Targeted: My Inside Story of Cambridge Analytica and How Trump, Brexit and Facebook Broke Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I called Chester to vent.

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

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

His merely suggesting that we attend Davos was one of those things that made me realize at a much deeper level that Chester was extremely well connected. I knew he’d attended the conference before, but I had had no idea what that meant. I’d certainly read about “Davos.” Since 1971, the mountain resort town in the Swiss Alps had hosted a world-famous international conference of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a nonprofit organization whose members were the world’s billionaires and executives of the most valuable companies on the planet. Attending the conference each year along with the uber rich were public intellectuals, journalists, and the heads of state from the top seventy nations ranked by GDP. They came to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,”

in sessions that focused on everything from artificial intelligence to solving economic crises. Davos attendees that year were to include Angela Merkel of Germany; the premier of China, Li Keqiang; U.S. secretary of state John Kerry; and business leaders from a number of Fortune 200 companies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Codirecting the Nigerian team were Ceris and a man I had never met before. His name, Alexander said, was Sam Patten. A senior adviser to the SCL Group, he was one of the most experienced consultants on our global roster for running campaigns on the ground in foreign countries. Sam had worked on the 2014 parliamentary election in Iraq, and in 2012, he had played a critical role in the election of the opposition government in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. He had also served as a senior adviser to President George W. Bush.

Unfortunately, though we couldn’t know it in 2015, Sam Patten would become an infamous figure in the Robert Mueller investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His business partner, a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik, would come to be of interest to Mueller with regard to Donald Trump’s connection to the Russians, and would be accused of being a spy for the Russian intelligence services.

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

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

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

There was an international outcry about the postponement, including from Secretary of State John Kerry, who insisted that the elections be held on time, and he warned the Nigerian government against using “security concerns as a pretext for impeding the democratic process.”

The All Progressives Congress (APC), challenger Buhari’s party, called the move “highly provocative” and “a major setback for democracy.”

And UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon “urged officials to take all necessary measures to enable Nigerians to vote ‘in a timely manner.’”

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

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

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

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

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

It sounded brilliant to me.

There’s always a hitch.

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

Asteroids?

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

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

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

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