The human catcher
Hundreds of thousands of refugees want to come to Europe from Libya – a billion-dollar deal for gangs of traffickers. A local warlord has declared war on the smugglers: with a boat, 37 men and opaque motifs.
09/06/2017
The boat is only a few meters away, the mouth of a machine gun flashes at night, shots crash, we throw ourselves on the floor of the wheelhouse and press the faces on the ship’s mats. Bullets are hitting our heads.
From our cover aboard the Tileel, a patrol ship of the Libyan coast guard, we see a dinghy with African refugees in the waves of the Mediterranean Sea. Right next to it, less than thirty metres from us, men in camouflage suits and face masks with automatic weapons fire at us from a speedboat.
Thursday, April 6,2017, shortly after midnight. The attack comes as a surprise. Commander Al Bija of the Libyan Coast Guard rushed with the Tileel to the refugees to rescue them from the heavy seas on their way from Libya in North Africa to Italy. We had almost reached them when the speedboat emerged from the night and raced towards us like a shadow – smugglers, determined to assert control over their human commodity.
For ten days, we have been travelling along the Libyan coast, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, the world’s most dangerous border. According to the German government, up to one million refugees and migrants are currently in Libya, by far the most important transit country by sea from Africa to Europe.
300 000 people could cross Europe’s coasts this year.
The EU already wants to stop them in Libya. At their summit in Malta in February 2017, the Heads of State and Government of the member countries reached an agreement with Libya: the Libyan coastguard is to seal off the Mediterranean Sea, intercept refugees and bring them to Libya’s reception camps. This coast guard consists of a single boat and 37 men west of the capital Tripoli, where many of the strongholds of the gangs of smugglers are located. Their leader: Commander Al Bija, a dreaded warlord. Al Bija, thirty, has a mutilated hand he uses like a claw – “I had to kill a lot of people,” he says. And he loves horses. He lived in Berlin for three years. For some he is a hero, for others a criminal or even a murderer. And for Europe’s political leadership led by Angela Merkel, it is the only chance in Libya, this desolate country without central government, army and police, to put a stop to the traffickers of West Libya. While we are crouching on the ground while attacking the Tileel, the commander runs over the deck in hail of bullets, fires at the attackers, gives cover to his people, calls them orders. Around him the bullets of the tugboats crackle against the ship’s side. Slice splinters. Explosions. Screaming. Men fall down, remain motionless. Gunshots are booming for minutes. Then it is suddenly quiet; only the nocturnal Mediterranean Sea claps at the fuselage of the Tileel.
“There is no way around us,” says Commander Al Bija four days before the attack of the smugglers in his command centre, a small room with a glass front above the Zawiya basin, about fifty kilometres west of Tripoli. Beyond the quay walls, the Mediterranean Sea crashes against ochre-coloured cliffs. Al Bija – combed hair, full beard, piercing gaze, gun under the black leather belt of the jeans – puts a cigarette between the ring finger and the little finger of his mutilated hand, lets his lighter crack and pulls the smoke into his lungs. His men are sitting on the sofas with Kalashnikovs. “We’re the only functioning coast guard in West Lybyen.” For almost two years now, Commander Al Bija has been controlling the coastal waters from the Tunisian border to Dschansur just before Tripoli – a territory almost thirty times the size of Lake Constance – with the 16-metre-long Tileel, a few dinghies and his tiny crew. “Our mission,” says Al Bija:”To rescue refugees from distress at sea, track down smugglers, kill them if necessary.”
Since August 2015, Al Bija and his people have brought more than 37,000 people back to Libya from the Mediterranean Sea. On March 18,2016 alone, on a single day, they would have rescued a total of 2,700 people from twelve dinghies and a large wooden boat. The Libyan Ministry of Defence confirms these figures.
On his cell phone, Al Bija shows us a video: African men, women and children rescued from sea distress dance happily in front of the command centre in the harbour with his people. “To the heroes of Zawiya, without you I’d be dead.” Or, “May God reward you a thousand times over.” Or, “You saved my baby from the sea, my life is yours.”
So, is Commander Al Bija the ally that Europe is urgently looking for? Merkel’s husband in Libya? At the summit of heads of government in Malta, the Chancellor agreed to train Libyan coastguards on European warships and on land in armed border control and in dealing with refugees. In order to put an end to the traffickers’ business, Italy is providing 200 million euros and the EU Commission is making another 200 million euros available in a first phase.
“We don’t need training,” says Al Bija at the command centre in Zawiya harbour. “We know how to navigate, how to fight and kill.” Then what does he want? “If we are to do the dirty work for Europe, Europe is to pay us for it.” The price for his services: “A rescue ship for up to a thousand people, speedboats, spare parts, fuel, pay.”
Does the Commander really belong to the “good guys”, as he himself claims? Or is he playing double-cross?
There are currently no alternatives to Al Bija for Europe. Six years after the overthrow and death of Libyan ruler Muammar al-Gaddafi in the course of the International Military Mission in 2011, the euphoria of the Arab Spring has long since vanished. Hardly anyone in Libya hopes for a transition to democracy. The people’s brigades, who had risen against the dictatorship during the revolution under the rejoicing of the Western world, did not lay down their weapons after Gaddafi’s fall. They plundered military arsenals, occupied empty ministries and set up militias.
The “Government of National Unity”, on which the EU’s plans are based, has little control over Libya. Prime Minister Fayiz as-Sarradsch, empowered by the United Nations and in office since 15 March 2016, is to establish a new state. But the parliament, which meets in Tobruk, a thousand kilometres east of Tripoli, has not recognised Sarradsch’s unity government. In the east of the country, the powerful General Haftar refuses to cooperate with him. And the terrorist organisation Islamic State has conquered several cities.
1700 militant groups, experts estimate, are fighting in Libya in an opaque civil war along clan, tribal and religious borders and in the territories of local warlords. Rival militias control cities, highways, refineries and oil fields. And the multi-million-dollar deal with people who want to travel to Europe via the Mediterranean.
The people of the EU are sitting in their fancy offices and making things up,” says Commander Al Bija as he shows us his base, a rocky bay with tightly guarded entrances and port walls. On board the Tileel, several men oil a heavy machine gun. The West Libyan coast is the “mother of all tribes and clans”, explains Al Bija: a world sealed off from outsiders – even against foreign Libyans. “Whoever hasn’t been born and raised here won’t survive.”
Al Bija says that hundreds of well-trained people are needed to rid the coast of smugglers. But who will choose these men? The weak unity government in Tripoli? The EU? “Me,” says the commander. “I know the right people.”
He tells his story like this: In 2011, he finished his studies at the Naval Academy in Tripoli. He joined the rebels against Gaddafi, was severely wounded nine times and lost two fingers of his right hand in a grenade attack. He slightly retracts his left leg; his hip is crooked. If he feels unobserved, he takes painkillers.
In the summer of 2015, the son of a former army officer, whose real name was Abdurahman Salem Ibrahim Milad, and whose nickname was Al Bija, sat in a café in bombed Zawiya with his revolutionary comrades. Gaddafi had been dead for four years, Libya a failed state. There was no work. Neither do prospects. Then an idea came to them: “Why don’t we do something big and take over the port?”
His friend Mohamed Ramadan, thirty, is inseparably fraternized with his machine gun. Ramzi Ibrahim, boy’s face with dazzling white teeth, 26, can compete with any sniper on the Kalashnikov. Mohamed Erhouma, son of a fisherman, thirty, knows the Libyan waters since early childhood and is regarded as a gifted navigator. And Mohamed Shkoundali’s magic hands get every machine back on track. At the age of 35, he is the oldest in the group.
Together they grabbed their weapons on that mild early summer day in 2015, drove an enemy militia out of the port in a bloody battle, set up the command centre and made the battered Tileel, a 16-metre long patrol ship with an infantry gun in the bow, ready to sail. Then they created their own coat of arms, gave themselves military rank, called themselves “Libyan Coast Guard of Zawiya” and went out to the Mediterranean Sea.
Their self-declared enemy: smugglers. The United Nations assumes that there are dozens of gangs organised in a network on the Libyan coast. They often detain refugees and migrants who cannot afford the money to travel to Europe for months on end, in private prisons where they are beaten, raped, tortured and murdered. A recent internal report by the German embassy in Niger speaks of “concentration camp-like conditions”.
One of the most powerful smugglers in West Libya is said to be a man from Sabratha who is barely thirty years old. “Ahmed Dabbashi – VIP trips to Europe,” says Al Bija. “Good boats with powerful engines, escorted by their own militia – guaranteed arrival in Italy.” Dabbashi’s largest boat was launched on July 5,2016, around four o’ clock in the morning. “A dozen of them incapacitated, escort sunk, 600 Africans returned.” Since then, everyone in Libya knows, the Commander says: “We don’t fuck around!”
Why is Al Bija risking his life? “I have a good heart,” he says and lays his hand on his chest. “Shall I let my brothers drown in the sea?”
And how does he make his living? He’s a horse dealer, says Al Bija. His comrades: Shopkeepers, builders, locksmiths. “Much of our income flows into our operations.” Later on, he’ll say they’re at sea 300 days a year.
So how does he really feed his family? “We seize illegal fishing boats from Egypt and Tunisia, sell their catch and keep them until the owners pay the fine.”
Their clans earn millions, buy modern weapons, bulletproof vehicles, tanks – if we don’t disturb their business, they will control, drive us out, kill us in the end “. Here, in the shadowy realm of the warlords, militias and organised smuggling of human beings, Europe wants to do “border management” in order to stop immigration from Africa. But is a warlord like Al Bija the right partner? As a refugee hunter on the Mediterranean, in the EU’s pay? The Commander has taken control of a vast territory that has escaped the state by force of arms. His power is not politically legitimized, but by the power of his troops.
In his bulletproof all-terrain vehicle, parked in the footwell of Kalashnikov, Al Bija takes us to the contested hinterland of Zawiya, where he wants to show us something. We leave behind us the deserted outskirts of the city with the destroyed facades and garnet impacts. At checkpoints, young men patrol in flight jackets and army trousers, with mirrored sunglasses and assault rifles, on their pickups they have mounted anti-aircraft cannons and rocket launchers.
After half an hour, we reach a remote farmstead. Behind a steel gate, another world opens up: magnificent horses are standing in well-kept stables. Two paddocks with accurate sand, willows, a riding hall is under construction. In a small villa with stucco ceiling and wall paintings it still smells of colour. More and more armoured SUVs with loopholes in the blackened discs are rolling in. Men with devious faces, gold jewellery and bodyguards get out. “If there are problems between clans and tribes,” says Al Bija, “we’ll sort them out here.” It is now clear to us that we are at the centre of power.
Al Bija takes off his shoes, walks barefoot through the sand and pulls one of his horses out of the stable: Jodran, the “brave one”, is a grey stallion with well-formed muscles, his fur is groomed several times a day. With shining eyes Al Bija puts a red belly belt and red socks on him.
What does a stallion like Jodran cost? “$50,000!” Everything from sequestrated fishing boats? Al Bija pulls the gun out of the leather belt, hands it to one of his men, swings himself into the saddle and rides away.
Between eucalyptus and fig trees, on an abandoned street, somewhere between the confused fronts of the civil war, the princes of the clans ride side by side a little later in step. It is a demonstration of external unity, a choreography of opaque alliances in the war for Libya. Then they suddenly tear their horses around, give them the spurs and hunt – each one for themselves – towards the horizon. Right in front: Commander Al Bija.
Why is he showing us all this? In the late afternoon we sit together in the sand. Al Bija cooks mint tea over an open fire. We drink from a glass that is passed around among the men and is constantly refilled. So why? “To give something back to the Germans.” Severely wounded in the revolution, he was flown out to Berlin in 2012, where surgeons at St. Marien Hospital patched up his gunshot wounds, amputated the two finger stumps, left Gaddafi’s grenades from his right hand, and provided the wounds with skin transplants. Al Bija spent three years in Berlin. He was treated with respect everywhere in Germany. “And the German women,” he says,”Beautiful!” He speaks Arabic with our translator and has forgotten his German. But he still remembers one word. “Brother,” he calls us and pat us on the shoulder.
Why didn’t he stay in his small apartment at Ernst-Reuter-Platz in Berlin-Charlottenburg? Why did he return in the summer of 2015 to a country that has since sunk into civil war? “Father, mother,” says Al Bija. “Family, clan, tribe.” In Libya you can’t just say goodbye to the war, it’s about more than your own life: “responsibility, honour”.
However, heavy charges are being made against Al Bija. Back at the Command Centre, we read TRT World, one of the leading Turkish news portals based in Istanbul, February 22,2017:”Al Bija is the largest player in the mafia of the Coast Guard, which has a firm grip on the lucrative business of human smuggling in Zawiya and the surrounding coastal region.”.
Al Bija’s gaze darkens. His men are leaving their cell phones. “All smugglers west of Tripoli pay Al Bija their share,” the article says. If you refuse, the Commander will attack you with the Tileel.
Experts such as the Italian journalist Nancy Porsia, who has been reporting from Libya for years, are certain:”The coastguard of the Libyan navy is involved in human trafficking”. Colonel Tarek Shanboor, who is subordinate to the Interior Ministry of the unity government in Tripoli, admits:”We have smugglers in our ranks, that’s a real problem.”
If Europe strengthens the Libyan coastguard under these circumstances, it is doing exactly the wrong thing, warns Frank Dörner of the German aid organisation Sea Watch. Instead of combating smugglers, the EU action plan risks the opposite:”It makes a violent escalation on the water more likely. This makes the situation more dangerous for the refugees.” Commander Al Bija puts his mutilated hand on the table. “Lies,” he says menacingly calmly. “Sent into the world by traffickers.” When his coast guard gets out of the way, they’ll have a free rein for their dirty business.
Al Bija and his men take the Africans, who they intercept in the boats of the tugboats on the Mediterranean, to special camps of the UN-backed unity government – as the EU is planning to do throughout Libya in the future under the Malta Agreement. In Surman Camp, half an hour’s drive west of Zawiya, more than 200 women cower on the ground in a hall with rusty window frames, many with babies. Her knees were pulled against her chest, her headscarves were pulled in front of her face, her eyes fixed on her feet. Nobody dare to move. Not the slightest whispering can be heard.
Only when the guard, a man in camouflage uniform with a neglected beard, reddened eyes and a red flag of alcohol, briefly leaves, does a young woman take her courage to talk to us. She is from Nigeria and has been trapped in Surman Camp for more than ten months, without contact with the outside world. No-one knows where she is, her family must think she’s dead.
She kneels before us, folds her shaking hands. “They rape us!” she whispers and shows us her arms. They are covered with bruises, the impressions of individual fingers are recognizable. “Help us! Please!” She’s lifting her shawl. Her tracksuit is smeared with blood between her legs and knees. “Who did this?” “All of them. One after the other.”
The guard’s coming back. She stops and looks at us, begging. We feel faint. There’s nothing we can do for the women. On the contrary: a false word from us, we suspect, and they would have to pay for it. Maybe with their life.
Outside, Colonel Ibrahim Ali Abdusalam, director of the women’s camp, is waiting. Officially he reports to the Ministry of the Interior, but in reality local militias control the camp. “Look how quiet they are,” he says and smiles. “That means they’re comfortable with us.”
Why would he keep a record of the women for months under these pathetic circumstances? Europe does not want to have these women,”he says calmly and without thinking for a long time. “Good, we’ll keep her here.” But it is high time Europe finally paid for them:”Mobile toilets and showers, swings and slides, tampons, nappies, baby milk.”
We are beginning to understand: The more Africans they put together and the worse off these people are, the better the bargaining position of the militias vis-à-vis the European states. The fact that Europe has long since arrived in Surman that it wants to relocate its border guards to Libya and invest on a large scale has long since arrived. According to Malta’s action plan, the Libyan coastguard will in future deliver intercepted refugees and migrants in “adequate reception capacities”. Libya is then to supply the people and build up a bureaucracy to carry out asylum procedures in accordance with international law. Recognized ones could be distributed to European countries in “contingents”. Rejected, the EU wants to support the “voluntary return” to its home countries.
Aid organizations are storming against this plan. As long as refugees and migrants in Libya are being detained, mistreated, abducted or raped, travelling across the Mediterranean Sea is for many people the only hope of escaping this hell,”explains Markus Beeko of Amnesty International Deutschland. Serious human rights violations against refugees and migrants in Libya must be brought to an end when the EU considers possible cooperation. The organisation Pro Asyl writes in an open letter to Angela Merkel about a “low point of European refugee policy”. Libya has already become a refugee prison once before, financed by Europe. In 2010, the EU took part in a deal between Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar al-Gaddafi, and pledged EUR 50 million to Gaddafi, who had been banned since the 1970s because of his support for international terrorism, to detain refugees and migrants.
Gaddafi didn’t make any misunderstandings: Without him, Europe would turn black through illegal migration. On behalf of Europe, he sent people taken up in the Mediterranean Sea back to Libya and detained them indefinitely in detention camps without checking their right to asylum. Even then, human rights organisations denounced beatings, sexual abuse and torture.
According to the United Nations, the unity government operates 24 internment camps for migrants in Libya, many of them dating back to Gaddafi’s times. Europe wants to use the existing infrastructure and develop it into a humane reception centre. Non-portable camps are to be closed. It remains unclear how the EU intends to get the militias to give up their camps. They let us rot here,”whispers a man from his cell in the Annasser Camp, which is housed in a former tire factory in Zawiya. Through the tiny window in the steel door, only the white of his eyes can be seen. A pungent smell strikes us. Then matches are lit inside, more and more frightened faces shine in the darkness, naked upper bodies, covered with skin diseases and wounds.
The men are cowering close together on the ground. Because it’s too narrow to stretch out, they sleep in a sitting position. There’s no shower, no toilet. Under their blankets they urinate in small water bottles, which they have drunk before. They carry out their bowel movements in plastic bags.
The man at the window of the cell is Mohamed Moseray, 25 years old, a student of computer science from Sierra Leone. He still wears the salt-crusted tracksuit that he wore when he was half-drowned from the Mediterranean sea weeks ago. Underneath his skin is burned by the petrol that had leaked out in a leaking dinghy. In Sierra Leone, he says, he had to quit his studies because he didn’t find a job and his family couldn’t support him. He just couldn’t see any perspective. My big goal is a university degree,”says Moseray, begins to tremble, cries, recovers. “That’s why I want to go to Italy and Canada.” There his studies are financed by the state.
After a five-year odyssey across West Africa and the Sahara, Moseray says, Libyan smugglers pushed the dinghy into the Mediterranean Sea, which Moseray was to bring to Italy on 19 March 2017, shortly after midnight. More than 150 people forced the smugglers into it. “If you don’t get in, they’ll shoot you.” Not even two hours they were at sea, and the boat capsized. “Screams, prayers, people, all over the water, pregnant women, children, babies – they can’t swim!” He enumerates his friends:”Mohamed Focus Diallo – drowns. Amadou Melodiba – drowning. Mohamed Bah – drowns “One by one, he saw him drowning beside himself in the water.
Mohamed Moseray doesn’t remember what came after that. He only remembers the ship that came to them shortly after sunrise. And to the hand his savior held against him. “Like a claw,” says Mohamed Moseray. “A few fingers were missing.”
Around 10 p. m. we board the Tileel, carrying a dozen heavily armed men in camouflage uniforms, put the Velcro fasteners under their chins. Commander Al Bija has been tipped off by his informers: On the beach of the neighbouring town Sabratha, tugboats brought a rubber dinghy full of people to Europe in the stormy night.
The men push cartridges into the magazines of their Kalashnikovs, place grenade launchers on the seats and an ammunition belt into the heavy machine gun in the bow. For them, saving means fighting more and more often. By crossing with the Tileel off the coast, they are heating up the spiral of violence – as more and more gangs of traffickers are moving to escort their human cargo armed.
The cost of the trip to Italy for each individual is currently up to $2500. Put this amount on the 181,000 people who crossed the Mediterranean in 2016 to Italy, and the more than 5,000 people who drowned in the attempt, Libyan smugglers took some 450 million dollars last year.
The fare is due in advance, but losing the freight to Tileel is bad for the hard-fought business. Those who are intercepted at sea and brought back to Libya are advised against their traffickers in the widely ramified networks along the African migration routes. From their point of view, less tragic: when their customers drown and disappear into the Mediterranean. Or drifting no longer identifiable to the beaches.
Without lights, like a phantom, the Tileel walks out of the port of Zawiya and later crashes out into the Mediterranean Sea through high waves. Sprays on both sides of the bug. Gusts of wind shake the wheelhouse. “If we don’t find them, they’ll die,” says Commander Al Bija at the helm.
In Libya, where survival is at stake, nobody plays with their hands wide open. Whatever Al Bija’s agenda may be – at the latest on board the Tileel we suspect: We are part of it. Does he want to show himself as a worthy partner of Europe in the story we will tell about him? And now provide proof that he can deliver?
Al Bija says his EU deal is in full swing. Shortly before our arrival he met British diplomats in Tunis. The Spanish government had invited him to Madrid. What are these conversations about? “Secret!” He reveals some of his demands to us:”Life and health insurance for me and my men. And free visas – for two-week holidays in Europe.”
Course north-northwest, 18 knots. The lights of the coast are retarded, above the pitch-black water the crescent moon stands almost in the zenith, when something flashes on the radar screen. Tense, the men are crowding around Commander Al Bija. The windows of the wheelhouse mist up from their breath, their fingers brushing over the radar as if they could feel on the glass what awaits us out there. We’re heading for the signal in half an hour. Then the infrared camera in the bow, about 400 meters away, detects a boat. Commander Al Bija studies the silhouettes on the monitor. “Rubber Dinghy,” he finally says,”Triumph swings in his voice.
Al Bija looks at us in a meaningful way. Until the end we don’t know who the commander really is – the man who was in Berlin-Charlottenburg to return to Libya and to conquer the coastal waters with a captured ship and a few men. One thing is certain: In war-torn Libya, Al Bija has found a loophole to capitalize on the rescue of refugees.
The main pillars of the EU’s deal with Libya are shaking. The Coast Guard: interspersed with dubious players. Safe reception camps: currently nothing more than militia-managed warehouses for defenceless people, a resource in the war for Libya – and around millions from Europe.
There are no quick solutions,”says Martin Kobler, the German UN special envoy to Libya. “We must do everything we can to stabilise Libya.” Then, instead of boarding the boats, many would stay in this oil-rich country to work under Gaddafi, as in the past. And the people smugglers are running out of merchandise.
The 150 people who are now sitting in the overloaded dinghy within sight of the Tileel and fighting against waves several metres high will not be helped by long-term solutions. We almost reached them, the speedboat races out of the night, the tugs open the fire, we throw ourselves on the ground.
Commander Al Bija runs through the hail of bullets, fires back, pulls a wounded man out of the line of fire, robs over to us. His mutilated hand touches our shoulders. Are we still alive? It seems as if the success of his mission depended on it.
Then it’s suddenly quiet. Carefully we raise our heads. With a hook, Al Bija and his men pull in the speedboat. Three tugboats are shot dead on the ground, two are seriously wounded. it.
“Do you believe us now?” screams the commander. “Do you believe us now that we’re not among them?” We are sure that in order to show ourselves as a partner of Europe, Al Bija has not only risked his life and that of his men, but also ours. And that of the people in the dinghy.
As if petrified, they sit in the light of our flashlights. None of them seem to be hurt. Women folded their hands for prayer. Crying children bury their faces in their mothers’ jackets. Moving her back into port would take hours. The tugboats had still communicated their base with a satellite telephone. The Tileel would have no chance against her fleet of heavily armed speedboats.
Too risky,”says Commander Al Bija, knocking off the dinghy with his foot. The water’s up to their calves. Why doesn’t he take some of them on board? At least the kids? Instead of replying, Commander Al Bija gives you a full drive back to Zawiya. People in the dinghy drift away and disappear into the darkness.
Micheal Obert & Moises Saman have come under fire earlier in crisis areas. But not on a boat, at night on the Mediterranean Sea. On land, it is usually possible to retreat in a controlled manner – on the Tileel, they could only stay on the ground and hope. Translators Salah Almorjini and Moises Saman remained unharmed, Michael Obert broke several ribs in a fall during the attack.
The Great British Brexit Robbery: how our democracy was hijacked
“The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty.”
Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016
“It’s not MI6’s job to warn of internal threats. It was a very strange speech. Was it one branch of the intelligence services sending a shot across the bows of another? Or was it pointed at Theresa May’s government? Does she know something she’s not telling us?”
Senior intelligence analyst, April 2017
07/05/2017
In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through London when she called up the boss of a firm where she’d previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.
“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”
Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”
Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask him. And he looks at me like I am mad. “It was like working for MI6. Only it’s MI6 for hire. It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. Fly all over the world. You were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. It’s not like election campaigns in the west. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit.”
On that day in June 2013, Sophie met up with SCL’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, and gave him the germ of an idea. “She said, ‘You really need to get into data.’ She really drummed it home to Alexander. And she suggested he meet this firm that belonged to someone she knew about through her father.” Who’s her father? “Eric Schmidt.” Eric Schmidt – the chairman of Google? “Yes. And she suggested Alexander should meet this company called Palantir.”
I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of eBay and PayPal, who became Silicon Valley’s first vocal supporter of Trump.
In some ways, Eric Schmidt’s daughter showing up to make an introduction to Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I have ever researched.
A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our time. Sophie Schmidt now works for another Silicon Valley megafirm: Uber. And what’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley – Google and Facebook and a small handful of others – are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.
It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being remade – in a radical and alarming way – by Trump.
“Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.”
There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.
My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with “did the holocaust happen”. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.
Google’s algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it was Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first person to map and uncover an entire “alt-right” news and information ecosystem and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.
He called the company a central point in the right’s “propaganda machine”, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda.
Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet (with a gravity-defying 71.8% annual return). And, he is also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, told me that it was Mercer who had directed his company, Cambridge Analytica, to “help” the Leave campaign.
The second article triggered two investigations, which are both continuing: one by the Information Commissioner’s Office into the possible illegal use of data. And a second by the Electoral Commission which is “focused on whether one or more donations – including services – accepted by Leave.EU was ‘impermissable’”.
What I then discovered is that Mercer’s role in the referendum went far beyond this. Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law. The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass ourelectoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia.
It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750. “Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t. Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”.
How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit? It’s a question that Martin Moore, director of the centre for the study of communication, media and power at King’s College London has been asking too. “I went through all the Leave campaign invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site in February. And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”
Moore contributed to an LSE report published in April that concluded UK’s electoral laws were “weak and helpless” in the face of new forms of digital campaigning. Offshore companies, money poured into databases, unfettered third parties… the caps on spending had come off. The laws that had always underpinned Britain’s electoral laws were no longer fit for purpose. Laws, the report said, that needed “urgently reviewing by parliament”.
AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated network of influence that Mercer has created. A source emailed me to say he had found that AggregateIQ’s address and telephone number corresponded to a company listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its overseas office: “SCL Canada”. A day later, that online reference vanished.
There had to be a connection between the two companies. Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer. It was too big a coincidence. But everyone – AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU, Vote Leave – denied it. AggregateIQ had just been a short-term “contractor” to Cambridge Analytica. There was nothing to disprove this. We published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered.
Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. “It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found we’d turned into the Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.”
He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. “Find Chris Wylie,” he said.
Who’s Chris Wylie?
“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.”
There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie.”
I did find Chris Wylie. He refused to comment.
Key to understanding how data would transform the company is knowing where it came from. And it’s a letter from “Director of Defence Operations, SCL Group”, that helped me realise this. It’s from “Commander Steve Tatham, PhD, MPhil, Royal Navy (rtd)” complaining about my use in my Mercer article of the word “disinformation”.
I wrote back to him pointing out references in papers he’d written to “deception” and “propaganda”, which I said I understood to be “roughly synonymous with ‘disinformation’.” It’s only later that it strikes me how strange it is that I’m corresponding with a retired navy commander about military strategies that may have been used in British and US elections.
What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics” firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories. Geoffrey Pattie, a former parliamentary under-secretary of state for defence procurement and director of Marconi Defence Systems, used to be on the board, and Lord Marland, David Cameron’s pro-Brexit former trade envoy, a shareholder.
Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. The Observer has seen letters endorsing him from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and Nato.
SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. An ex-commanding officer of the US Marine Corps operations centre, Chris Naler, has recently joined Iota Global, a partner of the SCL group.
This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Us. David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it is “an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not transparent or open where it’s coming from, it raises the question of whether we are actually living in a democracy or not.”
Paul and David, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, were working at the firm when it introduced mass data-harvesting to its psychological warfare techniques. “It brought psychology, propaganda and technology together in this powerful new way,” David tells me.
Steve Bannon, former vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, now a key adviser to Donald Trump. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data (legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook “likes”. And SCL/Cambridge Analytica contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.
“Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals.”
Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.
The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets – on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel – and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. It matched all this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s information environment,” said David. “And the personality data enabled Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.”
Finding “persuadable” voters is key for any campaign and with its treasure trove of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people high in neuroticism, for example, with images of immigrants “swamping” the country. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter.
Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence.
But does it actually work? One of the criticisms that has been levelled at my and others’ articles is that Cambridge Analytica’s “special sauce” has been oversold. Is what it is doing any different from any other political consultancy?
“It’s not a political consultancy,” says David. “You have to understand this is not a normal company in any way. I don’t think Mercer even cares if it ever makes any money. It’s the product of a billionaire spending huge amounts of money to build his own experimental science lab, to test what works, to find tiny slivers of influence that can tip an election. Robert Mercer did not invest in this firm until it ran a bunch of pilots – controlled trials. This is one of the smartest computer scientists in the world. He is not going to splash $15m on bullshit.”
Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New York University, helps me understand the context. She has researched the US military’s funding and use of psychological research for use in torture. “The capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well established. This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.
“We are in an information war and billionaires are buying up these companies, which are then employed to go to work in the heart of government. That’s a very worrying situation.”
A project that Cambridge Analytica carried out in Trinidad in 2013 brings all the elements in this story together. Just as Robert Mercer began his negotiations with SCL boss Alexander Nix about an acquisition, SCL was retained by several government ministers in Trinidad and Tobago. The brief involved developing a micro-targeting programme for the governing party of the time. And AggregateIQ – the same company involved in delivering Brexit for Vote Leave – was brought in to build the targeting platform.
David said: “The standard SCL/CA method is that you get a government contract from the ruling party. And this pays for the political work. So, it’s often some bullshit health project that’s just a cover for getting the minister re-elected. But in this case, our government contacts were with Trinidad’s national security council.”
The security work was to be the prize for the political work. Documents seen by the Observer show that this was a proposal to capture citizens’ browsing history en masse, recording phone conversations and applying natural language processing to the recorded voice data to construct a national police database, complete with scores for each citizen on their propensity to commit crime.
“The plan put to the minister was Minority Report. It was pre-crime. And the fact that Cambridge Analytica is now working inside the Pentagon is, I think, absolutely terrifying,” said David.
These documents throw light on a significant and under-reported aspect of the Trump administration. The company that helped Trump achieve power in the first place has now been awarded contracts in the Pentagon and the US state department. Its former vice-president Steve Bannon now sits in the White House. It is also reported to be in discussions for “military and homeland security work”.
In the US, the government is bound by strict laws about what data it can collect on individuals. But, for private companies anything goes. Is it unreasonable to see in this the possible beginnings of an authoritarian surveillance state?
A state that is bringing corporate interests into the heart of the administration. Documents detail Cambridge Analytica is involved with many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch. One memo references Cambridge Analytica trying to place an article with a journalist in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal: “RM re-channeled and connected with Jamie McCauley from Robert Thomson News Corp office,” it says.
It makes me think again about the story involving Sophie Schmidt, Cambridge Analytica and Palantir. Is it a telling detail, or is it a clue to something else going on? Cambridge Analytica and Palantir both declined to comment for this article on whether they had any relationship. But witnesses and emails confirm that meetings between Cambridge Analytica and Palantir took place in 2013. The possibility of a working relationship was at least discussed.
Further documents seen by the Observer confirm that at least one senior Palantir employee consulted with Cambridge Analytica in relation to the Trinidad project and later political work in the US. But at the time, I’m told, Palantir decided it was too much of a reputational risk for a more formal arrangement. There was no upside to it. Palantir is a company that is trusted to handle vast datasets on UK and US citizens for GCHQ and the NSA, as well as many other countries.
Now though, they are both owned by ideologically aligned billionaires: Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel. The Trump campaign has said that Thiel helped it with data. A campaign that was led by Steve Bannon, who was then at Cambridge Analytica.
A leading QC who spends a lot of time in the investigatory powers tribunal said that the problem with this technology was that it all depended on whose hands it was in.
“On the one hand, it’s being done by companies and governments who say ‘you can trust us, we are good and democratic and bake cakes at the weekend’. But then the same expertise can also be sold on to whichever repressive regime.”
“We believe we live in a free and fair democracy. Which is what, I believe, makes the last part of this story so profoundly unsettling.”
In Britain, we still trust our government. We respect our authorities to uphold our laws. We trust the rule of law. We believe we live in a free and fair democracy. Which is what, I believe, makes the last part of this story so profoundly unsettling.
The details of the Trinidad project finally unlocked the mystery that was AggregateIQ. Trinidad was SCL’s first project using big data for micro-targeting before the firm was acquired by Mercer. It was the model that Mercer was buying into. And it brought together all the players: the Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, AggregateIQ, Chris Wylie, and two other individuals who would play a role in this story: Mark Gettleson, a focus group expert who had previously worked for the Lib Dems. And Thomas Borwick, the son of Victoria Borwick, the Conservative MP for Kensington.
When my article linking Mercer and Leave.EU was published in February, no one was more upset about it than former Tory adviser Dominic Cummings, the campaign strategist for Vote Leave. He launched an irate Twitter tirade. The piece was “full of errors & itself spreads disinformation” “CA had ~0% role in Brexit referendum”.
A week later the Observer revealed AggregateIQ’s possible link to Cambridge Analytica. Cummings’s Twitter feed went quiet. He didn’t return my messages or my emails.
Questions had already been swirling about whether there had been any coordination between the Leave campaigns. In the week before the referendum, Vote Leave donated money to two other Leave groups – £625,000 to BeLeave, run by fashion student Darren Grimes, and £100,000 to Veterans for Britain, who both then spent this money with AggregateIQ.
The Electoral Commission has written to AggregateIQ. A source close to the investigation said that AggregateIQ responded by saying it had signed a non-disclosure agreement. And since it was outside British jurisdiction, that was the end of it. Vote Leave refers to this as the Electoral Commission giving it “a clean bill of health”.
On his blog, Dominic Cummings has written thousands of words about the referendum campaign. What is missing is any details about his data scientists. He “hired physicists” is all he’ll say. In the books on Brexit, other members of the team talk about “Dom’s astrophysicists”, who he kept “a tightly guarded secret”. They built models, using data “scraped” off Facebook.
Finally, after weeks of messages, he sent me an email. We were agreed on one thing, it turned out. He wrote: “The law/regulatory agencies are such a joke the reality is that anybody who wanted to cheat the law could do it easily without people realising.” But, he says, “by encouraging people to focus on non-stories like Mercer’s nonexistent role in the referendum you are obscuring these important issues”.
And to finally answer the question about how Vote Leave found this obscure Canadian company on the other side of the planet, he wrote: “Someone found AIQ [AggregateIQ] on the internet and interviewed them on the phone then told me – let’s go with these guys. They were clearly more competent than any others we’d spoken to in London.”
The most unfortunate aspect of this – for Dominic Cummings – is that this isn’t credible. It’s the work of moments to put a date filter on Google search and discover that in late 2015 or early 2016, there are no Google hits for “Aggregate IQ”. There is no press coverage. No random mentions. It doesn’t even throw up its website. I have caught Dominic Cummings in what appears to be an alternative fact.
But what is an actual fact is that Gettleson and Borwick, both previously consultants for SCL and Cambridge Analytica, were both core members of the Vote Leave team. They’re both in the official Vote Leave documents lodged with the Electoral Commission, though they coyly describe their previous work for SCL/Cambridge Analytica as “micro-targeting in Antigua and Trinidad” and “direct communications for several PACs, Senate and Governor campaigns”.
And Borwick wasn’t just any member of the team. He was Vote Leave’s chief technology officer.
This story may involve a complex web of connections, but it all comes back to Cambridge Analytica. It all comes back to Mercer. Because the connections must have been evident. “AggregateIQ may not have belonged to the Mercers but they exist within his world,” David told me. “Almost all of their contracts came from Cambridge Analytica or Mercer. They wouldn’t exist without them. During the whole time the referendum was going on, they were working every day on the [Ted] Cruz campaign with Mercer and Cambridge Analytica. AggregateIQ built and ran Cambridge Analytica’s database platforms.”
Illustration: James Melaugh
Cummings won’t say who did his modelling. But invoices lodged with the Electoral Commission show payments to a company called Advanced Skills Institute. It takes me weeks to spot the significance of this because the company is usually referred to as ASI Data Science, a company that has a revolving cast of data scientists who have gone on to work with Cambridge Analytica and vice versa. There are videos of ASI data scientists presenting Cambridge Analytica personality models and pages for events the two companies have jointly hosted. ASI told the Observer it had no formal relationship with Cambridge Analytica.
Here’s the crucial fact: during the US primary elections, Aggregate IQ signed away its intellectual property (IP). It didn’t own its IP: Robert Mercer did. For AggregateIQ to work with another campaign in Britain, the firm would have to have had the express permission of Mercer. Asked if it would make any comment on financial or business links between “Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, AggregateIQ, Leave.EU and Vote Leave”, a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica said: “Cambridge Analytica did no paid or unpaid work for Leave.EU.”
This story isn’t about cunning Dominic Cummings finding a few loopholes in the Electoral Commission’s rules. Finding a way to spend an extra million quid here. Or (as the Observer has also discovered )underdeclaring the costs of his physicists on the spending returns by £43,000. This story is not even about what appears to be covert coordination between Vote Leave and Leave.EU in their use of AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica. It’s about how a motivated US billionaire – Mercer and his chief ideologue, Bannon – helped to bring about the biggest constitutional change to Britain in a century.
Because to understand where and how Brexit is connected to Trump, it’s right here. These relationships, which thread through the middle of Cambridge Analytica, are the result of a transatlantic partnership that stretches back years. Nigel Farage and Bannon have been close associates since at least 2012. Bannon opened the London arm of his news website Breitbart in 2014 to support Ukip – the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”, he told the New York Times.
Britain had always been key to Bannon’s plans, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee told me on condition of anonymity. It was a crucial part of his strategy for changing the entire world order.
“He believes that to change politics, you have to first change the culture. And Britain was key to that. He thought that where Britain led, America would follow. The idea of Brexit was hugely symbolically important to him.”
On 29 March, the day article 50 was triggered, I called one of the smaller campaigns, Veterans for Britain. Cummings’s strategy was to target people in the last days of the campaign and Vote Leave gave the smaller group £100,000 in the last week. A small number of people they identified as “persuadable” were bombarded with more than a billion ads, the vast majority in the last few days.
I asked David Banks, Veterans for Britain’s head of communications, why they spent the money with AggregateIQ.
“I didn’t find AggegrateIQ. They found us. They rang us up and pitched us. There’s no conspiracy here. They were this Canadian company which was opening an office in London to work in British politics and they were doing stuff that none of the UK companies could offer. Their targeting was based on a set of technologies that hadn’t reached the UK yet. A lot of it was proprietary, they’d found a way of targeting people based on behavioural insights. They approached us.”
It seems clear to me that David Banks didn’t know there might have been anything untoward about this. He’s a patriotic man who believes in British sovereignty and British values and British laws. I don’t think knew about any overlap with these other campaigns. I can only think that he was played.
And that we, the British people, were played. In his blog, Dominic Cummings writes that Brexit came down to “about 600,000 people – just over 1% of registered voters”. It’s not a stretch to believe that a member of the global 1% found a way to influence this crucial 1% of British voters. The referendum was an open goal too tempting a target for US billionaires not to take a clear shot at. Or I should say US billionaires and other interested parties, because in acknowledging the transatlantic links that bind Britain and America, Brexit and Trump, so tightly, we also must acknowledge that Russia is wrapped somewhere in this tight embrace too.
For the last month, I’ve been writing about the links between the British right, the Trump administration and the European right. And these links lead to Russia from multiple directions. Between Nigel Farage and Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica.
A map shown to the Observer showing the many places in the world where SCL and Cambridge Analytica have worked includes Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities.
Article 50 has been triggered. AggregateIQ is outside British jurisdiction. The Electoral Commission is powerless. And another election, with these same rules, is just a month away. It is not that the authorities don’t know there is cause for concern. The Observer has learned that the Crown Prosecution Service did appoint a special prosecutor to assess whether there was a case for a criminal investigation into whether campaign finance laws were broken. The CPS referred it back to the electoral commission. Someone close to the intelligence select committee tells me that “work is being done” on potential Russian interference in the referendum.
Gavin Millar, a QC and expert in electoral law, described the situation as “highly disturbing”. He believes the only way to find the truth would be to hold a public inquiry. But a government would need to call it. A government that has just triggered an election specifically to shore up its power base. An election designed to set us into permanent alignment with Trump’s America.
Martin Moore of King’s College, London, pointed out that elections were a newly fashionable tool for would-be authoritarian states. “Look at Erdoğan in Turkey. What Theresa May is doing is quite anti-democratic in a way. It’s about enhancing her power very deliberately. It’s not about a battle of policy between two parties.”
“This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics.”
This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us. If we let this referendum result stand, we are giving it our implicit consent. This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.
Key names
SCL Group : British company with 25 years experience in military “psychological operations” and “election management”.
Cambridge Analytica: Data analytics company formed in 2014. Robert Mercer owns 90%. SCL owns 10%. Carried out major digital targeting campaigns for Donald Trump campaign, Ted Cruz’s nomination campaign and multiple other US Republican campaigns – mostly funded by Mercer. Gave Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU “help” during referendum.
Robert Mercer : US billionaire hedge fund owner who was Trump’s biggest donor. Owns Cambridge Analytica and the IP [intellectual property] ofAggregateIQ. Friend of Farage. Close associate of Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon: Trump’s chief strategist. Vice-president of Cambridge Analytica during referendum period. Friend of Farage.
Alexander Nix : Director of Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group.
Christopher Wylie: Canadian who first brought data expertise and microtargeting to Cambridge Analytica; recruited AggregateIQ.
AggregateIQ: Data analytics company based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Worked for Mercer-funded Pacs that supported the Trump campaign. Robert Mercer owns AggregateIQ’s IP. Paid £3.9m by Vote Leave to “micro-target” voters on social media during referendum campaign. Outside British jurisdiction.
Veterans for Britain: Given £100,000 by Vote Leave. Spent it with AggregateIQ.
BeLeave : Youth Leave campaign set up by 23-year-old student. Given £625,000 by Vote Leave & £50,000 by another donor. Spent it with AggregateIQ.
DUP : Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Spent £32,750 with AggregrateIQ.
Thomas Borwick: Vote Leave’s chief technology officer. Previously worked with SCL/Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ.
ASI Data Science: Data science specialists. Links with Cambridge Analytica, including staff moving between the two and holding joint events. Paid £114,000 by Vote Leave. Vote Leave declared £71,000 to Electoral Commission.
Donald Trump : US president. Campaign funded by Mercer and run by Bannon. Data services supplied by Cambridge Analytica and AggregrateIQ.
Nigel Farage: Former Ukip leader. Leader of Leave.EU. Friend of Trump, Mercer and Bannon.
Arron Banks: Bristol businessman. Co-founder of Leave.EU. Owns data company and insurance firm. Single biggest donor to Leave – £7.5m.
Some names, ages and other identifying details of sources in this article have been changed