urgency that, though quiet, seemed more characteristically New York than London. They worked long hours and gave 200 percent of themselves. Some had been embedded in the recent American election campaigns and had just returned to the London office to a hero’s welcome. They’d been living for a year in offices in Oregon and North Carolina and Colorado, where the most contested races had been. Those who’d stayed behind in London had worked just as hard, as experts on the countries where the SCL Group also did business.

Each of my colleagues possessed highly specialized skill sets that gave him or her very specific roles in the company.

Kieran, the director of communications, whom I had met during my interview, did everything from political party branding to global messaging strategy. His list of advertising awards was impressive, and his work in corporate branding was better than most I had seen. After Alexander, he’d been with the company the longest, and he showed me a thirty-strong shelf of political party manifestos and platforms SCL had written and he’d designed.

Though with the company for only a few years, Peregrine Willoughby-Brown—Pere, for short; pronounced “Perry”—a Canadian, had already worked in multiple countries, handling elections, running focus groups, gathering data, and organizing locals. He had recently been in Ghana, working on the enormous public health project Alexander had told me about. Pere helped orient me to what it was like to be embedded in foreign campaigns in places other than the United States. In developing nations, logistics could be a nightmare. Even getting access to certain regions was difficult; roads could be washed out or nonexistent. But most problems, he said with a grin, were with people, such as when local pollsters and canvassers didn’t show up or simply blew off their jobs after a first paycheck.

Jordan Kleiner was a jovial Brit with an enormous peacock tattoo on his chest. His job was to make sense of the company’s research and serve as liaison between the research team and the communications and operations teams. He also acted as a kind of bridge between the data people and the creatives, and he knew how to translate research into effective copy and images.

To a new person on the inside, the team comprised big thinkers and problem solvers who were politically liberal and who, in the early winter of 2014, didn’t seem terribly bothered by the fact that the company had taken on conservative clients—in part, I think, because they hadn’t gotten in too deep yet. The American midterms had introduced them to hawks and eccentrics, but it might have been possible for them to think of the latter as one-offs, and the company was only just beginning to secure contracts for the Republican primaries.

At the time, the mood in the office was cheerful, the camaraderie strong, and the members of the group uncompetitive with one another, as there were so few of them and their jobs didn’t overlap too often.

The SCL and Cambridge Analytica staff were energized by Alexander’s vision. The opportunity open to them was the equivalent of that at Facebook in the early days, and it hadn’t taken Facebook too many years to go public to the tune of an $18 billion valuation. Alexander wanted a similar outcome, and as Millennials, the staff looked to Mark Zuckerberg’s baby as a model of remarkable innovation in spaces no one had even thought to occupy until the company came along.

Cambridge Analytica was based on the same idealistic notion of “connectivity” and “engagement” that had fueled Facebook. The company’s raison d’être was to boost engagement in uncharted territory, and those who worked there clearly believed, as those at Facebook had, that they were building something real that the world simply didn’t yet know it couldn’t do without.

Alexander occupied one glass box at the front of the office, and the data scientists occupied one at the back. Theirs was filled with computer stations where the company’s small team of scientists were glued to multiple screens.

Some were eccentric and kept to themselves. One, a Romanian with dark brown eyes, looked up from his work only from time to time. His specialty was research design; he could break up a country into regions and make statistically accurate samples of populations others could use to identify target audiences. Another Lithuanian, who dressed like a posh Brit, often coming to work in a smoking jacket, specialized in data collection and strategy.

The two codirectors of Data Analytics were Dr. Alexander Tayler, a taciturn, ginger-haired Australian, and Dr. Jack Gillett, a dark-haired, friendly Englishman. Tayler and Gillett had been classmates at Cambridge University and, after graduation, each had spent a few years as cogs in the wheels of larger outfits—Gillett at the Royal Bank of Scotland and Tayler at Schlumberger, an oil field services company. Both had come to SCL for the opportunity to design cutting-edge data programs and run their own shop.

Tayler and Gillett had at their disposal a robust but supple database that gave the company a great advantage whenever it had to run a new political campaign. Usually, every time a campaign begins, those in charge of data have to build a database from scratch or buy a database from a vendor. SCL’s database was its own, and it could buy more and more data sets and model those data points more accurately with each client project. While I would later learn the true cost of this “advantage,” and the legal wrangling it took to convince clients to share their data with SCL permanently, for now it seemed to me an incredibly benign and powerful tool.

On the first Obama campaign, we’d had no advanced predictive analytics at all. In the six intervening years, things had changed so much. Alexander said that data was an incredible “natural resource.” It was the “new oil,” available in vast quantities, and Cambridge Analytica was on track to become the largest and most influential data and analytics firm in the world. It was an unprecedented opportunity for those with an adventurous, entrepreneurial spirit. There were claims to be staked, data to mine. And it was a honeymoon period in a completely new industry. It was the equivalent, Alexander said, of the “Wild West.”

Alexander wasn’t in the office very often. The company had just achieved a massive political upset in America, winning an unheard-of thirty-three out of forty-four races in the U.S. midterms. A 75 percent success rate for a communications agency coming in from the outside for the first time was astounding, and Alexander was out and about, using the company’s success to drum up new business. I understood him to be flying here and there to meet Bill Gates and others like him when in America and, when in London, entertaining British billionaires such as Sir Martin Sorrell.

The SCL office wasn’t the sort of place where one brought important businessmen or heads of state. The space itself was dingy and windowless, dark even at noon. Its carpet was a worn-in industrial gray, its drop ceilings pockmarked, uneven, and curiously stained. With the exception of the two glass boxes, one for Alexander and the other for the data scientists, it consisted of a single room of roughly a thousand square feet into which the entire staff was crammed, clustered at two sets of pushed-together desks. The only other private meeting space was a tiny room of about eight by ten feet, with a table, a couple of chairs, and no ventilation; it was dubbed “the Sweat Box.” While his employees packed into “the Sweat Box” like sardines, Alexander preferred to entertain potential clients at a nearby swanky bar or restaurant.

When I finally had a chance to sit down with him in his office in the second week of December, he and I talked about various projects I could pursue. He made it clear that if I wanted to chase social or humanitarian projects, I had to bring in money to fund them. He gave me his blessing to continue my work on post-Ebola Africa, a project I was interested in doing with the World Health Organization and the governments of Liberia and Sierra Leone. With Chester’s help, and with his unrivaled Rolodex of contacts, I would approach each and see if I could get a literal buy-in.

Alexander also suggested that I look into upcoming elections. He asked me to follow up with Chester’s prime minister and with the Central Asian men he had pitched at the sushi restaurant where he and I first met. We looked at other leads as well. Some were mine, and some were connections that I had through Chester and other worldly friends.

In contacting clients, I needed to determine three things right away, Alexander said. The first was “Is there a need?”—meaning was there a project? The second was “Do you have a budget?” And the third, which was as important as the second, was “Are you on a time line?” If someone didn’t have a time line, then there was no urgency to go ahead with the project and, regardless of how much money the client had, the lead would probably go nowhere.

I needed a title, Alexander said, something that “sounded impressive but that’s not too overinflated.” It wasn’t meaningful in-house, he explained, just a tag of sorts by which I could identify myself when addressing clients.

I suggested “Special Advisor,” which Alexander liked because it reflected my part-time status and was sufficiently vague. I liked it because it was the title given to UN envoys whose jobs I coveted, such as “Special Advisor on Human Rights.”

Now all I had to do was earn it.

In my early days as a street fund-raiser in Chicago, when I had all of sixty seconds to persuade someone to hand me over their credit card information and sign them up to make monthly donations to a charity they’d never heard of, I’d become inured to rejection and unafraid of approaching strangers. And in my more recent work, I’d called up ambassadors and other dignitaries and foreign businesspeople and had spent many days a week sometimes in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. I could talk with a businessman who had been born under the Raj or a prime minister who ran any nation, big or small.

It was with such boldness that in December 2014, I reached out to Prince Idris bin al-Senussi, of Libya, a country I had come to know intimately, face-to-face. A friend had kindly made the introduction for me. The prince had some friends who needed our help. The Nigerian presidential election was just a few months away, the prince said, and the men, very wealthy Nigerian oil industry billionaires who were aligned with the incumbent, were terrified that their candidate would lose. “The men are very religious,” Prince Idris said. “They fear for their lives and the lives of their families” if the incumbent doesn’t prevail, he told me.

I told the prince that SCL had done election work in Nigeria in 2007. This thrilled him. He wanted to make an introduction right away. Could Alexander and I fly immediately to Madrid to meet the Nigerians?

Alexander was more than game, but skeptical of my beginner’s prowess. He had a slight scheduling conflict and couldn’t get there right away. I would have to read through as many case studies as I could, put together a proposal for the Nigerians, and then fly into Madrid alone first. Alexander would arrive only on the second day, at which point he’d pitch them more formally. Was I up for the challenge of doing everything else that was involved before he got there?

I was terrified and excited all at once. This would be the first time I’d represent the company, and my understanding of the depth and breadth of it was still so shallow. I had been on the job for a little more than two weeks. I also knew next to nothing about Nigeria, except that it was the most populous country in Africa, with a quarter of a billion people. I had only beginner-level knowledge of its history and the present state of its politics, not to mention the issues and players in its imminent presidential election. Still, even this early, a viable contract seemed to be in front of me, one, Alexander had told me, that could be worth millions. The Nigerian prospect met all the criteria: it was a clear project, the clients had money, and the time line was urgent. Yes, I told Alexander. I’d go to Madrid.

In advance of the meeting, I made my way around the SCL office looking for any information I could find on the 2007 Nigerian campaign—there wasn’t much on it, so I pored over documents and case studies from other projects around the world. I pulled an all-nighter and threw together a proposal with a junior member of staff. It was sufficient as a start, especially under the rushed conditions, but with the election scheduled for February 14, 2015, there was so little time left that we didn’t even expect to win the contract—not that this deterred me in the least.

The situation in Nigeria was complex. The potential clients were backing a man named Goodluck Jonathan, the incumbent president. Jonathan was a Christian and a progressive, my human rights attorney friend John Jones QC informed me, a leader who had brought substantial reforms to the Federation of Nigeria since taking office in 2010. He was seen by some as a champion of youth and the underprivileged; he had worked to clean up environmental disasters, including lead poisoning that had killed some four hundred children in an impoverished region of the country; and he had endeavored to stabilize the nation’s energy sector by privatizing its wholly unreliable power grid. But his administration was corrupt, and he had recently become unpopular when he failed the country in a number of ways, not the least of which was his very public inability to bring home two hundred schoolgirls who had been kidnapped by the militant group Boko Haram. Not long before, he had been accused of masterminding a terrorist bombing. But as my friend John Jones informed me, in the election, Jonathan was the lesser of two evils.

The alternative was Muhammadu Buhari.

In three decades, Buhari had been involved in two military coups. In the first, he was appointed provincial governor, and in the second he claimed the presidency. Under his repressive rule, he had voiced support for Sharia law and persecuted both scholars and journalists. Various groups had filed complaints against him at the international criminal court, accusing him of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity (which Buhari denied and in the end the ICC did not pursue the complaints).¹ In fact, according to international law, if the accusations were true, it should have been illegal for him to run for president at all. John agreed with the prince and his oilmen friends that if Buhari won, the country could descend into violence.² With not much time left until the election, it was an imperfect situation, but as a human rights activist, I felt assured that at least SCL would be on the better side of the fence.

Alexander arranged for me to entertain the Nigerians at a luxury hotel, directing me to host them for a lavish meal. I’d never been given so much responsibility with so much hanging in the balance.

When I arrived in Madrid, I found Prince Idris waiting with only one Nigerian, and even he was not the one I had expected. The clients, it appeared, had flown in a representative to take the meeting. He was a tall, looming, thick-bodied man of early middle age, but I could see that he was terribly nervous, which made me feel better.

I made it through the first day, showing our potential client the proposal and talking through the basics of what I understood SCL could do for his boss. The company offered services such as opinion polling, caste and tribe research, opposition research, and even “competitive intelligence”—that is, state-of-the-art information gathering that could be used to research candidates’ personal and financial backgrounds and explore historic party dealings or “hidden activities.” I wasn’t so naïve as to think that this wasn’t negative campaigning, but I knew that at this late stage in the game, it might be necessary to show results quickly.

There was no time to do what SCL called a “party audit,” a census to collect members’ details, including their polling station and political affiliation. Nor could we clearly identify swing voters. But we could do strong get-out-the-vote work in regions where there was already great support for Goodluck Jonathan. And if we achieved a wide enough margin, that would serve to quell mistrust in the results and perhaps prevent violence in the postelection period.

I was relieved when Alexander arrived on the second day to do the formal pitch. To see him in full pitch mode was undeniably a thing of beauty. He was eloquence and elegance personified. He was self-assured and unhalting in his delivery, an appealing figure in his crisp navy suit and silk tie and more charismatic than most gentlemen one would ever meet. I regarded him with warmth and a degree of admiration that it had not occurred to me before I would ever feel for him.

The start of his pitch included much the same material he covered when Chester and I visited the SCL office back in October—the same slides with pictures of beaches and signs about sharks, the same points about Mad Men, the same top-down-versus-bottom-up creativity and blanket versus targeted advertising based on scientific and psychological research, but it felt more fluid, theatrical, and persuasive now. It seemed effortless, as perfectly managed and choreographed as the best TED Talk. With the small remote control firmly in his hand, Alexander, it seemed to me, had his finger on a button that had the potential to control the world.

The billionaires’ representative was rapt, and he leaned in, as did the prince, and nodded from time to time approvingly. And when Alexander got to the part of the presentation about how the company had the ability to, as he put it, “address individual villages or apartment blocks, even zoom right down to particular people,” their eyes widened.

How SCL did that was just a part of what made it different from all other election companies in the world. It was not an advertising firm, Alexander said, but a psychologically astute and scientifically precise communications company.

“The biggest mistake the political campaigns and communication campaigns face is starting where they are and not where they want to be,” Alexander said. “They tend to start with a preconceived idea of what is required. And that’s normally based on the subject matter.”

So, he said, SCL often walked into situations where clients tried to tell it what to do. Usually, a client’s idea was that they needed posters everywhere and TV adverts, Alexander said.

“Well,” he asked, “how do you know that that’s the right thing to do?”

The client raised his eyebrows.

“Because we’re not interested in the president or the party or whoever the client is,” Alexander said dismissively. “We’re interested in the audience.” He paused for a second for effect and pulled up a slide. On it was a picture of an audience in a movie theater staring up at the screen.

“The way to illustrate this,” he said, pointing to the slide, “is you want to sell more Coca-Cola in a movie theater, yeah?”

The client nodded.

“You ask an advertising agency what their plan is, and they’ll say, ‘You need more Coke at point of sale, you need Coke branding, you need a Coke advert before the main movie.” Alexander shook his head. “And it’s all about Coke,” he said. And that’s the problem with political campaigns.

“But,” he went on, clicking to another slide—this one showed images zooming left, right, and center, all of Coca-Cola advertising and branding, all quickly becoming overwhelming—“If you stop and look at the target audience and ask questions like ‘Under what circumstances would they drink more Coke?’ and you research them, you might find that they’re more likely to drink a Coke when they’re thirsty.”

Again, he paused.

“So,” he continued, “what you want to do,” he said, clicking to another slide, “is simply turn up the temperature … in the auditorium.”

The image on the slide was of a cartoon-like thermometer, the mercury in red, risen to almost bursting.

The solution, Alexander said, isn’t in the advert. “The solution is in the audience.” He paused again to make sure this had sunk in.

The solution is in the audience, I thought. It had never occurred to me to think this way.

It was a stunning moment, as eye-opening to me as what he had said in his initial presentation to Chester and me about the worthlessness of blanket advertising. Here was a brilliant concept: to get people to act, you created the conditions under which they would be more likely to do what you wanted them to do. The simplicity of the concept blew my mind.

Alexander said that SCL had done this again and again across the world.

In Trinidad and Tobago in 2010, he said, pulling up slides, the company had addressed that nation’s “mixed ethnicity.” (Half the nation was Indian, the other half Afro-Caribbean.) “Political leaders from one group there,” he said, “had difficulty making their messages resonate with those outside it.” SCL had therefore designed an ambitious program of political graffiti that it disseminated as campaign messages. And the youth vote had turned out in droves.

Brilliant, I thought. Getting out the youth vote was so difficult during elections.

In Bogotá, Colombia, in 2011, SCL had found that in a country with rampant corruption, the general population mistrusted all the candidates who were running, so SCL “enlisted others” to endorse the candidates instead. Having locals vouching for the candidate was highly effective, with no trace of the candidate’s face him- or herself.

How quickly could the Nigerians see results from SCL if it were to work in the upcoming election? the representative wanted to know.

I knew what Alexander was going to say, because I had read about it in the SCL brochures: SCL’s services were “results oriented.” The company always worked with its clients to ensure that the effects of its services were “readily identifiable and measurable.”

The representative looked pleased.

After the presentation, Alexander and I had dinner together. We spoke about the Nigerian campaign and all the other campaigns he’d done through the years, and I realized that Alexander Nix could likely be the most experienced elections consultant in the world. I began to see him as an important mentor. And while it had been difficult to get to know him in the first few weeks of the job, now he invited me to come out and visit his family or come see him play in a polo match. I was surprised when I realized that both sounded quite nice, in fact.

Then, on the day we flew back to London together, he and I had a sweet moment that almost made me feel like his equal. In keeping with the frugal SCL tradition, we had tickets in economy class, but before we boarded, he invited me to join him in the business class lounge, where we toasted our future success and drank a free glass of champagne. Cheers, we said, to the future.

Back in London, Christmas was approaching. At the company holiday party, a Prohibition-themed event, I wore a flapper’s dress with a pair of long, white gloves I’d borrowed from a dear friend who worked in costuming. I mingled with everyone I could—Pere; Sabhita; and Harris McCloud, a blond-haired, blue-eyed political messaging expert from Canada. I spoke with a few of the data scientists, including Dr. Eyal Kazin and Tadas Jucikas, Alex Tayler’s right and left hands. I wasn’t part of the team just yet; I was new, a curiosity, and it was quite hard to introduce myself in such a noisy venue. Still, I mingled and chatted with people as much as I could. Alexander wasn’t there; he was in Ghana with Ceris, to see if he could revive discussions with that country’s president. I envied his having work to occupy his mind.

Suddenly, one of the data scientists I hadn’t met yet came up to say hello. “So, how goes it in the elections-fixing business?” he asked.

I had no idea how to reply. I stood there for a moment looking at him, at the drink he was holding: an ice-cold, freshly shaken espresso martini. I was drinking the same; the glass would’ve been too cold to hold without my long, white gloves. Despite our icy beverages, I remember feeling the temperature in the room rise uncomfortably.

I don’t recall how I responded; probably with something lighthearted. After all, what was one supposed to say in reply to such a comment? And what was such a comment supposed to mean?

Around the time that I began my consultancy at SCL, I had started dating a lovely Scottish man called Tim. He was different from most of the men I had dated, and he reminded me somehow of Alexander. Tim, too, had attended British boarding schools, and came from old family money. Like Alexander in my professional life, Tim was more conservative than most people in my personal life. He worked in business development, as I had just begun to do. He was a social butterfly, the loudest and happiest person in any room. He dressed formally, in three-piece tweed suits, and was as handsome as any man gracing the cover of GQ.

I didn’t tell my family much about him—not just yet. I hadn’t had a very good experience sharing recent news. After all, when I told my mother about my new job, she had fretted.

“Oh, no,” she said, and told me she hoped I wouldn’t be giving up my PhD. I assured her I had no plans to.

There was really no home to go back to that Christmas. My family had already started packing boxes to leave our home. The idea of even trying was too dreary to contemplate. So, instead, I threw myself into my work at SCL, as if in those few short days between Christmas and the New Year, I might be able to stop things happening far away from crumbling. I followed up on the Nigerians. Perhaps that project would come through. I wanted it to; I wanted something to go right. I wished I could continue working through the holidays, to keep my mind off personal things, but the office was open only until Christmas.

In the end, Tim invited me to his family home in Scotland. Going away seemed a good way to distract myself. Tim’s parents lived in two adjoined turn-of-the-century country cottages surrounded by a perfectly manicured lawn. They were a warm and welcoming group, and I was diverted through Christmas Day with talking and drinking tea and sipping fine wine, with conversation and laughter. They made me feel right at home. Though, given what was going on with my family—something I didn’t share with Tim’s family or even Tim—this made me feel both wonderful and melancholy at the same time.

The house was so deep into the countryside that there was little cell service there. I’d asked Tim’s parents for permission to give out the number for their land line, in case of an emergency. I’d shared the number only with my mother, Alexander, Prince Idris, and the Nigerians. Alexander had said that if things went well in Madrid, we’d possibly be hearing from the prince or the Nigerian representative over the holidays.

“It’s now or never,” he had said before he left for Ghana and then a vacation with his family. The election was just over a month and a half away.

One night the phone rang. Tim’s brother ran to pick it up. I listened from the other room.

“We don’t want any of what you’re sellin’!” I heard him say in a gruff brogue. Tim’s mother was nearby, and I could hear her scrambling to take the receiver from him. She knew I was expecting important calls. When the scuffle was over, Tim’s brother returned to the room I was in, his face bright red.

“Uh, Brittany, it’s for you.” He paused. “It’s … a prince?” he said and shrugged.

Prince Idris. I gathered myself together quickly and picked up the phone. “Good evening, Your Royal Highness,” I said.

He had very good news. He had already called Alexander to tell him, and now he was reaching out to me. The Nigerians wanted to move forward—immediately. And they wanted to talk through the proposal in person. They were in DC.

Alexander, the prince said, was on holiday and couldn’t get away. “You must prepare to go and meet them yourself right away,” Prince Idris said.

After we hung up, I could hardly breathe. Surely SCL wouldn’t send me. They had senior people they could put on this. I was merely a graduate student who’d been working there for only three and a half weeks part time.

Suddenly, the phone rang again. This time it was Alexander. Before I could say anything beyond “hello,” he jumped in.

“Okay, Brits,” he said, using a nickname for me neither he nor anyone else had ever used. “Are you ready to prove yourself? These guys say they are ready to go but want to agree to the deal in person. Always close in person.”

I kept listening.

Everyone else was on vacation or unreachable, Alexander said. “That leaves you, my dear!”

I had no idea if I could really do it.

“If you really want it and you don’t think they are bullshitting us, then it’s now or never,” he continued. “If we close this, I’ll owe you one.”

4

Davos

JANUARY–APRIL 2015

The trip to DC went better than I could have imagined—better than anyone could have imagined.

Just after Christmas, I left Tim’s family home in Scotland and met one of the Nigerian billionaires behind it all. By the time I arrived, he had already met with government officials and businessmen from whom he was hoping to elicit a public outcry about challenger Muhammadu Buhari, but he had met with little success, and he was interested in a contract with SCL.

He was a large and physically powerful man, imposing, serious, and rich—the latter of which he made sure to impress upon me. I found him intimidating. He wasn’t used to doing business with women, let alone a young American woman, and I had the sense that he wasn’t entirely pleased that Alexander had sent me instead of coming himself.

I had my proposal with me, and I did the best I could to make clear what Alexander felt SCL, with six weeks left before the Nigerian presidential election, was capable of doing.

Nigeria was split down the middle between the two most powerful political parties in the country: Goodluck Jonathan’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the party backing Buhari. There was no time to win over swing voters. Our work would be to activate Jonathan’s base to promote voter turnout and, more important, ensure a wide margin of victory in order to avoid an uncontested election and therefore prevent violence from breaking out afterward.

We’d use radio, one of the most reliable means of communication in the country’s rural areas, as our primary medium, filling the airwaves with ads, paid interviews, and vox-pop pieces. We’d do some TV as well as print newspaper ads and op-eds. Given that only 10 percent of households had internet, our digital campaign would be limited to urban areas, where we’d put out Facebook posts, tweets, and YouTube content and banner ads. We’d also rely on billboards in targeted areas, as there wasn’t enough data to microtarget in any way or enough time to do modeling, a scientific way of analyzing data to predict individuals’ behavior, even if the data had allowed.

Even with all these strategies, I told the Nigerian billionaire, SCL couldn’t guarantee a win for Goodluck Jonathan. But at this point, I said, telling him what Alexander had told the man’s representative in Madrid, we were the best chance he had.

The man nodded. How much would it cost? he wanted to know.

Alexander had said that it would take at least $3 million.

The man balked, and countered with $1.8 million. And: would I mind if he filled a private jet with cash and sent it our way? Or, if that wasn’t suitable, they could line the interior walls of a car with the cash instead, and deliver it to a secret, prearranged set of coordinates, removing its doors and slitting its tires so that no one else could steal it, he added. It was in this way that contracts were settled in his country, he said. Shocked and out of my depth, I frantically called Alexander.

When I reached him, he casually explained that we did not accept cash, as if he were often offered that option, and he demanded a wire transfer. It wasn’t an issue—by the time I arrived back in England, on January 2, the money had hit the account whose number Alexander had provided. He was over the moon. The $1.8 million deal was the largest SCL had ever achieved in so short a time. He said he knew that I was going to continue to show him amazing things. The deal with the Nigerians hadn’t been just beginner’s luck, he was sure of it.

I was thrilled as well. I presumed I’d make a healthy commission or a split of the profits, maybe even enough to save my parents’ home from the banks and set them up comfortably for a time. I called my sister to share the good news.

But Alexander had other ideas. We hadn’t talked about a commission for me, and Prince Idris was expecting one, too, because he’d made the introduction. Also, it was Alexander who had chosen the team to work in-country, and had set the budget, which was going to be expensive.

I was crestfallen. Here I had made an enormous deal for the company, and the only compensation I’d be getting was my per diem. It didn’t seem fair.

I called Chester to vent.

I don’t know precisely when in our friendship it had dawned on me that Chester was more privileged than I would ever have imagined being myself. I knew he’d gone to boarding school in Switzerland. I knew he’d traveled everywhere—but then I learned that, some of the time, it was in a private jet. He didn’t have access to his family funds, so he had to work for his own money and live on whatever he made, but because the family he came from was a cushion he could rely on if anything went wrong, he was clearly in an entirely different class.

Still, every now and then, he would say or do something that reminded me of the stratum he was a part of, the experiences he’d had, and I would suddenly realize just how different we were. As he sat on the phone listening to me vent, he agreed that what I’d done for SCL was remarkable, that I deserved better than that. And that was when he said he had an idea for an opportunity to make even more connections and possibly drum up additional business for myself that would lead to an actual commission from SCL: together, he and I could go to Davos for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum, slated for late January, only a few weeks away.

His merely suggesting that we attend Davos was one of those things that made me realize at a much deeper level that Chester was extremely well connected. I knew he’d attended the conference before, but I had had no idea what that meant. I’d certainly read about “Davos.” Since 1971, the mountain resort town in the Swiss Alps had hosted a world-famous international conference of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a nonprofit organization whose members were the world’s billionaires and executives of the most valuable companies on the planet. Attending the conference each year along with the uber rich were public intellectuals, journalists, and the heads of state from the top seventy nations ranked by GDP. They came to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,”¹ in sessions that focused on everything from artificial intelligence to solving economic crises. Davos attendees that year were to include Angela Merkel of Germany; the premier of China, Li Keqiang; U.S. secretary of state John Kerry; and business leaders from a number of Fortune 200 companies.²

For all its good intentions, Davos had in recent years become known for its decadence—the partying, the hijinks, the poseurs and movie stars who had begun to crash it. In 2011 in Davos, Anthony Scaramucci, who would go on to become Donald Trump’s spokesman for the briefest time in history, held a wine tasting that devolved, as one reporter wrote, into “a drunken mess.” There were rumors of orgies, but Chester said that that was ridiculous, as no one would risk that kind of reputational damage on the world stage.³

No, he assured me. Davos was mostly a place where people did a year’s worth of business in one week, and it was important to keep as low a profile there as possible.

How could you not go? Chester said. It wasn’t really a question.

But “be prepared,” he said. “The people are vultures. Don’t let them take advantage of you. Don’t drink too much, and don’t talk to people that you don’t need to.”

His last piece of advice? There was no use bringing heels, he warned. Davos was high in the mountains, and the streets of the village were precipitous. The Swiss, Chester said, were so persnickety about their wooden floors that they refused to salt the sidewalks, and in January, the ground was so slippery that it had become a pastime for residents and forum attendees alike to watch passersby, from presidents to prime ministers, fall on their rear ends.

One didn’t want to do that, Chester said. Best to be prepared.

Alexander had chosen his team for Nigeria in the early days of January. It included Pere, Harris, and James Greeley, SCL’s jack-of-all-trades. Alexander had thought of sending me, but because I had done so well wrapping up the contract itself, he felt it better that I stay behind and pursue other leads. You have a knack for sales, he would say, buttering me up and making me overlook my interest in working on the campaign in-country.

Anyway, a knack for sales? It didn’t sound like me just yet, although I could tell I was getting the hang of it.

“Stick with me,” he said. “You have a future here. You might even become CEO someday.”

I thought he was joking at first, but he said it often enough for me to believe that he actually saw that level of potential in me.

Codirecting the Nigerian team were Ceris and a man I had never met before. His name, Alexander said, was Sam Patten. A senior adviser to the SCL Group, he was one of the most experienced consultants on our global roster for running campaigns on the ground in foreign countries. Sam had worked on the 2014 parliamentary election in Iraq, and in 2012, he had played a critical role in the election of the opposition government in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. He had also served as a senior adviser to President George W. Bush.⁴ Unfortunately, though we couldn’t know it in 2015, Sam Patten would become an infamous figure in the Robert Mueller investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His business partner, a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik, would come to be of interest to Mueller with regard to Donald Trump’s connection to the Russians, and would be accused of being a spy for the Russian intelligence services.

At the time I met him, though, Sam struck me as a consummate professional, trustworthy and serious, the kind of person who looked you dead in the eye and told it like it was. He arrived at the Mayfair office on January 3, 2015, dressed in a proper suit, but wearing a polo shirt and carrying a worn laptop bag that made it clear he was distinctly American and that he had likely carried the bag around the world for years.

I brought Sam up to date on my limited experience with the Nigerians and then handed off control. The plan was basically “crisis comms,” or crisis communications: getting out as much material as possible and as fast as possible to make as significant an impact as we could. I had given the campaign the name “Nigeria Forward,” and I assumed that in the few short weeks we had left, it would be an upbeat, all-out fight to support Goodluck Jonathan. I imagined the radio spots, the videos, and of course the rallies—held on the back of a truck that folded out into a stage, which I had been told were used for SCL-organized campaign events in Kenya.

Only two weeks later, the picture in Nigeria had changed significantly. News came that the Electoral Commission was planning to postpone the February 14 election until late March. The insurgents of Boko Haram in the north were disruptive and threatened to make polling impossible. There were technological and logistical problems as well. It was difficult to distribute voter ID cards, and the biometric card readers weren’t working, the Election Commission reported. The new elections were scheduled for March 29. While that should have been good news, as it meant the team would have more time to accomplish its goals, the delay, along with other factors, would lead to a situation with the Nigerians that would become ever more complicated.

There was an international outcry about the postponement, including from Secretary of State John Kerry, who insisted that the elections be held on time, and he warned the Nigerian government against using “security concerns as a pretext for impeding the democratic process.”⁵ The All Progressives Congress (APC), challenger Buhari’s party, called the move “highly provocative” and “a major setback for democracy.”⁶ And UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon “urged officials to take all necessary measures to enable Nigerians to vote ‘in a timely manner.’”⁷

The project and the contract were valid only through February 14, the day originally set for the elections. Our team had expected to lift off from Abuja the day before, to avoid any problems. We therefore reached out to the clients to let them know that if they wanted to extend the contract, and have the SCL team stay longer, they would have to provide more funding, probably as much as or more than they already had. The team seemed happy to stay longer, according to feedback I heard around the office—by day they worked in their “war room” at the Abuja Hilton, by night they drank with David Axelrod’s team that consulted for the opposition—and they never complained to us at HQ.

Personally, I was thrilled with the idea. If I closed another deal with the Nigerians, I’d have the chance to earn that commission I had hoped to win in the first place. But the Nigerians were dubious about a re-up. They hadn’t seen enough progress yet to warrant it. Our team might be working tirelessly on the ground, but where were the results?

I didn’t know how to answer. I had enough elections experience to know that it takes time to see results, and in the case of the Nigerian campaign, the proof was going to be in the election results themselves. But the Nigerians said they needed to see what the team had actually done. Where were the billboards? Where were the radio spots? Where had their money gone? I knew that it took at least two weeks to get most of those things up and running, but I also knew that they had to be in progress.

To reassure the Nigerians, Alexander had Ceris write a report that detailed everything being done to date in the project. As for me, I called Chester to ask for suggestions as to what I could do.

His idea: let’s invite the Nigerians to Davos—and Alexander as well, so he can meet with them and reassure them. I asked if I could invite my friend John Jones, the human rights lawyer. He’d be perfect, I said, because his expertise could help the Nigerians use Davos as a platform to speak out against Buhari and gain the international outcry they wanted.

It sounded brilliant to me.

There’s always a hitch.

One of the things that Chester had on his Davos to-do list was to throw a party on one of the evenings—and not just any party, but a really odd one. The party would be for a consortium of billionaires who had formed a company that was endeavoring to mine precious metals in space, on asteroids, Chester explained.

Asteroids?

Yes, he said. The idea was that the billionaires would launch rockets to land on asteroids and set up mines there. They hadn’t done it yet, but they wanted to meet at Davos. They had asked Chester to help them set up a party as a venue for them to do so. If I came to Davos, I could help, Chester said. The asteroid mining company would pay us handsomely.

It was more money earned in one day than I could have made at SCL that whole month. I knew nothing about how to throw a party in Davos, but I was game.

I arrived in Davos a week early to prepare for a week of the highest-level meetings, and of course, the party, and it was a good thing I did. There was so much to do, and party logistics were so complicated in that village and at that crazy time of year. Chester had rented an apartment in the middle of the high-security zone, directly across from the Davos Congress Centre, the site of most of the key sessions for the World Economic Forum, and it wasn’t easy getting things in and out of that area. There would be caterers, bartenders, trucks filled with liquor, food, furniture, and other supplies; and the area just around the venue was almost as hard to penetrate as Fort Knox.

The temperature the night of the party was frigid, as it often is in January in Davos, but everything was ready. We set up heaters outside on the apartment building’s vast rooftop terrace, where the bar was located and where we’d placed glow-in-the-dark chairs and stools, which gave the place an otherworldly vibe, in keeping with the outer space theme.

And we spread salt to prevent the guests from slipping.

Indoors, I hung the banners and helped lay out the food. Here and there, I laid down business cards of my own and SCL brochures.

Alexander and John Jones were early arriving. They were thrilled to be there. Neither had been in Davos before.

I stood at the door and welcomed guests. Each was more famous than the last: the entrepreneur Richard Branson, Ross Perot Sr. and Jr., members of the Dutch royal family, and at least a hundred others. They spilled out onto the terrace, where they watched the bartenders performing magic tricks, mixing cocktails and juggling with fire. Inside, in the middle of the living room, they stood around watching a giant demonstration that the aspiring asteroid miners had set up: a model of an asteroid atop of which was perched a contraption that looked like a tripod and was meant to resemble something like an oil rig.

Milling among the guests, John Jones looked happy. While Alexander clearly felt that SCL was in a far smaller class than the other businesses represented in the room, he was glad to have the chance to network, and he was particularly happy to see Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. Before he ventured over to Schmidt, he shared with me that it was Sophie Schmidt, Eric’s daughter, who had been partly responsible for inspiring the inception of Cambridge Analytica.

The party was going swimmingly until my phone buzzed: the Nigerians had arrived and were downstairs, just outside the apartment building.

We had planned a literally flashy welcome for them. When they landed at Zurich airport, a limo was waiting for them, and on the drive into town, they were accompanied, in front of the limo and behind, by police cars, sirens blaring and lights flashing, announcing the arrival of visitors of significance.

But when the Nigerians reached me by phone, they weren’t pleased.

They were hungry. Where was their dinner?

I had invited them to the party; there was plenty of food there, I told them. Chester and I had spent hundreds of dollars of our budget on it.

No, they said; they were tired. They wanted to eat, be shown their lodgings, and go to bed. They weren’t interested in coming to a party. They had not eaten on the plane—a twelve-hour flight—and they wanted, they said, fried chicken. I would need to find it somewhere and bring it to them.

I had no choice but to throw on my boots and coat and head down to meet them on the icy streets below. They were standing outside the apartment building, where people were still lining up to get into my party. All five men again claimed they couldn’t possibly go upstairs and were demanding to be fed, chicken preferably.

I explained that we wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere to get it—the limo wasn’t allowed in the central area. Walking was the only choice, so I led them through the streets in the bitter cold.

They weren’t prepared for the weather. They had neither boots nor coats. They wore thin collared shirts and flat loafers. We slipped and slid, walking from closed restaurant to closed restaurant, finding, of course, no fried chicken in a Swiss mountain town, and little else as well. Finally, I happened upon a restaurant that served pasta atop of which the chef agreed to put some grilled chicken. Takeout containers in hand, I led the Nigerians back onto the slippery streets again, the men, freezing, following along behind me, barely able to stay upright. I carried the stack of chicken-and-pasta meals all the way to their lodgings, where I made sure they were settled in, and I said my good-nights. They looked cold, hungry, and far more unhappy with me than I would have liked.

I was away from the party for almost two hours. When I got back, it was 2:00 a.m., and the party was still raging.

Chester was nowhere to be found. No one had been at the door to welcome guests. No one had been in charge. The bartenders had run out of alcohol. The food had been devoured. Just before I returned, the guests had become rowdy, and a drunken princess had fallen outside and, though unhurt, was making an inebriated ruckus that had set off alarms.

For the second time that night, the air filled with the sound of sirens and the flash of spinning lights. The Swiss Police were on their way to stop the party. With the help of the son of the head of police, we managed to talk them out of arresting anyone, but not in stopping the party.

When the interaction was over, I stood in the middle of the empty room. I was starving. Like the Nigerians, I hadn’t eaten for hours.

Alexander was as pleased with the results of Davos as he was of the deal I had made with the Nigerians. He had found the party festive. He had met people he wouldn’t otherwise have, and of course SCL had walked away with a giant fishbowl full of business cards from some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world.

What he didn’t know yet was how disastrous the evening had been for our relationship with our Nigerian clients, and how angry they were the next morning when they woke to discover that Alexander had flown back to London without even bothering to meet them.

When they learned that he was gone, they demanded that I come to see them immediately. They didn’t want to go out themselves. It was too cold.

So, I made my way through the slippery streets in my inadequate boots, cringing.

I’d never been yelled at by an African billionaire before. He and the other Nigerians didn’t understand why they weren’t being treated better. They were VIPs, they said, just as important as the other VIPs at the conference. Why had no reception been arranged especially for them? Why hadn’t the CEO of my company, to which they had just paid nearly $2 million, stayed to meet them? They were unhappy, too, with the work we were doing in Nigeria. Where were the radio spots? Where were all the billboards? What’s our money going toward? they demanded to know.

I didn’t know how to reason with them. They had never invested in an election before. They didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps they had thought they would see a giant rally on the back of a truck with LED screens flashing and megaphones blasting. That hadn’t been part of the team’s plan. Measuring the impact of elections work is a complicated task, and, having been a part of the company for just over a month, I couldn’t explain to them right then and there why everything SCL had done wasn’t more obvious to the naked eye. The fruits of SCL’s labors might be borne out only on Election Day in March, and they needed to be patient.

But they wouldn’t listen to me. It wasn’t just that I was young; it was also that I was a woman. This attitude was eminently clear, and made me incredibly uncomfortable. It even began to feel threatening. These were powerful, wealthy men, the kind who thought nothing of filling a jet with naira, the Nigerian currency. What might they be capable of if they were unhappy with how that money had been spent?

When I put them on a conference call with Alexander, they were calmer, and much more respectful. They didn’t yell, but they weren’t assuaged. Yet Alexander seemed oblivious to how serious the situation was.

I arranged for John Jones to come over and visit with them. Perhaps they could find a way of working together. We discussed strategies for showing up Buhari in the press and making his alleged war crimes known, but when I left the Nigerians with him to head back to our apartment, I had the sinking feeling that there would be no second contract after February 14. The Nigerians hadn’t said as much, but the way they’d treated me was demeaning. How could I possibly return to them and close another contract? Things were trending in a bad direction, and even worse, while taking care of them, I’d had no time even to pursue any SCL leads, so the trip would not even result in new business.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, that morning the website Business Insider published a story about the evening before: “Davos Party Shut Down After Bartenders Blow Through Enough Booze for Two Nights,” the headline read.⁸

When the phone rang, it was Alexander. Maybe he had seen the article. Even if my name wasn’t in it, it could look bad for SCL. Maybe the Nigerians had called to give him a piece of their minds.

But he was buoyant. Neither had happened, it seemed.

“Brittany,” he said. “Davos was wonderful. Thanks to you and Chester for the excellent hosting! I’m calling to let you know that I’m offering you a permanent position with SCL that you’ve been waiting for!” he said, likely winking on the other end of the phone. “No more consulting. You’ll be a full member of the team.”

There’d be a bonus, he added: ten thousand dollars more per year; a regular salary, benefits; a company credit card. I could pursue the types of projects I liked, as long as they brought in the same kind of money as the Nigerian campaign. It was a high bar, but it had been an auspicious start.

Welcome aboard, he said.

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