A New Show Whitewashes The CIA Propaganda Outlet Bellingcat

A New Tv Show Called "The Kollective" Purports To Be About A Group Of Heroic Citizen Journalists, But It Is Based On A Shady CIA Propaganda Outlet.

A new TV show has premiered this month called “The Kollective: The Deadly Game Of Citizen Journalism,” which purports to be based on a true story, with its description reading:

When a passenger plane mysteriously crashes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo killing everyone on board, The Kollective decide to investigate. Among the crash victims is British journalist Steve Lush, the man investigating the involvement of Russian mercenaries in the region’s valuable coltan trade, a precious commodity fueled by the world’s insatiable thirst for mobile technology. But when the founder and leader of the Kollective, Joshua Moore is found brutally murdered, the group’s quest for truth becomes personal. Forming an alliance with journalist Maya Jansen (Natascha McElhone), the group unravels a major, international conspiracy pointing to Russia stockpiling one of the world’s most valuable resources. With Democracy and our global world order hanging in the balance, the Kollective embark on a dangerous chase that takes them from the chaotic streets of Kinshasa to the frozen wilderness of Siberia. The Kollective is an electrifying tale of relentless journalism and the human cost of exposing the truth in a world ruled by lies

The outlet “Budapest reporter” wrote that the show is “Inspired by the real-life exploits of the investigative journalist group Bellingcat”.

The show’s trailer portrays a brave group of investigative journalists risking their lives to tell the truth about contentious international incidents.

The real story it is based on however, Bellingcat, is far different.

The real Bellingcat is a shady propaganda outlet funded by the CIA’s meddling arm, the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), which puts out pseudoscientific reports laundering the CIA’s version of contentious events.

In this article, I will go over the real story of Bellingcat.

CIA Funded Non-Experts.

Bellingcat was founded by Elliot Higgins, who began his career writing as a war blogger under the pseudonym “Brown Moses”.

Given the fact that he focused heavily on Syria, often repeating the CIA’s narrative, journalist Mark Ames noted that his name “Brown Moses” gave the impression that he was “some kind of swarthy Middle Easterner whose friends’ and relatives’ lives were at stake” when in reality he was “a doughy pinkish Midlands gamer”.

In 2014, Higgins launched “Bellingcat,” which was touted in the mainstream media as the de facto authority on everything from chemical weapons to geopolitics.

Higgins, however, had none of the expertise normally required to be an authority on these issues. A New York Times profile on Eliot Higgins wrote, “Mr. Higgins attributed his skills not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he has spent playing video games”.

Why the media was so adamant in citing a geopolitical “expert” trained by Mario Kart begins to make more sense when one looks into Bellingcat’s funding.

Writing about Bellingcat, a leaked UK government assessment admitted that “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay”.

One of the people willing to pay was the CIA. The outlet declassified UK reported that :

The UK organisation Bellingcat, which is known mainly for its investigations of Russian secret service operations, has been funded by the NED since at least 2017.

The group is registered as a foundation in the Netherlands and its 2020 accounts show it received €112,524 (£94,000) from the NED that year, making the US agency one of Bellingcat’s largest institutional funders. What appears to be another NED grant is also referenced in the accounts, but the amount is not divulged.

Bellingcat’s 2019 accounts declare no grants from the NED, but its annual report from the same year lists the US agency as a “donor”. Declassified could not find accounts from previous years.

Elsewhere, Bellingcat mentions the NED as one of its “strategic partnerships”, adding that it has “attracted the attention (and financial support)” of the US agency “to both expand its work in research and training, and to professionalize its organisation.”

For context, the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) is an ostensible NGO funded by the U.S. government, which the CIA uses to outsource its regime change operations around the world.

Bellingcat has taken in money from other Western state cutouts. As Journalist Aaron Mate reported, “Bellingcat takes in more money from other Western governments and cut-outs, including the Dutch Postcode Lottery. Bellingcat was a founding partner in the Open Information Partnership (OIP), which is funded by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, FCDO. Another OIP partner, Zinc Network, which is funded by the UK and US governments, has given Bellingcat at least €160,000.”

Eliot Higgins also previously worked for the NATO-funded propaganda think tank “Atlantic Council”.

Aside from Higgins, the outlet was full of “former” spooks.

An investigation by journalist Alan Macleod found that some of the website’s top contributors were formerly part of the British Army, GCHQ, the American Department of Defense, the White House Military Office, and the British government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

As Macleod noted, “It could be said that ex-officials who have renounced their past or blown the whistle, such as Daniel Ellsberg or John Kiriakou, have utility as journalists. But those who have simply made the transition into media without any change in positions usually serve only the powerful.”

Indeed, the real reason Bellingcat was so heavily promoted by the mainstream media as an “investigative group of citizen journalists uncovering the truth” is that it was a way for Western intelligence agencies to launder propaganda under the guise of independent journalism.

Hence why the main targets of Bellingcat’s “journalism” were Syria, where the CIA was running a billion-dollar dirty war, and Russia, an obsessive target of the CIA, especially after the 2014 coup in Ukraine.

Speaking about Bellingcat in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, the CIA’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia Marc Polymeropolous said, “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this, Whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it, instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference their work”.

The assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under former President George W. Bush, Daniel Fried, bragged about being able to cite Bellingcat’s work to launder US talking points, saying, “The advantage of having Bellingcat doing it is that you don’t have to have a sources-and-methods debate within your government”.

The Democratic Rep. Bill Keating, who at the time of the article was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, and who wanted to “make Russia’s destabilizing actions a priority for the Biden administration” boasted about being able to use Bellingcat to launder CIA talking points about Russia, saying “The fact that it’s (Bellingcat) open-sourced is so important because we can talk about it more to the public, So many times we can’t do that—we get information and we can’t talk about it and what the public gets in this regard sometimes is very gray, widespread responses that aren’t on point.”

In leaked emails, Paul Mason, another shady intelligence-connected British journalist, admitted that Bellingcat “gets a steady stream of intel from Western agencies” and is an“intel service by proxy”.

Laundering CIA Psy-Ops

Since he started Brown Moses, Eliot Higgins has always laundered the CIA’s narrative on the conflicts he covered.

As far back as 2013, he covered up information given to him that the CIA-backed Jihadist rebels in Syria obtained chemical weapons.

Leaked emails show that Higgins’ source, the rebel-aligned foreign fighter Matthew Van Dyke said to him, “Don’t rule out the possibility that the rebels do have a small quantity of chemical weapons. I have a source that has been reliable in the past, who gave me information about rebels having acquired a small quantity a few months ago, and I know what building they came out of. And I know some things about the building, having been to the site, that gave the information some additional credibility”.

Not only did Higgins not talk about this on his blog, but he also actively wrote posts on his blog where he reposted statements from the Saudi-backed militia Liwa Al-Islam claiming that “Only the Assad regime has chemical weapons in Syria” without mentioning that his source alleged rebels got their hands on them.

Very shortly after Bellingcat’s founding, Higgins began writing articles blaming Russian separatists for the downing of the MH17 plane over Eastern Ukraine.

A Dutch court later convicted three separatists for the downing of the plane but acquitted one named Oleg Pulatov who Bellingcat repeatedly falsely claimed was involved in the plane downing.

While focusing heavily on the story that was used by the West to ramp up tension with Russia, Bellingcat refused to publish an investigation on a story that debunked a large part of the new Cold War narrative.

The United States backed the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014, largely justifying it by claiming that he was responsible for the massacre of protestors in Maidan Square.

But all available evidence, including witness testimony, video, forensics, and ballistics examinations, shows that the massacre was carried out by the U.S.-backed far-right group “Right Sector” as a false flag to justify the overthrow of Yanukovych.

Bellingcat announced that they were working on an investigation, which they never put out, likely because the only reasonable conclusion from the evidence shows that the U.S. lied and that their proxies carried out the massacre.

As the UOttawa professor Ivan Katchanovski put it, Bellingcat “initially indicated that it would analyze the Maidan massacre but did nothing because it did not fit politically”.

Higgins is happy to launder any psy-op that is anti-Russia, he is quoted on the back on Bill Browder’s book praising the billionaire’s fabricated story about Russia killing his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky for blowing the whistle on Russian corruption, when in reality Magnitsky was Browder’s accountant and went to jail for Browder’s tax fraud.

Bellingcat also took part in a major controversy at the UN’s OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons), the world's leading chemical weapons watchdog.

The controversy arose after the U.S., the UK, and France bombed Syria over allegations of a chemical attack in the town of Douma.

OPCW inspectors released documents to Wikileaks that were left out of the final OPCW report- and raised questions about what really happened in Douma- which they alleged were left out due to Western pressure.

The inspectors’ demands were simple: to have the OPCW meet with them and clear up the remaining questions from the investigation.

However, Bellingcat attempted to stop this discussion by publishing a fake letter, making it look like the inspectors’ concerns were already cleared up.

In a 2019 article, Bellingcat claimed to have obtained a letter sent from the OPCW director general, Fernando Arias, to one of the dissenting inspectors, Brendan Whelan, who Bellingcat doxed in the article (he previously went by “Alex”) which they claimed “shows that any notion of a cover-up at the OPCW is false and confirms that the organisation acted exactly as it was mandated to.”

First, the letter it published did not prove this. The letter published by Bellingcat stated, “analysis of wood samples taken from Douma indicated that the wood indeed had been exposed to chlorine gas” which still did not clear up the leaked toxicology assessment, which argued that the “death of the victims did not match chlorine” or the leaked engineering report which argued that the Chlorine cylinders were “likley manually placed rather than delivered by aircraft”.

Even worse, as journalist Aaron Mate reported, the letter published in the Bellingcat article was never actually sent to Whelan, and the real letter sent to him “is not the one Bellingcat published. Arias’ actual letter does not contain any of Bellingcat’s text – not even a single sentence.”

Bellingcat was then forced to concede that “it has been reported that the final version of the letter received by Whelan differed significantly from the draft version seen by Bellingcat.”

Bellingcat then published articles bolstering the US and UK narrative around the poisoning of the former Russian spy turned British spy Sergei Skripal, allegedly poisoned by Russian agents who put the soviet nerve agent Novichok on his house door handle.

Recent testimony, however, has called this narrative into question.

A British Doctor named Stephen Cockroft, who took care of Skripal’s daughter, Yulia Skripal, who was also affected by the poisoning, has testified that Skripal told him she and her father were “sprayed” with poison at a restaurant they were eating at after leaving the house.

Cockroft hinted at a UK government cover-up of this information, saying that “Dr. Christine Blanchard, the institution’s then-medical director, not only removed him from the intensive care rota, but ‘warned’ him he ‘should not discuss any aspect of the poisoning with colleagues… or other individuals.’ Cockroft was outright ‘forbidden to discuss any aspect of the presentation, recognition or initial treatment of Yulia or Sergei Skripal,’ even at regular ICU hospital meetings.”

He said in his testimony, “If [my colleagues] were having a conversation [about the Skripals] they would stop talking about it in front of me, it was odd. It was very odd.”

Perhaps the most sloppy mistake of the video game-trained experts at Bellingcat was when they outright fabricated an allegation of poisoning during negotiations between Ukraine and Russia early on in the war.

On March 28th of 2024, Bellingcat tweeted, “Bellingcat can confirm that three members of the delegation attending the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia on the night of 3 to 4 March 2022 experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning with chemical weapons. One of the victims was Russian entrepreneur Roman Abramovich.”

This fabricated claim was soon debunked with Reuters soon after reporting that “A U.S. official said on Monday that intelligence suggests the sickening of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators was due to an environmental factor, not poisoning.”

Bellingcat was huge in pushing in favor of the proxy war in Ukraine. One of their contributors, Christo Groze,v even said a Ukrainian attack on a cafe in St. Petersburg was a "legitimate target” because one journalist in the cafe was supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

He also defended the Ukrainian car bomb that was planted in the car of the controversial Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, which accidentally killed his daughter Darya Dugina.

Aric Toler, a researcher with Bellingcat, also doxed the source of leaked Pentagon documents on Ukraine, Jack Teixeira, who was then sentenced to 15 years in prison for leaking the documents.

While Bellingcat’s influence has dwindled significantly in recent years, and it is often not mentioned anymore in mainstream media, this ridiculous show whitewashing the outlet's actual legacy calls for a critical examination of what the outlet actually represented and did.

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