Eliot Higgins is the brains behind the investigation agency Bellingcat. How does he uncover crimes when national security services fail?
Colin Farrell, Bill Nighy and Paul Mescal are among the nominees for best actor at the Academy Awards later this month, but really the Oscar should go to Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader.
Navalny gave such an accomplished performance as an aide to a top security official that he duped one of the thugs who allegedly tried to kill him. The hapless scientist was so convinced by Navalny’s impersonation of a security apparatchik that he confessed how they had spread novichok on his underpants.
The sensational telephone call is the dramatic heart of the film Navalny, which won best documentary at the Baftas last month and is shortlisted at the Oscars.
Navalny himself won’t be at the Academy Awards, because he is incarcerated in a Russian penal colony east of Moscow. But he may take some grim satisfaction from hearing, in messages from his team (he hasn’t been allowed a visit in months), how the awards season is bringing more attention to a film that must have infuriated President Putin.
The exposé of the team that tracked and poisoned but failed to kill Navalny was the work of Bellingcat, the group of journalists and investigators founded by Eliot Higgins, a media studies dropout, from his home in Leicester. Bellingcat’s pioneering use of open-source investigation techniques had earlier revealed the identity of the GRU agents — military intelligence — who were behind the Salisbury poisonings.
Christo Grozev, Bellingcat’s lead Russia investigator, was in the room when Navalny called several of the Federal Security Service (FSB) team very early on a December morning in 2020. Higgins was in constant touch with Grozev as Navalny confronted members of the team that had targeted him. Grozev had discovered that they tracked the opposition leader for three years before poisoning him.
Reflecting on the calls now, two years later, Higgins says that they had no expectation that any of the FSB team would speak to them. “We thought we’d call, they’d hang up and we would have some fun clips. We didn’t think they would spend any time talking to him.”
Fortunately, Daniel Roher, the director of what would turn into a feature documentary, was in the room filming. The documentary explains how Navalny worked as a lawyer and became an anti-corruption campaigner and leader of the Russia of the Future party. With his mocking presenting style, he drew six million subscribers to his YouTube channel, where he poured scorn on Putin.
Eventually, in August 2020, Putin had clearly had enough and the FSB — the successor to the KGB — closed in while Navalny was on a trip to Siberia.
Navalny started feeling very ill on a flight to Moscow. Mobile phone footage captures his howls of agony and his removal from the plane after it made an emergency landing in order for paramedics to whisk him to hospital. A human rights group sent a plane to fly him to Germany, where he recovered.
In January 2021 he made the astonishingly brave decision to return to Moscow, where he was arrested. Now 46, he has been in jail ever since, much of the time in solitary confinement, and his health is reported to be deteriorating.
Before he returned to Russia, however, he was approached by Grozev with his findings that an FSB team had covertly shadowed Navalny around the country as he made public appearances. As they prepared to reveal what they had found, they decided to make some calls to the FSB team. Most hung up straight away when Navalny identified himself. But then he started pretending to be an official investigating what had gone wrong with the assassination attempt.
Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a military chemist, was duped into spilling the beans. He said that the operation might not have failed if the plane had been in the air longer, rather than diverting to a hospital. Unaware that he was really talking to Navalny, he revealed that he had been part of a team that had gone to retrieve and clean up Navalny’s clothes when he was at the hospital and that the highest concentration of the nerve agent was on the crotch area of his underpants.
The unflappable Navalny kept the scientist talking for 49 minutes. “It was a great performance,” says Higgins. “He’s so cool and collected. He asks all the right questions.”
That afternoon Bellingcat revealed its painstaking investigation into the identities of the hit squad but decided not to disclose the phone call just yet. A few days later, Putin held a press conference and claimed that while the security services needed to keep an eye on Navalny, whom he would not name, there was no need to poison him. Unaware of what Bellingcat had up its sleeve, he added what he presumably thought was a chilling boast about his security services’ potency. If they had wanted to poison him, he suggested with a glib laugh, “they would have probably finished the job”. Bellingcat then released the tape of the incriminating phone call.
It is hard to overstate just how incensed Bellingcat’s digging appears to have made Putin. Last December, Grozev was put on Russia’s most wanted list, prompting Bulgaria, where he is from, to protest. “He got his lawyers in Russia to find out what it was for and the authorities came back to say there were no charges against him. He’s just on the wanted list, no official reason,” says Higgins.
Last month, Grozev said he had been warned by Austrian authorities not to return to his home in Vienna. A former Austrian security agent had leaked his personal details to the Russians, he said. He is now in the US.
“He’s left Europe. He’s been told it’s not safe for him to be here,” says Higgins. “It’s a very serious threat to Christo. It’s maddening you can’t live in Europe because Russia has such a reach inside Europe that it can threaten citizens. There seems to be nothing you can do, apart from tell the person to leave their home: ‘We can’t protect you any more because of Russia.’ "
Higgins says there is a problem with Russian agents moving around Europe once they are in the visa-free Schengen area. “They exploit it and target people and blow things up and try to murder people.”
Would Grozev have been safe in the UK? Higgins doubts he would be, referring to “an ongoing situation” that he can’t say any more about.
Higgins is in regular contact with the police about his own security, and they are aware of attempts to hack into Bellingcat’s data.
Before last month’s Baftas, Grozev said that he and his family had been told by the police that they could not attend the event because they represented a “public security risk”. The Met said in a statement that decisions about attendance were a matter for the hosts.
One of the film’s producers dedicated the award to Grozev, “our Bulgarian nerd with a laptop, who could not be with us tonight because his life is under threat by the Russian government and Vladimir Putin”.
It seems outrageous that someone who was key to creating an award-winning film cannot attend the ceremony in London with royal and countless A-list guests, because the authorities cannot guarantee safety if he does. Higgins is weary. “There’s really only so much that can be done against a state actor that’s willing to use a nerve agent on UK soil. Further protection would have to involve limiting the number of Russians coming to the UK, and having much stricter visa requirements.”
Now the focus is on whether Grozev will be welcome in Los Angeles. “He’s going through a lot,” says Higgins. “It’s frustrating, but hopefully it won’t impact the Oscars as well, because he’s hoping to be there.”
Winning the Oscar would generate a whole new level of publicity for Navalny and Bellingcat. “I don’t like to even hope that we will, because then I could be disappointed,” says Higgins. “I want people to realise this is more than just Navalny. This is about all these other political prisoners. We have discovered a clear programme of assassination targeting political figures in Russia. The Russian opposition is being murdered by Putin. We have all these people falling out of windows in Russia. How bad is Russian window technology that people keep falling out of them?”
Higgins, 44, shows little of the ego and desire for personal glory one usually expects in driven investigative reporters, sleuths or spies. So when I first spoke to him last year and he said anyone could do his work, that Google was the most important tool of an open-source investigator, I thought that was just him being modest. But after reading his book, We Are Bellingcat, it became clear that the basic gathering of open-source intelligence is not complicated. Bellingcat and its legion of volunteers hunt suspected spies and examine incidents in war zones by watching YouTube videos and social media clips and then scouring satellite images and Google Street View to pinpoint where the images were taken and to establish what they are showing. The painstaking work requires many hours and many people.
However, Bellingcat’s biggest scoops have involved a different level of sophistication and know-how and a willingness to explore areas of the cyberworld unfamiliar to most of us. Its unmasking of the Skripal poisoners and the FSB gang who pursued Navalny involved probiv, the Russian term for buying personal data from those who are willing to sell. Russia is so corrupt that many are willing to do so, but Higgins says they thought carefully before each transaction they undertook. Their results certainly gave them a public interest defence.
“Russia is a unique case, because it’s so endemically corrupt. It’s not like [the information] was hard to find. It’s on the edge of being open source, by nature of being so easy to access if you know the right websites.”
The Skripal case brought Bellingcat to the attention of the wider public. In March 2018 the Russian defector and former double agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter nearly died when novichok was smeared on the door of his home in Salisbury. Dawn Sturgess, who was unrelated to the intended victims, died when she came into contact with a discarded perfume bottle containing the nerve agent.
Six months later, police issued pictures of two Russian men who were in Salisbury at the time of the poisoning. In Russia they gave a farcical interview claiming they had merely been visiting the famous cathedral. Bellingcat got to work and within days had identified the men as a GRU colonel and a military doctor. They obtained airline manifests and government identity documents but also trawled military academy websites until they found a picture of one of the men under a different name.
The Kremlin regularly denounces Bellingcat as a tool of western intelligence agencies, but the reality seems to be more remarkable: it established what was going on before our own intelligence services. Does he think that our spooks were not looking in the same places as his team? “I don’t know. It kind of feels like they didn’t,” says Higgins. When Bellingcat revealed the true identity of a Russian hitman who shot dead a Chechen dissident after cycling up behind him in a Berlin park, the intelligence services appeared to have their hands tied. “We got the impression the German intelligence services couldn’t actually do what we had done because of the restrictions in Germany.”
How bad is Russian window technology that people keep falling out of them?
When Grozev and his colleagues later came to hunt Navalny’s poisoners, they used black market sources again to access travel records and phone data to construct a picture of a team of FSB agents following Navalny around the country. Along the way, they discovered the pattern the Russian intelligence service used for creating fake identities: real first name; surname of the operative’s wife or girlfriend; real birthday but out by a year either way.
One can imagine the fate of those agents once their cover was blown, especially the garrulous Konstantin Kudryavtsev. “Vanished. We can only assume the worst for him,” says Higgins. “I don’t feel bad about it.” The travel histories of the hit squad subsequently implicated them in other suspicious deaths.
In Russia there has been some tightening up of procedures. Attempts to obtain an FSB officer’s information are likely to set alarm bells ringing and lead to a knock on the door for whoever is trying to access the information. But Higgins says there is plenty of scope still for their investigations. The authorities can’t keep tabs on everyone they might inquire into.
Intimidation of Bellingcat by Putin’s henchmen takes a variety of forms and Higgins has endured a personal legal onslaught from Yevgeny Prigozhin, the tycoon known as “Putin’s chef”, who is head of the Wagner Group, the notorious mercenary outfit that has been sending prisoners to the front line in Ukraine as cannon fodder.
Prigozhin, a former convict, hot dog salesman and holder of lucrative state catering contracts, rose to become a pugnacious ally of the Kremlin, even if recently he has been talked about as a potential threat to Putin.
Today, Prigozhin revels in his role at Wagner, but in 2021 Higgins received a letter from a British law firm saying he was being sued personally over articles linking Prigozhin to the mercenary group. The experience was “really, really stressful” and left Bellingcat with £70,000 (NZ$149,380) of costs, even though the UK firm, Discreet Law, stopped working for Prigozhin after the invasion of Ukraine and the legal action was dismissed.
Earlier this year it emerged that the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation had granted a licence to allow Prigozhin to get around sanctions imposed in 2020 and instruct Discreet Law to sue Higgins. The revelation caused outrage across the political spectrum and the Treasury said it would review the process.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority said there were concerns about solicitors making meritless claims on behalf of oligarchs who sought to stifle discourse about corruption or money laundering. The regulator is investigating the Prigozhin case in response to a complaint from Higgins’ lawyers that this was an obvious case of strategic litigation against public participation. Such cases, known as Slapps, are classed as threats of legal action that aim to stop journalists and whistleblowers from investigating allegations of wrongdoing. Higgins is frustrated that it has taken the regulator months to respond to his complaint.
Roger Gherson, the founder of Discreet Law, told the Financial Times that the company had “at all times complied fully with their legal and professional obligations”, and the Treasury said that everyone has a right to legal representation. “They can dress it up as ‘everyone needs representation’, but you don’t have to volunteer to represent the worst people in the world,” says Higgins.
Prigozhin is not the only Russian billionaire Bellingcat has encountered. A few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine last year, Grozev was mixed up in the extraordinary story of an apparent poisoning of Roman Abramovich and members of the Ukrainian team of peace negotiators.
People don’t believe it, because it seems so far-fetched. But we lived through it.
When some of the Ukrainian team fell ill, they approached Grozev because of his knowledge of chemical poisonings.
He arranged for the sick negotiators to see doctors and was astonished when Abramovich, who had been acting as a go-between, also turned up feeling unwell. The victims had symptoms that included eye and skin inflammation, but recovered. Officials on both the Russian and Ukrainian side denied a poisoning had been attempted, which Higgins attributes to concerns at the time that it would scupper negotiations.
Bellingcat hoped to get to the bottom of what had happened, but this time was not able to solve the mystery. “I think everyone involved wanted it to go away. The negotiators didn’t want to cause problems in the negotiations.” They were unable to establish what had been used to poison them or where it had taken place. “They were poisoned for sure. We had their apartment stripped of items and tested but nothing came out of there. So we don’t know where they were poisoned. People don’t believe it, because it seems so far-fetched. But we lived through it.”
Higgins was born in Shrewsbury and because his father was an RAF engineer, the family moved around the county when he was a boy. He was shy and introverted, which is hard to believe now as he poses, relaxed and confident, during the photoshoot at an east London studio, and then talks animatedly — and nonstop — for 90 minutes.
He found school “really difficult”, dropped out of a media studies course at Southampton Institute of Higher Education and was rejected from journalist training programmes. “I may have had ADHD when I was younger, but the hyper focus one, which means that you just focus on one thing and everything else falls away. I could never engage with homework or lessons, but I could spend hours and hours playing games.”
He was hooked on World of Warcraft and its big online community. “I would go to work, come home, play for six, seven hours, go to bed. That was my life. But then when I got rid of that, I filled the gap with investigation.” He credits meeting his wife with the switch away from gaming. “Even I realised that a marriage cannot survive online role-playing games.”
International affairs, especially the Arab Spring, became his new passion. He was working in various administrative jobs in Leicester that he did not particularly enjoy, including for a lingerie company, and would get into work early to log in to online communities that examined news events.
His obsessive nature once more came in handy as he started examining video clips from war zones. “Doing this kind of investigative work, that’s what you need: to be able to just focus entirely on one thing and obsess about it. ‘I’ve got this video. I need to find out every single thing about it.’ "
Higgins stumbled across geolocation, which he calls “the first technique of the digital detective”. He looked for landmarks in YouTube videos of the war in Libya and then used Google Maps and Street View to pinpoint where they were shot. He started posting on message boards and blogging about his discoveries. News organisations followed up when he identified weapons from Croatia being used by jihadis in Syria and highlighted the use of chemical weapons by the regime. His big breakthrough came when he identified the Russian vehicle that fired the missile that downed the passenger flight Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014.
That year he founded Bellingcat, named after the fable about mice wanting to put a bell on a cat, so they would be warned of its approach. In We Are Bellingcat, he describes the group as “an intelligence agency for the people”.
It now has an office in the Netherlands and around 30 staff, but it still relies on a legion of volunteer contributors. Much of the work is incredibly time-consuming, requiring countless hours of trawling the internet.
The community of online obsessives who are eager to try to uncover new things are a vital resource. More than 6000 people have done Bellingcat training courses. The courses provide around a third of Bellingcat’s funding; the majority of the rest comes from foundations and large donations, with some from crowdfunding.
A major part of the work involves studying and storing video clips in the hope that perpetrators of war crimes can be brought to account. The team is increasingly aware of the effect of deep immersion in such material. “That kind of content can have a really distressing impact on people,” says Higgins. Staff are given training to understand “vicarious trauma” and Bellingcat employs a counselling service.
Higgins has set himself a target of not looking at his phone before 9am and after 6pm and has been taking time to learn the piano. This timetable had to become more flexible again with the threats posed to Grozev and his colleague’s need to base himself across the Atlantic.
The reason I launched Bellingcat was to get more people doing this stuff and making the evidence useful.
Higgins and his wife are incredibly strict about screen time for their two children. His 11-year-old daughter is not allowed to have a smartphone, and she and her brother, 8, have no screen time, including television, during the week and just 20 minutes a day at the weekend. “People look at me like I’m mad when I say that.”
Higgins is a busy man. He was invited to the Baftas but didn’t go because he had “other things on my plate”. These days his role at Bellingcat is more about strategy than hard sleuthing. “The goal of Bellingcat is really similar to what it’s always been: spreading the use of open-source investigation.” He would like to see Bellingcat methods being used to monitor illegal activity in the Amazon and uncover stories in Africa. A project to better archive videos and make them searchable by location is a priority. This would enable all investigators to access useful material when holding war criminals to account. “The reason I launched Bellingcat was to get more people doing this stuff and making the evidence useful.”
He has ambitions for an education project in the UK that would teach open-source investigation in schools, which he believes would give kids the tools to better understand issues themselves and not be seduced by misinformation, conspiracy theories and fringe movements. “You’ve got to give people a way to actually feel that they matter; that they have power.”
The techniques used by Bellingcat investigators can be applied to all sorts of situations, says Higgins, and he tells the story of how the team reunited a dog owner with her pet after it was snatched off the street. The police could not identify the thief’s car from a two-second snippet of CCTV footage, but a graphics expert who had identified military vehicles implicated in the shooting down of MH17 was able to enhance the image enough to read the car number plate. The police linked it to an address and found the pup.
Higgins is currently focused on making a documentary on Russian assassination attempts and admits to slight regret at turning down the offer of an executive producer credit on Navalny.
A few years ago he was asked to join the advisory board of the International Criminal Court. Would he like to appear one day as a witness at a war crimes trial with Putin in the dock? “I think he’s more likely to fall out of a window himself or have a cup of tea or die of natural causes than be in any kind of courtroom.”
One aspiration is to see Navalny released. “I really just hope he survives long enough to see the outside of the prison. It feels like they’re slowly trying to kill him or drive him mad. And I honestly hope Putin isn’t around long enough for that to be the case.”
He has met Navalny’s wife, Yulia, but not him. “With our work I kind of like to compartmentalise things a bit, just for security reasons. Once you start talking to someone like Navalny and meeting them, who knows who is going to be following you home.”
Written by: Damian Whitworth
© The Times of London