The Ghost in the Data: Rykov’s Boast and the Shadow Networks of 2016
Further background notes for the forthcoming central section of my Trojan Horses story which moves into the first major Russian involvement British and US elections nine years ago
When Russian propagandist Konstantin Rykov claimed on election night in 2016 that he had worked with “Cambridge scientists” to help Donald Trump win, his words sounded like bluster.
But traced backwards, his boast reveals how Cambridge Analytica, Russian troll farms, GRU hacking, and Trump’s campaign converged.
Rykov’s Claim
On 8 November 2016, Kremlin-linked media entrepreneur Konstantin Rykov exulted online that he had worked with “Cambridge scientists” to deliver Trump’s victory.[Guardian]
Who did he mean? Possibly Dr Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge academic whose Facebook quiz app harvested millions of profiles; or perhaps Cambridge Analytica (CA) itself, the data-analytics firm that boasted of “5,000 data points on every American voter.”[House of Commons DCMS Report]
At first glance, the claim was easy to dismiss. But set against the record of overlapping operations in 2016, it reflected a troubling reality: the convergence of Western contractors and Russian state-backed influence operations on the same battleground — the American electorate.
Cambridge Analytica’s Playbook
By 2014, CA was creating fake Facebook pages with patriotic names like Smith County Patriots.[Wylie, Mindfck*] These groups channelled users into echo chambers of anger, then spilled into offline meetups in coffee shops or bars, where 40 people could feel like a movement.
Under Steve Bannon’s ideological guidance, CA pushed surveys probing racial taboos: could Black Americans succeed without white help, or were they genetically doomed to fail?[US House Testimony]
CA matched Facebook profiles to voter files, modelling how even a 1% turnout shift in swing states could decide an election.[Senate Intel Vol. 5]
Russia’s Mirror
At the same time, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St Petersburg was running the same playbook. It created fake groups such as Being Patriotic and Blacktivist.[Mueller Report Vol. I, pp. 23–27] By 2016, it staged real rallies, including duelling protests in Houston where unwitting Americans screamed at one another across the street.[Mueller Report Vol. I, pp. 30–33]
Meanwhile, GRU Units 26165 and 74455 hacked Democratic Party servers, releasing files through Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, later amplified by IRA trolls.[Mueller Report Vol. I, pp. 41–49, 59–65]
The Manafort Channel
Inside Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort was sharing internal polling data and strategy with his long-time associate Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee assessed to be a Russian intelligence officer.[Senate Intel Vol. 5, p. 28]
The Committee called this a “grave counterintelligence threat.”[Senate Intel Vol. 5, p. 29] Sensitive U.S. campaign intelligence flowed to Moscow just as the GRU and IRA operations intensified.
Patten, LUKOIL and the Russian Research Streams
A few months before CA’s first approaches to LUKOIL, the company had connected with Sam Patten, a political consultant who had worked across Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Patten had just finished a project for pro-Russian parties in Ukraine when CA hired him. At the time, he was working with Konstantin Kilimnik, later identified as a former GRU officer. Patten and Kilimnik had met in Moscow in the early 2000s and worked together in Ukraine for Manafort’s consultancy before becoming formal business partners.[DOJ Release]
Inside CA, Patten was a perfect fit: experienced in shadowy influence work, connected to Republicans, and tasked with managing U.S. field operations — focus groups, polling logistics, drafting survey questions. By spring 2014 he was overseeing research in Oregon. Then, something strange emerged: focus groups testing American attitudes to Vladimir Putin and Crimea.
“Is Russia entitled to Crimea?” one survey asked. Groups were shown images of Putin and asked where he looked strongest. Some participants admired his resolve. “He has a right to protect his country,” one said. Another compared Crimea to “Russia’s Mexico.”[Wylie, Mindfck*]
No one inside CA could later explain who authorised the Putin/Crimea tests. Patten’s Eastern Europe background raised questions, though he denied ever passing data to Kilimnik. Still, the overlap was notable: Manafort would later admit that he had shared Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik in 2016.
At the same time, whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed that Alexander Nix had sent LUKOIL CEO Vagit Alekperov a white paper Wylie wrote on CA’s U.S. data-targeting. Alekperov then requested a meeting. Nix told Wylie: “They understand behavioural micro-targeting in elections … but they are failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers.”[Wylie, Mindfck*]
Soon after, a 2014 internal SCL memo was drafted for Nix. It described in euphemistic terms the firm’s ability to provide “special intelligence services” and “scaled disinformation operations on social media.” It boasted of ex-intelligence officers from Israel, the U.S., UK, Spain and Russia, and proposed infiltrating opposition campaigns with “intelligence nets” and creating large webs of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts to cultivate followers.[Wylie, Mindfck*]
Kogan’s St Petersburg Research
Meanwhile, Aleksandr Kogan, the psychologist behind CA’s Facebook data harvesting, was also conducting research at St Petersburg State University, funded by a Russian government grant. His Russian work focused on identifying “dark triad” personality traits — narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy — and their correlation with trolling and authoritarian political expression online.[Guardian, Mar 2018]
Kogan lectured in Russia on political applications of social media profiling. According to one briefing, his team used “data of Facebook users from Russia and the USA by means of a special web-application” to study political engagement. Inside CA, psychologists soon began replicating these methods, profiling neurotic and authoritarian personalities most susceptible to conspiracy theories and nudges toward extreme behaviour.
Kogan later told investigators he had no ill intent, only naivety. But the overlap was there: psychological profiling research funded in Russia fed into the same conceptual frameworks CA was deploying in U.S. politics.
Indictments and Aftermath
The reckoning came in stages:
Feb 2018: DOJ indicted 13 Russians and three entities linked to the IRA.[DOJ Indictment]
July 2018: DOJ indicted 12 GRU officers for the DNC hacks and leaks.[DOJ Indictment]
July 2019: The FTC charged Cambridge Analytica, Nix and Kogan for deceptive harvesting and retention of Facebook data.[FTC Complaint]
Aug 2020: The Senate Intelligence Committee released Volume 5, confirming Kilimnik’s role and warning of the “grave counterintelligence threat.”[Senate Intel Vol. 5]
Epilogue
Rykov’s boast was propaganda — but it resonated because of the proximity of operations. Cambridge Analytica pitched its targeting methods to LUKOIL’s CEO, backed by a memo outlining espionage-style capabilities; Sam Patten, Manafort’s one-time partner, was simultaneously running U.S. focus groups testing American views of Putin; Aleksandr Kogan was researching dark-triad authoritarian traits in St Petersburg with Russian government funding while retaining Facebook datasets.
The result was not a formal conspiracy but a dangerous synchrony: data-harvesting, hack-and-leak, and troll-farm amplification converged in 2016, blurring the line between domestic campaigning and foreign interference.