Two months after Trump’s inauguration, on the morning of March 28, 2017, I woke up slightly groggy from another late night working on a briefing. It was just after six in the morning. As I stood in my underwear, waiting for the coffee to brew, I opened up Facebook and saw a private message from an account called “Claire Morrison.” I clicked on the profile, and there was no profile photo.
This has to be Cambridge Analytica, I thought. Not again. I just knew it had to be Cambridge Analytica messing with my head. No journalist had ever reached out to me, all of my warnings had been ignored, and this was exactly the kind of shit Nix would pull. I wanted no part of this faceless “Claire Morrison,” absent solid proof of who was behind the profile. So I replied that I needed proof that she was actually a Guardian journalist.
That same day, Cadwalladr sent me a long message from her Guardian email address about Vote Leave, BeLeave, Darren Grimes, Mark Gettleson, and how everything in those campaigns seemed to be routed through this little company in Canada, AggregateIQ. She had been told that I knew the people and the companies involved. Cadwalladr wrote that she had been investigating AIQ and Brexit and that, one evening in early 2017, a source had tipped her off with a bizarre clue. The telephone number listed on the official expense returns for AIQ appeared on an archived version of SCL’s website as the phone number for “SCL Canada.” At the time, there was almost no public information on SCL, save for a 2005 Slate article Cadwalladr had found about the firm, titled “You Can’t Handle the Truth: Psy-ops Propaganda Goes Mainstream.” The article began with a scenario where a “shadowy media firm steps in to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception.”
As Cadwalladr kept pulling the threads of this increasingly bizarre story, she found a former SCL employee in London who was willing to talk. The source was insistent that they meet somewhere discreet and that she had to keep everything off the record. The source was afraid of what the firm would do if they found out the two were talking. Cadwalladr listened as the source told her some wild stories about what SCL had done in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—honey traps, bribes, espionage, hackers, strange deaths in hotel rooms. The source told her to find someone by the name of Christopher Wylie, as he was the one who had recruited AIQ into the Cambridge Analytica universe. In examining all the complex relationships between all of these people and entities—Vote Leave, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, the Mercers, Russia, and the Trump campaign—Cadwalladr saw that I was right in the middle of all of them. Seeming to pop up everywhere, I looked like the Zelig of 2016 to her.
At first, I didn’t want to talk to Cadwalladr. I had no interest in being at the center of some massive Guardian exposé. I was exhausted, I had been burned over and over, and I wished that I could just put the Cambridge Analytica ordeal in the past. On top of that, Cambridge Analytica was no longer just a company. My old boss Steve Bannon was now sitting in the White House and on the National Security Council of the most powerful nation on earth. I had seen what happened to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning when they were at the mercy of the full force of the U.S. government. It was too late to change the outcome of the Brexit vote or the U.S. presidential election. I had tried to warn people, and no one seemed to care. Why would they care now?
But Cadwalladr cared. When I read what she had already published, I could see that she was on the trail of Cambridge Analytica and AIQ but had not yet cracked how deep their misdeeds actually went. After hesitating for a couple of days, I emailed back and agreed to talk, but strictly off the record. When it was time for our call, my heart was racing. I fully expected an unpleasant conversation in which she would make accusations and listen half-heartedly to my responses, after which she’d write whatever she wanted.
Instead I got a woman saying, “Oh, is that Chris? Oh, hi!” I heard barking in the background, and she said, “Sorry, I’ve just taken my dog for a walk, and I’m making some tea.” I started to say something, but I heard her making cooing sounds to her dog. I had intended to give Carole about twenty minutes, but four hours later we were still on the phone. It must have been well past midnight in London, but the conversation just kept going and going. This was the first time I had really talked to anyone about the totality of what had happened. What, she asked me, is Cambridge Analytica?
“It’s Steve Bannon’s psychological mindfuck tool,” I told her bluntly.
Even a well-informed journalist like Cadwalladr struggled at first to understand all the layers and connections of the Cambridge Analytica narrative. Was SCL part of Cambridge Analytica, or the other way around? Where did AIQ fit in? And even when she had the basic details nailed down, there was still so much more to share. I told her about psychometric profiling, information warfare, and artificial intelligence. I explained Bannon’s role and how we had used Cambridge Analytica to build psychological warfare tools to fight his culture war. I told her about Ghana, Trinidad, Kenya, and Nigeria and the experiments that shaped Cambridge Analytica’s data targeting arsenal. Finally she began to understand the scope of the company’s wickedness.
With the title “The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Hijacked,” that first article came out May 7, 2017. It caused a sensation, becoming the most read piece on The Guardian’s website that year. Cadwalladr’s reporting was solid, but she had only just started to skim the surface of a much murkier story. On May 17, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to oversee the investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign. It was beginning to become apparent that there was an appetite among Democrats and even some Republicans to get to the bottom of why Trump had so drastically fired FBI director James Comey after telling him to drop the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn—who, it turned out, had a consulting agreement with Cambridge Analytica. The full story went far beyond Brexit—it was about Bannon, Trump, Russia, and Silicon Valley. It was about who controls your identity, and the corporations that traffic in your data.
But I had a problem. If I was to help get this information out and persuade others at Cambridge Analytica to come forward, I couldn’t do it in Canada. I confided in some of Justin Trudeau’s team. They immediately understood the gravity of the situation and encouraged me to come forward and go to the U.K. to work with The Guardian. So I did.
I HAD NO PLAN and didn’t even have a flat sorted yet, so I flew to Alistair Carmichael’s constituency in the Shetland Islands, the most northerly of the British Isles, once part of ancient Norse kingdoms before its annexation by Scotland. At the airport, when I stepped from a tiny propeller plane with my life packed into a single bag, Carmichael was waiting, ready to take me to a guesthouse—but not without a scenic detour. As the local member of Parliament and an extremely proud Scotsman, he was keen to first give me a tour of the island, rain and harsh wind be damned. We were surrounded by sheer cliffs, Shetland ponies, and sheep roaming nearby when he asked what I planned to do.
“I don’t have a plan yet,” I answered. “I’m seeing Carole next week…Do you think this is a good idea, Alistair?”
“No—it’s crazy!” he shot back, almost shouting. Then he fell silent. “But it’s important, Chris. All I can say is that I will do what I can to help.” There are few politicians I would walk through miles of cold, wet grass in the freezing north of Scotland for. But Alistair had always been someone I could rely on. He’d become a confidant, a mentor, and a friend.
A couple of weeks later, Cadwalladr and I finally met in person, near Oxford Circus in London, at the Riding House Café—a large modern space with crimson sofas by the windows and a bar with bright turquoise stools. Cadwalladr was waiting for me inside, looking like a biker chick with her tousled blond hair, sunglasses, leopard print top, and well-worn leather bomber jacket. From across the street, I could see her in the large window of the restaurant. Unsure that this woman was actually the same Guardian journalist I had been speaking with for months on the phone, I searched for more photos of Cadwalladr on my phone, and held up the photos to compare with the woman sitting inside. When she saw me, she jumped up and exclaimed, “Oh my God! It’s really you! You’re taller than I imagined!” She got up and gave me a hug. She told me that The Guardian wanted its next story to be about how Cambridge Analytica had collected the Facebook data and asked if I would be willing to go on the record.
It would not be an easy decision. If I went public, I risked the wrath of the president of the United States, his alt-right whisperer Steve Bannon, Downing Street, militant Brexiteers, and the sociopathic Alexander Nix. And if I told the whole truth behind Cambridge Analytica, I risked angering Russians, hackers, WikiLeaks, and a host of others who’d shown no compunction about breaking laws in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and beyond. I had seen people face serious threats to their safety; several of my former colleagues had warned me to be extremely careful after I left. Before joining SCL, my predecessor, Dan Mureşan, had ended up dead in his hotel room in Kenya. This was a decision that I could not take lightly.
I told Cadwalladr I would think about it and continued to give her information. But then any trust I had in The Guardian was wrecked when the paper failed to stand by its own reporting. Cadwalladr had opened her May 7 article with the story of how Sophie Schmidt—daughter of Google CEO Eric Schmidt—had introduced Nix to Palantir, setting off the chain of events that led to SCL’s foray into data warfare. I knew the story, though I wasn’t the source for it; someone else had told Carole about it. The article was true. In fact, I had emails about Sophie Schmidt’s involvement in SCL. The story wasn’t remotely libelous, but Schmidt threw a battalion of lawyers at The Guardian, with the threat of a time-consuming and expansive legal battle. Instead of fighting an obviously spurious lawsuit, the paper agreed to remove Schmidt’s name several weeks after publication.
Then Cambridge Analytica threatened to sue over the same article. And even though The Guardian had documents, emails, and files that confirmed everything I had told them, they backed down again. Editors agreed to flag certain paragraphs as “disputed,” to appease Cambridge Analytica and mitigate the paper’s liability. They took Cadwalladr’s well-sourced story and watered it down.
At this point, my heart sank. I thought, All right, I’ve just moved back to London, I haven’t got a job, and I’m being asked to put my neck on the line for a newspaper that won’t even defend its own journalism. An additional complication was the super NDA that prohibited me from revealing details about my work at Cambridge Analytica. The whole point of Cambridge Analytica making me sign it was that it seriously increased my legal liability, and I had no doubt that my old employers would attempt to sue me into oblivion were I to breach the agreement. My lawyers said I had a strong defense—that by giving The Guardian this information, I was exposing unlawful behavior. But a good defense does not prevent a lawsuit from being filed in the first place, and fighting Cambridge Analytica in court would mean hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees—money I didn’t have.
All the same, I remained determined that the full story come out. My best course of action, I soon discovered, ran through Donald Trump’s hometown. Carole passed me on to Gavin Millar QC, a well-known barrister in London at Matrix Chambers who had worked on the Edward Snowden case for The Guardian, and he suggested that I give the story to an American newspaper. The First Amendment provided U.S. newspapers with much stronger defenses against accusations of libel, he said. The New York Times was far less likely to back down than The Guardian had been, and it would never delete parts of articles after the fact. This was a brilliant suggestion. It also ensured that the story would get as much play in the United States as in Britain.
I told The Guardian that I planned to share the story with The New York Times. They were not pleased, arguing that if we waited any longer, interest in the story would dry up, or someone else would publish before us. But the choice was mine, not theirs, and I stood my ground. I would give reporters at both papers the same information, with the condition that they publish on the same day—and only after I gave the go-ahead. There was too much at stake, and The Guardian’s actions in the Schmidt case had made me wary of the risk of Britain’s extremely plaintiff-friendly libel laws. I reiterated to the paper’s editors that I would not be cooperating or handing over documents until there was an agreement with The New York Times. Cadwalladr was actually completely supportive of letting the Times in, and The Guardian, not having much choice in the matter, acquiesced. The editors cringed at the idea of sharing with their rivals, but, to their credit, they swallowed their pride and set up a meeting with Times editors in Manhattan to start the discussions about how this was all going to play out. The papers reached a tentative agreement in September 2017, and shortly thereafter I met the reporter The New York Times had assigned to the story.
ON THE DAY I was scheduled to meet the American journalist, I walked into the buzzing lobby bar of the Hoxton Hotel, in Shoreditch, and spotted Cadwalladr, who waved me over to her table. She was sitting across from Matt Rosenberg of the Times. Completely bald, slightly beefy, and apparently divorced, he was quite fetching.
“So you’re the guy?” Rosenberg said as he rose from his seat to shake my hand. “I’m assuming,” he said, “we need phones away?”
We all pulled out our Faraday cases, which prevent phones from receiving or transmitting electronic signals. All my meetings with journalists started with this ritual. We then zipped the cases into a soundproof bag I had brought in case there was preinstalled listening malware that could turn itself on without remote activation. With my former Cambridge Analytica associates now working in the Trump administration, and given Cambridge Analytica’s history with hackers and WikiLeaks, we had to be extremely careful.
After more than two hours of conversation about my experience with Cambridge Analytica, Rosenberg said that he had enough to go back to his editors. He ordered some wine for the table and then shared war stories from his time in Afghanistan. He seemed like a straight-up decent guy, and I felt hopeful that maybe this was going to work out. Before the meeting broke up, he gave me his card: “Matthew Rosenberg. National Security Correspondent. New York Times.” He had scribbled a number on the back. “That’s for my burner phone. Call me on Signal. It’ll be good for a few weeks.”
With The New York Times now involved, I began connecting journalists with other former Cambridge Analytica employees, and the journalists flagged a recurring theme: Everyone thought that if they could talk directly to Nix, he wouldn’t be able to help himself—he’d start bragging about Cambridge Analytica’s operations to further wank his already overinflated ego. Although this was undoubtedly true, it seemed like a bad idea to tip him off about planned exposés.
“Maybe I should try to interview him,” Cadwalladr said to me one afternoon. Then she came up with a better idea: catching him in the act. If we put Nix in a situation where he was trying to win potential clients, he was sure to blab about his shady tactics in hopes of impressing them. I’d seen him do this at least a dozen times. And if we managed to get him on tape doing it, that would prove to the world that my accusations were true. So now, in addition to The Guardian and The New York Times, we decided to approach Channel 4 News. As a public television service, Channel 4 had a statutory mandate to represent more diverse, innovative, and independent programming than the BBC, which tended to be extremely risk averse in breaking new stories.
One afternoon in late September, Cadwalladr and I met Channel 4’s investigations editor, Job Rabkin, and his team at the back of an empty pub in Clerkenwell a few blocks from their studios. Cadwalladr introduced us, and Rabkin began describing his team’s experience with undercover work. When I started telling him about Cambridge Analytica’s projects in Africa, Rabkin’s eyes widened. He interjected, “This sounds so twisted and colonial.” Rabkin was the first journalist to use that word with me—“colonial.” Most of the people I told about Cambridge Analytica were fascinated with Trump, Brexit, or Facebook, but whenever I got onto the topic of Africa, I usually was met with shrugs. Shit happens. It’s Africa, after all. But Rabkin got it. What Cambridge Analytica was doing in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria—it was a new era of colonialism, in which powerful Europeans exploited Africans for their resources. And although minerals and oil were still very much part of the equation, there was a new resource being extracted: data.
Rabkin pledged the full support of the Channel 4 investigations unit, adding that his team was willing to take the risk of going undercover to get inside Cambridge Analytica. I began working with them on the operation, which I felt sure would truly blow the lid off of Nix’s corrupt tactics. But this would be an incredibly complicated and delicate undertaking, with disastrous results if Nix somehow discovered what we were up to.
With so many moving parts, whistleblowing was turning into a full-time job. I was also setting myself up for a storm of legal trouble if anything was done improperly, so I texted the lawyers who had helped me over the summer. Their answer was the last thing I wanted to hear. This was too much for pro bono support; I needed to either find cash or new lawyers. I was devastated. I was out of work, in the thick of an extremely complicated mess, and risking serious legal jeopardy—all without a lawyer. But as with so many things in life, sometimes you get lucky and bad news leads you somewhere amazing. And this was one of those moments, because it led me to Tamsin Allen.
Gavin Millar heard about what had happened and referred me to Allen, a top U.K. media lawyer at the firm Bindmans LLP who was an expert in defamation and privacy, in the fall of 2017. Her list of clients included ex-MI5 spies and celebrities who’d had their phones hacked in the infamous News Corp case. She seemed like a perfect fit for my dilemma, and when I met her, we immediately clicked. Growing up, Allen was once expelled from school for skinny-dipping, and just as the 1980s punk scene was taking off, she moved to London, where she lived with squatters in Hackney. “I have so many stories that are completely untellable,” she recollected one late evening as we were prepping evidence. Allen was a rebel herself, and she was unfazed by a pink-haired guy with a nose ring recounting bizarre stories of spying, hackers, and data manipulation. In my journey to become a whistleblower, Allen became my number one ally.
Allen recognized that my interests weren’t entirely aligned with those of Channel 4, The Guardian, and The New York Times. The reporters were focused on the scoop of the year, maybe the decade, while I needed to tell this vitally important story and simultaneously steer clear of legal jeopardy. She counseled that I stay razor-focused on the public interest aspect of the Cambridge Analytica story, particularly because of the super NDA, as British law allows a defense to breach of confidence if it was required to reveal illegality or was manifestly in the public interest. We had a lot of discussions about what “the public interest” was and how we could hew to that line, avoiding revealing anything too gossipy or that would risk legitimate national security interests of the British or American governments, but Allen warned that even if we kept to an airtight legal standard, Cambridge Analytica would still probably sue me. She told me that Facebook also might file suit, and their resources were nearly limitless. And she said it was possible that Facebook or CA might apply for an injunction to prevent publication. Such injunctions are almost unheard of in the United States but are not uncommon in the U.K. Fighting the injunction would be time-consuming, and even if we ultimately won, the British journalists might get cold feet and pull out—Allen told me she had seen it happen many times.
But those were simply the legal scenarios. The story involved many characters who had a history of operating outside of the law, and Allen was becoming concerned for my personal safety. At one of our early meetings, she asked whether I had family in London and what safety precautions I’d taken. “Who are you going to ring in an emergency?” she asked me. We had to create a plan. But as time went on and we became increasingly devoted to each other, I decided that Allen would be the one I would call should things go sideways.
With my legal situation sorted, I started having conversations with Sanni about what had transpired between BeLeave and Vote Leave. He was very forthcoming. Without quite grasping the deeper implications of what he was describing—collusion and cheating—he outlined an arrangement in which Vote Leave wired hundreds of thousands of pounds through BeLeave to an AIQ account. After I helped him see the underlying offenses, Sanni finally understood that he had been used. He had no idea that AIQ was part of Cambridge Analytica, and he was visibly disgusted when I told him about the videos that AIQ had handled for CA during the Nigerian election.
A few days later, he showed me a shared drive containing strategy documents for BeLeave, Vote Leave, and AIQ. Under British law, this was evidence of unlawful coordination. In the activity log, someone had been using the administrator’s account to delete the names of leading Vote Leave officials from the drive. The deletions were made the same week the Electoral Commission launched its investigation of the campaign, Sanni told me. Vote Leave has since claimed this was a data clean-up, but it looked to me as if Vote Leave was trying to delete evidence of the over-spending and had potentially committed yet another crime: destruction of evidence. It began to look like an attempted cover-up, and when he showed me who else was on this drive, it became even more serious. Two of the accounts on the shared drive were those of two senior advisers who were now sitting inside the office of the prime minister, advising on the Brexit negotiation process. I emphasized to Sanni that he might be in possession of evidence of a crime—several crimes, in fact—and that he needed to be extremely careful lest he end up in serious trouble. He was already aware of my cooperation with The Guardian and The New York Times. As he grasped the enormity of what he discovered, Sanni agreed to meet with Cadwalladr, to tell her what he knew. And I also connected him to Tamsin Allen for independent legal advice.
In the beginning, Allen worked on a pro bono basis. But as the complexity of the situation grew, she could no longer give me the hours I needed without some sort of payment. She was also concerned about what would happen if Cambridge Analytica took me to court after they found out that I was going public. Allen refused to drop me over money, but we had to get creative. We decided to approach some of her well-connected contacts, as Allen knew it would be important to create a body of support. The first was Hugh Grant—yes, the Hugh Grant, the star of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Over dinner, Allen explained my predicament. Sanni joined us to go through what had happened on Vote Leave. Grant was warm and caring and seemed just like many of the characters he’s played. Grant had also had personal experience with stolen data—the Rupert Murdoch–owned News of the World had hacked his phone messages. He was taken aback by the scale of Cambridge Analytica’s activities and said he would help think of who could assist us.
The crucial piece of support came a few weeks after we were introduced to Lord Strasburger, a Lib Dem who sat in the House of Lords and is the founder of Big Brother Watch, a privacy activist group. He, in turn, connected me to an exceptionally wealthy individual who came to London to meet me. I asked him why he wanted to help, and he told me that it was because he knew the history of Europe. He said he knew what happens when everyone is cataloged. Privacy is essential to protect us from the rising threat of fascism, and so he said he would help me. A few days later he pledged funds to help me and gave me the backing I needed.
This was just part of the assistance that allowed me to get through the whistleblowing ordeal in one piece. As I prepared to speak out against political and corporate Goliaths, I was a David now backed by committed lawyers and journalists, a legal defense fund, and a huge amount of moral support. So often, whistleblowers are framed as lone activists standing up to giants for what’s right. But in my case, I was never alone, and I got incredibly lucky on several occasions. Without this help, I never would have been able to come forward.
IN OCTOBER 2017, Allen and I met with the Channel 4 News producers, Job Rabkin, and his editor, Ben de Pear. I described Nix and told them about the kinds of illegal activities he regularly engaged in. They were intrigued by the notion of catching him on tape, but as we discussed the details of how such a sting might work, they wondered whether it would be too complicated to succeed. Permission would have to come from the top legal team at the channel, and they could easily deem the undertaking too risky, both legally and reputationally, if it backfired.
We began working with their lawyers on an extensive legal preparatory document. Britain has laws protecting these types of sting operations, but journalists must show that what they’re proposing is in the public interest, that they’re not going to entrap anyone, and that the sting is going to reveal probable crimes. Preparing this document in advance would protect Channel 4 in the event Nix sued.
The sting would require a microscopic attention to detail. I called Mark Gettleson, who without hesitation agreed to help. Nix would have to believe that the people he was meeting with were clients, that the project he was being asked to undertake was real, and that the conversation he was having was completely private. The person playing the “client” would have to be extensively briefed on how Nix operated. He would have to know exactly what to ask for and would also have to be well versed in the political situation of whichever country we chose to have the “project” based in.
We decided to set the scenario in Sri Lanka, for a couple of reasons. One: SCL had done work in India and had an office there, so a neighboring country would feel familiar enough to Nix. And two: The labyrinthine nature of Sri Lankan politics and history made it easier to create a fake political scenario loosely based in reality. Whatever project we created would have to involve enough real players that when a Cambridge Analytica assistant did a bit of Googling before the meeting, it would still seem legit and eventually pass their due diligence procedures.
After Channel 4 hired a Sri Lankan investigator to play the client, “Ranjan,” Gettleson and I coached the Channel 4 team on Nix’s habits and peculiarities, walked them through how Cambridge Analytica vetted prospective clients, and showed them emails from Nix to help them ascertain how he and the company operated. There would be four meetings altogether—three preliminary ones with other Cambridge Analytica executives and then a final one to close the deal with Nix. Ranjan would have to let Nix come up with illegal ideas on his own so there could be no possible suggestion of entrapment.
Ranjan was to play an agent representing an ambitious young Sri Lankan who’d traveled to the West, made a lot of money, and now wanted to return home to run for political office. But because of a family rivalry, a particular minister in the government had frozen his family’s assets. He would use the name of an actual minister and throw in enough factual detail about Sri Lankan politics that Nix and the other executives would buy into the whole scenario. Channel 4 had to do a huge amount of detailed advance research, because any misstep could potentially blow the whole sting up. The carrot for Cambridge Analytica was 5 percent of the value of the man’s assets, if they succeeded in getting the (imaginary) funds released. We knew Alexander wouldn’t be able to resist.
At the first two meetings, Ranjan met with chief data officer Alexander Tayler and managing director Mark Turnbull in private rooms at a hotel near Westminster. The executives pitched Cambridge Analytica’s data analysis work and suggested intelligence-gathering services, but nothing concrete came out of the meetings. They seemed cagey, hedging in how they talked about what Cambridge Analytica really did. Channel 4 was frustrated, but we had an idea for how to fix it.
We realized that whenever guys like this go into a private hotel room, they assume that it’s bugged, so Channel 4 had to figure out how to have these meetings in a public place. The Channel 4 executives pushed back, saying the logistics would be impossible. If we tried to record a meeting in a restaurant or bar, the noise might drown out the audio. Also, where would we put the cameras, to ensure we’d get video recordings of the executives? We couldn’t just lead them to a specific table—that would be too suspicious.
The Channel 4 team, to their credit, made an audacious decision. They rented out a large part of a restaurant, filled it with people hired to have lunch and talk quietly, and aimed dozens of hidden cameras at all the available tables. Nix and the other executives could choose whichever table they liked, which would help make them feel less guarded. However, pretty much everything around them was a camera—even some of the table settings, handbags, and “guests” sitting around them would be recording the conversation.
Two meetings took place at this restaurant. At the first, Turnbull laid the groundwork for some of the more questionable services Cambridge Analytica offered. He told Ranjan that Cambridge Analytica could do some digging about the Sri Lankan minister, saying they would “find all the skeletons in his closet, quietly, discreetly, and give you a report.” But he pulled back toward the end, saying that “we wouldn’t send a pretty girl to seduce a politician, and then film them in their bedroom and then release the film. There are companies that do this, but to me, that crosses a line.” Of course, just by describing what Cambridge Analytica supposedly wouldn’t do, he succeeded in putting the idea on Ranjan’s plate.
Finally, weeks after the sting began, Nix made his entrance. For this fourth meeting, Channel 4 took extra care to make sure that everything was arranged flawlessly. All the tables were bugged, and cameras were set up around the room. There were hidden cameras in the handbags of a couple of women having lunch at the next table. Everything was ready, and we held our breath that Alexander wouldn’t cancel or postpone.
He didn’t. He dug his own grave. Ranjan did a perfect job of asking the right questions and showing interest at the most opportune moments. And Alexander, bless him, just walked right in and opened his big mouth.
TWO MONTHS WOULD PASS before Channel 4 was ready to show us the tape from the restaurant. One morning in early November, I had an appointment with Allen, and I decided to walk because it was a sunny and crisp autumn morning. As I waited for her in the reception lobby, I noticed that I had received several new messages from a strange number. I opened them and reflexively yelled, “What the fuck!” The receptionist stood up and asked if I was okay, and I said no. The messages were photos of me walking that morning. Someone had followed me to my lawyer’s office, and they wanted me to know.
We suspected that Cambridge Analytica may have found out that I had moved back to London and had hired a firm to find out what I was doing. From that point on, Allen said we needed to change my routines—where I went and how I met with lawyers. A few days later, Leave.EU posted on Twitter a video clip from the movie Airplane! depicting a “hysterical” woman being repeatedly beaten, with Cadwalladr’s face superimposed. In the background played the Russian national anthem. She told me she had found out that they might be using a private intelligence firm to investigate her and warned me that if they had been following her around, they might have seen me too and connected the dots. If Cambridge Analytica found out what I was doing, Allen cautioned me, the company could go to court and apply for an injunction preventing me from handing over any more documents to The Guardian or The New York Times. With every turn, I was feeling more concerned about what was going to happen. A few days later, on November 17, the same day Cadwalladr published a story in The Guardian about the threats she had received, I had a seizure on a London street, blacked out, and was taken to a hospital. The doctors said that the cause was unclear.
Soon after I was released from the hospital, I asked Allen if there was anything we could do to secure the information that I had against any effort to keep it away from the public. Was there a surefire way to protect against injunctions in Britain? She said no but then paused, pointing out that the one exception is inside the Houses of Parliament, where the ancient laws of parliamentary immunity shield MPs from injunctions or libel claims in the courts. Discussions of legal principles dating back to the 1600s seemed academic at first, but what Allen told me gave me an idea to take Alistair Carmichael up on his offer to help. Meeting with Carmichael at his office in Parliament, I told him that I was probably under surveillance and that I needed him to lock away some hard drives to safeguard evidence in the event I was not able to publish it. Carmichael agreed and told me that, should it come to it, he would do whatever was necessary to get this information out, even if it meant using his parliamentary immunity. I handed him several hard drives, and for the rest of the time before the stories broke, we kept key evidence in his safe.
I also helped him secure some remarkable recordings. Dr. Emma Briant is a British professor and information warfare expert who came across several Cambridge Analytica executives during the course of her research into CA’s work for NATO. Even as someone who hangs around in military propaganda circles, she had been shocked by her conversations with the firm and had begun recording them. Cadwalladr had introduced us because Briant needed help getting the same kinds of protections I was able to secure working through Carmichael at Parliament. I sat in Alistair’s office as Briant played a recording of Nigel Oakes, the CEO of SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company. “Hitler attacked the Jews, because he didn’t have a problem with the Jews at all, but the people didn’t like the Jews,” said Oakes. “So he just leveraged an artificial enemy. Well, that’s exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim.” Oakes’s company was helping Trump do what Hitler did, but he seemed to find the whole thing amusing. In a separate clip of a discussion between Briant and Wigmore, the Leave.EU communications director also seemed to be interested in reviewing the strategic nature of the Nazis’ communication campaigns. In the tape, Wigmore is recorded explaining, “The propaganda machine of the Nazis, for instance—if you take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff, it was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did. In its pure marketing sense, you can see the logic of what they were saying, why they were saying it, and how they presented things, and the imagery….And looking at that now, in hindsight, having been on the sharp end of this [2016 EU referendum] campaign, you think, crikey, this is not new, and it’s just—it’s using the tools that you have at the time.” As we played the recordings, Carmichael just sat there in silence.
Finally, in February 2018, Allen and I were invited to a screening room in the ITN building, which coincidentally was across the street from Tamsin’s office on Gray’s Inn Road. I watched as Nix shifted in his seat in our pretend dining room, trying to cater to his guests’ whims and desires. I watched as each sentence was spoken, each mistake made. It was insane. Here I was watching Nix in full form, admitting to some of the grotesque things Cambridge Analytica had done and was willing to do. Nix discussed how he had met Trump “many times” during the 2016 campaign. Turnbull went further, revealing how Cambridge Analytica had set up the “crooked Hillary” narrative. “We just put information into the bloodstream [of] the Internet and then watch it grow,” he said. “And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.” As I watched, I could barely contain myself. My experience was finally being validated by Nix’s own words.
The footage was perfect. Nix and Turnbull were caught dead to rights, casually offering to find kompromat and to blackmail a Sri Lankan minister. Nix, draping one leg over the other and sipping a drink, said:
Deep digging is interesting. But you know, equally effective can be just to go and speak to the incumbents and to offer them a deal that’s too good to be true, and make sure that’s video-recorded. You know, these sorts of tactics are very effective. Instantly having video evidence of corruption. Putting it on the Internet, these sorts of things….
We’ll have a wealthy developer come in—somebody posing as a wealthy developer….They will offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance. We’ll have the whole thing recorded on cameras. We’ll blank out the face of our guy and then post it on the Internet.
Yes, Nix actually proposed conducting a sting operation, right in the middle of ours. I sat there watching with Allen and the Channel 4 team, taking in the sheer irony of it all. And then Nix went on and offered to:
send some girls around to the candidate’s house. We have lots of history of things….We could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us, you know what I’m saying….They are very beautiful. I find that works very well….I’m just giving you examples of what can be done and what has been done….I mean, it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed.
After months of work and endless wrangling, we finally had all the elements in place. This Channel 4 footage would serve as the story’s coup de grâce, and in that moment I finally felt confident that we were actually going to stop Cambridge Analytica.
AT LONG LAST, it was agreed that the print stories and the corresponding broadcast investigation would come out during the last two weeks of March 2018. A couple of weeks before publication, I met with Damian Collins, the chair of Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS), at his office in Portcullis House, a modern glass building on the Parliamentary Estate. Collins had opened up an official inquiry into social media disinformation, and several MPs and committee chairs I’d talked with had recommended that I meet with him. Collins was extremely polite and posh and spoke with the preppy charm that English Tories of a certain breed seem to have. I was impressed with him from the start. He was far more aware of what Cambridge Analytica was than any other MP I had met, and he had in fact already called Nix to testify several months prior. Nix had denied before the committee—on record—that Cambridge Analytica used any Facebook data. I told Collins that was false and that Nix may have misled the committee—which was quite serious, as it was potentially contempt of Parliament. I plugged one of the drives from Carmichael’s safe in to my laptop and turned the screen to Collins. On the screen was a fully executed contract for Facebook data with both Nix’s and Kogan’s signatures signed in bright blue ink. We spent several hours going through internal documents from CA that established that the company used Facebook data and had relationships with Russian companies, and showing some of the extremely gruesome propaganda they had disseminated showing people being murdered. After Collins and the committee staff identified the documents they needed, I made a copy and handed a drive over to him. We agreed that, two weeks after the scheduled publication date, his inquiry would call me to testify in public. On that day, he would start a document dump via the committee of the documents I had given him.
At the same time all this was happening, I had been updating the Information Commissioner’s Office—the government agency that investigates data crimes—on the evidence we were gathering about Cambridge Analytica’s illicit activities. After seeing the Channel 4 footage, I told Commissioner Elizabeth Denham that CA was still at it, proposing to commit crimes on behalf of prospective clients. The ICO asked us to hold off on breaking the stories, because they wanted to conduct a raid before everything went public. They didn’t want CA to have a chance to delete evidence. I gave them all the evidence I had, including copies of CA executives’ files, project documents, and internal emails, which they then passed along to the National Crime Agency, the British equivalent of the FBI. I had to curate the evidence, since it was all quite complicated, in order for the ICO to execute proper warrants for the raid. Tamsin and I were also preparing witness statements and a full written opinion to be provided to the Electoral Commission, about the crimes committed by the Leave campaign. We were hardly sleeping—working on legal documents, advising law enforcement, managing the journalists. It was an exhausting time. But, finally, everything was coming together.
About a week before publication, The Guardian sent out right-to-reply letters to the people and companies named in their reporting. The letters are a customary British journalism practice intended to give people a chance to respond to allegations before articles are published. On March 14, I received a letter from Facebook’s lawyers demanding that I hand over all my devices for their inspection, citing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the California Penal Code in an attempt to intimidate me with criminal liability. On March 17, the day before publication, Facebook threatened to sue The Guardian if it moved forward with the articles, insisting that there had been no data leak. When the company realized that publication was inevitable, in an attempt to get ahead of the story and shift focus, it announced that it was banning me, Kogan, and Cambridge Analytica from using the platform. The Guardian and The New York Times were furious that Facebook was using the extra notice it had been given, in good faith, to attempt to undermine the story with its announcement.
On the evening of March 17, The Guardian and the Times worked all night to rush through the publication of their stories. The Times headline read: “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions.” The Guardian editors chose a more dramatic headline: “ ‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower.” The stories instantly went viral, and that night Channel 4 began running its series, including the devastating sting exposing Nix. The channel also released an interview with the defeated 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, who described the allegations about Cambridge Analytica as “very disturbing.” In the interview, Clinton said, “When you have a massive propaganda effort to prevent people from thinking straight, because they’re being flooded with false information and…every search engine, every site they go into, is repeating these fabrications, then yes, it affected the thought processes of voters.” Cadwalladr’s story blew up after that. Two other Guardian journalists, Emma Graham-Harrison and Sarah Donaldson, wrote articles explaining how it all connected. Their brilliant storytelling obviously resonated with regular non-tech folk and caused a massive jamboree on social media (save for Facebook, which instead promoted its own press release in its trending news stories section). The Times story focused on the Facebook data breach, identifying it as “one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history.” Reporters Matthew Rosenberg and Nicholas Confessore, bylined with Cadwalladr, also connected the dots between Bannon, Mercer, and Cambridge Analytica and explained in detail how they had used Facebook data to propel Trump to victory.
In London, the British authorities had already been investigating both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook for months, as I had handed over evidence to them before the story broke. But while the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office was in the process of applying for warrants in the British courts to execute a search of Cambridge Analytica’s offices and seize evidence, Facebook had already hired a “digital forensics firm” to examine Cambridge Analytica’s servers, beating the authorities into CA’s headquarters. Although the ICO required a warrant to enter, Facebook did not, as it had been granted access by CA. When Facebook found out that the story was about to break, it contacted Cambridge Analytica, which agreed to provide Facebook access to its servers and computers while the ICO was still in the process of requesting a warrant. But when the ICO was tipped off that Facebook had entered CA’s headquarters, they were furious. They had never seen a company take such brazen steps to handle evidence that would soon become the subject of a judicial search warrant. What made the situation even worse was that Facebook was not a mere bystander in this affair—Facebook’s data was also a subject of the investigation and the company was inside a potential crime scene handling evidence that could affect its own legal liability. The ICO sent agents to the scene, escorted by the police. Late that night, a dramatic standoff ensued between ICO agents, British police, and Facebook’s “forensic auditors.” Facebook’s auditors were ordered to drop everything and immediately leave Cambridge Analytica’s offices, and they agreed to stand down. Elizabeth Denham, the U.K. information commissioner, was so incensed by Facebook’s actions that she made a rare appearance the next day on British news, issuing a statement that Facebook’s actions would “potentially compromise a regulatory investigation.”
The reaction on both sides of the Atlantic was instant and explosive. I was called before the parliamentary inquiry into “fake news and disinformation.” It would be the first of many public and secret hearings, covering everything from Cambridge Analytica’s use of hackers and bribes to Facebook’s data breach to Russian intelligence operations. Mark D’Arcy, the BBC’s parliamentary correspondent covering the hearing, said, “I think the [DCMS committee] hearing with Chris Wylie is, by a distance, the most astounding thing I’ve seen in Parliament.”
In Washington, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched investigations, while lawmakers in the United States and the U.K. began calling for Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify under oath. The Department of Justice and the FBI flew to Britain to meet me in person on a Royal Navy base a few weeks after the story broke. The NCA had borrowed the building from the Royal Navy.
As Facebook’s stock slid, Zuckerberg remained out of sight. He finally emerged on March 21, with a Facebook post saying he was “working to understand exactly what happened” and saying there had been a “breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.” The hashtag #DeleteFacebook started trending on Twitter, with Elon Musk stoking the fire by tweeting that he’d deleted the Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla. As I prepared for my public testimonies, I listened to Cardi B, the American rapper who had released her debut album only a few weeks after the story broke. The record’s (purely coincidental) title, Invasion of Privacy, quickly prompted memes to circulate on social media with Mark Zuckerberg’s face appended to an edited version of the now-platinum album’s cover. It began to look as if the story was tipping into the zeitgeist, and people who had already been feeling uneasy about how Facebook operates were now having their fears confirmed in the most public fashion. In the throes of this PR nightmare, Zuckerberg bought ad space in major newspapers to publish a letter of apology, only a couple of weeks after Facebook first threatened to sue The Guardian in an attempt to shut down the story, but the letter did little to quell the anger. Just two weeks later, he faced two long days of grilling by U.S. congressional leaders.
In Britain, there was still more to report. This time it was about Brexit. As the stories were breaking in America, a new tranche of right-to-reply letters were sent out to those involved in Vote Leave. Dom Cummings and Stephen Parkinson were among the recipients. It was only when Sanni arrived at our lawyer’s office that evening after receiving a flurry of calls from former Vote Leave staffers that we realized what Parkinson had done in response. Parkinson had responded in the most cruelly personal way imaginable. At the time, Parkinson was working as a senior adviser to Prime Minister Theresa May, and a day before The Guardian published the story, the Downing Street press office issued an official statement, which we discovered only when The New York Times asked us to comment. In the statement, Parkinson revealed his relationship with Sanni and dismissed the accusations as bitterness over their breakup. Sanni is a Pakistani Muslim, and he had not yet come out to his family as gay, because it would have put his relatives back in Pakistan in physical danger, a fact that Parkinson knew full well. Despite this, he chose to out Sanni to the world’s media and let his former intern deal with the consequences. This was the first time, at least in recent history, that the press office of the prime minister had publicly outed someone in an act of retaliation. When Sanni heard about the statement, he looked solemnly into everyone’s eyes and sat back in his chair. Allen and Cadwalladr would eventually convince Cummings to remove a blog post he had written in response about the affair, but the damage was done. Parkinson had done exactly what he intended to.
The Vote Leave revelations had to compete with the cover of the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail: “PM’s Aide in Toxic Sex Row Over Pro-Brexit Cash Plot.” Continuing their vilification of LGBTQ people, Britain’s right-wing press had reduced Sanni and his evidence of the largest breach of campaign finance law in British history to nothing more than “toxic sex.” By now, Sanni’s family in Karachi had to take security measures back at home due to the threat of violence that LGBTQ people and their families face in Pakistan. His life and the lives of the people he loved had been upended. I’ll never forget watching Sanni through a window as he sat alone in Allen’s office at half past midnight, dialing his mother to tell her that, yes, he was gay. It was a moment in which the courage and consequences of his decision to come out as a whistleblower were inseparable. In the following days, the violence Sanni faced only worsened as he was followed by people with hidden cameras, and photos of him and me inside a gay bar were later published on British alt-right sites with incredibly homophobic commentary. In Parliament, Prime Minister Theresa May herself defended the actions of Parkinson. It was heartbreaking to watch, but it made me so proud to call Sanni my friend.
ON THE EVENING OF March 20, three days after the Cambridge Analytica story broke, I went to the Frontline Club, in London, with Allen and Sanni for my first public appearance. I was swarmed by photographers as I walked in, and the venue heaved with reporters from around the world. Journalists had grabbed the closest seat they could get. All along the back, there were cameras from more than twenty news channels, and with so many people crammed inside, it was getting hot. The journalist and privacy activist Peter Jukes interviewed me before the crowd, and I then took questions. When I couldn’t take any more attention, I left via a discreet escape route. So as not to make a scene, the plan was for Allen to leave a few minutes later. Outside, I turned right and was headed down Norfolk Place when a man approached me. He held a glowing phone up to my face. I took a step backward, confused and a little alarmed. I asked what he wanted, and he told me to just look at his phone.
My eyes adjusted, and I could make out a screenshot of a Cambridge Analytica invoice to UKIP. He then swiped to what looked like an email from Andy Wigmore, the communications director of Leave.EU, to someone with a Russian name. I didn’t have long to look at it, but it seemed the message was about gold. “They worked with the Russians,” the man told me. At this point, Allen and the others came out with some of the others. When they saw the man, they were worried for my safety and ran up, trying to grab him. The man shook them off and got away. I was just in a daze from it all. Earlier that day I had been on back-to-back live TV interviews and had been chased down by photographers. It was an overwhelming day. In the car ride back to Allen’s office to collect my bag, I told her that I wasn’t really sure what it was about but that the messages looked real enough: I recognized the bank account details. Later that week, Allen received a cryptic message and called to say she thought that the man who had stopped me on the street was trying to contact me.
I had thought most of my work as a whistleblower was over by this point, but what transpired next led me to information so sensitive that my meetings with the House Intelligence Committee that day in June 2018 had to be conducted in the SCIF, underneath the United States Capitol. In the two months before that secret hearing, I met the man in several random locations scattered across London, and it became clear that he had access to files belonging to Leave.EU co-founder Arron Banks and communications director Andy Wigmore. The documents constituted a record of extensive communications between Leave.EU, a major alt-right pro-Brexit campaign, and the Russian embassy in London during the Brexit campaign. Once we were assured of their authenticity, Allen and I contacted MI5 and the National Crime Agency.
In April, Allen met with an NCA officer in one of their unmarked offices inside a major London train station to update them on my behalf, as we couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t being followed. We were both worried because we’d learned that the man was traveling with these documents, which potentially contained evidence of a Russian intelligence operation, throughout Ukraine and Eastern Europe. The NCA notified the British embassy in Kiev about the situation. Then we lost track of him and his phone was disconnected. We were all deeply concerned about his safety.
Several weeks later, the man reemerged and wanted to meet again. Allen and I decided that I would secretly record my meetings with the man. We handed over copies of the recordings and screenshots of the documents to the British authorities. We also notified the Americans, because we saw evidence that the Russians were speaking with Cambridge Analytica clients immediately before and after the clients met with the Trump campaign. We eventually had a meeting with California congressman Adam Schiff, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, in Nancy Pelosi’s office in the Capitol. Allen and I told Congressman Schiff about the existence of these documents. I agreed to return to D.C. with the documents, which were kept secure in Carmichael’s safe at Parliament.
Soon after this D.C. meeting, I was contacted by Fusion GPS, the private intelligence firm that had put together the Trump-Russia dossier authored by Christopher Steele. Steele’s firm had learned about the documents and recordings I had through a British source, and Fusion GPS told us they had documents and information of their own that illuminated the same set of connections—between the Russians, Brexit, and Trump’s campaign. We all agreed to meet in the office of DCMS committee chair Damian Collins. Like a jigsaw, Collins, Fusion GPS, and I had each acquired different sets of documents about the same events, and we began piecing everything together. Allen approached the NCA again, but they declined to take action, so we instead handed everything over to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, which agreed to pass it on to the appropriate American intelligence channels. If the U.K. authorities were not going to touch the evidence we had about Brexit and the Russian embassy on their own, we hoped that when the American agencies got access to the documents they would put pressure on their British colleagues to take action.
THE DOCUMENTS TELL A remarkable story. In 2015, not long after I left Cambridge Analytica, the U.K. Independence Party–backed Leave.EU campaign retained the firm to, as Leave.EU stated at its campaign launch, “map the British electorate and what they believe in, enabling us to better engage with voters.” The CA-UKIP relationship was one that was fostered by Steve Bannon. Once Banks and Wigmore had been speaking to Bannon about Cambridge Analytica, Nigel Farage introduced them to his friend Robert Mercer. Mercer was keen to help their budding alt-right movement, but the American billionaire, like all foreigners, was legally barred from donating or substantively interfering in British political campaigns. So the Brexiteers were told by the billionaire that the data and services of Cambridge Analytica could be useful, and Bannon offered to help. Farage, Banks, and company accepted Bannon’s offer, consummating the emerging Anglo-American alt-right alliance with databases and algorithms.
It was this relationship that became a focal point of interest for the House Intelligence Committee, as it appeared that this relationship was exploited by the Russian embassy as a discreet vehicle into the Trump campaign. In November 2015, Leave.EU publicly launched its referendum campaign with Brittany Kaiser, who, in addition to working at Cambridge Analytica, was appointed as Leave.EU’s new director of operations. On the campaign, Kaiser was to have a special focus on deploying CA’s microtargeting algorithms.
Shortly before the public launch with Cambridge Analytica, the top donors to UKIP and Leave.EU—Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore—began their flirtations with the Russian government. It all started at the 2015 UKIP conference, in Doncaster, with a meeting between the two and Alexander Udod, a Russian diplomat who invited them to meet his ambassador at the Russian embassy. A few weeks later, after what was described in correspondence as a “boozy six-hour lunch” with Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador in London, Banks and Wigmore met the ambassador a second time and were given an enticing offer, which Banks then extended to several associates, including Jim Mellon, a prominent investor and Brexit backer. The Russian embassy was interested in facilitating introductions for some potentially lucrative deals to invest in what Banks referred to in an email as “The Russian Gold Play.” The pitch to the men was made through the ambassador, who introduced them to Siman Povarenkin, a Russian businessman. Povarenkin suggested that several Russian gold and diamond mines were about to be consolidated and partially privatized. The embassy made clear that the deal would be backed by Sberbank, a Russian state bank, subject to U.S. and EU sanctions. The advantage of working through the embassy and Sberbank, the UKIP donors were told, was that it “leads to certain opportunities not available to others.”
In the time leading up to the announcement that Cambridge Analytica would be working on Leave.EU’s campaign, the contact with the Russian embassy continued. In an email responding to a meeting invitation from a Russian official, Banks wrote the embassy to say, “Thank you Andy and myself will be delighted to attend lunch to brief the Ambassador on the 6th November. There is massive interest in this referendum in the USA as well, and we are shortly visiting Washington to brief key [sic] on the campaign.” On November 16, 2015, the day after the announcement, Banks and Wigmore were invited back to the embassy for more meetings. We do not know exactly what transpired in the embassy that day, but we do know that the Brexiteers then flew to America to meet with their Republican counterparts and that the Russian embassy was aware of these trips. We also know that Banks and Wigmore were keen on keeping Ambassador Yakovenko updated, saying in one text message to the ambassador in January 2016, “Andy and myself would love to come and update you on the campaign. It’s all happening. All the best, Arron.”
Why Banks would tell the Russian ambassador about his American political contacts or the Brexit referendum campaign if he was strictly dealing with the Russians on business is unclear, but the meetings certainly had an effect on the Brexiteers. In one chain of correspondence, one of the men discussed helping to create a Brexit-style movement in Ukraine, with the goal of fighting pro-EU narratives in a country Russia has long fought to keep inside its sphere of influence. They later decided against a foray into Ukraine and in one email even discussed whether a sentence in a draft of a press release might be seen as “too overtly Russophile,” but Wigmore nonetheless responded with the suggestion to “send a note of support to the Ambassador.”
Banks and Wigmore kept in contact with the Russian embassy; Wigmore wrote to invite Russian diplomats to attend Leave.EU events—including their Brexit victory party in June 2016. Though Banks reportedly consulted experts about the Russian gold and diamond mine investment offers, he told reporters he ultimately turned all of them down. Wigmore had also decided “not to proceed further” with an investment. But shortly after the Brexit campaign concluded, an investment fund associated with Jim Mellon, one of UKIP’s major donors, reportedly made an investment in Alrosa, the Russian state-owned diamond company, which was partially privatized. However, a representative of the firm said that the specifics of the investment were made without Mellon’s knowledge and that the fund had made an earlier investment in Alrosa when public shares were first offered in 2013. In late July 2016, a month after Brexit was won and just weeks after the Russian intelligence hack of the Democratic National Committee’s files and emails was leaked, Alexander Nix went to a polo match and was photographed with Ambassador Yakovenko sharing a bottle of Russian vodka. Coincidentally, this was also around the time that Nix was seeking to get access to WikiLeaks’s information for the Trump campaign.
With Brexit won, Farage and Banks set their sights on America, now deep in the midst of the 2016 campaign. Over the course of 2016, these Brits campaigned vigorously for Trump, with Farage attending a myriad of public events for the Republican candidate. It seemed normal to casual observers at the time that then-candidate Trump, declaring himself “Mr. Brexit,” would invite the lead figures of UKIP to his rallies. But what many Americans don’t understand is how connected the alt-right is. It is a coordinated global movement. And it became a massive security risk in 2016.
On August 20, 2016, Sergey Fedichkin, the Third Secretary of the Russian embassy, was sent an email by Andy Wigmore, with the subject line “Fwd Cottrell docs—Eyes Only.” There were a couple of attachments and a cryptic one-line message: “Have fun with this.” The attachments contained legal documents pertaining to George Cottrell’s arrest by U.S. federal agents. At the time, Cottrell was the chief of staff to Nigel Farage and the head of fundraising for UKIP. Farage said later that he knew nothing of Cottrell’s illegal activities. After flying to America to celebrate their recent Brexit victory before a large Trump rally at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Cottrell and Farage were at Chicago O’Hare airport, about to return to England. Before takeoff, several agents boarded the plane and arrested Cottrell on multiple counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud. He had also been linked to Moldindconbank, the Moldovan bank alleged to be a key player in the “Russian Laundromat” money-laundering scheme. Wigmore is recorded, in emails I obtained from my contact, sending Russian diplomats copies of the U.S. Justice Department’s charges. Following a plea agreement, Cottrell pleaded guilty to wire fraud.
The Russian embassy clearly knew how tightly connected key figures in the Brexit movement were to the Trump campaign, and the embassy kept cultivating their relationship to the point where they received documents from Wigmore about their UKIP associate’s FBI arrests. Why should Americans care about what Russia was doing in Britain? Because these Brexiteers shared the same data firm, in Cambridge Analytica, and the same adviser, in Steve Bannon, and they were clearly keeping the Russians informed at each step of the way. And these same Brexiteers were some of the very first people invited to Trump Tower after his surprise victory. The president-elect of the United States met with British citizens who were regularly briefing the Russian government.
As the journalists celebrated having exposed Cambridge Analytica and plunged the stock of an intransigent Facebook, I did not feel joyous. I was numb. It felt like watching the death of someone whose time has come. It was the most grueling and arduous thing I have ever been through. I only began to process what had happened months later, after the adrenaline subsided. I realized how much trauma I had endured and I allowed myself to feel the pain of the experience, a pain made all the more acute by the role I had played in this disaster. As I saw Trump rise to power and watched as he banned citizens of Muslim states from entering the United States and gave justifications for white supremacist movements, I couldn’t help feeling that I had laid the seeds for this to happen. I had played with fire, and now I watched as the world was burning. In heading to Congress, I was not simply going there to give my testimony. I was attending my own confessional.