- Date:
- 2014 - present
- Areas Of Involvement:
- journalism
- investigative reporting
Bellingcat
What is Bellingcat known for?
Who founded Bellingcat?
What criticism has Bellingcat faced?
Bellingcat is a Netherlands-based journalism organization that specializes in open-source investigations. Though it started as a mostly volunteer operation, by the mid-2020s it had more than 30 staffers and has contributors in more than 20 countries. Much of its published work focuses on war crimes and human rights abuses. Several of its biggest scoops have been stories that implicate the Russian government in wrongdoing, including the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014 and the 2020 poisoning of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
Origins and investigations
Bellingcat’s founder is Eliot Higgins, a former finance worker from England. In the early 2010s Higgins used materials he found online, including video footage shot by citizen journalists (which was available on YouTube), to assess the flow of weapons that were being used in the ongoing Syrian conflict. His findings, which he reported on his blog, were picked up by international news outlets and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). An example of Higgins’s early work was a post he did in 2013 that reported that Syrian rebels were using Croatian guns, an apparent sign that international actors were covertly arming the opposition during the Syrian Civil War.
Bellingcat gets its name from an Aesop’s fable, in which a group of mice decide the best way to save themselves from their nemesis the cat is to put a bell around its neck that would alert them to its presence. But no mouse is willing to “bell the cat.” As Aesop noted, “It is one thing to say that something should be done, but quite a different matter to do it.”
In 2014 Higgins partnered with others he knew online to establish Bellingcat and scale up his investigations. In an early high-profile investigation the group used photos, video, and public documents to show that Malaysia Airlines flight 17—the plane that crashed in eastern Ukraine in July 2014—had been apparently shot down by a Russian missile, fired from an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists. The Dutch government, building on Bellingcat’s findings, later charged 4 men with the murder of the 298 people on the plane who were killed in the crash.
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Higgins also continued to report on the Syrian Civil War. Bellingcat published evidence that Russia had bombed a mosque and a hospital in the country and had used cluster munitions on a rebel group that was backed by the United States. In 2018 Bellingcat investigated the bombing of a wedding in Yemen, where 22 civilians, including 8 children, were killed. Saudi Arabia led the airstrike, but Bellingcat’s researchers demonstrated that the bomb had been manufactured by the Massachusetts-based company Raytheon.
Not all Bellingcat investigations involve the most high-tech or secret information. Bellingcat tracked down the activities of a notorious Irish drug lord through Google reviews of restaurants at which he was eating. “We were able to track his movements and use photographs that he posted and that other people posted at the same time to show who he was meeting with and extract details from that,” Higgins told Vox, Radboud University’s magazine, in 2024.
At first, Higgins supported the site with donations he received through Kickstarter and by teaching workshops on how to conduct open-source investigations for other journalistic organizations. He kept the overhead low and relied heavily on the contributions of volunteers. But as Bellingcat’s profile rose, it started receiving grants from charitable organizations and other sources.
In 2018 the site published evidence that two Russian men were responsible for the near-fatal poisoning of the former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. It identified both suspects as part of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, affiliations they denied. And in 2020 Bellingcat published evidence suggesting that Russia’s Federal Security Service was involved in the near-fatal Novichok poisoning of the dissident Alexei Navalny. In response, the Russian government has repeatedly claimed that Bellingcat has ties to Western intelligence. In the case of the Skripal poisoning, it noted that Bellingcat had access to a Russian database that was not publicly available.
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Bellingcat’s members told NPR in 2018 that they had never cooperated with, or received leaked materials from, any security services. One Bellingcat member said the group did receive anonymous tips but always tried to verify them independently so “we’re not being taken for a ride by some spooks.” Another member pointed out that Bellingcat had reported on air strikes the United States had carried out in Syria—evidence that it was not working on the U.S. government’s behalf.
Praise and criticism
Some left-leaning journalism groups in the United States also have been critical of how Bellingcat operates. They have pointed out that in its official reports, Bellingcat has acknowledged receiving funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, an NGO that is funded principally by Congress and has been accused of involvement in various regime changes around the world. Bellingcat’s critics have also pointed out that some of the group’s contributors are veterans of U.S. and European military and intelligence agencies.
Whether the work is funded by the U.S. government, federal officials see an upside to their investigations. Foreign Policy reported that U.S. government officials considered Bellingcat invaluable. “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this,” the CIA’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Asia told Foreign Policy. The article said Bellingcat had “enabled U.S. officials and lawmakers to discuss Moscow’s skullduggery openly without revealing the sources and methods of the U.S. intelligence agencies.”
Many conventional journalism outlets have also praised Bellingcat’s work, and it has won numerous awards normally dominated by more traditional outlets, including several Edward R. Murrow Awards and Online Journalism Awards. Additionally its journalists have been featured on news programs including 60 Minutes and in the Academy Award-winning documentary Navalny (2022). Muhammad Idrees Ahmad argued in the New York Review of Books that the rise of open-source reporting methods had encouraged “greater resourcefulness and rigor even among traditional journalists.” And the Poynter Institute and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism have recommended Bellingcat’s digital guides.
The New Yorker has also praised the transparency of the group’s methods. The magazine pointed out that in Bellingcat’s report on the Malaysia Airlines plane, for instance, all the video, images, and other sources were displayed for readers. “There are no leaks or secret sources,” it said. “It’s a rare form of journalistic investigation, in that the audience’s trust isn’t strictly required. Tech-savvy readers can corroborate everything for themselves.”