Is Zero Hedge a Russian Trojan Horse?
Seth Hettena/ March 9,2020
About a week before Christmas, I received a most unwelcome email. A criminal complaint had been filed against me in Bulgaria, a country I have never visited and with which I had no personal connection. I stood accused of defamation; attempted censorship; illegally spreading personal, family, and business information; and insulting the memory of someone’s parents and grandparents.
The email was from a veteran Bulgarian journalist named Krassimir Ivandjiiski, who took issue with an article I had written about Zero Hedge, the hugely popular website founded by his 41-year-old son, Daniel. My article, which appeared on my personal blog, was an outgrowth of a New Republic story I wrote about the business of conspiracies, in which Zero Hedge plays a major role. Millions of readers visit Zero Hedge each month, drawn by the site’s deeply pessimistic view of Wall Street and its alarmist, conspiratorial take on international affairs. In the world according to Zero Hedge, the financial markets are always on the verge of collapse and the United States is always a power in decline.
Zero Hedge is often blamed for spreading false information. In February, Twitter permanently banned Zero Hedge’s account, which boasted more than 670,000 followers, for violating Twitter’s policy prohibiting fake accounts and spam—part of a crackdown that intensified in response to Russia’s use of social media to influence voters during the 2016 presidential election. Within hours of the ban, Zero Hedge posted a counternarrative on its site, asserting—falsely, according to Twitter—that it had been suspended over its conspiratorial, evidence-free claims that the coronavirus was a Chinese biological weapon that escaped from a lab in Wuhan, “accidentally or not.” Zero Hedge’s Twitter ban was big news, and the knee-jerk response by journalists to cover both sides further spread the bogus coronavirus conspiracy, which has continued to gain ground since Republican Senator Tom Cotton repeated it on Fox News.
At first, I thought the criminal complaint was a joke. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would go to such lengths over a personal blog post that, at the time I received the complaint, had been read by little more than 100 people. The rambling email seemed paranoid, and it was rife with misspellings, including one for the word “comlpaint.” Ivandjiiski and his Bulgarian attorney refused to provide me a copy of the original, Bulgarian-language version of the complaint, leaving it unclear what laws I might have violated or even what country’s laws I might have stood charged with violating. Further checking, however, showed that a complaint had been lodged with the office of the Bulgarian prosecutor general.
In Bulgaria, the news that the publisher of Zero Hedge had filed a criminal complaint against an American journalist created a firestorm. I appeared on Bulgarian TV twice to answer questions, and the story was covered on multiple news sites. Journalists in Bulgaria were just as confused as I was about the criminal complaint. “Is this a common practice in the United States?” a journalist for a Bulgarian online publication asked me. No, it certainly is not. “Did you feel you were in danger?” a Bulgarian TV host asked me. Not really, though there was the possibility that I might have a Bulgarian court judgment hanging over my head. Still, an awful precedent could be set, so I decided to hire an attorney in Bulgaria and fight it.
Among the various “crimes” of which I stood accused was posting publicly available information that revealed Zero Hedge’s ties to Bulgaria. While Ivandjiiski’s son, Daniel, lives in an affluent northern New Jersey suburb, Zero Hedge’s domain was registered not in the U.S., but in Sofia. Court records revealed that Zero Hedge was owned by a company called ABC Media Ltd, a Bulgarian company whose sole manager was Krassimir Ivandjiiski.
The Bulgarian connection intrigued me because Zero Hedge runs political news and commentary that “frequently echo the Kremlin line,” as a 2018 RAND Institute study put it. Among Zero Hedge’s most Russia-friendly fare were stories depicting the Mueller investigation as a hoax, pieces claiming that the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was staged by British intelligence, and posts asserting that the Steele dossier was a work of “fanfiction” by internet trolls on 4chan. Andrew Weisburd, a private intelligence analyst who has done work for the U.S. intelligence community, has found that Zero Hedge is at the center of a web of conspiracy sites with spokes extending out into the darkest fringes of the internet.
Zero Hedge takes a particular interest in the controversy surrounding Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger jet that was shot down in Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people on board. A Dutch-led criminal investigation last year charged four people, three of whom had ties to Russian intelligence, with shooting down the plane. A few days after the criminal charges were filed, Zero Hedge published a story claiming, without evidence, that the U.S. was using the MH17 crash as a pretext for a NATO invasion of eastern Ukraine. An analysis by the Digital Forensic Research Lab, a project of the Atlantic Council, found that even though Zero Hedge is written in English, this disinformation narrative was picked up by Russian-language media, demonstrating “the synergy between conspiracy outlets in English and pro-Kremlin fringe media in Russian.”
A former Zero Hedge employee named Colin Lokey, who says he earned more than $100,000 in a year writing much of the site’s political content, claimed that he felt pressure to frame issues in a misleading way. “I tried to inject as much truth as I could into my posts, but there’s no room for it,” Lokey told Bloomberg in 2016. “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” In its published reply, Zero Hedge blasted Lokey as “deranged” and said critics had falsely called the website a Russian disinformation outlet “simply because we refused to follow the pro-U.S. script.”
All this only made the criminal complaint against me more puzzling. Why file a criminal complaint, instead of a lawsuit, in Bulgaria? Why call attention to the site’s ties to Bulgaria, and possibly to Russia? And all for a post hardly anyone had read?
It was clear I had touched a nerve. But how? What had I stumbled into?
The story of the criminal charges against me carried deeper meaning in Bulgaria, which is still coming to grips with its Communist past. Bulgaria today is a member of both NATO and the European Union, but it has close historic and cultural ties with Russia, which continues to cast a shadow over what had been one of its most loyal vassal states during the Cold War. In 2006, as Bulgaria prepared to formally join the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s long-serving ambassador to the EU, said, “Bulgaria is in a good position to become our special partner, a sort of a Trojan horse in the EU.” Last year, authorities in Bulgaria charged a socialist lawmaker in an espionage investigation examining how Russia was using nongovernment organizations to influence the country’s policy to the West. As a result of the investigation, Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian billionaire and ultranationalist dubbed “Putin’s Soros,” was banned from the country.
“Bulgaria is working not as a country, not a state, but as a Russian base,” Ivo Indzhev, a well-regarded Bulgarian political blogger, told me. “They have plenty of people who are willing to work as proxies for the Russian state.” American ignorance of the country made it a perfect staging ground for Russia’s information war against the U.S. “Bulgaria is a nobody,” he said, “unknown to the general American public.”
Several sources with connections to the Bulgarian government told me that they suspected Zero Hedge may be a Trojan horse as well. “I trust it is a project of Bulgarian intelligence,” a former senior Bulgarian government official told me. “It is unlikely that they would embark on their own without the backing or funding from Moscow.” An academic who asked not to be named because of his ties to the government agreed, saying he saw the criminal complaint against me as proof of Zero Hedge’s connections to Moscow. “It is likely that Russians are the ones that have been affected,” he said. “And they may have goaded the Bulgarians in the circle that runs Zero Hedge to file a criminal complaint.”
The evidence for this was indirect and primarily stemmed from Krassimir Ivandjiiski’s past associations. “If you read carefully his career, you can see the possibilities of the KGB in the shadow of the mirror,” said Nikolay Hadjigenov, the attorney who represented me in Bulgaria.
After studying at an English-language school in Sofia and graduating from the Warsaw School of Economics in 1971, Ivandjiiski worked briefly in the Bulgarian ministry of foreign trade and served in the military before beginning his career as a journalist. The main mission of the Bulgarian press during Ivandjiiski’s days as a reporter was to disseminate Communist Party propaganda. Ivandjiiski’s online bio says he spent a dozen years abroad as a foreign correspondent and became a “special envoy” to various wars in Africa.
Ivandjiiski also proudly informed me of his membership, since 1974, in the International Organization of Journalists, a front organization that a declassified CIA study described as “an instrumentality of Soviet propaganda.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ivandjiiski became involved in a movement called Neutral Bulgaria that looked very much like a Russian proxy, since it shared with Moscow the goal of keeping the country “neutral”—meaning out of NATO. Ivandjiiski’s partner in Neutral Bulgaria was the son of a Communist general who played a key role in Bulgaria’s Cold War intelligence service, the Committee on State Security. “We are talking the core of the core,” said the former senior government official.
Today, Ivandjiiski runs his own conspiracy website in Bulgaria called Strogo Sekretno (Top Secret). Another one of the “crimes” listed in the complaint against me was calling out Strogo Sekretno’s blatant anti-Semitism, such as a recent post that declared that the coronavirus was an act of bioterrorism by “colluding Zionists” in the West to weaken Russia and China. According to Ivandjiiski, this was an insult to him and his family of “anti-fascists,” which, I was told, reads as “faithful Communist” in Bulgaria.
Ivandjiiski never responded to requests for comment from me or from Bulgarian journalists who wrote stories about my case. On his website, he wrote that he had nothing to do with the KGB and threatened to sue anyone who asserts otherwise. It is nearly impossible to prove him wrong, as some 140,000 secret files on Bulgaria’s top Cold War agents have been destroyed, the former Bulgarian government official told me.
When I was a college student many years ago, someone passed me a copy of a magazine called Covert Action Information Bulletin. The magazine had been co-founded by a former CIA case officer, Phil Agee, who had turned against the agency. Covert Action Information Bulletin dedicated itself to exposing the CIA’s operations and personnel. For its first few issues, the magazine published an infamous “Naming Names” column that outed American spies, until Congress outlawed the practice in 1982 with what was popularly known as the “anti-Agee bill.”
Seth Hettena/ March 9,2020
Is Zero Hedge a Russian Trojan Horse?
The father of the founder of the conspiratorial site filed a criminal complaint against me in Bulgaria. Then things got weird.
About a week before Christmas, I received a most unwelcome email. A criminal complaint had been filed against me in Bulgaria, a country I have never visited and with which I had no personal connection. I stood accused of defamation; attempted censorship; illegally spreading personal, family, and business information; and insulting the memory of someone’s parents and grandparents.
The email was from a veteran Bulgarian journalist named Krassimir Ivandjiiski, who took issue with an article I had written about Zero Hedge, the hugely popular website founded by his 41-year-old son, Daniel. My article, which appeared on my personal blog, was an outgrowth of a New Republic story I wrote about the business of conspiracies, in which Zero Hedge plays a major role. Millions of readers visit Zero Hedge each month, drawn by the site’s deeply pessimistic view of Wall Street and its alarmist, conspiratorial take on international affairs. In the world according to Zero Hedge, the financial markets are always on the verge of collapse and the United States is always a power in decline.
Zero Hedge is often blamed for spreading false information. In February, Twitter permanently banned Zero Hedge’s account, which boasted more than 670,000 followers, for violating Twitter’s policy prohibiting fake accounts and spam—part of a crackdown that intensified in response to Russia’s use of social media to influence voters during the 2016 presidential election. Within hours of the ban, Zero Hedge posted a counternarrative on its site, asserting—falsely, according to Twitter—that it had been suspended over its conspiratorial, evidence-free claims that the coronavirus was a Chinese biological weapon that escaped from a lab in Wuhan, “accidentally or not.” Zero Hedge’s Twitter ban was big news, and the knee-jerk response by journalists to cover both sides further spread the bogus coronavirus conspiracy, which has continued to gain ground since Republican Senator Tom Cotton repeated it on Fox News.
At first, I thought the criminal complaint was a joke. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would go to such lengths over a personal blog post that, at the time I received the complaint, had been read by little more than 100 people. The rambling email seemed paranoid, and it was rife with misspellings, including one for the word “comlpaint.” Ivandjiiski and his Bulgarian attorney refused to provide me a copy of the original, Bulgarian-language version of the complaint, leaving it unclear what laws I might have violated or even what country’s laws I might have stood charged with violating. Further checking, however, showed that a complaint had been lodged with the office of the Bulgarian prosecutor general.
In Bulgaria, the news that the publisher of Zero Hedge had filed a criminal complaint against an American journalist created a firestorm. I appeared on Bulgarian TV twice to answer questions, and the story was covered on multiple news sites. Journalists in Bulgaria were just as confused as I was about the criminal complaint. “Is this a common practice in the United States?” a journalist for a Bulgarian online publication asked me. No, it certainly is not. “Did you feel you were in danger?” a Bulgarian TV host asked me. Not really, though there was the possibility that I might have a Bulgarian court judgment hanging over my head. Still, an awful precedent could be set, so I decided to hire an attorney in Bulgaria and fight it.
Among the various “crimes” of which I stood accused was posting publicly available information that revealed Zero Hedge’s ties to Bulgaria. While Ivandjiiski’s son, Daniel, lives in an affluent northern New Jersey suburb, Zero Hedge’s domain was registered not in the U.S., but in Sofia. Court records revealed that Zero Hedge was owned by a company called ABC Media Ltd, a Bulgarian company whose sole manager was Krassimir Ivandjiiski.
The Bulgarian connection intrigued me because Zero Hedge runs political news and commentary that “frequently echo the Kremlin line,” as a 2018 RAND Institute study put it. Among Zero Hedge’s most Russia-friendly fare were stories depicting the Mueller investigation as a hoax, pieces claiming that the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was staged by British intelligence, and posts asserting that the Steele dossier was a work of “fanfiction” by internet trolls on 4chan. Andrew Weisburd, a private intelligence analyst who has done work for the U.S. intelligence community, has found that Zero Hedge is at the center of a web of conspiracy sites with spokes extending out into the darkest fringes of the internet.
Zero Hedge takes a particular interest in the controversy surrounding Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger jet that was shot down in Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people on board. A Dutch-led criminal investigation last year charged four people, three of whom had ties to Russian intelligence, with shooting down the plane. A few days after the criminal charges were filed, Zero Hedge published a story claiming, without evidence, that the U.S. was using the MH17 crash as a pretext for a NATO invasion of eastern Ukraine. An analysis by the Digital Forensic Research Lab, a project of the Atlantic Council, found that even though Zero Hedge is written in English, this disinformation narrative was picked up by Russian-language media, demonstrating “the synergy between conspiracy outlets in English and pro-Kremlin fringe media in Russian.”
A former Zero Hedge employee named Colin Lokey, who says he earned more than $100,000 in a year writing much of the site’s political content, claimed that he felt pressure to frame issues in a misleading way. “I tried to inject as much truth as I could into my posts, but there’s no room for it,” Lokey told Bloomberg in 2016. “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” In its published reply, Zero Hedge blasted Lokey as “deranged” and said critics had falsely called the website a Russian disinformation outlet “simply because we refused to follow the pro-U.S. script.”
All this only made the criminal complaint against me more puzzling. Why file a criminal complaint, instead of a lawsuit, in Bulgaria? Why call attention to the site’s ties to Bulgaria, and possibly to Russia? And all for a post hardly anyone had read?
It was clear I had touched a nerve. But how? What had I stumbled into?
The story of the criminal charges against me carried deeper meaning in Bulgaria, which is still coming to grips with its Communist past. Bulgaria today is a member of both NATO and the European Union, but it has close historic and cultural ties with Russia, which continues to cast a shadow over what had been one of its most loyal vassal states during the Cold War. In 2006, as Bulgaria prepared to formally join the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s long-serving ambassador to the EU, said, “Bulgaria is in a good position to become our special partner, a sort of a Trojan horse in the EU.” Last year, authorities in Bulgaria charged a socialist lawmaker in an espionage investigation examining how Russia was using nongovernment organizations to influence the country’s policy to the West. As a result of the investigation, Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian billionaire and ultranationalist dubbed “Putin’s Soros,” was banned from the country.
“Bulgaria is working not as a country, not a state, but as a Russian base,” Ivo Indzhev, a well-regarded Bulgarian political blogger, told me. “They have plenty of people who are willing to work as proxies for the Russian state.” American ignorance of the country made it a perfect staging ground for Russia’s information war against the U.S. “Bulgaria is a nobody,” he said, “unknown to the general American public.”
Several sources with connections to the Bulgarian government told me that they suspected Zero Hedge may be a Trojan horse as well. “I trust it is a project of Bulgarian intelligence,” a former senior Bulgarian government official told me. “It is unlikely that they would embark on their own without the backing or funding from Moscow.” An academic who asked not to be named because of his ties to the government agreed, saying he saw the criminal complaint against me as proof of Zero Hedge’s connections to Moscow. “It is likely that Russians are the ones that have been affected,” he said. “And they may have goaded the Bulgarians in the circle that runs Zero Hedge to file a criminal complaint.”
The evidence for this was indirect and primarily stemmed from Krassimir Ivandjiiski’s past associations. “If you read carefully his career, you can see the possibilities of the KGB in the shadow of the mirror,” said Nikolay Hadjigenov, the attorney who represented me in Bulgaria.
After studying at an English-language school in Sofia and graduating from the Warsaw School of Economics in 1971, Ivandjiiski worked briefly in the Bulgarian ministry of foreign trade and served in the military before beginning his career as a journalist. The main mission of the Bulgarian press during Ivandjiiski’s days as a reporter was to disseminate Communist Party propaganda. Ivandjiiski’s online bio says he spent a dozen years abroad as a foreign correspondent and became a “special envoy” to various wars in Africa.
Ivandjiiski also proudly informed me of his membership, since 1974, in the International Organization of Journalists, a front organization that a declassified CIA study described as “an instrumentality of Soviet propaganda.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ivandjiiski became involved in a movement called Neutral Bulgaria that looked very much like a Russian proxy, since it shared with Moscow the goal of keeping the country “neutral”—meaning out of NATO. Ivandjiiski’s partner in Neutral Bulgaria was the son of a Communist general who played a key role in Bulgaria’s Cold War intelligence service, the Committee on State Security. “We are talking the core of the core,” said the former senior government official.
Today, Ivandjiiski runs his own conspiracy website in Bulgaria called Strogo Sekretno (Top Secret). Another one of the “crimes” listed in the complaint against me was calling out Strogo Sekretno’s blatant anti-Semitism, such as a recent post that declared that the coronavirus was an act of bioterrorism by “colluding Zionists” in the West to weaken Russia and China. According to Ivandjiiski, this was an insult to him and his family of “anti-fascists,” which, I was told, reads as “faithful Communist” in Bulgaria.
Ivandjiiski never responded to requests for comment from me or from Bulgarian journalists who wrote stories about my case. On his website, he wrote that he had nothing to do with the KGB and threatened to sue anyone who asserts otherwise. It is nearly impossible to prove him wrong, as some 140,000 secret files on Bulgaria’s top Cold War agents have been destroyed, the former Bulgarian government official told me.
When I was a college student many years ago, someone passed me a copy of a magazine called Covert Action Information Bulletin. The magazine had been co-founded by a former CIA case officer, Phil Agee, who had turned against the agency. Covert Action Information Bulletin dedicated itself to exposing the CIA’s operations and personnel. For its first few issues, the magazine published an infamous “Naming Names” column that outed American spies, until Congress outlawed the practice in 1982 with what was popularly known as the “anti-Agee bill.”
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