We Are Bellingcat review: journalism reimagined for our post-truth world
In the early afternoon of Sunday 4 March 2018, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped, semi-conscious on a park bench in Salisbury. The former operative of the GRU, the intelligence arm of the defence ministry in Russia, and Yulia had been struck by Novichok, a battlefield nerve agent developed by the Russian forces at the end of the Cold War. It was the first time this chemical weapon had been used in the West.
The agent was soon analysed and labelled by the NHS and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down – just up the road from Salisbury. A few days later two Russians were discovered to have been in Salisbury that day – they had just arrived a couple of days before. At Gatwick they had been checked through as Roslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov. A few days later the two appeared on Russia’s RT channel to confess they were innocent tourists who had gone to Salisbury, fascinated to see the famous spire of the cathedral.
As the Skripals, and some of their rescuers, fought for their lives, the joking soon stopped. The two so-called tourists had been outed, with photographs, as Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga, the frontmen of a hit team for the GRU. Mishkin had a medical background, and both had been involved in Ukraine; Chepiga had fought in Chechnya.
“The Russians were astonished at the speed with which the British identified the two men, and their skill at facial recognition techniques,” commented Bruno Macaes, the Portuguese former minister and commentator. However, this was not the work of a state intelligence agency. It was the work of a highly innovative internet investigative journalism outfit called Bellingcat, founded by an IT aficionado, Eliot Higgins, working from his small flat in Leicester.
Higgins tells the story of Bellingcat – its origins, struggles and triumphs – in We are Bellingcat – an intelligence agency for the people, just published. It is a gripping read. It is also a wonderful guide and tool box for any journalist working in the field. It should interest anyone trying to interpret facts on the ground, especially the most conflicted parts of the world such as Libya, Somalia, Syria, Crimea, Ukraine and the Caucasus.
The story begins with the Syrian and Libyan civil wars of 2011. By using geolocation through internet tools such as Google Earth, Higgins learnt how to interpret propaganda footage from the battlefront, using careful analysis of street scenes, pieces of landscape, the fall of shadows and the like. He began to establish a network of kindred spirits, sharing his interests but bringing different skills in languages and digital knowhow. He published their conclusions on the Brown Moses blog and Guardian Live Blog.
But Bellingcat had achieved fame and the almost inevitable wrath of the Russian regime and its media well before the Skripal plot in 2018.
On 17 July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was downed over eastern Ukraine by a Buk anti-aircraft missile, which led to the deaths of all 278 passengers and 15 crew aboard. This happened less than a week after Bellingcat had been formed as the organisation it is today. The network of colleagues and friends had adopted the name from the fable about the mice tracking the predatory cat by tying a bell to his collar while he slept – hence the expression ‘belling the cat.’
By combing through reports and video footage from the ground, Bellingcat established that Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur had been shot down by a missile from the ground in an area held by pro-Russian separatists. Russian state media began a bombardment of misleading information suggesting that the passenger plane – a Boeing 777 – had been shot down by a fighter of the Ukrainian air force. It became clear that the missile had been shot from a Buk multi-missile launcher – which the Russians, the Ukrainians, Belarus and the Finns all had in their armies. By an amazing piece of internet sleuthing, Bellingcat established that the day before a single Buk launcher had been brought across the Russian border and had been seen on the outskirts of a town called Snizhne in the separatist enclave of Donetsk. It had come from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russia army. Exactly where it was headed and where it was when the plane was downed at 4.00pm on the afternoon of 17 July was hard to establish. However, images eventually emerged of single vertical vapour trail – such as a rocket would emit – and a photo of a missile battery returning through the Snizhne area minus one of its four projectiles. That night the battery and its carrier were loaded on a truck, and smuggled back across the border into Russia.
It was an astonishing piece of detection. Later the agency managed to establish who was in charge of the battery, and the chain of command that gave the order for it to be deployed – which led directly back to Putin’s Kremlin. The same investigation also established that the Russian network on the ground in Donetsk was commanded by an officer called Ivan Strelkov, known as Igor Girkin – something of a homemade folk hero with his own fan page on local social media. He was part of a team of Russian army, special forces and intelligence operatives – a clear sign that the separatist war had direction from Moscow, despite vehement denials.
With the Malaysian airliner case, the rules and methods of Bellingcat were established. They were based on geolocation through tracking tools like Google Earth, and hosts of information sites and social media platforms. The second stage was establishing a chronology of events based on proven facts and evidence. The third element is analysis and setting the context for final reporting and presentation in video, social chat room, books and online publications.
Higgins says this differs from what traditional reporters aim at and achieve. Geolocation methods can see much further than a reporter in a battleground; the whole terrain and who is occupying it can be seen – all sides of the battle space, friend and foe. Journalists tend to be secretive and competitive, wary of being scooped by colleagues. Bellingcat, he says, are prepared to share with almost everybody. At times the generalisation about the world of reporting, and raw real world news, edge towards naïve. His view of reporters is similar that of Nicholas Taleb’s sweeping statements about journalists in his “Black Swan” essay, also the work of a self-proclaimed groundbreaker. In both cases it’s pretty clear that they don’t have close acquaintance with reporting first hand from the chaos of the theatre of action, and the scene of the crime.
Journalists do work together in tight spots – there is rivalry, true, but a lot of trust and camaraderie. Reporters have to interpret, analyse and compile – to say what being there is like for humans rather than machines. They also have to work out what witnesses are not saying as well as what they are, the silences often counting more than the words.
That said, Bellingcat is a brilliant new ally and true friend of the reporting world. It believes in real facts, and telling it how it is. Its achievements in debunking the mythmakers and conspiracists of the parallel worlds of the internet have been astonishing. In Syria it has debunked the myths and counterfactuals claiming that the most serious chemical attacks on Ghouta in August 2013 and Douma in April 2018, were not the work of Assad’s military. When between 40 and 50 villagers – the UN is still unsure of the final toll – were killed at Douma outside Damascus, some prominent members of the western media, including Robert Fisk of the Independent suggested that it was a put up job instigated by the British Intelligence agencies so the rebels could smear the Assad regime with a classic ‘false flag’ operation. The Pulitzer prize winner Seymour Hersh had suggested that several attacks were by Al Qaeda, and not the regime – hinting darkly that the rebels ‘had mastered the manufacture of sarin’, which was used at Ghouta.
Bellingcat showed that at Douma in 2018 chlorine had been released from barrel bombs – with dents in the containers from the impact of being dropped by helicopters flying in at altitudes of only a few hundred metres. They could not have been trundled in on the ground to be placed in upper stories of the houses – a huge government artillery bombardment ensuing at the time – as Fisk claimed.
As Bruno Macaes suggested, the agency has a very strong suit in facial recognition. Faces were identified in the militant right demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia on 12 August 2017. It was supposed to the ‘Fascists’ coming out party’, one wit commented, as Nazi and Ku Klux Klan emblems were on display. Though the march was thwarted and violently broken up, some of its leaders went on to head new groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and Anti-Communist Action. Though their first internet platforms, assiduously tracked by Bellingcat, were banned, many of the militant racist right moved on to colonise a site called 8chan.
This achieved a global audience. In March 2019, a lone gunman murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch New Zealand, and injured 40 more. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern refused to name the perpetrator in public, so as not to gratify his urge for publicity. Bellingcat quickly identified him as an adherent of 8chan. He posted a genocidal manifesto – ‘The Great Replacement Manifesto’ – claiming that all white races were under attack – on the site just hours before his maniacal attack.
It will be interesting to read the Bellingcat identification and analysis of the mob storming the Capitol on 6 January this year – who was there and why, despite the social platform smoke screens and denials. They have continued on the Novichok trail, too, moving to identify the FSB (former KGB) agents involved in putting Novichok in the underwear – and possibly a cup of tea – of Alexei Navalny when he was campaigning near Omsk last summer.
As Eliot Higgins suggests, the Bellingcat initiative is a partner, not rival, for good journalism. It organises workshops and media awareness seminars, especially on understanding and interpreting social media and its more questionable activities and value system. He has funds now, from crowd sourcing and benefactors.
It hugely enhances reporting from the ground, but cannot replace the view and interpretation of the reporter in the field – still vital interlocutors of news in the real world.
The principles of empirical, inductive reporting, laid down so brilliantly by Daniel Defoe three centuries ago, remain. Defoe, history’s top pamphleteering troublemaker, based his ideas on the notion of empirical study of nature and fact that became the underpinning principle and the founding ethos of the Royal Society. Defoe’s account of the great storm of November 1703 compiled from dozens of first-hand accounts of a cyclone which took more than 8,000 lives is one of the first great works of modern reportage. It is a down to earth empirical process.
In the preface to The Storm he lays out his standard for testing the veracity of his sources – some of which he knew were pretty dodgy. ‘I cannot but own,’ he confesses ‘‘Tis just, that if I tell a story in Print for a Truth which proves otherwise, unless I, at the same time, give proper Caution to the Reader, by owning Uncertainty of my Knowledge in the matter of fact, ‘tis I impose upon the World: my Relater is innocent, and the Lye is my own.’ In other words, he is owning up – admitting he alone is responsible for testing the evidence and its accuracy.
In this Daniel Defoe and Eliot Higgins are kindred spirits. Like Defoe in 1703, Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat have far to go and a lot do. Long may he and Bellingcat and all they stand for, continue to thrive.
We Are Bellingcat – An Intelligence Agency for the People, by Eliot Higgins