On September 3, Wired magazine published on its website a story ^[1] by reporter David Axe, who blogs at War Is Boring ^[2]. Axe has made a few freelance trips to Iraq and calls himself a “military correspondent,” with his main claims to fame ^[3] being that he (a) often writes about Iraq for Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times and the Village Voice and (b) he writes graphic novels about war.  It doesn’t appear that he has any expertise in Russia at all, or any military or national security credentials. The Daily Gamecock ^[4]described Axe this way in 2001: “David Axe is 23 years old, a graduate student, a movie theater manager, and an overall nice guy, but, first and foremost, he’s a writer. The Dallas native received his undergraduate degree at Furman University and went on to study medieval history at UVA for a semester before coming to USC to continue those studies. He has since switched to the master of fine arts program, pursuing a degree in creative writing.”

The story claimed that Georgia had been making military preparations to invade Ossetia before it did so, and further claimed this proved it was the aggressor in the conflict. It attempted to rebut a story published August 16 on Eurasia.net ^[5] by reporter Brian Whitmore, a seasoned Russia correspondent, which explained how Russia had been gathering a massive invasion force on Georgia’s border for months before the conflict, thus “suggesting that Russia’s military action in Georgia was planned months in advance, awaiting only an appropriate pretext to act.” In a companion piece, Axe accused Georgia of waging a “propaganda war ^[6]” to cover its alleged aggression.

The sole basis for Axe’s account was an email sent out by one Professor Gordon Hahn and republished ^[7] by Axe on his blog. We have previously discredited Hahn over at my blog La Russophobe ^[8] and exposed his persistent pro-Kremlin misinformation about Russia. In a nutshell, he has close ties to Peter Lavelle, who is employed by the Russia Today Kremlin-funded propaganda TV network and whom La Russophobe has likewise previously ^[9] exposed ^[10] as a shameless pro-Kremlin shill.  German sources ^[11] are now reporting that Russia Today has censored their Tbilisi correspondent William Dunbar’s reporting on Russian bombing of civilians in the Georgian city of Gori during the recent war, and Dunbar has resigned in protest ^[12]. Its coverage of Russia’s actions in the crisis has been intensely partisan ^[13], to say the least.

Hahn works for something called the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, but he’s also affiliated ^[14] with St. Petersburg State University in Russia, a school which is owned and operated by the Kremlin. Not only that, Hahn operates a pro-Kremlin propaganda blog called Russia: Other Points of View ^[15] under the aegis of something called Center for Citizen Initiatives ^[16]. He writes for Russia Profile, a Kremlin-funded propaganda outlet, and ROPOV republishes much of that content, as well as publishing content from a host of Russophiles, including the same Patrick Armstrong ^[17] who provides much content to the Russia Blog propaganda enterprise operated by the controversial Discovery Institute. Russia Blog is likewise closely tied to Russia Today and La Russophobe has repeatedly exposed ^[18] Russia Blog for wild-eyed pro-Kremlin misstatements about Russia (blogger Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has done the same ^[19]). ROPOV has also featured the pro-dictatorship commentary of Pat Buchanan ^[20] (Pat’s been repeatedly discredited right here ^[21] on Pajamas) along with a host of other Kremlin apologists. Its blogroll consists of eight entries, half of which are filled out by the Kremlin’s English-language website and three Kremlin-controlled wire service websites, ITAR-TASS, INTERFAX, and RIA Novosti. Kremlin-critical blogs, like La Russophobe and that of Robert Amsterdam, are ignored.

CCI is headed ^[22] by Sharon Tennison ^[23], a determined Russophile propagandist who frequently contributes content to ROPOV and is listed on its masthead, and CCI is staffed by two Russian program officers, Masha Maslova and Olga Tretyakova. Tennison has, for instance, aggressively defended ^[24] Russia’s adoption of legislation cracking down on foreign NGOs, using words no different than those the Kremlin would speak. The Heritage Foundation ^[25] has called that law “an attack on freedom and civil society.” ROPOV also operates what it calls the “Russia Media Watch ^[26]” by which it seeks to attack and discredit any negative reporting on Russia; they say they are interested in “accuracy,” but just try to find one news report they attack for being inaccurately positive about the Kremlin. Good luck with that. They repeatedly attack the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, the three toughest critics of the Kremlin in the MSM.

As for the Monterey Institute, earlier this year, CQ Politics ^[27] reported:

The top U.N. official responsible for monitoring the clandestine nuclear programs of Iran and Pakistan is a Russian spy, according to a new book on Moscow’s espionage operations in the United States and Canada. The official is identified only by his Russian code name, ARTHUR, but other sources identified him as Tariq Rauf, 54, a Pakistani-born Canadian who is chief of verification and security-policy coordination at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The allegations appear in Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War ^[28] by former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley, author of two previous books on Russian spying in the United States. The book amounts to a blistering memoir by Sergei Tretyakov, a former top Russian intelligence operative stationed in New York and Canada during the 1990s, first with the communist-era KGB and then its successor, the SVR. “When Sergei had recruited ARTHUR [in 1990],” Earley writes, “he worked at the Canadian Centre for Arms Control,” a think tank for experts on nuclear weapons. Later, ARTHUR was “a project director at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, part of the Monterey Institute of International Studies ^[29], a California think tank,” he relates.

So quite possibly, it seems, the Monterey Institute is an actual nest of Russian spies. At the very least, it’s being suckered by them, and helping them to dupe others — like the editors of Wired, for example.