Fact cats
The inside story of Bellingcat and the Skripal scoop
OWEN MATTHEWS
ness to release suppressed information — for
instance, footage of US choppers shooting
up unarmed civilians in Iraq — but later
turned into a channel for political dirt stolen
by Kremlin-sponsored Russian hackers. Was
Bellingcat also allowing itself to be manipu-
lated by the spooks in the same way? ‘Might
not the group’s good name be being used to
get information into the public domain that
officials do not want to vouch for?’ asked
Mary Dejevsky in the Independent. ‘And, if
so, would this be to inform, or to mislead?’B
ut the inside story of Bellingcat’s Skripal
scoop, reported here for the first time,
paints a very different picture — not of a
group using unsourced leaks, but rather of
researchers willing to break the law and use
Russia’s thriving commercial black market
in personal information to obtain confiden-
tial data from the state.
For their investigation into the identity of
the Skripal suspects, Bellingcat teamed up
with a group of investigative journalists in
Russia who publish the Insider — a site that
regularly investigates corruption and came
to prominence in 2014 when it was able to
independently corroborate the accuracy of
much of a trove of stolen Russian govern-
ment emails leaked by a Russian hacktivist
group. The Insider’s founder, Roman Dobro-
khotov, was a prominent opposition activist
before going into journalism.
Initially, Bellingcat wasn’t interested
in the Skripal story — until the suspects
appeared on the Kremlin-controlled RT
channel with their now-infamous cock-
and-bull story about wanting to visit the
‘123-metre-tall spire’ of Salisbury Cathedral.
The ham-fisted official denial confirmed to
Bellingcat that the Russian state was cover-
ing up something juicy. ‘If it hadn’t been for
the RT interview, we probably wouldn’t have
looked so closely,’ says Higgins.
The first assumption checked by Belling-
cat’s team was whether any of the personal
details in either passport used by ‘Alexander
Petrov’ or ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ were actually
true. To do that they needed the passport
data of millions of Russian citizens — whichB
ellingcat is an independent group of
exceptionally gifted Leicester-based
internet researchers who use infor-
mation gleaned from open sources to dig up
facts that no other team of journalists has
been able to discover.
Or, Bellingcat is a sophisticated front
used by western intelligence agencies to dis-
seminate stories that would be considered
tainted if they came from an official source.
Which is it? The answer matters, not just
because Bellingcat’s investigators — a tiny
outfit with just 11 staffers and around 60 vol-
unteers around the world — have apparently
identified Sergei Skripal’s would-be assas-
sins, pinned the blame for chemical weap-
ons attacks in Syria squarely on the Assad
regime and the responsibility for the down-
ing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 on
the Russian army. It matters because Bell-
ingcat’s methods have transformed the way
that news — and intelligence — is gathered.
Bellingcat’s pioneering technique
involves cross-referencing social media
posts, tweets, news photographs, publicly
available databases, Google Street View and
maps into a detailed mosaic of apparently
irrefutable data. Their information has been
judged watertight enough to be used by the
official commission investigating the down-
ing of MH-17 and has been cited in the Unit-
ed Nations as proof of Syrian war crimes.
And if Bellingcat truly is a group of dedi-
cated nerds armed with nothing more than
an internet connection and a talent for crea-
tive Googling, they’ve proved not only more
effective than other journalists but they have
quite possibly outdone the West’s intelli-
gence agencies too.
‘I’d say they’re way ahead of us on many
things,’ admits a senior British security offi-
cial. Bellingcat’s methods are ‘way too inno-
vative for the great majority of lemmings in
government,’ says one former CIA officer.
Today’s spooks live in constant fear of
enquiries over possible failures. ‘MI5 would
just hold them back, almost certainly’ if
researchers strayed into illegality, says the
source. Bellingcat’s willingness to buy infor-
mation on the black market or scoop it upfrom private sites makes them better than
governments at gleaning information from
open sources in ‘almost all’ cases, he says.
Of course, if you believe that Bellingcat
is an MI6 or CIA front, then the West’s tra-
ditional spooks would have every interest in
standing up the upstarts’ credibility. ‘Belling-
cat looks to me very much like the informa-
tion warfare department of MI6,’ says former
Russian member of parliament Sergei Mark-
ov. ‘Very professional people are working on
this falsification... they are liars and workfor British intelligence.’ For Charles Baus-
man, editor-in-chief of the pro-Kremlin Rus-
sia Insider alternative news website, the story
that Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins ‘is just
a remarkable young man doing God’s work
sells well to a large, dumbed-down MSM
[mainstream media] market... But the alt-
media universe holds him up as a classic
example of subversion and fake news.’
Bellingcat’s latest scoop — unmasking
the identity of the Skripal hitmen — has also
been their most controversial. In a depar-
ture from their earlier adherence to only
open-source material, the group admitted
using confidential human sources for some
of their information. To many, that rang
alarm bells. Julian Assange’s Wikileaks was
once fêted by western media for its willing-‘I’d say they’re way ahead
of u s on m any things,’ a dmit s
a senior British security offi cial