In short, he was a man I, and much of the educated world, had come to despise.
As I stood that day outside the UN building with members of an organization called UN Watch—as one man after another, ambassadors and princes, kings and businessmen, passed through its doors—I thought about these men: whether they agreed with him or not, they had the power and the clout to be in the room with Ahmadinejad, to hear him speak, and to engage with one another in dialogue about it.
I looked at the crowd of protesters of which I was a part. Many looked just like me—some were graduate students, young, in torn jeans and worn sneakers and rugged boots. I respected these people, I believed in what they did, and I believed in myself.
But that day, I put down my protest sign and slipped through the glass doors without anyone noticing I had entered. At the registration desk, I obtained a badge, the kind of pass students can get in order to use the library there: white with a blue stripe at the top, but almost identical to the badges diplomats wore on their lapels.
And wearing my finest hand-me-down power suit, adorned with that badge, I made my way to the auditorium without being questioned.
When Ahmadinejad began his anti-Israel rant, I watched as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and other European leaders walked out. These were powerful people, and their act of protest made headlines that day. It put pressure on the United Nations to reconsider Iran’s position in the global conversation. My friends outside and their protest had gone nearly unnoticed. To make a bigger difference, it seemed, one had to be on the inside, no matter how much compromise that took, and you couldn’t be afraid to be in a room with people who disagreed with your beliefs or even offended you.
For most of my life, I’d been a staunch, intense, and even angry and oppositional activist, refusing to engage with those who disagreed with me or whom I judged to be in some way corrupt. I was more pragmatic now. I had come around to the realization that I could do a lot more good in the world if I stopped being mad at the other side. I began to learn this when Barack Obama, in the early days of his first term, announced that he would sit at the table with anyone willing to meet with him. There needn’t be any conditions, even for those considered “rogue leaders.” And the older I got, the more I understood why he’d said that.
I knew that working for Cambridge Analytica was going to cause a sea change in my life. At the time, I believed that what I was about to do would give me a chance to see up close how the other side worked, to have greater compassion for people, and the ability to work with those with whom I disagreed.
This was what was in my head when I said yes to Alexander Nix. Those were my hopes when I crossed over to investigate the other side.
DECEMBER 2014
SCL was made up of ten to fifteen full-time employees—some British, some Canadian, an Australian, three Lithuanians, and an Israeli among them—and I made my rounds to meet them and learn a little more. Each was my age or a bit older, most with master’s degrees, but also many with PhDs. All had already amassed impressive experience working in the for-profit and nonprofit worlds, in everything from banking to high-tech to the oil and gas industry to running humanitarian programs across Africa.
They had come to the company because it offered them the unique opportunity to work at a place in Europe that had the feel of a Silicon Valley start-up. They were supremely hardworking and serious. Their tone was subdued and professional, with an undercurrent of urgency that, though quiet, seemed more characteristically New York than London. They worked long hours and gave 200 percent of themselves. Some had been embedded in the recent American election campaigns and had just returned to the London office to a hero’s welcome. They’d been living for a year in offices in Oregon and North Carolina and Colorado, where the most contested races had been. Those who’d stayed behind in London had worked just as hard, as experts on the countries where the SCL Group also did business.
Each of my colleagues possessed highly specialized skill sets that gave him or her very specific roles in the company.
Kieran, the director of communications, whom I had met during my interview, did everything from political party branding to global messaging strategy. His list of advertising awards was impressive, and his work in corporate branding was better than most I had seen. After Alexander, he’d been with the company the longest, and he showed me a thirty-strong shelf of political party manifestos and platforms SCL had written and he’d designed.
Though with the company for only a few years, Peregrine Willoughby-Brown—Pere, for short; pronounced “Perry”—a Canadian, had already worked in multiple countries, handling elections, running focus groups, gathering data, and organizing locals. He had recently been in Ghana, working on the enormous public health project Alexander had told me about. Pere helped orient me to what it was like to be embedded in foreign campaigns in places other than the United States. In developing nations, logistics could be a nightmare. Even getting access to certain regions was difficult; roads could be washed out or nonexistent. But most problems, he said with a grin, were with people, such as when local pollsters and canvassers didn’t show up or simply blew off their jobs after a first paycheck.
Jordan Kleiner was a jovial Brit with an enormous peacock tattoo on his chest. His job was to make sense of the company’s research and serve as liaison between the research team and the communications and operations teams. He also acted as a kind of bridge between the data people and the creatives, and he knew how to translate research into effective copy and images.
To a new person on the inside, the team comprised big thinkers and problem solvers who were politically liberal and who, in the early winter of 2014, didn’t seem terribly bothered by the fact that the company had taken on conservative clients—in part, I think, because they hadn’t gotten in too deep yet. The American midterms had introduced them to hawks and eccentrics, but it might have been possible for them to think of the latter as one-offs, and the company was only just beginning to secure contracts for the Republican primaries.
At the time, the mood in the office was cheerful, the camaraderie strong, and the members of the group uncompetitive with one another, as there were so few of them and their jobs didn’t overlap too often.
The SCL and Cambridge Analytica staff were energized by Alexander’s vision. The opportunity open to them was the equivalent of that at Facebook in the early days, and it hadn’t taken Facebook too many years to go public to the tune of an $18 billion valuation. Alexander wanted a similar outcome, and as Millennials, the staff looked to Mark Zuckerberg’s baby as a model of remarkable innovation in spaces no one had even thought to occupy until the company came along.
Cambridge Analytica was based on the same idealistic notion of “connectivity” and “engagement” that had fueled Facebook. The company’s raison d’être was to boost engagement in uncharted territory, and those who worked there clearly believed, as those at Facebook had, that they were building something real that the world simply didn’t yet know it couldn’t do without.
Alexander occupied one glass box at the front of the office, and the data scientists occupied one at the back. Theirs was filled with computer stations where the company’s small team of scientists were glued to multiple screens.
Some were eccentric and kept to themselves. One, a Romanian with dark brown eyes, looked up from his work only from time to time. His specialty was research design; he could break up a country into regions and make statistically accurate samples of populations others could use to identify target audiences. Another Lithuanian, who dressed like a posh Brit, often coming to work in a smoking jacket, specialized in data collection and strategy.
The