Meet the spooks, mercs and chickenhawk politicos enlisting as NAFO trolls

by ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN

While fundraising for a notoriously brutal militia in Ukraine and trolling critics of the proxy war, the membership roll of “North Atlantic Fellas Organization” has filled up with NATO suits, congressional chickenhawks, neocon operatives, mercenaries and intel agents.
 
Read part one of Alex Rubinstein’s ongoing investigative series on NAFO, “How the pro-Ukraine NAFO troll operation crowd-funds war criminals.”
 
When he is not shedding performative tears over the fate of US democracy or publicly guffawing over the apparent assassination of Iranian military officials, Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) has sought to define himself as a leading opponent of perceived antisemitism in Washington DC. When his colleague, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, mildly criticized of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 2019, Kinzinger called on congressional leaders to strip her of top committee assignments.
 
“Anti-Semitism has no place in this Congress or this country,” Kinzinger thundered in March 2019, falsely conflating criticism of AIPAC, an Israel lobbying group, with anti-Jewish sentiment. “We must hold ourselves to a higher standard in office.”
 
Yet Kinzinger, who has emerged as a zealous backer of NATO’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, has apparently failed to apply the same standards to his own political allies.
 
Since Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine this February, Kinzinger has agitated for increased US support for the Kiev-aligned military despite widespread documentation of open neo-Nazis permeating its ranks. More revealing was Kinzinger’s public endorsement of an online harassment campaign led by “NAFO,” a pro-NATO digital troll farm co-founded by a secretive Twitter account with noted antisemitic views.
 
Founded in early 2022, “NAFO,” or the “North Atlantic Fellas Organization,” is an online alliance of social media accounts aimed at fortifying the digital frontline of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. The group has made its mark on Twitter, where NAFO members, known as “fellas,” bombard critics of the Ukrainian military with insults and memes of cartoon dogs.
 
NAFO’s harassment campaigns have become so omnipresent that virtually every prominent Western media outlet, including Deutsche Welle, The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, The Economist, VICE News, has granted the operation wildly favorable coverage. The troll farm has also drawn admiration from anti-Russia hardliners in Washington DC, including from its most enthusiastic inside-the-Beltway member: Rep. Kinzinger, who publicly identifies as a “fella” in his Twitter handle while participating in coordinated dog-piles.
 

 
In part one of this investigative series, The Grayzone revealed that “NAFO” is not only a digital troll farm, but in fact a thinly-veiled fundraising campaign for the Georgian Legion, a division of foreign fighters within the Ukrainian army that stands accused of numerous war crimes. The Grayzone also established that a retired US marine named Matthew Moores created NAFO alongside Kamil Dyszewski, a Polish video game reviewer who operates under the Twitter pseudonym “Kama Kamilia.”
 
“I just stumbled my way through life, now into this,” Dyszewski commented in a July 2022 interview while discussing his foray into the realm of online harassment campaigns.
 
“What fuels it for me is the absolute hatred and vitriol I have towards the Russians,” he explained.
 
While touting his anti-Russian hostility, Dyszewski has also tweeted multiple antisemitic memes, including images which appeared to glorify Adolph Hilter and mock Jewish victims of the Holocaust. While mainstream media has neglected to mention Dyszewski’s controversial opinions in its coverage of NAFO, independent researcher and Grayzone contributor Moss Robeson has clinically documented and publicized his most inflammatory posts.
 
https://twitter.com/mossrobeson__/status/1581069641945784320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1581069641945784320%7Ctwgr%5Eb6104fd80c42c8893f8f7fcf562ac4a3aba15a7b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2022%2F10%2F28%2Fspooks-mercs-hawks-nafo-troll%2F
 
As evidence of Dyszewski’s hateful views circulated online, however, NAFO members doubled down on support for their leader.
 
“Spare a kind word or a kind thought for my little brother from another mother, @Kama_Kamilia,” a NAFO fella identified as “Pete” tweeted on October 15, tagging Dyszewski’s pseudonym and Twitter handle (an apparent reference to Culture Club’s 1982 chart topper, “Karma Chameleon”). “He’s taken a hard path here, and is handling it with grace and integrity.”
 
Taken on its own, the message of solidarity for Dyszewski from a Twitter account boasting fewer than 6,000 followers was unremarkable. But despite “Pete’s” underwhelming reach on Twitter, his tweet caught the eye of one of NAFO’s most notable fellas.
 
“Nobody is making a big deal about this, but the repeated nafo comments is (sic) spreading this,” read the top reply to “Pete’s” tweet. The blatant call to ignore screenshots of Dyszewski’s antisemitic posts was issued by none other than Rep. Kinzinger from his personal, verified account.
 
“So, all good,” the congressman advised his fellow fella. “Move on.”
 
With no end to the Ukraine conflict in sight, Kinzinger is not the only DC policymaker who has opted to look the other way and continue coordinating with or boosting NAFO’s digital troll operation. In fact, as NATO’s online information war intensified alongside the physical battlefield, NAFO’s ties to Washington’s elite have only strengthened.
 
US government-funded think tank celebrates NAFO’s “information warfare” success
 
Despite the fact NAFO is a literal troll farm, the organization has managed to legitimize itself in the eyes of Washington’s pro-NATO intelligensia. The Economist, for example, conceded that while “NAFO’s flippancy obscures its role as a remarkably successful form of information warfare,” the group has successfully countered pro-Russia accounts on social media while elevating “Ukraine’s role in popular culture.”
 
“It’s been effective at not allowing Russia to run wild across the info-war landscape the way they used to,” Peter W. Singer, a career consultant for the military-industrial complex and author of the book, LikeWar, told the publication. His comments were published in an August 31 profile of NAFO titled, “A virtual army of impish cartoon pooches is waging war on Russia.”
 
Days after the publication of The Economist’s report, on October 5, the DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank published an hour-long podcast discussion entitled, “#NAFO and Winning the Information War: Lessons Learned from Ukraine.” CSIS’s top government donor is the United States; the think tank receives support from five other NATO states, the European Union, as well as a number of US defense contractors.
 
Moderated by CSIS senior fellow Kathleen McInnis, the CSIS panel on NAFO included two of her colleagues: Iuliia Mendel, a Washington Post contributor and former spokesperson for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and NAFO co-founder Matt Moores, a retired Marine Corps tank commander.
 
Throughout the event, Mendel praised NAFO and called for limits on free speech to “fight the disinformation.” “I think this war showed that the boundaries of freedom of speech have got a new framework,” the ex-Zelensky flack remarked, “and in this new era of emergent information and technologies we need to answer if we are ready to face the challenges. If we can make tough political decisions and doubt our own rules about freedom of speech to fight the disinformation, the weaponized words that come from Russia and I think this Russian war against democracy in Ukraine showed that we can actually take really difficult decisions.”
 
Yet the de facto US brand ambassador for Ukraine’s president had previously spread disinformation herself. In March 2022, she echoed bogus reports that the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah had agreed to send 800 fighters to aid Russia’s fight in Ukraine by the end of the month. While the troop transfer has yet to come to fruition, the cooked-up claim that one of Washington’s most notorious designated enemies planned to enter the Ukraine conflict was designed to excite support for Kiev-aligned military among US hawks.
 

I’m still waiting for Hezbollah in Ukraine. You were so sure Lul pic.twitter.com/YL7MmbNHWh

— Hadi (@HadiNasrallah) October 5, 2022

 
Despite her apparently hazy conception of reality, Mendel later proclaimed, “NAFO stands for truth, together with USA!”
 

#NAFO stands for truth, together with the USA! 🙂 https://t.co/L6vZcHxuvB

— Iuliia Mendel (@IuliiaMendel) August 4, 2022

 
During the October 5 CSIS panel, NAFO co-founder Matt Moores elaborated on the group’s information warfare tactics. He shed light on the nihilist mentality of NAFO trolls, explaining:  “The power of what we’re doing is — instead of trying to come in and point for point refute and argue about what’s true and what isn’t — it’s coming and and saying look, ‘hey that’s dumb.’”
 
The moment somebody’s replying to a cartoon dog online, they’ve lost,” Moores added, referring to the digital Shiba Inu dog avatars NAFO fellas display on their Twitter accounts.
 
Weeks after its panel with Mandel, CSIS featured Moores once again, this time in a podcast published on October 13. During the discussion, Moores attempted to characterize NAFO as an “organic” movement while simultaneously explaining that the online “national security community” helped astroturf NAFO to prominence.
 
“If you look specifically at the national security Twitter community, I think you can see the origins of this for a long time,” Moores said. “I think that structure already existing really did help [NAFO] to grow.”
 
For a second time in interviews with CSIS, Moores expressed pride in NAFO’s fundraising for the Georgian National Legion. Between direct donations to the legion through NAFO and its partnership with the Saint Javelin merchandise shop, Moores estimated they had raised more than a million dollars for the atrocity-inclined militia.
 
As the previous installment of this investigation revealed, NAFO was launched to raise money for the Georgian Legion, a mercenary-filled militia outfit whose members have been caught on camera committing war crimes, which has been accused of torture, kidnapping and executions by former members, and is led by Mamuka Mamulashvili, a Georgian warlord who has boasted of the legion’s policy of executing captive Russian soldiers.
 

Celebrated in mainstream US media for its anti-Russian trolling, the Twitter operation known as NAFO was founded by a Polish antisemite to raise money for a militia that has hosted war criminals, white nationalists and wanted murderers

By @RealAlexRubi https://t.co/4qs01gbJkX

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) October 20, 2022

 
Next, Moores boasted of NAFO’s brazen retorts to allegations that it coordinates with US intelligence elements or trades in online hatred. “One of the ways we stick our finger back in the eye is that, you know, if you look at any fellas’ profile you’ll see the dog avatar but then their location will often be Langley, Virginia. They say we’re CIA. Yeah, sure, we’re CIA. They say, you know, Russiaphobes? Like yes, good morning Russiaphobes.”
 
While Moores publicly mocks allegations of intelligence ties and Russophobia, members of the intelligence community have flocked to NAFO and Moores himself has made nakedly Russophobic comments in private.
 
Rep. Kinzinger gushes over avowed war criminal, urges pals to “move on” from NAFO founder’s antisemitism
 
During recent trips to Washington’s Capitol Hill, Georgian Legion commander and avowed war criminal Mamuka Mamulashvili has held meet-and-greets with five to seven members of the House of Representatives and two senators.
 
On August 2, Rep. Adam Kinzinger posted a photograph of himself during a Zoom call with Mamulashvili, whom he hailed as a “heroic Commander” that is “fight[ing] hard for freedom.”
 
Kinzinger has also sought to tie himself to the Georgian Legion’s viral social media influence campaign, putting “fella” in his Twitter display name and participating in online harassment missions alongside fellow fellas.
 
This October, a member of the Georgian Legion personally visited Kinzinger at his congressional office in Washington DC.
 
https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1569666514755649538?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1569666514755649538%7Ctwgr%5Eb6104fd80c42c8893f8f7fcf562ac4a3aba15a7b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2022%2F10%2F28%2Fspooks-mercs-hawks-nafo-troll%2F
 
When NAFO co-founder “Kama Kamilia” was subsequently exposed as the author of several antisemitic tweets, Kinzinger urged other “fellas” to look the other way.
 
“Nobody is making a big deal about this but the repeated nafo comments is spreading this.  So, all good. Move on,” the congressman tweeted.
 
https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1581468674476515328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1581468674476515328%7Ctwgr%5Eb6104fd80c42c8893f8f7fcf562ac4a3aba15a7b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2022%2F10%2F28%2Fspooks-mercs-hawks-nafo-troll%2F
 
The congressman’s dismissive comments contrast his past posturing on the issue of antisemitism. Back in 2019, when Representative Ilhan Omar criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful Israeli lobby group in Washington, Kinzinger called for congressional leadership to strip her of important committee assignments.
 
“Anti-Semitism has no place in this Congress or this country. Rep. Omar should be removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. We must hold ourselves to a higher standard in office,” Kinzinger proclaimed.
 
Since becoming a fella, Kinzinger has spent endless hours tweeting out silly memes and taunting NAFO targets, including this journalist. Much of the congressman’s trolling takes place during work hours, though it often continues until late in the night.
 
https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1571266000535838721?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1571266000535838721%7Ctwgr%5Eb6104fd80c42c8893f8f7fcf562ac4a3aba15a7b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2022%2F10%2F28%2Fspooks-mercs-hawks-nafo-troll%2F
 
NAFO: a merry band of spooks, mercs, and cyber-spies
 
Paul Massaro, a senior policy advisor at the US government’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe who met with Ukrainian President Zelensky this September, has also been a vocal NAFO supporter. In August, Massaro held talks with Mamulashvili and was even made an honorary member of the Georgian Legion. On Twitter, Massaro’s profile picture features an image of himself bearing both a Georgian Legion and a NAFO patch.
 
Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, has similarly posed with NAFO memorabilia and presented President Zelensky with a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of Saint Javelin  — the online merchandise shop named for Raytheon’s Javelin anti-tank missile which recently incorporated NAFO.

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