In the last 48 hours questions have been raised regarding the Netherlands-based investigative journalist group Bellingcat’s connection to intelligence agencies.
The questions arise after Bellingcat journalist Aric Toler allegedly discovered Allen, Texas mall shooter Mauricio Garcia’s Russian social media account.
Seen below:
CEO of Tesla Elon Musk even raised questions about Bellingcat’s shadiness and tweeted “Didn’t the story come from Bellingcat, which literally specializes in psychological operations?”.
The founder of Bellingcat is Eliot Higgins.
In 2021 The CIA did a review of Higgins book titled “We Are Bellingcat”.
Just take a look:
Google CIA and Bellingcat and this will show up:
Here’s an excerpt of the review:
One place where Higgins is wrong, however, is in his assertion that his “intelligence service for the people” is a new, exciting creation. In fact, it looks more like he is replicating a traditional intelligence service. Higgins notes several times, for example, that Bellingcat relies on collaboration by ordinary citizens. As he identifies these partners, though, it becomes clear that not all of Bellingcat’s contributors are as ordinary as he sug- gests—a former Stasi analyst, a professor of visual com- puting, experts in various types of weapons, and people with the skill and patience to spend days searching for information—but, instead, sound a lot like the types of specialists long found at CIA and other traditional state services. Moreover, his description of finding people in Russia who are willing to sell specific bits of information sounds like traditional targeting and recruitment, and the thoroughness of Bellingcat’s searches of social media and the most obscure corners of the web would make our own open-source analysts proud. Finally, Higgins’s discussion of threats to Bellingcat’s people and computer systems leaves one wondering how long it will be before he sets up his own security and counterintelligence apparatus.
At the end of the review it says the reviewer was a CIA Directorate of Analysis.
In 2018 The Moscow Times claimed Bellingcat has intelligence connections too:
“It’s no secret to anyone, Western journalists write openly that Bellingcat is connected to special services,” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with Euronews on Tuesday.
“They leak information through it to have some effect on public opinion,” he said.
Unclassified UK previously reported Bellingcat received money from the National Endowment of democracy which has received money from US Congress.
Per Unclassified UK:
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-profit corporation funded by the US Congress, has ploughed over £2.6m into seven British independent media groups over the past five years.
The NED was “created…to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades”, the New York Times reported in 1997. That included spending millions of dollars to “support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries.”
Since the end of the Cold War, the NED has grown and been involved in trying to undermine or remove governments independent of Washington, including democratic ones in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
Allen Weinstein, the director of the research study that led to creation of the NED in the 1980s, remarked in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The NED has traditionally focused on Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. But Declassified has found that the organisation has recently funded three British media outlets and four UK press freedom groups. All are seen as on the progressive end of the political spectrum.
NED money has gone to UK investigative groups Bellingcat, Finance Uncovered and openDemocracy, as well as media freedom and training organisations Index on Censorship, Article 19, the Media Legal Defence Initiative, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
If that wasn’t enough shadiness about Bellingcat, then there’s always this too:
