CHINA, INFORMATION WARS, MEDIAAugust 18, 2020
US govt-funded Coda Story smears American journalists who undermine new Cold
War propaganda
With backing from the US governments regime-change arm, an Operation
Mockingbird-style website called Coda Story is attacking American
journalists who have punctured Washingtons sensationalist narratives
against China.
By Ben Norton
A shadowy neoconservative website called Coda Story has launched a smear
campaign against American journalists who challenge new cold war propaganda.
But what this publication has not disclosed is that it is funded by the US
government, backed by the European Union, linked to the NATO war alliance,
and part of a larger network of regime-change outfits that are bankrolled by
Western governments and corporate oligarchs.
Launched in 2016, Coda Story markets itself as a brave counterweight to
Chinese and Russian state-backed disinformation. This is quite ironic,
because the website is itself financed by the regime-change arms of the US
government and the European Union, and peddles disinformation of its own in
support of Washingtons new cold war on Beijing and Moscow.
A case study of Coda Storys deceptive smear tactics came in the form of a
malicious hatchet job the site published in July, maligning The Grayzone for
exposing the extremely dubious sources and methodology of Western government
propaganda against China.
The Coda Story hit piece did not dispute a single fact in The Grayzones
thoroughly documented reporting. Instead, the diatribe relied on superficial
insinuations and misleading guilt-by-association tactics, implying that The
Grayzone is fringe and untrustworthy because its contributors have given
interviews to Russian and Chinese state-backed media outlets, and because
foreign government officials have occasionally tweeted links to The Grayzone
articles.
Despite the patent lack of facts, the Coda Story smear piece inspired a
similarly McCarthyite article by an avowedly anti-China blogger at the
corporate-run outlet Axios, which also failed to challenge any of The
Grayzones factual journalism. Instead, Axios writer Bethany
Allen-Ebrahimian quoted the ranking Republican co-chair of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, to vilify The Grayzone as deeply
disturbing and reinforce the Donald Trump administrations attack on the
World Health Organization.
Allen-Ebrahimian also cited the US government-funded Alliance for Securing
Democracy, an intelligence agency and State Department cutout, to defame The
Grayzone and try to link it to the Chinese government. Not only did she fail
to inform readers about the Alliances US government backing,
Allen-Ebrahimian was unable to point to any data buttressing her dubious
claim, despite repeated challenges to do so.
While Coda Story and Axios went to great lengths to imply this outlet is
somehow connected to Beijing, the institution attacking The Grayzone is, in
fact, sponsored by the same Western governments responsible for igniting a
new cold war with China.
Unlike Coda Story, The Grayzone is totally independent; it does not accept
funding from any government or any state-backed group.
Coda Story cannot say the same about itself. Although the neoconservative
website markets itself as independent and its editor has claimed we dont
take money from governments, it is actually financed by the US governments
regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
The NED is a CIA cutout established by the Ronald Reagan administration
during the last decade of the first cold war. One of its primary goals,
stated clearly on the NED website, is to promote free markets. To do so,
the putative democracy promotion organization finances right-wing
opposition groups, NGOs, and media outlets in countries the US government
has targeted for regime change.
A co-founder of the NED, Allen Weinstein, gloated in the Washington Post in
1991, A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.
In 2019, the Coda Network that presides over Coda Story reaped a $180,130
grant from the NED. The ostensible mission of the funding was to bring
together journalists and independent media outlets from throughout Eurasia
to create high-quality narrative journalism, focusing on a set of key themes
related to disinformation.
NED Coda Network Coda Story
The description of the 2019 NED grant for Coda Network
This June, the NEDs blog Democracy Digest celebrated its grantee Coda Story
winning the European Press Prize for its anti-China content.
Coda Story NED China
Coda Story is funded by the US governments National Endowment for Democracy
(NED)
The National Endowment for Democracy appears to believe it is getting its
moneys worth, because the US government regime-change organization followed
up with a post on the official NED website a few days later that again
praised grantee Coda Story for its work.
Coda Story NED grantee US government
Coda Story is funded by the US governments National Endowment for Democracy
(NED)
Democracy Digest, the NED blog, frequently promotes Coda Story. It cites the
neoconservative websites articles to portray China and Russia as evil
totalitarian regimes and threats to democracy that spread constant
disinformation.
The NED also invited Coda Storys co-founder and editor-in-chief, Natalia
Antelava, on its Power 3.0 Podcast to discuss authoritarian technology
and disinformation.
In its description accompanying the podcast episode, the NED misleadingly
portrayed Coda Story as an indie underdog operation, selling it as an
award-winning media start-up curiously failing to mention that the
website was swimming in money from powerful interests like the NED.
Anne Applebaum, a neoconservative pundit and anti-Russian fanatic who
frequents hawkish Western think tanks, is also listed as a member of the
board of advisers of Coda Story. Applebaum also happens to sit on the board
of directors of the NED.
Applebaums husband Radoslaw Sikorski is a conservative Polish politician
who has filled top roles in Polands government, including minister of
defense and foreign affairs.
Coda Story Anne Applebaum board of advisors
But the NED is not the only Western government regime-change organization
that bankrolls Coda Story.
The European Union has a regime-change arm as well, which also funds the
website. This EU soft-power organization, founded in 2013, was explicitly
modeled after the NED, and shares almost the same name: the European
Endowment for Democracy (EED).
Like the NED, the EED uses the cover of democracy promotion to destabilize
foreign adversaries and advance Brussels foreign policy interests.
In the About section of its website, Coda Story lists a series of
organizations as partners and supporters. The first financial sponsor
listed is the EED.
Coda Story European Endowment for Democracy
Organizations that Coda Story lists as partners and supporters
The money that the European Endowment for Democracy gives to Coda Story in
turn is provided by European countries making it another form of indirect
state sponsorship.
The EED website makes it clear that 23 European governments are responsible
for its budget.
European Endowment for Democracy funding countries
Coda Storys NATO links and mysterious office in Georgia
The US governments National Endowment for Democracy emphasized in materials
praising Coda Story that the media outlet has two offices: one in New York,
typical for Western news organizations; and another in the country of
Georgia, a former member of the Soviet Union that since the end of the first
cold war has become a major hub for Western intelligence operations and
color revolution coup-plotting.
Following a Western-backed 2003 regime-change operation dubbed the Rose
Revolution, Georgia effectively became a client state of the United States,
NATO, and European Union. Georgia has actively sought to become a member of
NATO, and the US-led military alliance boasts on its official website that
Georgia is one of the Alliances closest partners.
Georgia represents a central friction point with Russia, and waged a brief
war with Moscow in 2008. Some members of Georgias special forces who were
trained by the US military to battle Russia in that conflict later went on
to join the genocidal Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, including top ISIS
commander Omar al-Shishani.
Mikheil Saakashvili, the strongly pro-Western president who assumed power as
a result of the color revolution, had been carefully cultivated for a
leadership role by US intelligence officials, and was so subservient that he
was described as a Washington pet.
This son of this loyal US asset, Eduard Saakashvili, landed a job at Coda
Story after he graduated from college in the United States.
Eduard Saakashvili worked as an associate managing editor of Coda Story from
2018 to 2019, writing about his personal experiences with disinformation
concerning his father and Georgian politics. He also oversaw the creation of
the blogs section on Authoritarian Tech by which the neoconservative
website means technology largely originating from China, Russia, and their
allies, not the West.
Coda Story publishes some of its articles in the Georgian language. The
website also translates pieces into Russian.
Natalia Antelava, the co-founder of Coda Story, is an overtly pro-Western
journalist originally from Tbilisi, Georgia. Before becoming the
neoconservative sites editor-in-chief, Antelava worked as the Caucasus
correspondent for the UK government-backed BBC, and covered the 2008
Russo-Georgian War from a hardline anti-Moscow perspective.
NATO has taken notice, and has found utility in Antelavas viewpoint. In
2018, the Coda Story editor was invited to speak at the NATO-Georgia Public
Diplomacy Forum in Tbilsi.
The NATO conference featured Georgias prime minister and president,
alongside top US government officials. It was organized by Tbilisis NATO
and EU Information Center, along with the Georgian foreign and defense
ministries.
Antelava participated in a panel titled The Era of Post-Truth and Fake
News. Joining Antelava on the stage was Oleksiy Makukhin, the director of
the Hybrid Warfare Analytical Group of the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, an
anti-Russian organization funded by a long list of Western governments,
including the United States, NATO, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway,
and the Netherlands, along with the European Endowment for Democracy.
The other panelist sitting next to Antelava at the NATO conference was Anna
Nemtsova, a correspondent for neoconservative website The Daily Beast whose
willingness to propagate the most lurid narratives of the new Cold War has
made her a favorite at Western confabs.
The moderator of the event was Mark Laity, a NATO spokesperson who directs
strategic communications at the military alliances Supreme Headquarters
Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).
Like Antelava, Laity is a veteran of the UK governments BBC, which is
closely linked to British intelligence and was used by MI6 during the first
cold war to spread propaganda.
NATO Georgia Coda Story Natalia Antelava
Coda Story provides neoconservative disinformation warriors with a new home
Natalia Antelava founded Coda Story with a little-known professor of
journalism named Ilan Greenberg. Greenberg, who serves as publisher and
editorial director of the website, states on his bio that he began
discussing the idea for Coda Story with Antelava when he was a fellow at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center is a US government-funded think tank
whose offices are located in the governments Ronald Reagan Building. The
organization is dedicated to producing research that advances Washingtons
foreign policy interests. It is directed by hawkish former Democratic Rep.
Jane Harman, whose congressional campaigns were heavily funded by the arms
industry, and whose husband, Sidney Harman, was a longtime Pentagon
contractor.
Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo is a member of the
board of trustees of the Wilson Center. Other members of the board of the
elite organization which claims to be the most-quoted think tank in the
corporate media include Trumps education secretary, billionaire
privatization enthusiast Betsy DeVos, and Trumps health secretary, the
former Big Pharma lobbyist and corporate executive Alex Azar.
In February 2018, Greenberg announced that Coda Story had merged with The
Interpreter, an anti-Russian blog that has also relied on US government
backing.
The two neocon websites proudly stated they had entered into a strategic
partnership to closely cooperate, share resources, and expand the scope of
their journalism.
Greenberg proclaimed in a press release, The bridging of Codas
storytelling and The Interpreters approach to explaining Russian politics
and anatomizing disinformation campaigns is the beginning of what we hope
will be a long and fruitful partnership.
The Interpreter is a pet project of neoconservative operative Michael Weiss.
The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal published an exposé on Weiss, showing how
the fanatical war hawk has undergone a series of rebrandings, while always
pushing the most belligerent line on US foreign policy.
Weiss kicked off his career as an anti-Muslim agitator and moderate
Republican who organized rallies with far-right Islamophobe Pamela Geller.
Once the Syria proxy war kicked off, he fashioned himself a supposed Russia
expert and friend of the Islamist Syrian opposition, lobbying for more
Western military support for Salafi-jihadist rebels in Syria while demanding
the most aggressive policies possible against Moscow.
Weiss has attacked The Grayzone with obsessive fury, and has sponsored less
distinguished henchmen to spin out smear pieces.
In fact, when Coda Story asked him for a comment for its hit piece on The
Grayzone, editor Max Blumenthal pointed to the editorial role Weiss plays in
the neoconservative website. But Coda Story edited Blumenthals quote,
removing this salient piece of information.
The Interpreter was created by Weiss in 2013 with the backing of former
Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a staunch opponent of President
Vladimir Putin, who was one of a group of men who plundered Russias economy
in the 1990s, quickly becoming billionaires as millions were reduced to
paupers.
In its early years, the Interpreter blog was overseen by the Institute of
Modern Russia, a think tank run by the powerful Khodorkovsky family to push
anti-Russia propaganda. Additionally, the blog stated that it was the
recipient of a seed grant from the London-based Herzen Foundation.
Strangely, there are no references online to Herzen outside of its
association with The Interpreter.
In 2015, The Interpreter announced that it was being sponsored as a special
project of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a US government
propaganda outlet founded by the CIA during the first cold war to spread
disinformation against the Soviet Union.
Then in 2017, The Interpreter became a media partner of NATOs de facto
think tank, the Atlantic Council. This notoriously hawkish organization,
which is funded by NATO, the governments of the US and Britain, corporate
weapons manufacturers, and the fossil fuels industry, has also benefited
from huge sums of money from the Burisma Group, the scandalously corrupt
Ukrainian gas company that paid former Vice President Joe Bidens son Hunter
$83,000 per month to sit on its board.
The 2018 strategic partnership stipulated that Michael Weiss would still
remain editor-in-chief of The Interpreter, while also serving as Consulting
Executive Editor for Coda Story. The press release noted that Weiss will
provide guidance and thought leadership to Codas senior editorial
management and will contribute his own journalism to both publications.
But The Interpreter is not the only neoconservative US organization that
enjoys a close relationship with Coda Story. The website also lists hawkish
think tank the Center for European Policy Analysis as a partner.
Despite its name, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) is not
based in Europe but rather in Washington. The neoconservative group is made
up of a whos who of anti-Russian, pro-NATO hawks, including Coda Story
advisor Anne Applebaum and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
This Coda Story partner is also bankrolled by Western governments, NATO, and
the weapons industry. CEPA states clearly on its website that past donors
include the NED, the US State Department, NATOs Public Diplomacy Division,
and the arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Bell Helicopter.
Center for European Policy Analysis CEPA funding
Coda Story did not respond to The Grayzones request for comment inquiring
about its exact relationship with CEPA.
Coda Storys singular fixation on non-Western disinformation
Coda Storys extensive links to Western governments and neoconservative
organizations might explain its obsessive, almost singular focus on China
and Russia, portraying them as the roots of all evil in the world.
The website says its bloggers exclusively cover three subjects:
disinformation, authoritarian tech, and the war on science. Its interest in
these topics scarcely extends beyond the realm of Moscow and Beijing to
places like Washington or Brussels.
Coda Story offers appetizing fellowships to journalists, pledging to
subsidize their reporting with tens of thousands of dollars, as long as they
cover one of the blogs three approved topics.
The Coda Story smear piece attacking The Grayzone was filed under
disinformation. This is ironic, because the NED-funded blog has
demonstrated itself to be in essence an instrument of US and NATO
propaganda.
On Twitter, Antelava claimed that Coda Story doesnt take money from
governments, oligarchs, and tech platforms. That statement is simply false,
as the NED that provides her outfit with grants is an arm of the US
government that is funded by Congress.
Coda Story has other notable sources of financing. When the neoconservative
website launched its Authoritarian Tech channel under the editorial
guidance of the son of Georgias pro-Western president, the blog
acknowledged that it was provided seed funding by a foundation called Access
Now.
Access Now is a pass-through that uses millions of dollars from Western
governments and massive corporations to fund open technology initiatives
targeting countries where the US and EU want regime change.
Coda Story did not reveal who gave Access Now the money to create its
Authoritarian Tech channel, but in 2019, the year it launched, the
foundation reported millions of dollars in funding from the governments of
Britain, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as corporate
tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Facebook, and Twitter.
Access Now also gets significant pass-through money from other foundation
giants, which have historic ties to the CIA and the regime-change industry,
such as the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations of billionaire
George Soros, and the Omidyar Network and Luminate Group of tech oligarch
Pierre Omidyar.
On its website, Coda Story also lists the Content Fund as a financial
supporter. The Content Fund describes itself as a private law foundation
based in Brussels with its office in Kyiv. Its mission is to spread
pro-Western, anti-Moscow messaging in the Russian-language media.
The Content Fund discloses on its website, Our funding comes from voluntary
contributions of like-minded governments, private foundations and
international organisations. Which specific governments bankroll it is not
revealed.
Coda Story did not respond to a request for comment from The Grayzone,
including a detailed series of questions about its funding sources.
The website is part of a larger constellation of pro-NATO Eastern European
media outlets called Coda Network. Other members include the pro-Western
Ukrainian website Ukrayinska Pravda, which holds friendly interviews with
the US ambassador and is also funded by avowed anti-communist billionaire
George Soros, a generous sponsor of regime-change campaigns from Venezuela
to Syria.
Coda Network Coda Story NED
Coda Story enjoys crossover with another pro-Western website bankrolled by
US government-linked regime-change billionaire George Soros: Eurasianet, a
project spun out of the Open Society Foundations (OSF) that was created as
the media arm of the oligarchs Eurasia Program, which is aimed at
strengthening NATO and the EU and weakening any independent countries that
refuse to join the hegemonic US-led imperial bloc.
Eurasianet was in 2016 transferred from OSF over to Columbia Universitys
hawkish Harriman Institute, a relic of the first cold war that was created
by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce anti-communist scholarship on the
Soviet Union. Today, the Rockefeller Foundation is headed by the former
director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and is
historically linked to US intelligence as a CIA pass-through.
In 2018, editor Antelava tweeted, many thanks to Eurasianet for allowing us
to commission Joshua Kucera, the Turkey/Caucasus editor at the pro-Western
website, who produced a lengthy article for Coda Story bashing Russias
attempt to create a Eurasian Economic Union.
Coda Storys articles are also very frequently reprinted by Rappler, another
media outlet funded by the US governments NED. These pieces, naturally,
portray China and Russia as dystopian authoritarian hellscapes, and even try
to blame racial tensions in the United States on Moscow. Rapplers primary
funder is Omidyar, the big tech billionaire who also sponsors Access Now.
In fact, editor Natalia Atelava stated that Rappler is an editorial
partner of Coda Story.
These extensive ties reveal Coda Storys location in the center of an
ecosystem of online publications sponsored by Western governments and
oligarchs that were established to wage information warfare on Washingtons
designated adversaries. And those enemies not only include Russia and China,
but also independent US journalists who challenge the hegemonic political
line.
Coda Story cites US government-backed Uyghur separatist to smear The
Grayzone
Coda Storys defamatory hatchet job attacking The Grayzones independent
investigative journalism demonstrate the deceptive tactics that have become
a hallmark of the outlet.
Notably, Coda Story did not challenge any of The Grayzones factual
reporting on its merits. Instead, the neocon US government proxy site
resorted to defaming The Grayzone by citing highly partisan anti-China
separatist activists who are themselves funded by the US government.
Caitlin Thompson, the Coda Story staffer who authored the article,
previously worked at Foreign Policy, another hawkish pro-war website that is
closely linked to the US national security establishment. Edited until
recently by David Rothkopf, who has moved on to a lucrative gig lobbying for
the United Arab Emirates, Foreign Policy is itself supported by the UAE, an
absolute monarchy that practices modern-day slavery.
The main source Thompson relied on to smear The Grayzone was Nury Turkel,
whom she identified simply as a Uyghur lawyer and the Commissioner of the
U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
What the neoconservative blog curiously failed to mention is that Turkel is
a separatist leader whose anti-China organization is, like Coda Story,
substantially funded by the US governments National Endowment for
Democracy.
A fan of Turkeys authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkel has also
collaborated with the Trump administration to ratchet up pressure on
Beijing, successfully lobbying for US sanctions on China.
Coda Story used Turkel to maliciously accuse The Grayzone of providing
talking points to the Chinese propaganda machine. To support this
defamatory claim, Coda Story pointed to Chinese diplomats posting a link to
The Grayzones factual reporting on Twitter.
Turkel, for his part, is a key figure in a network of US government-funded
anti-China groups that provide talking points to the Trump administration
and corporate media.
Nury Turkel Pompeo NED Uyghur Human Rights Project
Separatist leader Nury Turkel, co-founder of the US government-funded Uyghur
Human Rights Project, meets with Mike Pompeo in July 2020
Nury Turkel is a co-founder and chairman of the board of the Uyghur Human
Rights Project (UHRP), one of the most influential separatist groups in the
US. The Grayzone has reported on UHRPs role in the new cold war on China,
documenting how Western corporate media reports on Xinjiang and repression
of the Uyghur minority rely overwhelmingly on unsubstantiated, hyperbolic
claims made by the organization.
Through the National Endowment for Democracy and other regime-change organs,
the US government has poured many millions of dollars into Uyghur separatist
groups, who explicitly say that they want to break off Chinas western
Xinjiang province and turn it into a new state they call East Turkestan.
This is part of Washingtons new cold war strategy against China, which
seeks to carve up the country on ethno-sectarian lines, much as the United
States and NATO did when they balkanized the former Yugoslavia.
The NED has been bankrolling UHRP since it was founded in 2004. Turkel
praised the US governments regime-change arm in a 2005 press release, which
noted that the NED is the UHRPs main source of funding, providing $126,000
in that year alone.
Uyghur Human Rights Project NED funding Nury Turkel
Since then, US government funding for the Uyghur separatist organization has
only increased. A search on the NED grants database shows that the CIA
cutout gave UHRP more than $1.2 million in funding in the four years from
2016 to 2019, at an average of approximately $310,000 per year.
Uyghur Human Rights Project NED funding
The Uyghur Human Rights Project gave its stamp of approval to the Coda Story
article attacking The Grayzone by republishing the hatchet job on its
website. The UHRP has also reposted other smear pieces against The Grayzone,
which never dispute facts and instead rely on baseless insinuations.
As a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkel
is part of an organization notorious for politicizing religion to advance
Washingtons geopolitical goals.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has been widely
criticized for racism and bias. Its current vice chair, Tony Perkins, is a
far-right Christian extremist who, as The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal
first reported, purchased a mailing list from neo-Nazi and former KKK grand
wizard David Duke and delivered a speech to the white supremacist Council on
Conservative Citizens.
Perkins and other Christian dominionists such as Johnnie Moore and Gary
Bauer are seated beside Turkel on this hyper-partisan commission. This July,
Turkel hammed it up with Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike
Pompeo a notorious Islamophobe who once proclaimed that politics is a
never-ending struggle
until the rapture.
Following his meeting with Pompeo, Turkel lavished praise on the Trump
administration for elevating human rights as a centerpiece on China policy
above anything weve seen for at least 4 decades.
Turkel has also actively lobbied for US government sanctions on China. He
has published op-eds writing explicitly, I urge President Donald Trump and
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to impose sanctions on [China].
When the Trump administration did impose sanctions on top Chinese officials
under the Global Magnitsky Act, the US Commission on International Religious
Freedom quoted Turkel, insisting the new punitive measures represent a
major victory for religious freedom and an important step toward holding
Communist China accountable for its crimes against humanity.
While painting China as a dystopian nightmare, Turkel has celebrated
Turkeys repressive leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government has jailed
more journalists than any country on earth (including more than China, a
country 17 times larger than Turkey). In an op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal, Turkel portrayed Erdogan as a rock star, claiming Ankaras
concern for the Uighurs has set an example for other democracies.
Coda Storys reliance on a right-wing, US-backed separatist figure to attack
The Grayzone only proved the point that this outlet elucidated in its
reports on Xinjiang: The campaign of new cold war propaganda against China
relies almost entirely on opposition groups cultivated and bankrolled by
Western governments.
This information warfare is also dependent on a media echo chamber nurtured
by Washington, which has been deployed to attack any journalist or public
figure that threatens the hostile narrative of the new cold war. Despite its
claims of independence, Coda Story is little more than a gear in this vast
network.
Ben Norton
Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant
editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast,
which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com
and he tweets at @
