Just hours after last weekend’s
ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, one of Pierre Omidyar’s newest hires at national security blog “
The Intercept,” was already digging for the truth.
Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s “senior policy analyst,”
speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep” forces on behalf of
“Pax Americana”:
“There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.”
These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.
Wheeler is partly correct. Pando has confirmed that the American
government – in the form of the US Agency for International Development
(USAID) – played a major role in funding opposition groups prior to the
revolution. Moreover, a large percentage of the rest of the funding to
those same groups came from a US billionaire who has previously worked
closely with US government agencies to further his own business
interests. This was by no means a US-backed “coup,” but clear evidence
shows that US investment was a force multiplier for many of the groups
involved in overthrowing Yanukovych.
But that’s not the shocking part.
What’s shocking is the name of the billionaire who co-invested with the US government (or as Wheeler put it: the “
dark deep force” acting on behalf of “Pax Americana”).
Step out of the shadows…. Wheeler’s boss, Pierre Omidyar.
Yes, in the annals of independent media, this might be the strangest
twist ever: According to financial disclosures and reports seen by
Pando, the founder and publisher of Glenn Greenwald’s government-bashing
blog,“The Intercept,” co-invested with the US government to help fund
regime change in Ukraine.
[
Update: Wheeler has responded on Twitter to say
that her Tweets were taken out of context, but would not give
specifics. Adam Colligan, with whom Wheeler was debating, commented on
Pando that "while Wheeler did raise the issue of external interference
in relation to a discussion about a coup, it was not really at all in
the manner that you have portrayed." Further "[Pax Americana] appeared
after the conversation had shifted from the idea of whether a coup had
been staged by the Ukrainian Parliament to a question about the larger
powers’ willingness to weaken underlying economic conditions in a
state.” Neither Wheeler or Colligan has commented on the main subject of
the story: Pierre Omidyar’s co-investment in Ukrainian opposition
groups with the US government.]
* * * *
When the revolution came to Ukraine,
neo-fascists
played a front-center role in overthrowing the country’s president. But
the real political power rests with Ukraine’s pro-western neoliberals.
Political figures like Oleh Rybachuk, long a favorite of the
State Department,
DC neocons,
EU, and
NATO—and the
right-hand man to Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko.
Last December, the
Financial Times wrote that Rybachuk’s “New Citizen” NGO campaign “played a big role in getting the protest up and running.”
New Citizen, along with the rest of Rybachuk’s interlocking network of
western-backed NGOs and campaigns—
“Center UA” (also spelled “Centre UA”),
“Chesno,”
and “Stop Censorship” to name a few — grew their power by targeting
pro-Yanukovych politicians with a well-coordinated anti-corruption
campaign that built its strength in Ukraine’s regions, before massing in
Kiev last autumn.
The efforts of the NGOs were so successful that the Ukraine
government was accused of employing dirty tricks to shut them down. In
early February, the groups were the subject of a massive
money laundering investigation by the economics division of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry in what many denounced as a politically motivated move.
Fortunately the groups had the strength – which is to say, money – to
survive those attacks and continue pushing for regime change in
Ukraine. The source of that money?
According to the
Kyiv Post,
Pierrie Omidyar’s Omidyar Network (part of the Omidyar Group which owns
First Look Media and the Intercept) provided 36% of “Center UA”’s
$500,000 budget in 2012— nearly $200,000. USAID provided 54% of “Center
UA”’s budget for 2012. Other funders included the US government-backed
National Endowment for Democracy.
In 2011, Omidyar Network gave
$335,000
to “New Citizen,” one of the anti-Yanukovych “projects” managed through
the Rybachuk-chaired NGO “Center UA.” At the time, Omidyar Network
boasted that its investment in “New Citizen” would help “shape public
policy” in Ukraine:
“Using technology and media, New Citizen coordinates the
efforts of concerned members of society, reinforcing their ability to
shape public policy.
“… With support from Omidyar Network, New Citizen will strengthen its
advocacy efforts in order to drive greater transparency and engage
citizens on issues of importance to them.”
In March 2012, Rybachuk — the operator behind the 2004 Orange Revolution scenes, the
Anatoly Chubais of Ukraine —
boasted that he was preparing a new Orange Revolution:
“People are not afraid. We now have 150 NGOs in all the major cities
in our ‘clean up Parliament campaign’ to elect and find better
parliamentarians….The Orange Revolution was a miracle, a massive
peaceful protest that worked. We want to do that again and we think we will.”
Detailed
financial records
reviewed by Pando (and embedded below) also show Omidyar Network
covered costs for the expansion of Rybachuk’s anti-Yanukovych campaign,
“Chesno” (“Honestly”), into regional cities including Poltava,
Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Ternopil, Sumy, and elsewhere, mostly in the
Ukrainian-speaking west and center.
* * * *
To understand what it means for Omidyar to fund Oleh Rybachuk, some
brief history is necessary. Rybachuk’s background follows a familiar
pattern in post-Soviet opportunism: From well-connected KGB intelligence
ties, to post-Soviet neoliberal networker.
In the Soviet era, Rybachuk studied in a military languages program half of whose graduates went on to work for the
KGB.
Rybachuk’s murky overseas posting in India in the late Soviet era
further strengthens many suspicions about his Soviet intelligence ties;
whatever the case, by Rybachuk’s own account, his
close ties to top intelligence figures in the
Ukrainian SBU
served him well during the Orange Revolution of 2004, when the SBU
passed along secret information about vote fraud and assassination
plots.
In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rybachuk moved to the newly-formed Ukraine Central Bank, heading the
foreign relations department
under Central Bank chief and future Orange Revolution leader Viktor
Yushchenko. In his central bank post, Rybachuk established close
friendly ties with western government and financial aid institutions, as
well as proto-Omidyar figures like
George Soros, who
funded many of the NGOs involved in
“color revolutions”
including small donations to the same Ukraine NGOs that Omidyar backed.
(Like Omidyar Network does today, Soros’ charity arms—Open Society and
Renaissance Foundation—publicly preached transparency and good
government in places like Russia during the Yeltsin years, while Soros’
financial arm
speculated on Russian debt and participated in
scandal-plagued auctions of state assets.)
In early 2005, Orange Revolution leader Yushchenko became Ukraine’s president, and he appointed Rybachuk
deputy prime minister in charge of integrating Ukraine into the EU, NATO, and other western institutions. Rybachuk also pushed for the
mass-privatization of Ukraine’s remaining state holdings.
Over the next several years, Rybachuk was shifted around President
Yushchenko’s embattled administration, torn by internal divisions. In
2010, Yushchenko lost the presidency to recently-overthrown Viktor
Yanukovych, and a year later, Rybachuk was on Omidyar’s and USAID’s
payroll, preparing for the next Orange Revolution. As Rybachuk told the
Financial Times two years ago:
“We want to do [the Orange Revolution] again and we think we will.”
Some of Omidyar’s funds were specifically earmarked for covering the
costs of setting up Rybachuk’s “clean up parliament” NGOs in Ukraine’s
regional centers. Shortly after the Euromaidan demonstrations erupted
last November, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry opened up a money laundering
investigation into Rybachuk’s NGOs, dragging Omidyar’s name into the
high-stakes political struggle.
According to a
Kyiv Post article on February 10 titled, “Rybachuk: Democracy-promoting nongovernmental organization faces ‘ridiculous’ investigation”:
“Police are investigating Center UA, a public-sector
watchdog funded by Western donors, on suspicion of money laundering, the
group said. The group’s leader, Oleh Rybachuk, said it appears that
authorities, with the probe, are trying to warn other nongovernmental
organizations that seek to promote democracy, transparency, free speech
and human rights in Ukraine.
“According to Center UA, the Kyiv economic crimes unit of the
Interior Ministry started the investigation on Dec. 11. Recently,
however, investigators stepped up their efforts, questioning some 200
witnesses.
“… Center UA received more than $500,000 in 2012, according to its
annual report for that year, 54 percent of which came from Pact Inc., a
project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Nearly 36 percent came from Omidyar Network, a foundation established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife.
Other donors include the International Renaissance Foundation, whose
key funder is billionaire George Soros, and National Endowment for
Democracy, funded largely by the U.S. Congress.”
* * * *
What all this adds up to is a journalistic conflict-of-interest of
the worst kind: Omidyar working hand-in-glove with US foreign policy
agencies to interfere in foreign governments, co-financing regime change
with well-known arms of the American empire — while at the same time
hiring a growing team of
soi-disant “independent journalists”
which vows to investigate the behavior of the US government at home and
overseas, and boasts of its uniquely
“adversarial” relationship towards these government institutions.
As First Look staffer Jeremy Scahill
told the Daily Beast…
We had a long discussion about this internally; about
what our position would be if the White House asked us to not publish
something…. With us, because we want to be adversarial, they won’t know
what bat phone to call. They know who to call at The Times, they know
who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre?
Glenn?
Of the many problems that poses, none is more serious than the fact that Omidyar now has the only two people with
exclusive access to the complete Snowden NSA cache,
Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Somehow, the same billionaire who
co-financed the “coup” in Ukraine with USAID, also has exclusive access
to the NSA secrets—and very few in the independent media dare voice a
skeptical word about it.
In the larger sense, this is a problem of 21st century American
inequality, of life in a billionaire-dominated era. It is a problem we
all have to contend with—PandoDaily’s 18-plus investors include a gaggle
of Silicon Valley billionaires like Marc Andreessen (who serves on the
board of eBay, chaired by Pierre Omidyar) and Peter Thiel (whose
politics I’ve
investigated, and described as repugnant.)
But what is more immediately alarming is what makes Omidyar
different. Unlike other billionaires, Omidyar has garnered nothing but
uncritical,
fawning press coverage, particularly from those he has
hired. By acquiring a “dream team” of what remains of independent media — Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Wheeler, my
former partner Matt Taibbi — not to mention press “critics” like
Jay Rosen — he buys both silence and fawning press.
Both are incredibly useful: Silence, an absence of journalistic
curiosity about Omidyar’s activities overseas and at home, has been
purchased for the price of whatever his current all-star indie cast
currently costs him. As an added bonus, that same investment buys
silence from exponentially larger numbers of desperately underpaid
independent journalists hoping to someday be on his payroll, and the
underfunded
media watchdogs that survive on Omidyar Network grants.
And it also buys laughable fluff from the likes of Scahill who also boasted to the
Daily Beast of his boss’ close involvement in the day to day running of First Look.
“[Omidyar] strikes me as always sort of political, but I
think that the NSA story and the expanding wars put politics for him
into a much more prominent place in his existence. This is not a side
project that he is doing. Pierre writes more on our internal messaging
than anyone else. And he is not micromanaging. This guy has a vision.
And his vision is to confront what he sees as an assault on the privacy
of Americans.”
Now Wheeler has her answer — that, yes, the revolutionary groups were
part-funded by Uncle Sam, but also by her boss — one assumes awkward
follow up questions will be asked on that First Look internal messaging
system.
Whether Wheeler, Scahill and their colleagues go on to share their
concerns publicly will speak volumes about First Look’s much-trumpeted
independence, both from Omidyar’s other business interests and from
Omidyar’s co-investors in Ukraine: the US government.
Editor’s note: Pando contacted Omidyar Networks
for comment prior to publication but had not received a response by
press time. We will update this post if they do respond.
Update: First Look staffer, Glenn Greenwald, has responded to Pando’s report
here. Paul Carr, the editor of the above report, has written a follow-up
here.
* * * *
Chesno document showing total funding from USAID and Omidyar Network to “Centre UA”:
Chesno document showing numerous Omidyar fundings for activities in regional cities:
