ingcat isn’t linked to government, who is it
linked to?
The alt-media universe has made much
of Higgins’s now-lapsed affiliation to the
Atlantic Council, a conservative thinktank
in Washington DC (‘Higgins’s real identity
as a neocon, Atlantic Council stooge is being
brought to light,’ says The Duran blog). The
frequently anti-Russian tone of Higgins’s
tweets have also come under attack (‘Hig-
gins either vehemently hates, or has been
told to hate Russia, and Russia’s president
Putin... his Twitter timeline can read at times
like one man trolling an entire country,’
writes sometime RT journalist Graham Phil-
lips, aka The Truth Speaker). And even the
entirely mainstream Dejevsky claims that
Bellingcat ‘has never, so far as I am aware,
reached any conclusion that is inconvenient
to the UK or US authorities.’I
n reality, despite Higgins’s personal Twit-
ter stance, plenty of Bellingcat’s reporting
has attacked the US — and even exoner-
ated Russia. When a mosque in Al-Jinah,
a Syrian village located in the western part
of the Aleppo governorate, was bombed
in March 2017 a Bellingcat investigation
linked photographs of bomb fragments
taken by a Dutch journalist to stated US air
raids on that day to prove that a US AGM-
114 Hellfire missile was responsible, not the
Russians. And one of Bellingcat’s most con-
sistent ongoing projects has been keeping
track of airstrikes in Yemen — including on
a hospital and a market — by Saudi aircraft
using US supplied munitions.
Bellingcat’s funding also has every
appearance of transparency. Higgins says
that some 60 per cent of the funding for his
11 staffers comes from giving training sem-
inars on their investigative techniques to
journalists and researchers (sample topic:
‘How To Scrape Interactive Geospatial
Data’), and the rest from grants from NGOs
such as the Google Digital News Initiative,
Adessium (a Dutch free speech foundation),
the Open Society Foundation and, later this
year, the Dutch postcode lottery.
If these guys are for real, the question
becomes, why isn’t everyone, from spooks to
newspapers, doing what they do? Part of the
answer, at least in the case of news gathering,
is simply time. Some Bellingcat investiga-
tions — for instance, a recent report on how
social media can act as a gateway to fascist
organisations — take dozens of contributors
months of work.
The real secret of Bellingcat is that they
have stumbled upon a disturbing truth: that
it has become impossible to tell analogue
lies in a digital world. In an age where almost
all personal data is searchable and every
event photographed, the most secret infor-
mation is often hiding in plain sight. All you
need to know is where to look for it — even
if that means delving into the internet’s dark-
est corners.on the principle of uniting people with old
school and university contemporaries. A
group photograph of the Far Eastern Mili-
tary Command Academy yielded an image
of a man who resembled ‘Boshirov’ — one
Anatoliy Chepiga, whose later photographs
and personnel records had been carefully
and systematically expunged from social
networks and official photographs, immedi-
ately arousing suspicion.
Bellingcat also used a Swedish-designed
app widely utilised in Russia called True-
caller, designed to crowd-source telephone
numbers by scraping the telephone address
books of all its users — to identify people
who could be connected to Chepiga. Using
that data, Bellingcat approached some of
Chepiga’s old comrades to verify the identi-
ty of the man in the photograph — confiden-
tial sources again, but covered by journalistic
source-protection rules rather than to con-
ceal a targeted leak, insists Toler. And Bell-
ingcat also obtained a copy of Chepiga’s
passport through the same agency route and
found a clear match in the photographs. A
flood of open-source information — includ-
ing car registration data and official records
of Chepiga’s being honoured as a Hero of
Russia by Vladimir Putin — confirmed what
the human sources had told them.‘We are not being approached with any-
thing at all,’ says Toler. ‘We don’t do that.
With human intelligence, we have only done
that kind of stuff when there are no other
options.’ Obtaining passport information
from shadowy agencies ‘was the nuclear
option for us. We did this because [we had]
exhausted all other info. This was the only
thing left for us. This will not be a habit.
Ninety- nine per cent of our work will remain
very open source.’
If anything, Bellingcat’s buccaneering
approach to data mining actually strength-
ens the case for them being a genuinely
independent outfit willing to do things most
government agencies would balk at. The use
of black-market information ‘is more than a
little WTF,’ says the former CIA source. ‘I’d
say it proves Bellingcat is non-government
(or non-government linked).’ But if Bell-Bellingcat has stumbled on a
d angerou s t ruth: it is impossibl e to
keep analogue lies in a digital worldturned out to be the easy part. ‘In Russia
there are a lot of people who have access to
this kind of data,’ says Aric Toler, a Belling-
cat staffer. Bellingcat’s researchers down-
loaded a 650-gigabyte file of passport data
for free from a Russian torrent site (where it
is still available today), and cross-referenced
it with other publicly available databases.
‘Ruslan Boshirov’ came up with no match-
es. But one man — Alexander Yevgenyevich
Mishkin, a military doctor — shared a birth-
day and first and patronymic names with the
fictional Alexander Yevgenyevich Petrov.
Then came the legally dubious part. Rus-
sia has a thriving black market in personal
information. ‘These services are very cheap,
which shows that there is low risk and high
demand,’ says Roman Dobrokhotov. A
search on Yandex, the Russian equivalent
of Google, does indeed turn up dozens of
such agencies offering, more or less coyly, to
obtain passports, driving licences, business
registration documents and marriage certifi-
cates for a fee of around 100 euros. Belling-
cat commissioned several searches from such
agencies. One turned up the original passport
application for Petrov and Boshirov’s near-
ly consecutive fake passports, issued by an
office dealing exclusively in officials’ pass-
ports and stamped ‘Do Not Give Out Infor-
mation’. They also obtained Mishkin’s real
passport and driving licence.
The agency paid to leak information was
one of Bellingcat’s controversially confi-
dential sources — and Dobrokhotov says
that they protected the agencies’ identity
from journalistic principle, not to protect a
hidden leaker. ‘If you are sent a document,
that is the least reliable possible source,’
he says. ‘It means someone wants to prove
something... If you find the documents
yourself, that’s very different. In this case...
we ordered the copy of [Mishkin’s] passport
from a person who knew nothing about our
investigation.’
Is it possible that Bellingcat were being
played? Dobrokhotov went on to order
legal copies of publicly available informa-
tion on Mishkin, such as his apartment and
car registration (his vehicle turned out to be
registered at the headquarters of Russian
Military Intelligence at Moscow’s Khoro-
shovskoye Shosse, 76). He also sent a report-
er to his home village in the Russian Arctic
to question friends and family members.
‘Several sources correspond to each other,’
says Dobrokhotov. ‘Each single stage can be
falsified — but all together they can’t.’
The search for ‘Boshirov’ was more chal-
lenging. Since cross-referencing Boshirov’s
fake passport with real information hadn’t
yielded any results, Bellingcat trawled the
social media accounts of military men of
similar age who had attended Russian mil-
itary intelligence academies in the early
2000s. The organising principle of the Rus-
sian social media site Odnoklassniki (liter-
ally ‘Classmates’) helped — the site works
‘If there’s global warming then
how come there’s a cold war?’