# Bellingcat A Netherlands-based investigative-journalism collective, founded in **July 2014** by the British citizen-journalist **Eliot Higgins** (previously known for his "Brown Moses" blog on the Syrian war). Bellingcat pioneered the mainstream use of [[Open-Source Intelligence]] (OSINT) — reconstructing events from publicly available photos, videos, flight data, satellite imagery, and social-media traces — and turned a method once reserved for state intelligence agencies into a tool wielded by journalists, researchers, and volunteers. Higgins has described the group, half-jokingly, as "an intelligence agency for the people." ## Major investigations Bellingcat built its reputation on attribution work that embarrassed states, particularly Russia: - **MH17 (2014–)** — its first major project, done largely by unpaid volunteers, traced the Buk missile system that downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine back to a specific Russian military unit. - **Skripal poisoning (2018)** — Bellingcat publicly identified the [[GRU]] officers behind the [[Novichok]] attack on Sergei and [[Yulia Skripal]] in Salisbury, naming the operatives behind their cover identities. - **Navalny poisoning (2020)** — it identified the [[FSB]] team that trailed and poisoned [[Alexei Navalny]], work dramatized in the Oscar-winning documentary *Navalny*. - Ongoing documentation of the Russo-Ukrainian war, war crimes, and far-right networks. This record made Bellingcat, in one framing, "Russia's biggest nightmare" — and a standing target of Kremlin disinformation. ## The funding controversy Bellingcat is a recurring lightning rod, and the dispute over it is itself useful to this knowledge base. About half its budget comes from grants and donations — including, notably, from the U.S. government-funded **National Endowment for Democracy (NED)** — with the rest earned by running OSINT-training workshops. Critics across the spectrum (Kremlin state media, the anti-interventionist left such as *The Grayzone*, and parts of the populist right) cite the NED money and contributors' contacts with Western institutions to cast Bellingcat as an intelligence cut-out laundering "national-security-state talking points." Defenders counter that its methods are transparent and independently reproducible — anyone can check the work — regardless of who funds it. The credibility of the funding attack was not helped by Higgins himself: in 2016 he dismissed the claim of NED funding as a "ludicrous conspiracy theory," then acknowledged it the following year. ## Right-wing-KB relevance Bellingcat is the canonical case in this vault's [[Open-Source Intelligence]] coverage — the clearest example of OSINT as a *counter-power* against state impunity. It also sits at an instructive crossfire: the same outfit doing the most damaging anti-Kremlin attribution work is attacked, by Kremlin media and by segments of both the anti-war left and the populist right, as a Western-intelligence front. Tracking that pattern matters because "who funds the fact-checkers" is a standard delegitimization move, and Bellingcat is where the genuine question (funding ties) and the disinformation reflex (dismiss the findings *because* of the funding) are hardest to disentangle. The method's reproducibility is the usual test offered for separating the two. ## See Also - [[Open-Source Intelligence]] - [[Russian State Hacking Groups]] - [[Active Measures]] - [[Novichok]] - [[Disinformation Hub]]