Eliot Higgins - We Are Bellingcat

WE ARE BELLINGCAT

WE ARE
BELLINGCAT

Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News

ELIOT HIGGINS

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

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First published in 2021 in Great Britain

First published in the United States 2021

Copyright Eliot Higgins, 2021

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-730-3; eBook: 978-1-63557-731-0

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950711

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Contents

Government ministers hurried into an underground conference room in central London for the COBRA crisis-response meeting. A chemical weapons attack had taken place on British soil; it looked like an assassination attempt. The Skripals remained on ventilators in a hospital, pumped full of atropine, under sedation and under armed guard. Britain needed to respond. Suspicions turned to the Kremlin one victim had been a former colonel in Russian military intelligence who had worked as a double agent for the British. On 4 March 2018, he and his daughter were found slumped on a bench in the peaceful English city of Salisbury, both on the verge of death. Moscow denied responsibility.

Our colleagues say with pathos, with serious faces that, if this was done by Russia, then the response will be such that Russia will remember it forever, said Foreign Minister

Yet the Kremlin had been implicated in revenge poisonings before, notably in the case of Alexander Litvinenko, another former Russian intelligence officer who had defected to Britain and become a scathing critic of President Vladimir Putin. On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko met two former KGB agents at the Millennium Hotel in London. Later that night, he fell ill. Within weeks, he was dead of exposure to polonium-210.

By coincidence, the British defence lab that studies such poisons, Porton Down, happens to be a few miles outside Salisbury. Chemical-weapons experts there were urgently studying blood samples from the sixty-six-year-old Sergei Skripal and his thirty-three-year-old daughter, Yulia, trying to figure out what afflicted them. The results came back: Novichok A234, a nerve agent that the Soviet Union had developed in the 1970s and 1980s, back when Vladimir Putin was just an officer in the KGB. A smear on the skin could cause loss of vision, constricted breathing, incessant vomiting, convulsions, death. Intelligence analysts discovered that Russia had been intercepting communications between Skripal and his daughter before she flew from Moscow for a two-week holiday. Tracking Yulia, Russian operatives would have found her father.

Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country, Prime Minister

Russian state-funded news outlets spread conspiracy theories, alleging that Britain held the Skripals against their will. Also, if the nerve agent had been military-grade, why werent the victims dead? This was a contention with a double effect, spreading doubt and menace at once, as if to say Kremlin violence would not have failed. The British expelled twenty-three Russian diplomats,

At Bellingcat, we watched, awaiting a point of entry. Scattered around the globe, we are an online collective, investigating war crimes and picking apart disinformation, basing our findings on clues that are openly available on the internet in social-media postings, in leaked databases, in free satellite maps. Paradoxically, in this age of online disinformation, facts are easier to come by than ever. A core team of eighteen staffers works with scores of volunteers, producing reports seen by hundreds of thousands, including government officials, influential media figures, and policymakers. We have no agenda but we do have a credo: evidence exists and falsehoods exist, and people still care about the difference.

During the months after the attack, Sergei and Yulia Skripal recovered, but Scotland Yard struggled to solve the case. No surveillance cameras covered Sergei Skripals front door, which was the probable contamination site. Detectives gathered and watched 11,000 hours of local CCTV footage, pored over credit-card payments and studied mobile-phone usage in the area.

Six months after the Skripal attack, the police at last provided what we needed. Images showed two Russian men arriving at Gatwick Airport a couple of days before the poisoning, travelling together by train from London to Salisbury on consecutive days and lurking near the defectors home.Ruslan Boshirov. Scotland Yard hoped someone might recognise them. The Kremlin certainly did.

We know who they are, we have found them, Putin said. I hope they will turn up themselves and tell everything. This would be best for everyone. There is nothing special there, nothing criminal, I assure you. Well see in the near future.

The future comes fast when the president demands it: the following day, 13 September 2018, the two suspects materialised in an interview on the Kremlins international news channel, RT. On the Bellingcat internal chat forum we fired messages back and forth, transfixed by this broadcast. The two men proclaimed themselves innocent, merely two friends who had taken a last-minute holiday to Britain to admire a provincial cathedral. Petrov glared as if furious about appearing in public. Boshirov winced, a sheen of sweat on his face. They were not assassins, they protested, just entrepreneurs in the fitness industry.

RT interviewer: What were you doing there?

Petrov: Our friends have been suggesting for quite a long time that we visit this wonderful city.

Interviewer: Salisbury? A wonderful city?

Petrov: Yes.

Interviewer: What makes it so wonderful?

Boshirov: Its a tourist city. They have a famous cathedral there, Salisbury Cathedral. Its famous throughout Europe and, in fact, throughout the world, I think. Its famous for its 123-metre spire. Its famous for its clock. Its the oldest working clock in the world.

One day before the poisoning, the two burly Russians made their initial visit to Salisbury by train, a three-hour round trip from London, yet spent only thirty minutes there because, they said, the snow had put them off. The next day, they took the LondonSalisbury trip again. They claimed not to have a clue where Skripals house was. The interviewer inquired about the perfume bottle.

Boshirov: Dont you think that its kind of stupid for two straight men to be carrying perfume for ladies? When you go through customs, they check all your belongings. So, if we had anything suspicious, they would definitely have questions. Why would a man have womens perfume in his bag?