Starting on 12 November 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s shock victory in the US Presidential Election, a Russian politician and internet activist called Konstantin Rykov posted two bizarre and outlandish Facebook Posts in which he claimed that he and his team had been working for “four years and two days” on ensuring “the victory of Donald in the election of the US President”.
The Facebook posts were like something from The Matrix.
Rykov claimed that, during a US Presidential Election debate between Barack Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney in 2012, he and his colleagues had the “insane idea” that they would “digitize all possible types of modern man” and “change their perception of reality” to elect the New York property tycoon to the presidency.
To do this, Rykov went on to say that Donald Trump himself solicited a “special scientific department of Cambridge University”.
Who is Konstantin Rykov? Who are his colleagues? What is the special scientific department in Cambridge? And what has this got to do with Russian interference in British politics?
The Super Secret Weapon
Rykov is a maverick online entrepreneur, politician and disrupter. An early adopter of internet memes, conspiracy theories and social media disinformation, he founded the anarchic idiot.ru website and a lucrative dark net prostitution service called Dosug before being recruited by Russian state TV to run its internet department and other news websites.
So strong was Rykov’s association with the early years of political trolling, sock puppets, automated avatars and other kinds of information operations that, as early as 2007, his bot armies were described as “Rykovians” or “Rykovites”.
The success of Rykov’s digital warfare soon drew the attention of another playful but powerful ideologue: Vladimir Putin’s former deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, a master of ‘non-linear’ warfare.
Surkov was infamous for deploying all the tricks of theatre and reality TV to create fake opposition parties and sow counter-narratives and conspiracy theories so that Putin’s opponents were constantly lost in a hyper-real fog of doubt and despair. He appears to have adopted Rykov as his protégée. By 2008 – at the age of only 28 – Rykov was elected as a deputy in the Russian Parliament for the ruling United Russia party and became known as Putin’s internet guru.
So, as a provable Kremlin propagandist, Rykov certainly has the credentials to make his extraordinary claim about the 2016 US Presidential Election. Moreover, there is independent corroboration that he was supporting Trump in October 2012.
Rykov’s friend, the young oligarch Artem Klyushin, was in the room with Trump in 2013 during the Moscow Miss Universe event where his candidacy was discussed with Russian oligarch Aras Alagarov.
By 2015, Rykov had created his own site based on Trump’s famous ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan – only in Russian.
Rykov was also part of a wider strategic project to undermine the European Union after the war in Ukraine. He was advocating for Scottish and Catalonian independence in 2014, renaming himself McRykov and insisting that “Scotland will be free”. During the Maidan uprising in Kyiv against Putin’s ally Viktor Yanukovych, he was pushing conspiracy theories that the EU shot 100 or so demonstrators.
By this point, according to British intelligence, the Kremlin had “a secret black budget of tens of millions of dollars” earmarked for populist-nationalist politicians who were opposed to the EU. Text messages show Rykov, using his familiar first name ‘Kostya’, discussing with one of Putin’s top advisors how to get Marine le Pen’s National Front to recognise the recently annexed Crimea in return for Russian loans.
With these connections, Rykov’s next statement cannot be dismissed.
“British scientists from Cambridge Analytica suggested making 5,000 existing human psychotypes the ‘ideal image’ of a possible Trump supporter,” Rykov explained on the morning after Trump’s victory. The company was involved in a vast psychological targeting operation online to “put this image back on all psychotypes and thus picked up a universal key to anyone and everyone”. This “secret super-weapon” cost Trump only $5 million and it was boosted by “a pair of hacker groups [and] civil journalists from WikiLeaks.”
Bear in mind that November 2016 was a full year before Special Counsel Robert Mueller would indict 13 members of the Internet Research Agency, a multi-million dollar operation run from the Olgino suburb of the second Russian city of St Petersburg, involved in ‘active measures‘ to win the US election for Donald Trump. Rykov’s allegations about Wikileaks and two “hacker groups” was years before FBI indictments revealed the role of Julian Assange in deploying material hacked by ‘Fancy Bear’, associated with Russian military agency GRU, and the FSB’s ‘Cozy Bear’ group from the Democratic National Committee and its officials.
If everything else in this post has come true, what of the claims about Cambridge Analytica?
A couple of weeks before the post, Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive Alexander Nix told Sky News that his company held 5,000 data points on each US voter. But it was an obscure interview. Except for a small number of election specialists, the company was virtually unheard of.
It wasn’t until March 2018 that the Observer’s Carole Cadawalladr revealed that Cambridge Analytica had illegally harvested the profiles of 87 million Facebook users and the company was shut down and raided by Britain’s Information Commissioner.
Rykov has both the credibility, connections and inside knowledge to make claims about Russian interests working in league with Cambridge Analytica during the Trump campaign. But what does this have to do with Russian interference in British politics?
Well, everything.
Why ‘Cambridge’ Analytica?
Though its front-facing entity was registered in the US, and 90% of its seed corn investment came from the right-wing American billionaire Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica was essentially a British company and played a crucial role in the country’s tumultuous but slim vote in favour of leaving the European Union.
Cambridge Analytica was co-founded in the autumn of 2013 by future Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon and Alexander Nix of SCL – a British company specialising in military-grade psy-ops, cyber warfare and civil society programmes.
The name of the now infamous ‘political consulting’ firm came from the location of its first few meetings because, according to SCL’s then head of research, Christopher Wylie, Bannon was enamoured by the cultural caché of Britain’s ancient university town – one which also conveniently had a psychology department using online data analytics for psychometric profiling of millions of people.
In December 2013, Wylie and his CEO Nix set up a fake office in