How British computer geek Eliot Higgins uncovered war crimes, exposed poisoning plots, and found himself in Russia's crosshairs

Photos: Bellingcat, AP Images

Last Thursday, prominent Putin critic Alexei Navalny drank an innocent-looking cup of tea before boarding a flight to Moscow. The teacup held a tempest – in the form of a poison that left Navalny in a coma.

The story set off alarm bells for those familiar with another high-profile poisoning: that of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in 2018. Skripal, a Russian spy who defected to Britain, also landed in the hospital after his front door in the quiet English town of Salisbury was sprayed with Novichok, a deadly nerve agent, by Russian intelligence agents. Those who remember the unlikely detectives who tracked down his attackers have now set their eyes on a quiet suburban house in a small British city. Over the years, they’ve learned that chances are good the owner of that home — a man by the name of Eliot Higgins — will unravel government-sponsored crimes more efficiently than some of the world’s top spy agencies.

“Russian opposition figures can experience tragedy very suddenly,” Higgins tweeted dryly this week in response to the Navalny poisoning. He would know. With his hoodie, laptop and a certain quiet intensity, Eliot Higgins has the look of a computer geek — which is exactly what he is, content to spend weeks trawling through vast databases and obscure websites. But although a self-proclaimed nerd (“the geeks shall inherit the earth,” he likes to say), Higgins is no hacker or software engineer. In fact, the closest description of his field of operations is intelligence.

From his living room in Leicester, Higgins, a self-described “citizen journalist,” has uncovered Syrian war crimes; identified the separatists who shot down Malaysian airliner MH17 over Ukraine in 2014; and exposed assassins from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence.

With no formal intelligence training, foreign language skills or visiting conflict zones — without even much of a formal budget — he relies on a simple laptop, close data analysis, and a lot of patience.

“People all over the world share vast amounts of photos and videos on social media, and that creates a footprint on the internet,” he explains. “Even when they try to remove it, traces remain, and by using open-source tools like Google Earth and methodologies like geolocating, we can locate where those pictures were taken and expose false claims.”

Measuring that digital footprint began as a hobby, but Higgins has turned it into a formidable new field of intelligence known as OSINT, or open-source intelligence, whose techniques security services around the world are now eager to learn. “I’d say they’re way ahead of us on many things,” the Spectator, a right-leaning British weekly, quoted a senior British security official as saying in a profile last year.

What began as a personal crusade to understand which civilians the Syrian regime were barrel-bombing, has been transformed into an investigative website called Bellingcat, a team of researchers and an army of open-source enthusiasts.