MAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 25
CHRISTIAN CHARISIUSDPAZUMA
ploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profi les.
And built models to exploit what we knew about them
and target their inner demons,” Chris Wylie, who helped
launch the company, told the British Observer. “That was
the basis the entire company was built on.” Next came the
release of an undercover investigation by the United King-
dom’s Channel 4, which captured video of Nix and other
Cambridge executives explaining how they could covertly
inject propaganda “into the bloodstream to the internet.”
They also described how their services could include brib-
ing a politician and recording undercover video or sending
“very beautiful” Ukrainian “girls” to entrap a candidate.
The fallout was swift. Facebook, already under fi re
for facilitating the spread of disinformation, suspended
Cambridge from its platform. British oi cials sought a
warrant to search the company’s oi ce. Lawmakers on
both sides of the Atlantic demanded answers. “They
should be barred from any US election or government
work until a full investigation can be conducted,” Rep.
Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), a member of the House
Intelligence Committee, tweeted.
The story of Cambridge Analytica’s rise—and its rapid
fall—in some ways parallels the ascendance of the can-
didate it claims it helped elevate to the presidency. It
reached the apex of American politics through a mix of
blui ng, luck, failing upward, and—yes—psychological
manipulation. Sound familiar?
Like Trump, Nix was a master of hype who peddled a story
that people wanted to believe. Take Jeff rey Ruest, the voter
Nix identifi ed at the Concordia Summit, down to the latitude
and longitude of his home, to illustrate the fi rm’s psycho-
graphic prowess in Iowa. The message was that Cambridge
had the ability to peer into the minds of—and to persuade—
voters on the most granular level. Ruest wouldn’t have been
useful to Cruz or any of his gop rivals in Iowa, though. He
lives a thousand miles away in North Carolina. But why let
inconvenient details interfere with the perfect pitch?
- “WE CALLED HIM MR. BOND”
“We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler,” the
consultant said. “We appeal to people on an emotional
level to get them to agree on a functional level.”
The year was 1992. The consultant was Nigel Oakes,
a former Monte Carlo TV producer and ad man for
Saatchi & Saatchi, and he was speaking to the trade mag-
azine Marketing. Oakes was then running the Behavioural
Dynam ics Institute, a “research facility for understanding
group behaviour” and for harnessing the power of psychol-
ogy to craft messages that change hearts and minds. But in
reality, Oakes’ institute was a stalking horse for the company
he would launch the year after the interview.
Strategic Communication Laboratories, the public af-
fairs company that would later spawn Cambridge Analyt-
ica, began small, applying its behavioral-science-minded
approach to public infl uence campaigns in the United
Kingdom, including one that, it boasts, rescued Lloyd’s of
London by convincing Britons to invest another $1.5 billion
in the ailing insurance market. But scl soon branched into
politics. Oakes says he advised Nelson Mandela’s African
National Congress on how to prevent violence during the
1994 elections, as well as politicians in Asia, South Amer-
ica, and Europe. In 2000, the government of Indonesian
President Abdurrahman Wahid, who was struggling to
contain the violence and upheaval in his country, hired
Oakes to burnish his image, which involved building an
elaborate media command center in Jakarta for monitoring
and shaping public sentiment. “We called him Mr. Bond
because he is English,” one of Oakes’ Indonesian employees
told the Independent, “and because he is such a mystery.”
In 2005, scl expanded into military and defense, pitch-
ing the use of “psychological operations” and “soft power”
in the war on terror. The fi rm began picking up major
clients, including the Pentagon and the UK Ministry of
Defense , advising them on which Afghan leaders to target
with counterinsurgency messages or how to dissuade teen-
age boys from joining Al Qaeda.
The company had meanwhile hired Nix, a former fi -
nancial analyst, to grow its nondefense business. Former
colleagues say he was just the man for the job. “Nix the
salesman is an artist, to be honest,” one told me. Another
referred to him as a “chancer,” the British term for a con-
summate opportunist. “He’ll always be like, ‘Can I give it
a go?’” the colleague said. “‘Can I sell this to you and work
out the details afterward?’”
Nix had an eye on the United States, where the courts
were stripping away restrictions on political spending and
Alexander Nix