This article explores the origins of the controversial (and now defunct) political consulting and data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica the shadowy history and intelligence connections of its parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratories.
It is part one of the series “Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, and the Bad Boys of Brexit on the 2016 Trump Campaign.”
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available .
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —In the months before the election of Donald Trump, political events in the United Kingdom presaged the populist uprising that would shake the foundations of the West to the core. The factors that drove a slim majority of Britons to vote to separate the UK from the European Union, popularly known as Brexit, were interpreted by Donald Trump and his supporters to mean that his campaign had emerged at the perfect moment to ride a wave of popular discontent across Europe and the United States.The Brexit referendum and the Trump candidacy, however, were connected by more than shared themes and ideological underpinnings.The British consulting and data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) served a core nexus between the Trump campaign and a flamboyant cast of British politicians and businessmen associated with Brexit.The company was founded in part by a group of Americans who formed the central pillars of support for the Trump campaign.While the exact nature and efficacy of the work performed by CA on both Brexit and the Trump campaign remains disputed, an exploration of the facts is useful insofar as it reveals the risks posed by data-informed psychological operations to democracy.There was a remarkable overlap between the techniques utilized by both CA and the Russian troll farm the Internet Research Agency, as well as mysterious third parties .
Read my in-depth analysis of the activities of the Internet Research Agency and the Kremlin’s troll army during the 2016 election here.
An analysis of CA also provides a prism to explore the suspicious interactions between the Trump campaign and several prominent Brexiters with dubious links to Russia, and more broadly the remarkable infiltration of Russian money, as well as its intelligence apparatus and organized crime, into British social, political and economic life.
Nigel Oakes and Strategic Communications Laboratories
Nigel Oakes, founder of Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL)Both the separation of the United Kingdom from Europe and the election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States were foreign policy goals held by the Kremlin.As of this writing, there is no direct evidence that Cambridge Analytica conspired, knowingly or otherwise, with the Russian intelligence services in their efforts to influence the outcomes of either the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK or the presidential election in the US.That being said, the curious linkages between CA and its parent company SCL Group with Russian actors and interests, as well as those of the prominent Brexiters who later became active supporters of Trump, demand further scrutiny.“Cambridge Analytica,” according to a report issued by the US Senate Intelligence Committee, “had a degree of intersection with and proximity to Russia, and .”A key element adding to the mystery of Cambridge Analytica is that fact that the company was but one part of a complex and opaque corporate ownership structure consisting of a byzantine array of parent and subsidiary companies.This practice, commonly used in the corporate world for the purposes of tax avoidance or evasion, functioned on several different levels. It allowed the individuals behind these loosely linked corporate vehicles to obscure their involvement, as well as to take advantage of various, competing legal jurisdictions in a practice known as jurisdictional arbitrage.
Perhaps most intriguingly, while these structures are often used to launder money, they can also be used to launder data.
For example, a company might legally gather data in one jurisdiction for one purpose, and then transfer that data to a linked entity to be used for an entirely separate, possibly illegal purpose.The corporate structure that surrounded the late Cambridge Analytica remains opaque not only to the general public but to investigatory bodies that supposedly investigated the organization.“The Committee does not purport to have fully uncovered the extent of the corporate structure,” the .“Furthermore, the Committee’s witnesses attributed activities to a single entity (e.g., “Cambridge Analytica”) that may have in fact been undertaken by several entities within the complex arrangement or may have been ambiguous, such as Cambridge Analytica, LLC in the United States or Cambridge Analytica, Ltd. in the United Kingdom. The Committee has attempted to substantiate and/or appropriately attribute the facts within the limitations of evidence it gathered.”CA’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), was established in 1993.The company was founded by Nigel Oakes, an old Etonian and member of the British establishment who had achieved minor notoriety in his youth after dating Lady Helen Windsor, a relative of the British royal family.
At one point he worked as a D.J. in a mobile disco he operated named “.”Oakes went on to work at Saatchi & Saatchi, a British advertising firm famous for his historical connection to the Conservative Party, where he worked on shaping and promoting the image of the iconic Conservative .Towards the end of the 1980’s, Oakes had developed a fascination with the science behind shaping behavior and mass psychology. In 1989, he established the Behavioral Dynamics Institute (BDI) with the psychologists Adrian Furnham and Barrie Gunter.
Furnham and Gunter book published in 1989A central insight they arrived at was that one should target social groups rather than individuals, and that the efforts should not be aimed at having people change their minds.The academics later distanced themselves from Oakes after determining that he was overselling what their understanding of psychology at the time could substantiate.
Oakes was not averse to making broad, sweeping statements. “We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler,” he told Marketing in 1992. “We appeal to people on an emotional level to .”
At Strategic Communication Laboratories, Oakes applied his new methodology to foreign elections, primarily in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.One of the earliest projects the group took on was the 1994 South African election on behalf of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. While it isn’t clear what exactly the company did in South Africa, promotional materials suggest that it was tasked with .
Nelson Mandela votig in the 1994 election.While the election experienced less violence than feared, what role Strategic Communication Laboratories played in this outcome and the methods it employed are unknown.By 1998, the company had expanded into .In the year 2000, the British press reported that Oakes and his company had been hired by Indonesia’s embattled President. Following the dictator Suharto’s resignation in 1998, the country had been shaken by political unrest. After surveying the country, it was determined that the primary instigators of the unrest was Indonesia’s educated youth.
According to internal documents viewed by Quartz, Strategic Communication Laboratories claimed it clandestinely set up alternative peaceful demonstrations at universities and secondary schools to channel .
As part of the project, Oakes established a flashy “operations centre” in Jakarta. The set up was so theatrical that local contractors took to referring .”Strategic Communication Laboratories engaged in dirty tricks on behalf of the Indonesian government. Oakes paid an NGO several thousand dollars that he falsely claimed was from USAID in order to have the NGO put out positive news stories about his clients. He was paid $300,000 cash for the project. Oakes was forced to leave the country after these claims were .Following 9/11, new opportunities opened up for Strategic Communication Laboratories. As the US found itself embroiled in a “Global War on Terror,” there were vast populations across the Middle East, Asia and Africa that it sought to influence away from violent extremism.Strategic Communication Laboratories used its relationship with the Behavioral Dynamics Institute, which kept an office in Britain’s much heralded scientific body the Royal Institution, to promote itself as being on the vanguard of “psychological warfare” and “influence operations.”It was soon deluged with U.S. government contracts, including from the Department of Homeland Security, .According to a , in 2004 Strategic Communication Laboratories was .“Faced with mounting opposition and increasingly vocal internal dissent following the dissolution of Parliament,” the website read, “in 2004 the Orange coalition turned to SCL Elections for help. As part of a multi-national consultation team, and with the aid of modern research and efficient campaign intervention techniques, SCL succeeded in maintaining the cohesion of the coalition to ensure a hard fought victory.”Virtually nothing is known about Strategic Communication Laboratories role in Ukraine beyond what they put up (before taking down) on their website.If Strategic Communication Laboratories did work on behalf of the Orange Coalition, it may have come to the attention of Russian intelligence.Vladimir Putin and the security officials around him believed that, in part, the Color Revolutions had been initiated by outside instigators.“In Vladimir Putin’s opinion,” writes Yulia Nikitina, “decisions to start revolutions are made from without, based on a certain political expediency for the countries making the decisions and not for the countries where the .”
SCL Group, Vincent Tchenguiz, Organized Crime and Israeli intelligence
In 2005, Oakes set up SCL Group, which claimed expertise in “influence” and “psychological” operations. SCL Group . It purchased a booth at the UK’s largest military trade fair and set up a mock “operations centre” that simulated a smallpox .Oakes founded SCL Group with his younger brother, Alexander, and a fellow Etonian named Alexander James Ashburner Nix.
Alexander NixNix, the wealthy son of the Ashburner Nix family, had been hired by Strategic Communication Laboratories in 2003 as a director. Nix’s mother was a . Other shareholders included members of Britain’s .SCL Group’s largest shareholder between 2005 and 2015, Vincent Tchenguiz, has attracted scrutiny for his connections to Russian organized crime and the Israeli intelligence services.
Vincent Tchenguiz ()Born in Tehran to Iraqi-Jewish parents, Vincent and his brother Robert earned billions after becoming some of Britain’s largest property moguls with the establishment of a .The London property market has long been a favorite sink for money from the former Soviet Union.In 2002, the Tchenguiz brothers purchased the Shell-Mex House, a notable Art Deco office building on the Thames, for £350 million.
Shell-Mex House on the Thames in London.They co-owned the building with the Reuben brothers, whose activities in post-Soviet Russia led them to making billions in the aluminum market. The Reuben’s had been business partners with Lev and Mikhail Chernoy, allegedly high level members of the .
Read my description of the Reuben brothers and their conquest of the Russian aluminum industry, leading to the rise of the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who later employed Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, here.
In 2005, Vincent Tchenguiz’s company Consensus Business Group purchased 22,533 shares of SCL Group, making him a 24% percent shareholder, the largest single investor at the company.While the shares were initially held by Consensus Business Group, they were subsequently transferred to another Tchenguiz owned entity called Wheddon Ltd.During roughly the same timeframe of his investment in SCL Group, another Tchenguiz investment vehicle, Vantania Holding’s Ltd, invested in a soil regeneration company called Zander Group Ltd.Between 2006 and 2011, the largest single shareholder in Zander was Dymytro Firtash, whose shares were .
Ukrainian oligarch Dymytro Firtash
Read my description of Dymytro Firtash’s links to the Eurasian organized crime lord Semyon Moglivich, and of Firtash’s business links to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, here.
Firtash is currently under indictment by U.S. authorities who are attempting to seize Spadi Trading. He is also being investigated by .He has been described in U.S. legal documents as an “upper-echelon .”In addition to his position in the Ukrainian natural gas industry, where he was alleged to serve as a front for Mogilevich, Firtash is also a fertilizer magnate, .Tchenguiz eventually transferred his ownership stake in Zander to Wheddon Ltd, thus housing both his investments in SCL Group and the Dymytro Firtash-linked Zander Group Ltd under the same holding company.
Tchenguiz, a notorious socialite who once claimed he was “too rich to marry,” was a . In 2010, The Guardian reported that he had been seen on multiple occasions attending .
SVR “illegal” agent Anna Kushchenko (AKA Anna Chapman)Born Anna Vasilyevna Kushchenko, Chapman was the daughter of a KGB agent and served as an undercover illegal Russian intelligence agent working for the SVR. She lived in London between 2001 and 2006 where she worked at the Mayfair hedge fund for Nicholas Cammilery, a friend and associate of Tchenguiz’s.After moving to the United States, Chapman was arrested with ten other illegals by the FBI and .In 2011, Vincent and Robert Tchenguiz were arrested in a raid by the British Serious Fraud Office in relation to their alleged role in the collapse of the Icelandic Kaupthing Bank in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.The Tchenguiz brothers’ investments had been fueled by billions worth of debt, much of which had been provided by Kaupthing.
Robert (left) and Vincent Tchenguiz ()Vincent and his brother Robert were deeply entwined with Kaupthing, with Robert even serving as director Kaupthing’s largest shareholder, an investment group called Exista.While Icelandic lending rules limit its financial institutions to lending out no more than 25% of their capital base, shortly before the crisis struck Kaupthing and lent the Tchenguiz brothers .Kaupthing failed in October of 2008, impacting 150,000 Britons and forcing the UK Treasury to step in and cover the £2.5 billion in losses.Two weeks before it failed, Kaupthing’s credit committee engaged in an orgy of lending that exceeded 100% of the bank’s equity base.Among those who received the questionable loans were Robert Tchenguiz, a British fashion tycoon named .Usmanov, one of the richest men in Russia, has investments in precious metals and Gazprom, is reported to have links to .
The leadership of the Solntsevskaya BratvaUsmanov was at one point was a .Kaupthing offered Usmanov two loans, one in the sum of £1.2 billion to purchase a stake in Norilsk Nickel, and another amounting to £1.1 billion to purchase a Finnish insurance company.It later emerged that Usmanov owned a 1.5% stake in Kaupthing, thus making him a shareholder alongside Exista, which was directed by Robert Tchenguiz.Usmanov’s office in Mayfair, London is located next door to the Tchenguiz brothers’ office.In a legal dispute between Vincent Tchenguiz and his onetime good friend Keyvan Rahimian, who at one point lived at Vincent’s home and served as an IT director at one of his companies, it was revealed that Rahimian and Usmanov were friends, thus placing the criminally-linked Uzbek oligarch again .Tchenguiz’s conflict with Rahimian also highlights his involvement in private espionage. Rahimian accused Tchenguiz of instructing him to install “spying software” on the phone of an unnamed individual.In a conflict between the Tchenguiz brothers and their former brother-in-law, Vivian Imerman, who was in the process of divorcing their sister Lisa Tchenguiz, Robert Tchenguiz ordered his IT staff to hack into Imerman’s computer files.Robert and Vincent, along with their IT staff, went through the stolen material and downloaded documents related to his personal finances and family trusts.A British judge later ordered the Tchenguiz brothers .Coincidentally, Lisa Tchenguiz once attempted to open a restaurant on St. Tropez .Following his and Robert’s arrest, Vincent Tchenguiz turned to former Israeli intelligence agents for help in his battle against the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Tchenguiz sought advice from Meir Dagan, who had only recently stepped down as the head of Israel’s Mossad.
Former Mossad head Meir DaganHe asked Dagan how he could utilize the expertise of former Israeli intelligence members to look into business rivals who he believed had alerted the authorities to his activities vis-a-vis Kaupthing bank.Dagan told Technguiz, “.”Dagan connected Tchenguiz with Dan Zorella and Avi Yanus, and Tchenguiz later provided seed funding to establish, and became the first major client of the .
The firm employed former members of Mossad, Shin Bet and Israeli military intelligence and featured Dagan on its board as well as another former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy.Yet another board member was a .When Tchegnuiz was introduced to Zorella in 2010, the latter worked at an Israeli business intelligence firm called Businesscope.The firm’s other directors included Schai Schiller, Itay Yonat, Doron Dabby and Gadi Aviran, the latter a former head of an Israeli military intelligence team. All were notable figures within the Israeli web intelligence industry.Tchenguiz purchased a stake in Businesscope, and .Terrogence’s vice president of business development, Royi Burstien, later became the CEO of Psy-Group, which offered its services to the Trump Campaign in 2016.Black Cube, which Zorella established on May 7th, 2011, was partially funded by Tchenguiz and used his Mayfair office as their UK headquarters. From December 2011 to December 2012, it provided him with weekly reports on their work.The SFO’s case against the Tchenguiz brothers eventually collapsed, marred by errors in the .Tchenguiz and Black Cube later had a falling out over payment issues and traded lawsuits that ultimately settled.Just how separate Black Cube was or is from the Israeli government and intelligence establishment is open to question, between 2012 and 2013 it was hired out by the Israeli Defense Ministry and several of its employees reportedly .The firm would later become infamous for its work on behalf of the .In other notable cases, Black Cube on a state prosecutor of the Romanian Anti-corruption directorate, secretly individuals affiliated with George Soros-linked NGO’s during the re-election campaign of the pro-Putin Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Russian anti-corruption activists including Vladimir Putin’s chief nemesis Alexey Navalny.During its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Senate Intelligence Committee requested that the former Israeli intelligence agent Walter Soriano provide them with all of his communications with Black Cube. It is not known why they did so and he .There is virtually no public information about Vincent Tchenguiz’s activities involving SCL Group or his interactions with Nigel Oakes or Alexander Nix.His interests on SCL Group’s board were represented by Julian David Wheatland, a Tchenguiz employee who was initially listed as one of four directors of SCL Group before being made chairman in 2010.
Julian David WheatlandAt the time of SCL Group’s founding, Wheatland was the CEO of Consensus Community, a subsidiary of Vincent Tchenguiz’s Consensus Business Group, through which he had .Wheatland is also a prominent supporter of British conservative politics in his role as chairman of the .In 2014, Wheatland became the director of Phi Energy Ltd, an oil and gas company based out of London. According to promotional materials, Phi Energy was “exploring opportunities” in .In 2015, Wheatland became a shareholder in the company.One of the only three other shareholders was a Cypriot shell company called Ravica Holdings. Ravica’s sole director, a Cypriot woman named Sofia Iosif, manages billions of dollars for the Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin through her nominal ownership of his holding company Interros.In 2015, the same year Wheatland became a shareholder, Phi Energy hired a Ukraine-based Russian translator named Stanislav Novak to translate an investment teaser from English into Russian that was requesting €200 million to purchase a Northern European oil refinery.
Despite media inquiries, why these documents were translated into Russian was never explained. It does not appear that any deals were ever made and Phi Energy was quietly dissolved in late 2016.
SCL Group’s affiliation with Tchenguiz was no obstacle to winning U.S. Government contracts.In 2007, SCL Group paid the Washington lobbying firm Global Policy Partners $20,000 to promote it in Washington and SCL ultimately won contracts with the Pentagon to .SCL Group scored another government contact with Sandia National Laboratories, where between 2007 and 2012 they conducted “an in-depth behavior change study in relation to .”
Dirty Tricks: SCL Group’s Business and Voter Suppression Election Activities
While winning contracts with the American military, SCL Group was simultaneously engaging in clandestine activities and dirty tricks abroad, particularly in African elections.In a surreptitious recording from the Summer of 2016, Alexander Nix described SCL’s activities in the 2007 Nigerian elections.
Alexander Nix“A few years later we were in Nigeria again, and this was a campaign for [presidential candidate Umaru] Yar’Adua, who was the puppet for [incumbent president Olusegun] Obasanjo,” .“So we persuaded our client to do something quite unusual. We persuaded him to allow us to tell everyone in Nigeria that they were planning on stealing the election.”“And the reason we did this was to inoculate them. We ran this campaign for about 12 months saying, oh, the government’s going to steal the election. And then, when the Jimmy Carter Center — who was monitoring the election — announced that the election was not ‘free and fair’, everyone was like… ‘Yeah, we know that.’ As opposed to going ‘WHAT?!!’ and getting really angry!”In 2010, SCL Group was contracted to undertake a research project in Afghanistan and survey twelve of the war torn country’s provinces.“The ultimate goal of the research,” according to SCL Group’s promotional literature, “was to improve the understanding of audience identities, attitudes, needs, behaviors, and narratives so that the client could better communicate with the Afghan population. The methods that were employed came from SCL’s bespoke methodology and consisted of both qualitative and .”
According to a report in Fast Company, , then the director of intelligence for the international security assistance force in Afghanistan.
Michael FlynnFlynn later became a prominent surrogate for the Trump campaign before serving as Trump’s National Security Advisor.After Trump’s election, Flynn served as advisor to SCL Group as it bid for government and .The SCL family of companies also worked for the British government and military. It contracted with the British Foreign Office from 2008–2009, the Home Office in 2009 and the Ministry of Defense (MoD) from 2014–2015.The MoD contract was awarded to SCL Insights, 40% owned by SCL Group and 60% owned by Nigel Oakes. The British MoD awarded SCL provisional List X accreditation, which granted it access to secret documents. MoD .It has also been claimed that SCL provided , which also .While SCL Group was working with the British military and conducting surveys in Afghanistan, on the other side of the world in the Caribbean it was engaged in a very different activity: supporting those involved in the global passport trade.The legal but murky “citizenship-by-investment” industry, in which the global rich can essentially purchase second passports, is believed to be worth $2 billion a year.One of the leaders in the industry is Dr. Christian Kalin, chairman of the London-based firm Henley & Partners. After making the acquaintance of Alexander Nix, Kalin backed SCL Group’s activities in at least five Caribbean countries.
Christian KalinIn St. Kitts and Nevis, where Kalin had established a lucrative secondary passport trade, SCL Group set up a sting operation in which if filmed one of the island’s political opposition leaders accepting a .In 2010, Alexander Nix grew intrigued by Google Analytics and considered opening up a .By 2012, Nix and Oakes began to have competing visions for SCL Group, which was struggling financially at the time. Nix wanted to develop the elections side of the business, while Oakes wanted to promote the defense side based on the “operations centre” model he had developed in Indonesia.Ultimately, a solution was found with Nix taking control of a new SCL .In 2013, Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of Google CEO Eric Schmidt and a recent graduate of Princeton, became an intern at SCL. After absorbing all the information he could from her about Google’s efforts in the realm of data analytics, Nix became determined to incorporate advanced, predictive data analytics into SCL’s suite of services.He realized early on that the United States, with its lax data and privacy regulations relative to Europe, would be an .Nix also saw that the Democratic Party in the United States enjoyed a decisive advantage at the time over the Republicans in the sophistication of their data operations.This .In June of 2013, Nix hired Christopher Wylie, a 24-year old Canadian data whiz who had .At first glance, Wylie was an odd fit at SCL. Gay, often sporting pink hair, Wylie had cut his teeth working in liberal politics. Between 2005 to 2009, Wylie volunteered with the Liberal Party of Canada and was already thinking about ways to harvest data from social media, which many in the Liberal Party .
Christopher WylieIn 2008, he volunteered on the Obama campaign where he learned even more about the possibilities data science and predictive analytics offered to political campaigns.The 2008 Obama campaign pioneered the use of data in its Get-Out-The-Vote campaign, a feat it further developed in the 2012 campaign.After a frustrating stint advising the British Liberal Democrats, who he felt didn’t understand the enormous potential of incorporating data and analytics into its practices, Wylie went to work for SCL.Wylie’s initial role at SCL was to figure out ways to digitize the traditional techniques of information warfare.He suggested that SCL reorient its focus toward gathering more accurate data. This would allow them to build more effective algorithms which could then target specific people using online mediums.On his first day on the job, Wylie claims that Nix asked him about the company Palantir, which he had learned about from Sophie Schmidt.Co-founded by the libertarian billionaire and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, later the most notable Trump supporter in Silicon Valley, Palantir is a well funded data analytics firm that has provided services and “information operations” to the US Intelligence Community and Department of Defense.According to Wylie, Nix .One of their earliest projects that sought to incorporate data into their psychological operations took place in Trinidad and Tobago.The company already had a shadowy and shockingly unethical history of activities on the dual-island Caribbean nation.In yet another secret recording, Nix can be heard describing how SCL Elections devised a clandestine psychological campaign involving subtle messaging and a fake grassroots movement to increase cynicism and apathy and .SCL Elections work in Trinidad and Tobaggo presages the race-based voter suppression techniques Cambridge Analytica would later assist the Trump campaign with.By the time Wylie had joined SCL, the firm had been hired by the Trinidad Ministry of Security to see if data could be used to predict which Trinidadians were most likely to commit crimes.SCL gained access to the country’s raw census data, which would have been impossible in most developed countries.SCL gained access to the island’s telecom companies customer data, allowing them to see what .Alexander Nix would take these insights and apply them to a new company, Cambridge Analytica, and in a new countries, such as Britain and the United States of America.
The next article in the series will explore the role of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer in the establishment of Cambridge Analytica and the firms methodologies.
