Milo Yiannopoulos at a news conference. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer One of the mysterious men behind Reagan Battalion, an anonymous conservative Twitter account, seemed floored recalling the events of the past 72 hours.

"We didn't anticipate that it was going to blow up the way it did," he said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Late last weekend, the unidentified Republican operative and his three cohorts posted video of Milo Yiannopoulos appearing to condone sexual relationships between "younger boys and older men." The effect was like nothing previously seen in the aftermath of controversial comments from the right-wing provocateur. Yiannopoulos lost his keynote-speaking slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He saw his lucrative book deal canceled. And he resigned as senior editor at Breitbart News.

The Reagan Battalion managed to do something no one had previously been able to pull off: make Yiannopoulos pay dearly for one of his outlandish remarks.

And the organization did so through a two-minute video clip that had been readily available on the internet for nearly a year.

The Reagan Battalion cofounder, who spoke with Business Insider on the condition of anonymity, said video of Yiannopoulos' remarks about underage sex had already been viewed about 60,000 times before his group breathed new life into it.

The video was no secret, he said. But deployed ahead of Yiannopoulos' highly publicized CPAC speech, the year-old comments packed a new punch that managed to, at least temporarily, bring Yiannopoulos stumbling to the ground.

It was all the result of a tip from another anonymous Twitter account. The Reagan Battalion cofounder said a user with "probably 15 followers" tipped Reagan Battalion off to Yiannopoulos' comments. The operator of that account was not interested in speaking with the media, said Yossi Gestetner, a spokesman for the Reagan Battalion who was hired because of the immense interest in the group after the Yiannopoulos incident.

Yiannopoulos arriving for a news conference. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Indeed, the events of the past several days have focused a bright spotlight on the Reagan Battalion.

The group's Twitter account has gained thousands of new followers and been the topic of much speculation, with rumors swirling about who might be behind it. Some supporters of Yiannopoulos, for instance, suggested the Reagan Battalion was tied to Evan McMullin, the third-party 2016 presidential candidate who billed himself as a conservative alternative to Republican Donald Trump. The Reagan Battalion group backed McMullin's long-shot bid for the presidency but denied any formal connection to his campaign.

Initially formed in 2016 to prevent Trump from becoming the Republican Party's nominee for president, the Reagan Battalion first called itself the Stop Trump PAC before rebranding itself after the election.

With a new name, and Trump in the White House, the four-person group shifted its mission away from opposing Trump and toward pressuring politicians and conservative talking heads to sticking to conservative principles.

—The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) February 21, 2017

The cofounder who spoke with Business Insider said targeting CPAC for inviting Yiannopoulos to deliver its keynote address aligned perfectly with that mission. He said the members had no problem with Yiannopoulos having platforms to express his beliefs. Rather, they took issue with "conservative leaders embracing him and painting him as a spokesperson for the movement."

The Reagan Battalion, the cofounder said, had additional footage of Yiannopoulos but decided, for the moment, not to publish it. He warned, however, that if conservative leaders continued to hold Yiannopoulos up as a poster child for the movement, "the Reagan Battalion will continue to point out the challenges of doing so."

Yiannopoulos, who said this week he would launch a new media venture in the near future, declined to comment for this story.

The group, the cofounder said, intends to use its fresh scalp to springboard into something larger. Right now, for instance, it exists only on Twitter with a bare-bones website.

"There are plans to expand our reach and message," the cofounder said, adding, 'We have had well-known people reaching out to us in the last few days offering to help us take this to the next level."

Asked if members of the Reagan Battalion would eventually unmask themselves, the organization's cofounder invoked internet news mogul Matt Drudge and said members would like to follow in his footsteps.

"People know his name but not much of him or about him," the cofounder said. "He's not much out there. He doesn't run around on TV shows all day."

"I think for the foreseeable future," he added, "Reagan Battalion will continue to operate anonymously."