Cambridge Analytica Abroad: Connections to Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia
This article describes the controversial political consulting and data analytics company Cambridge Analytica’s activities abroad, including its work for individuals connected to Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, among others, prior to Brexit and the 2016 Trump campaign.
It is part three in the series “Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, and the Bad Boys of Brexit on the 2016 Trump Campaign.” While it is not necessary to read previous entries, it is recommended.
Part one describes the mysterious father company of Cambridge Analytica, Strategic Communications Laboratories.
Part two describes the role right wing activist Steve Bannon and hedge fund manager Robert Mercer played in founding Cambridge Analytica.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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Prior to its work on Brexit and the 2016 Trump campaign, the controversial British data analytics and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica conducted work for individuals linked to Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, some of whom may have had links to foreign intelligence services.
Lukoil, Russian Intelligence and Polling Americans About Putin
In the Spring of 2014, Cambridge Analytica was contacted by executives from the oil company Lukoil, the second largest privately held corporation in Russia. Later that year, the company was placed on the US sanctions list following the Russian invasion of Crimea.
Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, who handled the initial conversation with Lukoil, sent a white paper drafted by CA’s data whiz Christopher Wylie to Lukoil’s CEO Vagit Alekperov, an Azerbaijani billionaire and former Soviet oil minister.
Alekperov is noted as being an ally of Vladimir Putin, and sits beside his Aras Agalarov on the Union of Azerbaijani Organizations of Russia (UAOR), which has been accused by officials and analysts in Baku of being a vehicle of Kremlin influence.
According to Catherine Belton, Alekperov has always been close to Russian intelligence and Lukoil’s co-founder, Andrei Pannikov, was a former member of the KGB.
Around this time, Wylie claims to have grown increasingly suspicious of how SCL and its new subsidiary Cambridge Analytica operated.
Shortly after Lukoil’s initial outreach, Wylie saw an internal company memo that described SCL’s capabilities. “SCL retains a number of retired intelligence and security agency officers from Israel, USA, UK, Spain and Russia each with extensive technical and analytical experience.”
The memo further detailed SCL strategies such as leaking damaging stories to the foreign press and how the company infiltrated opposing campaigns using “intelligence nets’’ to gather “damaging information.”
More intriguing still, the brief described how SCL created scaled networks of “Facebook and Twitter accounts to build credibility and cultivate followers.”
The last point provides an example of the overlap in methodology between SCL/CA and the Internet Research Agency.
“They understand behavioural micro-targeting in the context of elections (as per your excellent document/white paper),” Nix wrote in an email to Wylie regarding the potential Lukoil project, “but they are failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers.”
Executives from Lukoil traveled to London where they were pitched by Nix. According to Wylie, during the meeting the Lukoil executives were interested in how Cambridge Analytica targeted American voters.
The New York Times spoke with a second source familiar with the discussions who confirmed Wylie’s account but wished to remain anonymous due to a NDA.
Nix told the Lukoil executives about SCL’s previous work in Nigeria, showing a slide titled “Election: Inoculation,” then went on to explain how SCL had counterintuitively promoted the idea that the election was going to be stolen.
Nix also showed them slides about Cambridge Analytica’s data assets, most of which, Wylie noted at the time, was American data, and none of which consisted of data in Russia or any of the former Soviet States, where Lukoil primarily operated.
When Wylie asked them why they were interested in this information, the Lukoil executives claimed they were still trying to figure that out but that they wanted to hear more about the data Cambridge Analytica possessed.
“In reality,” Wylie later wrote, “when Nix and I met with these “Lukoil executives,” we were almost certainly speaking to Russian intelligence. They likely were interested in finding out more about this firm that was also working for NATO forces. That’s likely also why they wanted to know so much about our American data, and Nix probably struck them as someone who could be flattered into saying pretty much anything. It’s entirely possible that Nix did not know to whom he was speaking, just as I did not. What made these contacts all the more concerning was that they wouldn’t have needed to hack Cambridge Analytica to access the Facebook data. Nix had told them where it could be accessed: in Russia, with Kogan.”
There is no direct evidence supporting Wylie’s claim that the Lukoil executives he and Alexander Nix met with were members of Russian intelligence.
There is ample evidence that Lukoil has a deep relationship with the Russian intelligence services and has been used as a tool of the Russian state for both economic and political influence purposes in the past.
Keith C. Smith, the former US Ambassador to Lithuania, described how in 1998–1999 the Kremlin used Lukoil to shut off oil supplies to Lithuania when the tiny Baltic state was negotiating with an energy corporation Williams Company.
“During the height of negotiations between Lukoil and Williams,” Smith writes, “Moscow sent a former KGB officer, who had been the agency’s liaison with Lukoil, to Lithuania as Russia’s ambassador, on order to stop the sale of the assets to a Western company and to support a Lukoil takeover.”
“Over time,” Smith continued, “the bargaining over ownership of Lithuania’s energy assets involved Lukoil, TNK and Yukos, Russia’s three largest oil companies, but with Moscow clearly favoring Lukoil. Some Russian negotiators representing the three companies were former KGB or GRU officers. They made little effort to conceal their past affiliations.”
Lukoil appears to have played a role in the 2013 election of the pro-Kremlin President of the Czech Republic Miloš Zeman.
After facilitating the Czech Republic’s accession into the EU as Prime Minister from 1998 to 2002, Zeman left office and became friendly with influential Russians, including the ex-KGB officer, head of Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin.
When Zeman ran for Czech President in 2013, rumors swirled that Lukoil funded his campaign. A key financial official in Zeman’s successful campaign, and a vice chairman of his party, Martin Nejedly, is widely seen as a shadowy architect behind Zeman’s pro-Russian policies. Nejedly spent most of the 1990s working in Russia and in 2007 founded Lukoil Aviation Czech, a Lukoil subsidiary.
In 2016, Lukoil mysteriously paid a $1.4 million fine in Czech court on Nejedly’s behalf, allowing him to maintain his influential position in the Zeman administration.
Another strange coincidence linking Cambridge Analytica to Russian intelligence took place just before its interaction with Lukoil.
Through a mutual acquaintance named Anna Miller, Alexander Nix met and hired the American political consultant Sam Patten in early 2014 to perform work in the United States.
Patten was a friend and longtime associate of Konstantin Kilimnik, the alleged Russian military intelligence officer who served as Paul Manafort’s right hand man and who later provided Russian intelligence internal polling data from the Trump campaign.
Read my description of Konstantin Kilimnik and Paul Manafort’s numerous interactions during the 2016 Presidential campaign here.
In February of 2015, Patten established a DC-based political consulting firm with Kilimnik called Begemot Ventures International LLC.
Patten and Kilimnik had been friends since 2001, when they met while both working at the International Republican Institute in Moscow.
Begemot is a character in the Russian novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. In the novel, the character is an enormous, demonic black cat capable of changing into human form, fond of chess, firearms, vodka and sarcasm. The first image featured on Begemot’s now defunct website was a large, dark cat.
According to the Russian publication Proekt, Kilimnik’s nickname while he attended the Military University at the Ministry of Defense was “cat.”
Nix invited Patten to participate in an “experiment” Cambridge Analytica was conducting.
After he agreed, Patten was trained in England and Canada before being sent to Oregon in the Spring of 2014, where Cambridge Analytica worked on three local conservative campaigns as part of a “trial run” while getting ready for the upcoming presidential election.
Patten had previously worked primarily overseas as a political advisor, including in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine and Iraq. He saw the job as an opportunity to get back into American domestic politics. In later interviews he revealed a particularly cynical attitude regarding the politics of his home country.
“I’ve worked for Ukraine, Iraq, I’ve worked in deeply corrupt countries,” Patten told the researcher Emma Briant, “and our system isn’t very different.”
Nor did Patten seem to think highly or care much about the ethics of SCL or Cambridge Analytica. In the same interview with Briant, conducted after the 2016 election, Patten mentioned that SCL had asked him to work on a job in Kosovo.
“[W]hen they contacted me they said they had a short fuse sort of thing in Kosovo, and they didn’t really get into details and they said could you be ready one day if this happens? I said yes without even… I assumed it was the dirty bad guys, the mafia guys? You know, the gangsters? … Anyway, the irony was… because it was SCL I assumed it was the bad guys, but it wasn’t! It was the old liberal professors who were the clients. So… it was an interesting, yeah, one of these three week campaigns.”
While in Oregon, Patten served as a “message architect.”
According to Christopher Wylie, Patten was tasked with conducting focus groups, data collection and writing polling questions.
When Wylie searched through the repository of questions being asked of respondents in America, he was surprised to find that they seemed to only be about Russia.
The Oregon team was asking questions like, “Is Russia entitled to Crimea?” or “What do you think about Vladimir Putin as a leader?”
Photos of Putin would be distributed to focus groups of Americans and they would be asked to choose in which photo he looked the strongest.
Photos of Putin would be projected against the wall and the American focus group participants would be asked what it felt like to see a strong leader.
Wylie was surprised by the number of Americans who appeared to admire Putin’s “strength” as a leader. He was further surprised to discover that Putin was the only foreign leader being asked about.
Wylie later told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Steve Bannon had authorized the focus groups exploring American attitudes regarding Putin and Russian expansionism.
He further told the Committee that Bannon and Konstantin Kilimnik were two of three individuals responsible for the idea.
While Wylie’s claim regarding Kilimnik has yet to be corroborated, we do know that Patten and Kilimnik were in contact during this period.
Immediately following his work in Oregon, Kilimnik invited Patten to join him and Paul Manafort in Ukraine and work on behalf of Serhiy Lyovochkin and the Russian friendly Opposition Bloc in Ukraine.
Read my in-depth article about Manafort and Kilimnik’s relationship with the pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarch Serhiy Lyovochkin here.
While there is no public evidence that Bannon ever met or spoke with Kilimnik, in July of 2016 he featured Sam Patten on his Sirius FM radio show.
Patten continued to communicate with Bannon after the election, meeting with him, Erik Prince and Sebastian Gorka early in Trump’s presidency at the Executive Office Building ostensibly to discuss Iraq.
Around the time Patten was working in Oregon and Cambridge Analytica was conducting its Russian messaging research, Steve Bannon gave a speech before a conference being held at the Vatican in which he laid out his fiery, almost apocalyptic political and philosophical views. During the Q&A portion of the presentation, he also expounded upon his views of Vladimir Putin.
In his speech, the conservative Catholic Bannon painted a grim picture of a Judeo-Christian West sapped of energy by growing secularism and a crony form of capitalism that viewed people as commodities and drained Western society of spiritual vitality and meaning.
These corrosive trends were occurring, according to Bannon, just as the West faced a cataclysmic and civilizational struggle against radical Islam.
“[W]e’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict,” Bannon warned, “of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”
It was in this context that Bannon situated the rise of conservative and religious populist movements in the West such as the Tea Party in the United States, UKIP in Great Britain and the National Front in France.
Bannon admitted the presence of racists within these movements, but suggested that such individuals and groups were marginal to the overall movement and would “burn away over time.”
In the Q&A section, Bannon was asked about Putin’s cultivation of some of the parties he had mentioned. His response is worth reproducing in full as it provides the clearest summation of his views on Putin at a time when Cambridge Analytica and Sam Patten were experimenting with pro-Putin messaging on Americans.
“I think it’s a little bit more complicated,” Bannon replied to a questioner who brought up Putin’s support of France’s National Front. “When Vladimir Putin, when you really look at some of the underpinnings of some of his beliefs today, a lot of those come from what I call Eurasianism; he’s got an adviser who harkens back to Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian fascism. A lot of people that are traditionalists are attracted to that.”
The advisor Bannon is referring to is Aleksandr Dugin.
“One of the reasons is that they believe that at least Putin is standing up for traditional institutions,” Bannon continued, “and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism — and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism for their country. They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union or they don’t believe in the centralized government in the United States. They’d rather see more of a states-based entity that the founders originally set up where freedoms were controlled at the local level.”
“I’m not justifying Vladimir Putin and the kleptocracy that he represents, because he eventually is the state capitalist of kleptocracy. However, we the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism — and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing. I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors, and that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.”
“You know, Putin’s been quite an interesting character. He’s also very, very, very intelligent. I can see this in the United States where he’s playing very strongly to social conservatives about his message about more traditional values, so I think it’s something that we have to be very much on guard of. Because at the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand. However, I really believe that in this current environment, where you’re facing a potential new caliphate that is very aggressive that is really a situation — I’m not saying we can put it on a back burner — but I think we have to deal with first things first.”
Bannon’s comments indicate that, like so many others on the Trump campaign, he viewed the treat from radical Islam in a Manichean, existential light.
Whatever misgivings he may have had about the state capitalism and “kleptocracy” of Putin’s Russia, Bannon clearly felt that the civilizational struggle with Islam took precedent.
Furthermore, Bannon displayed a firm grasp of the philosophical thinking prevalent in Putin’s Kremlin, particularly in the aftermath of the Revolution in Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Crimea, going as far as to reference Alexander Dugin, who was at the time a mostly obscure figure in the West.
Notably, he viewed the Traditionalism prevalent in the Kremlin as something to learn from rather than be alarmed by.
It is unclear whether he understood that a key plank in Dugin’s vision for Eurasian global supremacy consisted of destroying the “Atlanticist” United States as a unified political entity.
Sam Patten, Israeli Intelligence and Additional Foreign Operations
Oregon was not the only place Sam Patten worked for SCL/Cambridge Analytica, he also worked for SCL Elections in Nigeria.
In December of 2014, SCL hired a young American named Brittany Kaiser, who sold SCL/Cambridge Analytica’s services around the world. She had cut her teeth working at the Chicago headquarters of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, where she first became aware of the importance of data on modern campaigns.
Kaiser had cited the work of Julian Assange, whom she admired, and Wikileaks in her Masters thesis on war crimes, which later lead to her meeting with Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in February of 2017.
Kaiser’s meeting with Assange appears to have been entirely unrelated to the events of 2016.
Kaiser’s job at SCL/Cambridge Analytica was to enlist new clients. The earliest business she brought in was from Nigeria, where the firm had worked several times before.
Kaiser had a connection to a Nigerian billionaire named Benedict Peters, the billionaire founder of Aiteo Group, Nigeria’s largest indiginous oil producer. Peters was a close ally of Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and his oil minister Diezany Alison-Madueke, the latter of whom was later arrested in London on corruption charges.
Jonathan was facing an election challenge from from a Muslim candidate named Mohamed Buhari, and Peters worried that his access to lucrative government contracts could be jeopardized should Buhari win.
Sam Patten was brought on to co-direct the Nigeria project. Brittany Kaiser first met Patten at SCL’s Mayfair office on January 3rd, 2015.
As the Nigerian election was scheduled to take place in February of 2015, though it was later delayed until March due to security concerns, Kaiser suggests that the SCL strategy was to pursue “crisis communications’’ to try and push out as much pro-Goodluck Material as possible.
It appears, however, that SCL actually planned to engage in the kind of dirty tricks campaigns it had conducted in the past.
Read about SCL’s history of organizing dirty tricks in foreign elections here.
In her memoir, Kaiser writes that at the time of the Nigeria job she had been in discussions with “an Israeli defense and intelligence firm,” which she avoids naming, about “freelance election work.”
The firm, according to Kaiser, described their capabilities as “everything from giving advance warning of attacks on their clients campaigns to digging up material that would be useful for counter-operations and opposition messaging.”
Kaiser further claims that she introduced the Isreali firm to the Nigerians, who hired them separately from SCL.
In her testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kaiser said that “Cambridge Analytica may have assisted the client retain former Israeli Mossad agents, working in a private capacity, to conduct opposition research against the client’s political opponent.”
The exact identities of the Israeli firm and the individuals involved, and how Brittany Kaiser came into contact with them in the first place, remains unknown to the public.
Nor is it known whether Vincent Tchenguiz, with his relationship with CA’s parent company SCL Group and his extensive relationships and investments in the Israeli private and web intelligence industries described in part one of this series, was involved.
Sam Patten led the Cambridge Analytica team on the ground in Nigeria, where they holed up at a hotel in Abuja.
Seven sources familiar with the Nigeria project told the reporter Carole Cadwalladr that Cambridge Analytica had worked with “Israeli computer hackers,” who provided the company with hacked “kompromat” stolen from Buhari.
Cadwalladr reported that two senior members of the CA team held a two hour meeting with the Israelis at the hotel in Abuja.
To the team on the ground, it was unclear whether the Israelis worked for actual Israeli intelligence or were working in a private capacity.
After the meeting, the Israelis swept the Cambridge Analytica staff’s hotel rooms for listening devices and switched out their phones. A source told Cadwalladr that the Israelis clearly didn’t want Buhari to win.
Several weeks later, another as-yet unidentified individual from Israel flew to London for a meeting in Mayfair with Nix and Kaiser. At the meeting the Israeli produced a laptop and Nix and Kaiser instructed a Cambridge Analytica employee to download its contents onto a thumb drive.
The content consisted of hacked documents and materials pertaining to Buhari’s financial and medical records. When certain employees saw the materials, they reportedly “freaked out” when it became clear to them that they had come from hackers.
Despite these dirty tricks, which also included spreading initially innocuous links online that actually led to gory videos suggesting that a potential Buhari presidency would lead to the implementation of violent Sharia law, Goodluck Jonathan lost decisively. In the aftermath of the election, many of the Cambridge Analytica staffers in Abuja fled Nigeria as quickly as they could, fearing violent retribution.
It was while he was working in Nigeria in February of 2015 that Sam Patten established Begemot Ventures International with Konstantin Kilimnik in Washington, DC.
Nor was Nigeria the only foreign work the companies in the SCL family participated in in this timeframe.
In January of 2015, King Salman came to power in Saudi Arabia. His ascent led to the Vision 2030 reform effort to modernize Saudi Arabia spearheaded by the young and ambitious Saudi Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS).
As part of this effort, SCL Group was enlisted to conduct research into popular Saudi attitudes towards the royal family and tested opinions regarding reform measures.
A Western consultant who saw the report generated by SCL Group described it as “Machiavellian” and further described it as a “manual” for how the Saudi’s royal family could hold onto power in an era of declining oil prices.
While groups within the SCL umbrella were conducting research into American popular attitudes towards Vladimir Putin and Russian expansionism, working with Israeli hackers to attempt to sway an election in Nigeria, and studying popular attitudes on behalf of the Saudi royal family, they were also providing courses for NATO on Russian disinformation and propaganda.
In May of 2015, yet another subsidiary of SCL Group, IOTA Global, was paid £500,000 to run a two month course held in Riga, Latvia that provided training to 20 military and intelligence officials from various NATO countries.
The course was led by Steve Tatham, the former commanding officer of Britain’s 15 PsyOps Group, and was funded by the Canadian Government.
The subject of the course was, ostensibly, how to fight Russian disinformation campaigns across Europe and the Baltic, with a primary focus on Target Audience Analysis (TAA), defined in the course as the “scientific application, [that] involves a comprehensive study of audience groups and forms the basis for interventions aimed at reinforcing or changing attitudes and behavior.”
Shortly after the course was completed, Cambridge Analytica was pitching TAA to campaigns affiliated with both Brexit and the 2016 US Presidential election.
The next installment in this series will explore the role Cambridge Analytics played in Brexit, and connections of senior figures in the Leave Campaign had with Wikileaks and Russia.