#TheTruthIsOutThere

On 26 September, the Russian Embassy to the Netherlands posted the following on its verified Twitter account:

“Q: How much time does a couple of people thousands of miles away need to disclose a ‘true identity’ of an ‘intelligence officer’? A: Less than a month provided they use Google #TheTruthIsOutThere.”

The derisive Tweet was in response to an open source investigation published earlier that day by Bellingcat, a British investigative journalism collective, revealing the identity of one of the two Russian nationals suspected of the attempted murder of retired double agent Sergei Skripal. By 8 October, their team had uncovered the identity of the second would-be assassin.

Bellingcat’s work, carried out in conjunction with The Insider, a Russian investigative media outlet, illustrates how high-quality open source research, the bedrock of investigative journalism, can unearth what is hiding in plain sight. And contrary to the claims of the Russian embassy’s social media team, there was more to the investigation than speculative ‘googling’. In fact, open source investigators like Bellingcat have developed sophisticated and methodical research processes which now allow them to corroborate reams of publicly available raw data through a series of highly intelligent refined and deductive investigative techniques.

BELLINGCAT’S BREAKTHROUGH

In the wake of Prime Minister Theresa May’s early September announcement that the Skripal poisoning suspects had entered the UK under the names Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, Bellingcat’s analysts set to work establishing their potential links to the Russian government. Initial analysis of the Russians’ passport files in leaked official documents and Russian passport databases suggested that the two shared non-civilian status, indicating that they were likely to be agents of Russia’s military intelligence agency, widely known by its former acronym, GRU. Working off this assumption, Bellingcat began the process of unmasking “Boshirov” and “Petrov”, with only their photographs and cover identities to go off.

Unable to identify their targets by scraping Russian telephone directories and running reverse-image searches of their photographs, Bellingcat soon had to employ more creative strategies. With knowledge of their approximate age and border crossing data, its analysts hypothesised that the two agents would have likely graduated from a specialist Russian military school in the early 2000s, and had probably specialised in operations in Western Europe.

With no obvious leads forthcoming, they reached out to their network of regional contacts to find which specialised schools two agents with profiles similar to “Boshirov” and “Petrov” were likely to have attended. Bellingcat then scoured the relevant online yearbooks and reunion photos, identifying several possible matches for “Boshirov”. One such match, in a photograph of graduates of the Far Eastern Military Command Academy deployed in Chechnya, referred to seven graduates bestowed with the “Hero of Russia” award, Russia’s highest state honour. Online searches for “Chechnya”, “Hero of the Russian Federation” and the “Far Eastern Military Command Academy” soon led Bellingcat to “Boshirov”’s true identity. Similarly creative methods were used to identify “Petrov”, who they found previously had resided in a communal apartment in St. Petersburg, which online maps indicated stood just a few steps away from a Russian military medical academy.

By confirming their findings with sources who either had access to real passport data or were familiar with the agents themselves, Bellingcat claimed to have proved beyond reasonable doubt that the subjects of their investigation were in fact undercover GRU officers: “Boshirov” is Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a high-ranking military officer, and “Petrov” one Alexander Mishkin, a trained military doctor.

MEANWHILE IN RUSSIA...

Faced with an apparent body of clear, logical and factual evidence, Westerners hitherto reserving judgement on the extent of the Russian state’s involvement in Skripal’s attempted murder have largely been convinced. Most Russians, however, remain unpersuaded, or rather unbothered, by the evidence.

This is for several reasons. First, Bellingcat’s work is unlikely to have ever entered the ordinary citizen’s field of vision, at least not in a version faithful to the original. The majority of Russians continue to receive their news from state-controlled or Kremlin-friendly television channels, where reporting often strays significantly from the facts. When re-reported by these broadcasters and the pro-Kremlin press, the conclusions of the investigation have been presented without acknowledgement of Bellingcat’s research process, thus appearing as nothing more than speculation and decontextualized conspiracy theories. Though Russia’s more independent liberal online news outlets have engaged with Bellingcat’s investigations more objectively, their content is unlikely to have reached beyond their limited and often Western-leaning urban readership.

More crucially, however, those in Russia who have heard of the Skripal case or do come across Bellingcat’s findings are simply uninterested. With the Russian government’s recent and widely-protested pension reforms, which have raised the retirement age for Russian men a mere year above their life expectancy, most ordinary Russians have concerns far more pressing than spy stories unfolding in the West. Even the opposition to the Kremlin, gauging the lack of traction of Bellingcat’s findings among the general population, has expended little energy in exploiting the Skripal affair to criticise the government. This is because unlike the pension reforms, the attack is highly unlikely to mobilise the public or jeopardise Putin’s approval rating; Russians do not expect the country’s intelligence and security agencies to have accountability before the Russian public, just as they no longer really expect the Russian government to be accountable to the electorate.

CANCELLING OUT THE NOISE

For the small portion of Russians following the story with interest, there are myriad conflicting narratives to wade through before they reach the facts. In the month that followed Skripal’s poisoning, Russian media outlets published over twenty different explanations for the affair. Many more have since spawned via an array of state-controlled and Kremlin-friendly outlets. Some of the most farfetched of these claim that Theresa May helped orchestrate the attack with CIA director Gina Haspel.

The Russian state has coupled these domestic diversion techniques with a public attack on all other Western narratives. The Russian Foreign Ministry’s response to Bellingcat’s “Boshirov” investigation, which it immediately branded as “fake news”, epitomises the Russian state’s wider strategy of denial, deflection, and dissemination of conflicting narratives through state media and social media trolls. On her personal Facebook profile, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reiterated that owing to the lack of “evidence” of Russian involvement in the Skripal attack, the UK was clearly keeping up their “information campaign” aimed at diverting attention away from what really happened in Salisbury. In a recent poll undertaken by Levada-Center, a Russian polling organisation, which asked members of the Russian public who they thought was responsible for the Skripal poisining, 56% of respondents believed “it could have been anyone”.

Independent Russian journalist Oleg Kashin has also noted the Russian state’s marshalling of infoshum (literally “info noise”), the spreading of trivial or unimportant stories to “distract the unwary and uncritical” and drown out more controversial or damaging stories, such as the Skripal case findings. This tactic appears to be working; the recent arrest of two Russian footballers on assault charges has now largely supplanted the latest developments in the Skripal case in the Russian news agenda.

THE INFORMATION WAR

These tactics both form part of a wider weaponised Russian state information strategy, concerned not with persuasion or long-term credibility, but with disrupting Western narratives and confusing the public. The constant bombardment of false information has assaulted the ordinary Russian citizen’s ability to reason critically, and has numbed many into indifference: it is far easier to accept the Russian state’s overarching narrative than to fight against multiple fragments of competing information.

The emerging danger in the last 10 years has been Russia’s growing use of this box of tricks abroad. Fake news, thrust into the spotlight during the 2016 US presidential elections, has irrevocably altered our perception of journalistic truth. RT, the Russian state’s media voice in the West, has long fanned the flames of the growing scepticism we harbour regarding our own media and political class, eroding our confidence in these institutions and incubating sympathy for the view that Russia is the victim of an information war itself.

In this climate of uncertainty and mistrust, transparent and well-sourced investigative work such as Bellingcat’s is an invaluable tool for exposing and combating Russia’s disinformation.With limited resources and primarily open sources to work with, Bellingcat sets an example to the investigative and intelligence community. In spite of Russia’s attempts to divert, distract and deflect, for those able to think creatively and work methodically, the truth often is out there.

BELLINGCAT’S GREATEST HITS

MH17

Prior to its work on the Skripal attack, Bellingcat was arguably best known for its research into the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over Eastern Ukraine by anti-air missile in 2014. Their team analysed satellite imagery, the digital footprints of combatants in the area and a number of other open data sources to identify and locate the anti-missile system behind the attack. Bellingcat also tracked the transportation of the missile from Russia to the Donbass and identified the commander likely to have given the order to fire on the civilian aircraft.

Syria

The collective has also published several investigations into suspected war crimes and terrorist attacks perpetrated in Syria. In particular, the site has sought evidence to counter claims made by the Assad regime that it had not used chemical weapons.