We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins review – the reinvention of reporting for the internet age

In this gripping manifesto, the citizen journalist who uncovered the identities of the Salisbury assassins sets out his optimistic vision for news gathering in the 21st century

In July 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine. Why? In pre-digital times it would have taken weeks or months to get an answer. These days, the truth can be found at warp speed. A former office worker, Eliot Higgins, saw a post on YouTube of a Buk missile launcher trundling down a street. “Gold star sticker to the first person who geo-locates this video,” he tweeted.

Seven minutes later one of Higgins’s followers solved the mystery. They suggested the Buk had gone through Snizhne in eastern Ukraine, a town under the control of pro-Moscow rebels. Higgins looked at the clues – a two-lane road, three distinct trees, red roof. He pulled up Google Earth. It matched. The launcher was going south. The question now was where had the Buk come from, and which state had fired it at MH17?

What followed was a 21st-century sleuth drama. It pitted Higgins’s newbie investigative outfit, Bellingcat, against the mighty Kremlin and its spy agencies. There wasn’t much of a contest. Higgins’s army of online amateur detectives tracked the Buk to the 53rd brigade, a military unit based in the Russian city of Kursk. It had travelled into Ukraine in a convoy. It left in the dead of night, minus one missile.

We Are Bellingcat is Higgins’s gripping account of how he reinvented reporting for the internet age. The book was finished before his latest scoop. In December, Bellingcat outed the kill-team behind the novichok poisoning last summer of Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s number one critic. The investigation helped galvanise street protests on 23 January across Russia, following Navalny’s courageous return to Moscow and inevitable arrest.

Higgins’s own story is an improbable one, shaped by good timing and grit. A media studies dropout and avid gamer, he found he had time on his hands as the Arab spring kicked off, and after the birth of his baby daughter. Higgins began posting on the Guardian’s Middle East blog, as “Brown Moses”. He realised it was possible to establish from your sofa what was going on in a faraway war zone, in Libya or Syria. The material was out there: YouTube videos, Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram – a galaxy of images and text tossed out via social media. By sifting, discoveries could be made. Higgins became an expert on weapons. He found collaborators. Bellingcat developed a credo: look for public evidence, cite sources, collaborate. An open model, in contrast to tabloid chicanery.

This transparent method has had remarkable success. Bellingcat has uncovered war crimes in Syria and unmasked neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville. In 2018 it winkled out the real identities of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the two GRU assassins who went to Salisbury to snuff out Sergei Skripal. (The pair claimed they were merely sightseers who had come to see the Cathedral spire.)

Bellingcat’s rise reveals something new about our digitally mediated times: spying is no longer the preserve of nation states – anyone with an internet connection can do it. The balance between open and secret intelligence is shifting. The most useful stuff is often public. Bellingcat, you suspect, knows more than the suits of MI6; certainly, it’s nimbler. “An intelligence agency for the people,” as Higgins’s subtitle puts it.

The book – written with the novelist and journalist Tom Rachman – is also a manifesto for optimism in a dark age. It argues that “cyber-miserabilism” – the doomy belief that big tech and bad actors have permanently screwed our democracy – is wrong. Instead, Higgins hails the internet as an “extraordinary gift”. In his view, facts still matter, accountability is possible, and people still care about the difference between truth and lies.

In a recent BBC interview Barack Obama complained that conspiracy theories turbocharged by social media had fuelled America’s bitter political divisions. The era was suffering from a bad case of what Obama called “truth decay”. After Trump and Brexit, We Are Bellingcat offers a route out of our current epistemological crisis. Higgins’s answer: a bracing restatement of empirical values and good method.

The book blasts what Higgins calls the “Counterfactual Community” – the leaderless network of conspiracy mongers and state bloggers who swap disinformation. Favourite topics are the White Helmets – the group of volunteer rescuers in Syria – and the “dangers” of the Covid-19 vaccine. “Their practice is to begin with a conclusion, skip verification, and to shout down contradictory facts,” Higgins observes.

This evidence-denying community has some strange ideological allies. There is the far left: tough on imperialism, so long as the west and the US is the aggressor. Aligned with it is the “alt-right”, Higgins says. Both groups are pro-Assad and pro-Putin. Their views are expressed on alternative media outlets and via government propaganda channels such as RT, the Kremlin’s TV wing – and Bellingcat’s most vocal critic.

Higgins devotes several pages to the chemical weapons strike in 2013 on the eastern suburbs of Damascus. Geolocation tools showed a Syrian military base had fired the rocket. The veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, however, blamed the poison gas on jihadi rebels. Higgins describes Hersh’s piece for the London Review of Books as an “embarrassing muddle”. It “posed questions I’d already answered”, he writes.

The Bellingcat approach goes well beyond traditional journalism. Its volunteers have compiled an archive from the decade-long war in Syria, featuring 3.5m pieces of digital content. This has been preserved to assist future war crimes prosecutions. Dates and metadata are carefully recorded. Bellingcat has assisted Dutch prosecutors, who have charged several Russians with murdering those on board MH17.

Higgins thinks traditional news outlets need to establish their own open source investigation teams or miss out. He’s right. Several have done so. The New York Times has recruited ex-Bellingcat staff. Higgins approves of this. In his view, rivalry between media titles is a thing of the past. The future is collaboration, the hunt for evidence a shared endeavour, the truth out there if we wish to discover it.

Luke Harding’s latest book, Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West, is published by Guardian Faber

We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People by Eliot Higgins is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

• Eliot Higgins will talk about the founding of Bellingcat at a Guardian Live online event on Wednesday 3 February

Contributor

Luke Harding

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Reporter: A Memoir by Seymour Hersh – review
US journalist Seymour Hersh recounts in fine detail the stories that made him, from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib

Rachel Cooke

10, Jun, 2018 @6:00 AM

Article image
The Vanity Fair Diaries review – Tina Brown’s supreme balancing act
Brown’s record of her years as editor of the magazine in the 80s is both enthralling and terrifying

Peter Conrad

19, Nov, 2017 @6:30 AM

Article image
The Power and the Story: The Global Battle for News and Information – review
John Lloyd’s thorough survey of the state of the free press is a timely reminder of how vital it is to democracy

Peter Preston

13, Aug, 2017 @6:00 AM

Article image
Eliot Higgins: 'People accuse me of working for the CIA'
The founder of the online investigative collective Bellingcat talks about working with Alexei Navalny, open source reporting and the trouble with ‘cyber-miserablism’

Luke Harding

20, Feb, 2021 @6:00 PM

Article image
The Story of the Face by Paul Gorman review – the original purveyor of cool
Revolutionary style bible the Face deserves a more spirited history

Ekow Eshun

11, Dec, 2017 @7:00 AM

Article image
News and How to Use It by Alan Rusbridger review – an insider's appeal to sceptics
The former Guardian editor’s insights into journalism and how it must regain the public’s trust are perceptive and reflect a chaotic and messy business

John Naughton

24, Nov, 2020 @7:00 AM

Article image
Ctrl Alt Delete: How Politics and the Media Crashed Our Democracy – review
Tom Baldwin’s account of the abusive relationship with the truth in media and politics is lucid, punchy and often funny

Andrew Rawnsley

23, Jul, 2018 @6:00 AM

Article image
War Diary of the Ukrainian Resistance review – extremely loud and incredibly close
The young reporters at the Kyiv Independent – Ukraine’s fledgling online English-language newspaper – have produced courageous journalism of frightening urgency

Jonathan Heawood

28, Feb, 2023 @7:00 AM

Article image
Barton Gellman: ‘The Assange precedent is dangerous’
The US journalist talks about being hacked by intelligence services, his dealings with whistleblower Edward Snowden, and why he loves detective fiction

Andrew Anthony

23, May, 2020 @5:00 PM

Article image
Retroland by Peter Kemp review – an author preoccupied with his past
The veteran Sunday Times critic’s survey of 50 years of British fiction rattles through titles, authors and genres, but often at the expense of insight

Anthony Cummins

11, Jul, 2023 @6:00 AM