and the Hillary campaign wasn’t up and running yet.
I’d then pursued a dream job working for my friend John Jones QC, a barrister at the Doughty Street Chambers and one of the world’s most prominent human rights attorneys. (On his team was the equally formidable Amal Clooney, née Alamuddin.)
John was an unparalleled champion of global civil liberties. He’d defended some of the world’s most controversial bad actors, from Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, second son of Muammar Gaddafi, to Liberian president Charles Taylor. At tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, and Cambodia, he’d confronted thorny issues such as counterterrorism, war crimes, and extraditions, and he did this in the service of upholding international human rights law. More recently, he had taken on the case of WikiLeaks founder (and the source of primary material for one of my master’s theses) Julian Assange, who was evading extradition to Sweden and had sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
John and I had become friends. We talked about and bonded over our admiration for the infamous whistleblower, and we joked about the rivalry between the prep schools we’d attended; he was British but had attended Phillips Exeter Academy, the rival school to my own, Phillips Academy Andover, both started in the late eighteenth century by two members of the Phillips family. I didn’t yet have my credentials as a barrister, but John had kindly seen in me keenness and the potential to do good work, and he’d been trying to find funding for a position he wanted me to fill in The Hague, where he aimed to open a new branch of Doughty Street called Doughty Street International.
But the money hadn’t come through yet. Even if it had, it wouldn’t have been the type of money commercial lawyers make. That was the world of human rights work. John and his small family sacrificed for their belief in the law, living much more modestly than other world-famous lawyers, as John did pro bono work most of the time. As much out of principle as practicality, he was a no-frills vegetarian who rode his bicycle everywhere.
While I had imagined a close-to-the-bone and ethically authentic life like John’s someday, that didn’t seem in the cards right now. Back home, my parents were on the verge of poverty, the culmination of events over a decade in the making.
For many years, my father’s family owned commercial real estate and a string of upscale health clubs and spas; my mother had been able to stay home to raise her children herself; and my younger sister, Natalie, and I had grown up in a privileged upper-middle-class household, enjoying a private school education, dance and music lessons, and family trips to Disney World and Caribbean beaches.
But when the subprime mortgage crisis hit in 2008, my father’s family businesses suffered. A number of other problems occurred, and these, too, had been out of my parents’ control. Soon, we had no savings left. Years before, my mother had been an employee at Enron, and when that Houston house of cards collapsed in 2001, she lost all her retirement money.
My father was now jobless; my mother, who hadn’t worked in twenty-six years, had to retrain herself to reenter the workforce. In the meantime, my parents refinanced our family home and sold off their assets until, when the bank came calling, they had literally nothing at all but the belongings in our house.
During all this, something deeply troubling was happening to my father’s state of mind. He was strangely emotionless. When we tried to speak to him about what was going on, he wasn’t really all there. His eyes were eerily vacant. He spent his days in bed or in front of the television, and if anyone asked him how things were, he answered flatly, saying that things were fine. We assumed it was clinical depression, but he refused to seek therapy or take medication. He refused even to be seen by a doctor. We wanted to shake him, to wake him up, but we felt helpless to reach him.
By the time Alexander Nix called Chester to invite me in for a job interview at SCL, in October 2014, my mother had found a job as a flight attendant. She’d had to move to Ohio, where the airline was based, and she was living in hotels with her coworkers. Back home, my father was surviving on food stamps. My mother, who had grown up with limited resources on American military bases, never thought she’d go back to struggling. But here it was, staring us in the face.
As much as I had my reservations about SCL, I couldn’t afford to be picky. I would somehow try to balance finishing my PhD with working as a consultant. I needed a job that could help sustain me and my family. I was thinking not only of the present, but of the long term as well.
Alexander was landed gentry. In the eighteenth century, his family had its hand in the famed East India Company. He was married to a Norwegian shipping heiress.
Although I had been raised with plenty of privilege, there wasn’t anything left to draw on. I was now a poor student who had a habit of overdrawing my already meager bank account, with nothing in the way of savings. My home was a ramshackle flat in East London. I had plenty of work bona fides, but I knew if I wanted to run around with Alexander, I needed to spruce myself up.
I researched new developments in digital campaigning and data analysis. I brushed up on nonprofit marketing and campaigning techniques. Then I pressed my best suit, a hand-me-down from my mother’s Enron days.
When I arrived for my interview, Alexander was in the middle of an urgent phone call. He thrust into my hands an oversized, nearly sixty-page document and told me to read it while I waited. It was a mock-up for a new SCL brochure, and it was a veritable encyclopedia. I thumbed through it, knowing I’d get to the rest of it later, but I zeroed in on a section about how the company used “psyops” in defense and humanitarian campaigns.
I was familiar with the term, and it intrigued rather than troubled me. Short for “psychological operations,” which itself was a euphemism for “psychological warfare,” psyops can be used in war, but its applications for peacekeeping appealed to me. Influencing “hostile” audiences can sound terrifying, but psyops, for example, can be used to help shift young men in Islamic nations away from joining Al-Qaeda or to de-escalate conflict between tribal factions on Election Day.
I was still gobbling up the information in the brochure when Alexander invited me into his office. I expected the inner sanctum of a man who presented as so worldly to bear evidence of the universe in which he lived, but the room was little more than an unadorned glass box. There were no personal photos, no mementos. Its furnishings consisted of a desk, two chairs, a computer monitor, and a narrow shelf of books.
Alexander sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. Why, he asked me, was I interested in working for the SCL Group?
I joked that he was the one who had asked me to come see him.
He laughed. But, really, he pressed, kindly.
I told him that I had just organized an enormous international health care conference with the British government, MENA Health, and I knew another was coming up soon, this one on security. As exciting as the work was, it had also been exhausting.
As I talked, he listened carefully, and as he spoke more about the company, I found it ever more interesting. At one point, I sneaked a glance at his bookshelf, and when he caught me doing it, he burst out laughing.
“That’s just my collection of fascist literature,” he said, and he waved a hand in the air dismissively. I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I laughed, too. Clearly there was something on that shelf about which he was embarrassed, and it put me at ease to know that some of those conservative titles I noticed, and shunned, might not be quite his cup of tea, either.
We talked for a while longer, and when we came to my work in public health in East Africa, he jumped out of his chair and said, “I have some people here that you must meet.” He then took me into the larger office
