Zero Hedge is a Russian Trojan Horse

[Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin]

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.
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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.
In Bulgaria, the news that the publisher of Zero Hedge had filed a
criminal complaint against an American journalist created a firestorm.

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.”
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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.”
American ignorance of Bulgaria made it a perfect staging ground for
Russia’s information war against the U.S.

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.”

I no longer recall the particulars of the issue I read, but the magazine
reflected my nascent political beliefs, such as they were, during the
first Bush administration. I was angry at the CIA, which I saw then as an
evil force controlling world affairs and corporate media; as a result, I
believed only people outside the mainstream could expose the truth.
Decades later, while reading the revelations of a KGB defector, I learned
how deeply I had been had. Files spirited out of Russia by Vasili
Mitrokhin, a former archivist for the Russian intelligence service,
claimed the magazine was founded “on the initiative of the KGB,” which
assembled a task force to keep the publication supplied with material
designed to compromise the CIA. (There was no evidence that the magazine’s
staff was aware of the KGB’s role.)

It’s a cautionary tale for the disinformation wars of the internet age, or
at least it should be. “Where does my news come from?” is a question not
enough Americans are asking these days. Even as venerable newspapers
collapse into bankruptcy and the FBI warns that Russia is poisoning our
public discourse, popular sites like Zero Hedge continue to grow in power
and influence.
“Where does my news come from?” is a question not enough Americans are
asking these days.

All of Zero Hedge’s posts are written under the nom de plume of “Tyler
Durden,” the anti-establishment character played by Brad Pitt in the film
Fight Club. “We believe that not only should you be comfortable with
anonymous speech,” Zero Hedge contends in its “manifesto,” “but that you
should be suspicious of any speech that isn’t.” For whatever reason,
people seem to go along with this, and it’s a strange sight to see the
name of a psychopathic character in a Chuck Palahniuk novel cited as a
source in a Congressional Research Service report and a scholarly law
review article, or introduced as a guest on Bloomberg radio.

Neither Zero Hedge’s anonymity nor its Bulgarian connections and pro-
Kremlin views have turned off some financially savvy readers. Mark B.
Spiegel, a professional investor, praised the site for its “spectacular”
market coverage but panned its take on foreign policy, which he said he
ignores. “I consider ZH [Zero Hedge] to be a collection of great sources
(the financial stuff) and bad sources (the foreign policy stuff),” he told
me. “I consider The New York Times to be a collection of bad sources
(pretty much the entire op-ed and national news sections) and great
sources (the feature articles).” Many other financial professionals,
however, dismiss the site as the Wall Street version of Infowars.

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden declares that “it’s only after we’ve lost
everything that we’re free to do anything”—a sentiment that reflects the
aborted career path of Zero Hedge’s founder, Dan Ivandjiiski. Born in
Soviet-era Bulgaria, Ivandjiiski was something of a wunderkind. He spoke
multiple languages, was a virtuoso pianist, and emigrated to the U.S. to
attend the University of Pennsylvania with hopes of becoming a doctor. He
changed his mind after graduation in 2001, when he realized how much money
he could make on Wall Street. Seven years later, he was banned from the
securities industry for earning $780 from an insider trade. He resigned
his job at a hedge fund and, in early 2009, Zero Hedge was launched.

Ivandjiiski’s early vision for Zero Hedge was a version of the sassy Wall
Street blog Dealbreaker, but with quantitative content. Ivandjiiski logged
20-hour days in the site’s early years. “He’s a machine,” says a person
who knows him well. “That’s all he would do is work.” He took on paragons
of the financial establishment like Goldman Sachs, and the site grew
quickly as Ivandjiiski won praise for calling attention to the problem of
high-frequency trading. New York magazine called him a “full-blown cult
hero—a blogger with a bullet.” (Ivandjiiski did not respond to messages
left by The New Republic seeking comment.)

Over the years, the site—and its audience—began to evolve. Zero Hedge runs
an annual story on its most popular posts of the year, which shows that in
2013 social and ideological issues edged out finance as the site’s most-
read articles. The audience grew rapidly over the next few years, with a
single post about whiny millennials reaching 9.4 million readers. It was
around this time that hateful, toxic views began to pollute the comments
section. Zero Hedge’s discrimination notice says “racism, to include
religious affiliation, will not be tolerated in ANY FORM on this site,”
but that’s clearly not true, as the comments section is riddled with
references to “joos” (Jews) and unmentionable words for African Americans.

What Zero Hedge became, in essence, was a forum for the hateful,
conspiracy-driven voices of the angry white men of the alt-right. Racists,
anti-Semites, extreme right-wingers, and conspiracy nuts were an
underserved audience, and, as it turns out, a profitable one. Steve
Bannon, the former White House adviser who recently described himself as a
“huge fan” of Zero Hedge, has largely built his career around the similar
recognition that these overlooked masses represented an untapped well of
anger that could be shaped into a powerful political force.

The synergy between Zero Hedge and the Trump era was made clear last year
when Facebook temporarily banned the site. Rising to the site’s defense
were political and media figures whose careers thrived on outrage: Nigel
Farage, leader of the Brexit Party; Katie Hopkins, the openly bigoted
British media figure; and Donald Trump Jr. (The ban was lifted after
Facebook identified what it called a “mistake with our automation to
detect spam.”)

“The censorship continues,” the president’s son wrote on Twitter.
“[Facebook] doesn’t agree with them and they hit the platform’s obvious
flaws at times. That’s it and it’s disgusting!”

“Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority,” reads the Zero
Hedge “manifesto,” but a conversation with one of the site’s former
employees made me realize that Zero Hedge’s anonymity and murky ties to
Bulgaria might be hiding something else.
What Zero Hedge became, in essence, was a forum for the hateful,
conspiracy-driven voices of the angry white men of the alt-right.

I had noticed that a few months after Zero Hedge launched, Daniel
Ivandjiiski quietly registered the domain “zerohedge.com” overseas—first
in Lichtenstein and Switzerland, two countries known for financial
secrecy, then in Bulgaria in 2011, according to records compiled by
domaintools.com.

I asked the former employee what this was all about. “Dan didn’t want to
have the U.S. looking at anything he’s doing,” the former employee said. I
thought that this meant that the younger Ivandjiiski was nervous about the
FBI or U.S. intelligence agencies tracking his actions, but I was
mistaken; Ivandjiiski didn’t want the government to know how many people
visited his site because that would give away how much money he was
making. “Five years ago, that thing had to be kicking off millions of
dollars in revenue,” the former employee continued. “If you look at Dan’s
tax returns, I’d bet there’s nowhere near a million dollars in revenue.”

Dan Ivandjiiski’s father, Krassimir, gave the game away when he accused me
of acting as an unnamed person’s agent to exert pressure on a court in New
Jersey. In his list of demands on the final page, he said I was to hand
over the names of the people with which he believed I was conspiring. The
purported object of this conspiracy was a divorce case in Bergen County,
New Jersey, that I had not previously known about, brought by a plaintiff
I have never met or spoken to, who turned out to be his estranged
daughter-in-law.

Dan Ivandjiiski’s wife filed for divorce in 2018, citing irreconcilable
differences that stemmed in part from her husband’s slavish devotion to
his website. The couple are battling over custody of their one child,
alimony, and child support. Court papers, released to The New Republic
under a media request, suggest that Zero Hedge paid the bills on the
couple’s luxurious lifestyle (one that the fictional Tyler Durden would
have no doubt abhorred), which included a $2.3 million mansion. In her
complaint, Ivandjiiski’s estranged wife, Blair Kress, stated that she had
inadequate means of support for herself and the couple’s only child or
even funds to pay her divorce lawyer. (Her husband disputed this claim.)
Attorneys for both parties either declined to discuss the case or did not
return messages seeking comment.

While Zero Hedge isn’t mentioned in the court documents that I’ve seen,
the website, and the money it generates, are an issue in the case. In his
email informing me of a criminal complaint filed against me in Bulgaria,
Ivandjiiski’s father had accused me of illegally stealing documents from
his son’s divorce case—including Zero Hedge’s parent company’s
registration in Bulgaria—that are protected under Bulgaria’s Personal Data
Protection Act and European Union laws. This was false, but one of the
hazards of writing about the business of conspiracy websites is that you
occasionally find yourself cast as a central character in another person’s
conspiracy.

The reason is that money, not ideology, is what drives Ivandjiiski and
other successful entrepreneurs in the burgeoning conspiracy business.
“They care what generates page views. Clicks. Money,” Colin Lokey, the
former Zero Hedge employee, told Bloomberg. Ivandjiiski’s personal beliefs
have little to do with the site’s content. “He may believe with 2 percent
of his body that everything’s going to blow up,” another former employee
told me, “but the other 98 percent knows this is what makes money.”
Another person who knows him well says, “He’ll write about what brings in
readers.”

Zero Hedge says it has been profitable from day one, but how much money
the site makes is a closely guarded secret. Dan Ivandjiiski took the
unusual step of requiring his wife to sign a nondisclosure agreement
during the divorce to prevent disclosure of Zero Hedge’s business secrets
“That’s how he is. He’s very secretive,” says the person who knows him
well, adding that leaving Wall Street to start Zero Hedge may have been an
even more lucrative career path. In a sign of just how profitable the site
might be, Daniel Ivandjiiski and his wife paid off a $1.7 million mortgage
on their New Jersey home in less than two years.

It may very well be true, as Zero Hedge claims, that it has never been in
contact with anyone from Russia, the U.S., or any government. At the same
time, it may also be true that Zero Hedge is, for all intents and
purposes, a Russian disinformation operation. In the bizarre world of
conspiracies and disinformation, both things can be true at once. The
warped incentives of the internet drive sites like Zero Hedge to publish
pro-Kremlin content without any help from Vladimir Putin. If conspiracies
and pro-Russia propaganda keep the audience clicking on the ads that
festoon Zero Hedge, then that’s what they get. This is the future we are
careening toward: a world where the “news” becomes whatever material holds
readers’ attention, no matter what it is, and is delivered by a machine
that doesn’t distinguish between true and false or between facts and
propaganda, so long as it maximizes revenue. It’s the cold logic of the
markets applied to publishing.

After a district prosecutor in Bulgaria declined to press charges against
me, finding insufficient evidence that I had committed a crime, I realized
what had sparked the criminal complaint was not Russian or Bulgarian
intelligence operations, but something much closer to home: I had
threatened the golden goose. Tyler Durden wasn’t defined by how much money
he had in the bank or what was in his wallet, but Dan Ivandjiiski, the man
who has made a fortune writing anti-establishment posts under his name,
very much is.333