What happens when a cutout is cut out
Three lawsuits reveal a San Francisco-based intelligence contractor's secret acquisition of the American face of a UAE-based offshoot of Cambridge Analytica's parent company.
Updated on August 6, 2025
As part of a late 2023 False Claims Act suit in the Eastern District of Virginia against the information operations contractor MSI, the company’s former president, Ingrid de la Fuente, laid out the details MSI’s secretive acquisition by the California-based gig-work data collection firm Premise Data in mid-2022. While Premise was most widely known for accusations that the Russian military had tasked its gig-workers for targeting help during the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the company first rose to prominence in 2021, when The Wall Street Journal published the company’s overview of its covert intelligence collection work for U.S. Special Operations Command.
Premise was also recently revealed to have hired the private investigation firm Whitestar Group to target the author and his alleged sources. But the foreign intelligence collection work behind the formation of MSI — which has received more than $35 million from public work with U.S. Special Operations Forces, often through subcontracting under Booz Allen Hamilton — is being published here for the first time.
One such one-year contract between MSI and U.S. Army Special Operations Command in South America, beginning in September 2021, was suggestively summarized as a “Guyana Ghost Men Assessment.”
According to the fragments of Ms. Fuente’s suit which are not under seal, around the time of her May 14, 2022 resignation, “Premise Data Corporation purchased MSI using a reverse triangular merger,” via a special-purpose subsidiary named Ikaika, Inc. “The details of the acquisition are not publicly disclosed, and most employees and even some of its United States government customers are unaware,” she continued. A March complaint against Premise by the founder of MSI, Timothy J. Riesen, and an ongoing suit against MSI by the British founders of its UAE-based silent partner, IAS, flesh out more than a decade of tension arising from the ambuiguity between operational security and financial exploitation.
(The essence of a ‘reverse triangular merger’ is that the acquiring company, in this case, Premise Data Corporation, creates a special-purpose subsidiary, i.e., Ikaika, Inc., which is then merged with and into the company being acquired, i.e., Madison Springfield, Inc.)
The central qui tam claim of Ms. Fuente’s suit — which was voluntarily dismissed for sealed reasons in May — was $1.5 million in alleged overbilling by MSI and “fake time sheet data” with an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency as part of a secretive foreign country data collection project named Beowulf, which was said to have been outsourced to International Advisory Services (IAS) from August 2019 through September 2020.
An ongoing suit filed by the IAS founders against Riesen has further repeatedly requested documents relating to “Mare Nova,” which public notices from the Government of Monaco reveal to be the business Mare Nova SARL registered by Mr. Everington on June 6, 2019 and then dissolved on October 31, 2022 — roughly four months after Premise’s acquisition of MSI.
Mr. Riesen had founded MSI in July 2012 while winding down his part-time role at the Tampa-based intelligence contractor Archimedes Global, having previously helped lead the company as chief operating officer through a subcontract with the British firm Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL Group), which later birthed a controversial American branch, Cambridge Analytica, leading to the entire company’s public downfall in 2018. Many of Mr. Riesen’s emails with the private intelligence contractor HBGary were made public as a result of the latter company being hacked by the activist group Anonymous in 2011, in retaliation for HGBary’s plans to collaborate with Peter Thiel’s data analytics giant Palantir Technologies on a campaign to subvert the American journalist Glenn Greenwald and the disclosure organization WikiLeaks.
(Palantir’s first employee, Alex Moore, was incidentally announced as a board member of Premise Data in January 2021.)
Mr. Riesen, MSI, and Premise Data have ended up at the center of three previously unreported lawsuits over the last two years, largely as a result of Riesen’s secret arrangement with two British former SCL employees. According to court filings from numerous parties with direct knowledge, Mr. Riesen in 2011 privately coordinated with Alexis Everington and Richard White — who were then working at SCL, with Everington as director of operations — to create an unofficial UAE-based successor to the covert intelligence collection project previously run by SCL on behalf of Archimedes. Due to “operational security” and foreign ownership concerns, Mr. Riesen backed out of taking an equal stake in the UAE-based International Advisory Services (IAS) and established MSI in Texas under his ostensibly sole ownership, leading to IAS being forced into a role as MSI’s quiet subcontractor.
“Defendant [Riesen] represented to Plaintiffs [Everington and White] that a United States company would need to be formed to obtain the highly classified contracts sought from the United States government and defense sector,” stated a February 13, 2024 legal filing by Everington and White.
A Strategic Multi-Layered Assessment (SMA) published by U.S. Central Command in January 2017 described Mr. Everington as MSI’s “director of research,” and Everington and White’s lawsuit further claimed that MSI’s marketing materials have described White as director of analysis. A 2015 report from the Santa Monica-based think tank RAND Corporation on the impact of Syria’s refugee crisis on Jordan further cited a February 2014 publication from MSI, “Strategic and Operational Target Audience Analysis: The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” with Riesen, White, Everington, and Everington’s French-born future wife as the listed authors.
More than a decade of financial conflict between Riesen’s MSI and Everington and White’s IAS boiled over as a result of Premise’s June 2022 acquisition of MSI, the terms of which the two IAS founders are demanding from MSI through active litigation in the Eastern District of Virginia. Everington and White claim to be disatisifed with the $1 million they were each payed through a May 10, 2022 “Bonus Agreement” — four days before Ms. Fuente’s reported resignation — which was allegedly coupled with an informal promise to later receive an additional $2 million each.
(Riesen in March filed, and then quickly voluntarily dismissed, a suit against Premise and MSI in Delware, though the details remain under seal.)
As previously revealed through exclusive leaked documents by journalist Max Blumenthal, Riesen was a “key contact” at Archimedes for a mid-2009 covert “research and analysis study” in Yemen’s Ma’rib and Hadamout governates, named Project Titania, which focused on discouraging “support for, and engagement in, violent Jihadism.” The introduction to a “motivation and segment profile” for the effort disclosed that, “Project Titania is a research and analysis study undertaken by Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) on behalf of Archimedes.”
The leaked research plan further stated that, “A cover story will be used to explain the purpose of the research to the researchers; the local researchers will not be informed of the objectives or sponsors of the study.“ The document added that participants might be told “that the study is part of a university research programme or a market research programme,” adding that “they will be informed that their responses will be kept confidential.”
Pictures published to the online photosharing platform Flickr in 2012 and 2013 further document the scope of Mr. Everington’s previous role as a strategic advisor to the Cairo-based nonprofit Karama. One such photo of Mr. Everington, taken during a UN Women-affiliated “Arab Regional Training” conference hosted by Karama in Amman, Jordan from October 26-29 in 2013, was descriptively entitled “Strategic Communications Training with Alexis Everington.” Mr. Everington is similarly shown providing strategic communications training in prior Karama photo albums for civil society groups in Yemen and Libya.
A press release published by Karama on June 29, 2013 noted Mr. Everington’s participation at the military-focused Information Operations Global conference in London earlier that month, in his capacity as a senior advisor to Karama.
An unverified public listing of “12 Key Staff CVs” for the British-funded Access to Justice and Community Security (AJACS) in Syria program, dated September 2014, provides a detailed curriculum vitae for Mr. Everington and his work at IAS which agrees with details otherwise revealed through recent lawsuits. Managed by the London-based development contractor Adam Smith International, the British foreign office suspended payments to AJACS in late 2017, following an investigation from BBC Panorama which reported evidence of funding for the program being diverted to Syrian extremist groups.
Alexis Everington did not respond to requests for comment through his personal email, nor did Karama reply to a request to be connected to Mr. Everington, or Ms. Fuente through her subsequent employer, Chainalysis Government Solutions. Premise Data and Madison Springfield, Inc. similarly did not respond to requests for comment.