On November 7, West Point’s Modern War Institute hosted a panel entitled: “Cyber Operations in Modern Warfare: Ukraine and Beyond.” It featured ‘NAFO’ (the North Atlantic Fellas Organization) on the subject of countering Russian disinformation. Their description explains: “Experts from the Army Cyber Institute and their research partners” will be “using a unique dataset they created that identifies Russian, Ukrainian, and third-party actors during the ongoing war in Ukraine.”
NAFO has fascinated the “anti-'disinformation’” community, as they don’t waste time countering arguments. They simply gang up online and ridicule their enemies, as would do, in pre-social- networking days, a lynch mob. A NAFO co-founder, a 20-something reviewer of video games named Kamil Dyszewski, was recently exposed for his pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic tweets; so, a co-founder, an ex-US Marine named Matthew Moores, has been making the rounds, appearing on a couple of CSIS formats over the last month. On their October 13 podcast, Moores claimed that NAFO has raised over a million dollars for their one charity, the infamous Georgian Legion of Mamuka Mamulashvili. (While Mamulashvili was also a co-founder of the infamous Azov Brigade, it is possible that his Georgian Legion has committed more war crimes.)
As Alexander Rubinstein wrote in his “Meet the spooks, mercs and chickenhawk politicos enlisting as NAFO trolls,” Moores explained 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 [NAFO] for a long time. I think that structure already existing really did help us to grow.” Translation: Their so-called self-starter group of independent activists were simply plugged into a place for which the intel community had laid the groundwork.
