The company accused of using dirty tricks to manipulate elections trained British officials on how to tackle Russian propaganda, The Times can reveal.
The officials were among 20 intelligence and military personnel from Nato countries sent on an eight-week course in 2015 run by Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group. Steve Tatham, the company’s defence expert, taught them advanced “techniques to counter Russia’s propaganda”.
SCL was paid more than £500,000 for the training, organised by Nato’s strategic communications centre of excellence in Latvia. The site has received at least £40,214 from the Ministry of Defence in the past three years.
The payments were discovered yesterday as the government was struggling to determine how much support it has given to SCL and whether it had any current contracts with the company.
It has emerged that Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, had an undeclared meeting with Alexander Nix, the suspended chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, in December 2016.
Mark Turnbull, an executive at SCL, also advised the Foreign Office on President Trump’s election campaign.
Theresa May’s official spokesman said on Wednesday that government departments had had three contracts with SCL. The Times, however, has linked the company to British officials on at least eight occasions. After repeated questions, the Ministry of Defence confirmed last night that it had had four contracts with the company.
SCL ran the Nato Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence training programme in 2015 for officials from Britain, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway and America. An article on the website for the Nato centre in Latvia describes the course as having taught advanced techniques “to help member states assess and counter Russia’s propaganda in Eastern Europe”. A spokeswoman for the organisation said: “There were representatives from the UK in this course. However, UK policy prevents us from providing details.”
Although different countries, including Britain, fund the organisation, the course was sponsored by the Canadian government. SCL was paid C$999,657 (about £550,000).
SCL has worked with the Ministry of Defence on at least three other occasions, including paying £40,000 for training in 2010-11 and £150,000 for “target audience analysis” in 2014-15. A key part of the work is thought to have been surveys of Libyans after the downfall of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.
In March 2009 the Home Office paid £500 to SCL for a training project. It said that it was a “one-off payment many years before the recent revelations”.
In 2008-09 the Foreign Office had a contract for an undisclosed amount with the company for a “communications project”. Mr Turnbull was one of two SCL executives who briefed Foreign Office officials in February last year on data in the 2016 presidential election. The executives boasted that the company had datasets for 250 million Americans “available to SCL” allowing messages to be “individually tailored”. A Foreign Office source said that they were not paid but were invited as they were considered “a useful source of information”.
Mr Johnson also had an undeclared meeting with Mr Nix to try to learn more about the Trump team. Mr Nix also met the junior minister, Sir Alan Duncan, and Foreign Office officials.
A Foreign Office spokesman said that the meeting was not registered in the records owing to an oversight. “This is being corrected,” he added.
The Cabinet Office declined to comment last night. SCL did not respond to a request for comment.
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