Are Bellingcat and the OCCRP 'Independent' Media?

These government funded “watchdogs” only exist to support government approved narratives.

Two major western propaganda operations, self-described international investigative news outfits that distribute stories picked up by major media across the globe, list their addresses at the same Amsterdam letterbox company that provides no space, just answers phones and forwards mail. They are the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP, and Bellingcat. Both organizations are funded by the US, UK and other Western European (and NATO-aligned) countries. They both run “news” stories that promote the political interests (mainly by portraying Russia as an enemy civilization) of their western funders which are then picked up by other western media outlets.

What is the likelihood that two western government-funded “independent” media use the very same European mailbox as their headquarters addresses? (The address is of a charming narrow building on a canal. I emailed the person who runs the service, and she said no other company has offices in the building.)

Drew Sullivan founded the OCCRP in 2007. The office that runs its European operations is at Herengracht 449A in Amsterdam. Bellingcat lists a European headquarters at the same Herengracht 449A in Amsterdam. Neither has an office there. The address they give is that of Amsterdam Office Space, a phone-answering and mail-forwarding service. Plus, they get a Chamber of Commerce registration.

This is Bellingcat's registration in Chamber of Commerce with the same address. It is listed as a company focusing on film production and research and development in the social sciences and humanities. There is nothing about its claim to be "a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group."

Why This ‘Coincidence’ Matters

First, the Netherlands is famous as an offshore money-laundering center. Curiously, in April, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, Sullivan said the OCCRP laundered money for other journalists organizations. He said, “OCCRP does that for its member organizations. We will take the money and pass it on to other journalists. Launder money legally, move the money away so there is not a direct connection between you and the donor.” He suggested other groups should do the same.

So, the Amsterdam shell company may also facilitate money-laundering, with the address used to set up bank accounts to make cash transfers.

OCCRP

OCCRP was founded right at the same time Julian Assange established Wikileaks, which exposed US global abuses. Sullivan had been an aerospace engineer and a stand-up comic. He set up the parent Journalism Development Network, registered in Delaware with a postbox in New York.

Here is how the money works

OCCRP was established with funding from the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. The money came through the Journalism Development Network.

Eventually, the OCCRP handlers transitioned to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which years before had taken over the CIA’s soft money operations, In November 2021, during an event titled “Independent Media and the Advancement of Democracy,” USAID chief Samantha Power referred to OCCRP as a “partner” of the US government. In fact, the contract allowed the federal government to approve senior personnel decisions, including the CEO and editor-in-chief.

Journalism Development Network filings show that almost all its funding is from the US government and a significant amount from the UK. (DOS is Department of State, FCO is UK Foreign Office.)

This page lists grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), set up to take the place of a scandalized “soft-power” operation of the CIA.

Money is passed through to local media groups, most going to those in Europe and Russia, so, these groups don’t have to admit to getting funding from the US government.

Money comes in from the NED and cash grants are funneled out to groups around the world. As Sullivan explained at the Perugia conference, OCCRP "laundered money for other journalists" to obscure the source of funding. (Here are the international media groups that get grants and where the money comes from).

OCCRP has more than 200 staff in some 60 countries and works as a hub for local reporters around the world. Between 2014 and 2023, the US government provided more than half (52%) of OCCRP's funding, totaling at least $47 million since its founding. Other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, have also contributed significant amounts over the last decade.

Since 2016, OCCRP has partnered with Transparency International to run the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium, which is funded by multiple western governments. Its investigations reportedly aim to provoke judicial actions and mobilize civil society against “corruption.” The funds go to media seeking to topple the governments of US adversaries.

Another source of funds is the RUSI partnership. RUSI is The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), self-described as the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defense and security think tank. RUSI vice-president is the CIA's former director, David Petraeus.

OCCRP’s project with RUSI’s Centre for Finance and Security is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Helping a government deal with sanctions evasion seems more a government operation than a journalistic one.

Besides that collaboration, here is how OCCRP earns its US and UK government funding

Assange

As a good US “partner,” Sullivan publicly rejected calls for the release of political prisoner Julian Assange. He declared, “For me his work on behalf of the Putin government crossed the line and so I no longer consider him a journalist but a self-serving media celebrity who has been destructive. He played a different game and he is reaping what he sowed.” So according to “journalist” Sullivan the exposés such as the famous “Collateral Damage” video which showed American helicopter pilots slaughtering innocents are to be ignored because they “sowed” condemnation of the US around the world.

Russia

Convicted tax fraudster William Browder has been an early and central figure in the US campaign against Russia. Browder declared in a 2015 deposition in US federal court that he obtained documents from OCCRP to support his allegations against the Russian government. (Bill Alpert of Barron’s, noted in the deposition, is also a Browder collaborator, writing puff pieces about him in that business magazine.)

OCCRP promoted Browder’s narrative on the Browder-Magnitsky hoax, invented by former State Department official Jonathan Winer who wrote the State Department’s Magnitsky law which was passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2012. It levied sanctions against anyone deemed responsible for Magnitsky’s arrest and death. (Magnitsky was the accountant who managed Browder’s Russian tax evasion. Coincidentally, Winer had worked for the Bureau of International Narcotics and was a central figure in spreading the Steele dossier around Washington during to 2016 presidential campaign).

Browder’s hoax, supported by the OCCRP, was an early, colorful and invented story aimed at winning public sympathy for the “victim” that had the added benefit of sowing hatred of Russia, which is why OCCRP has been devoted to writing Browder’s fabrications and getting them printed in media in the US and abroad.

OCCRP promoted its 2014 Russian Laundromat investigation based on allegations of money laundering involving Russian businesses. It got a lot of ink in western media; however, it had no evidence and none of the sensational charges led to actual cases much less convictions in the western countries named in the reports. Switzerland was a typical example, formally dropping the investigation after ten years.

In 2017, OCCRP reported that in 2008 Sergei Magnitsky, portrayed in the report as an independent lawyer, uncovered evidence that police and tax officials stole ownership of three Hermitage subsidiaries and claimed a $230 million tax refund.

That was a lie. First, Magnitsky was an auditor at the Moscow firm Firestone Duncan—he handled Browder’s tax evasion. OCCRP reported that Magnitsky uncovered evidence that police and tax officials stole ownership of three Hermitage subsidiaries and claimed a $230 million tax refund.

But the scam was that Hermitage itself set up fake shells that claimed they had been cheated and demanded restitution. The company duly paid and restated its tax filing to conveniently wipe out all profits and taxes.

Browder insisted his companies had been stolen and the scheme carried out by miscreants. OCCRP dutifully wrote that crooked Russian investigators had seized documents and company stamps from Hermitage and used them to set up counterfeit subsidiaries. Then Magnitsky presented evidence about this to Russian officials and was arrested. The story, with no evidence, was duly repeated by international media. It was fiction.

There is also no evidence that Magnitsky was murdered by anyone, though he got bad medical care. An extensive investigation was done by the Public Oversight Commission, a Russian NGO that monitors prisons. It found no evidence of Browder’s claimed beatings or murder. Its report was filed in US federal court and was used in a report by the Physicians for Human Rights, Cambridge, Mass.

So OCCRP’s Browder/Magnitsky story was a fake from start to finish. But it allowed the US government, with the help of compliant media, to create a story of “evil” Russia and target Russian government and corporate officials.

The Panama Papers

OCCRP played a significant role in the Panama Papers investigation, again focusing on Russia.

A German reporter, Bastian Obermayer got a huge cache of documents from the Panama company, Mossack Fonseca, which set up offshore accounts for tax evaders and other law-breakers. He worked with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which brought in OCCRP to help organize the data and recruit journalists to work on the project. David Kaplan, who organized the project for ICIJ, was an OCCRP board member.

Browder’s Berkeley Advisors had been set up by Mossack Fonseca to hide money moved out of Russia.

OCCRP should have tagged that. But none of the nearly 400 journalists writing about high profile offshore account holders mentioned Browder. ICIJ director Gerard Ryle in answer to my query of why not, said that the journalists decided what to write. But, somehow, when it set up the Panama Papers data base, it failed to include William Browder or Berkeley Advisors. So reporters couldn’t write about him.

OCCRP also played a key role in the Pandora Papers, the Suisse Secrets, and China Tobacco investigations, most targeted at US adversaries.

Regime change

Sullivan has claimed that OCCRP has been responsible for facilitating regime changes in several countries, including Bosnia, Kyrgyzstan, the Czech Republic, and Montenegro. This again raises questions about the organization's role on behalf of Washington.

Bellingcat

OCCRP’s colleague as a US-UK client is Bellingcat, which listed OCCRP as a partner in its 2021 annual report.

Bellingcat was founded in 2014 by Eliot Higgins, who lives in Leicester, England. In 2016, Higgins became a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by the State Department, the arms industry and NATO, and which lobbies on behalf of its sponsors in Washington.

Here is how the money works

Bellingcat is part of a network funded by US and UK government and pass-through organizations to promote anti-Russian narratives. It has received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy since at least 2017 and participates in several organizations funded by the UK foreign office.

Bellingcat’s own reports show it getting money from western governments and pass-throughs. (For more see, https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2022/05/Bellingcat-Annual-Report-2021.pdf and https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2024/06/Bellingcat-Annual-Accounts-2023.pdf)

Aside from the State Department’s NED, Bellingcat takes in money from the European Union and other Western governments and cut-outs, including the Dutch and Swedish Post-code Lotteries.

It’s connection to OCCRP is through its subsidiary, the Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative is funded by the UK Foreign Office and Bellingcat is a collaborator. It is organized by “clusters” of operatives whose role is to promote opposition to Russia.

Here are some of the operatives listed. They include, Browder, Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council, the journalists Ed Lucas and Anne Applebaum (who is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski).

What the US and UK get for financing Bellingcat

Bellingcat disseminates stories that the US and UK intelligence agencies prefer not to source themselves. This allows for narratives against adversaries, especially Russia, to be promoted without governments being asked for evidence. In effect, it specializes in disinformation, which used to be called propaganda.

According to Amy Mackinnon in Foreign Policy magazine, Bellingcat has been crucial in exposing Russian activities, enabling US officials to discuss these issues without disclosing intelligence sources (or proof).

Marc Polymeropoulos, the CIA’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia said, “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this... instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference their work.”

Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA chief of station, said, “The Russians routinely deny, and say, well, present us the facts. The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and then say, there you go.”

And the compliant media calls it an open-source investigative outfit instead of an intelligence front. They like getting dicey anti-Russian stories. They don’t ask how Bellingcat got information that only an intelligence agency could get.

Bellingcat is officially partnered with major media outlets CNN and NBC. CNN’s Jake Tapper has called Bellingcat “a great journalistic organization.”

Since when are media such as CNN partnered with operations funded by the US government or EU state intelligence agencies? Bellingcat's investigators claim to have access to “open source” information that is nowhere to be found on the internet or public data bases or files and that only state actors would possess.

MH17

The launch of Bellingcat came curiously just three days before the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was shot down in Ukrainian airspace. The plane crash became the first “serious case” for Bellingcat, which quickly found irrefutable evidence of Russia’s guilt. The best reporting on this is by Dutch journalist Eric van de Beek.

Bellingcat immediately provided “evidence” regarding the downing of Flight MH17, including photos allegedly tracking the movement of a Russian missile.

Where did it get them?

An email from November 2020 revealed that the Bellingcat investigation was shared with Amsterdam’s National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) prior to publication, indicating a collaboration to shape media narratives. Or did the sharing work both ways?

Bellingcat’s “investigations” into MH17 were accepted by western governments and mainstream media without question, despite the presence of numerous eyewitness accounts contradicting their narrative. Even Dutch intelligence files record that while many Ukrainian Buk systems had been spotted in eastern Ukraine, Russian equivalents were nowhere to be seen. Eyewitnesses claimed they saw fighter jets operating in the area of eastern Ukraine at the time MH17 crashed. Bellingcat smeared journalists writing such reports as agents of Russian intelligence.

According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, the author of the report in which Bellingcat accuses the Russian Defense Ministry of falsifying satellite imagery related to the MH17 case was Timmi Allen, pseudonym for a former employee of the East German Ministry for State Security, the Stasi secret police.

No mainstream journalist questioned how Bellingcat acquired the highly sensitive documents upon which its investigation was based. It somehow got confidential Russian intelligence emails and phone data showing calls between purported Russian intelligence officials and cell tower data tracking their movements. None of this information is remotely “open source.”

The only defendant to get a lawyer and give testimony during the Netherlands trial, Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted on all charges. The court found there was “no indication” he was involved in obtaining the missile system.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Christo Grozev, a prominent Bellingcat operative from Bulgaria, took over from Higgins as chairman and general director of the Bellingcat Foundation in 2022. He had just organized the 2022 propaganda film “Navalny,” which won an Academy Award. The film accused the Russians of putting a deadly poison in the underpants of Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny. Navalny survived. It seems the Russians are pretty bad at making a lethal Novichok poison. (And again, the German military hospital that examined him did not make results public.)

The film said Bellingcat obtained voluminous telecom and travel data that implicated Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in the alleged poisoning of Navalny. Telephone communications of Russian intelligence officers and the content of their mailboxes are highly confidential. They cannot be found on open sources. Bellingcat said that the information was bought on the black market. Grozev said that he had paid for it from his own pocket. Seriously. Is it reasonable to assume that the FSB, monitoring emails and internet, never discovered this market? The claims Grozev makes in the “Navalny” documentary are dissected here.

Grozev would be out of his job a year later, in 2023. He was discredited for his involvement in a failed attempt to get Russian pilots to defect and for defending the bombing of a café in St. Petersburg in which a war reporter was killed and 30 others injured. He said the reporter was a “legitimate target” because he was a “propagandist.” He said the same about the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin whose daughter was killed in Moscow after a bomb exploded under his car. Apparently, the National Endowment for Democracy funders were not pleased.

With some irony, PBS Frontline, had just posted an admiring film about Grozev. It says, “Antidote follows Christo Grozev, whose reporting with the open-source investigative group Bellingcat has exposed Russian spies and assassins…”

He actually hasn’t. The film was finished before Bellingcat fired him.

Even its friends say Bellingcat lies

Bellingcat deflects criticism by blaming external forces, such as Russia, for any negative assessments of their operations. However, a leaked report indicated that they have been discredited by their own side for disseminating misinformation.

The Zinc Network was seeking support for organizing NGOs to confront the “increasing threat from Kremlin-backed disinformation.” In a 2018 report produced for the UK Foreign Office, called “Upskilling to Upscale: Unleashing the Capacity of Civil Society to Counter Disinformation”, it discussed possible partners. It said that “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports to anyone willing to pay.”

Let’s repeat that. “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports to anyone willing to pay.” And this is the organization whose “news” accounts anyone takes seriously?

Higgins doesn’t like people pointing that out.

Far from being an independent “open-source “investigative outfit, Bellingcat is paid by Western governments to spread state narratives.

Their funding and dubious output show that OCCRP and Bellingcat are propaganda operations. Readers and serious media should not accept their reports without solid independently confirmed evidence. Or their own credibility will be compromised by publishing disinformation.

Lucy Komisar is an investigative journalist based in New York. She won the Gerald Loeb, National Press Club and other awards for her expose in the Miami Herald of Ponzi fraudster Allen Stanford. Her articles have appeared in the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, LA Times, Chicago Tribune and many other publications in the U.S. and Europe. Her website is https://thekomisarscoop.com / X handle is @lucykomisar