Re: <nettime> FSB, Christo Grosev, Bellingcat

Thanks Keith. Thing is, this doesn't rise to the level of a Bellingcat investigation, it's a forwarded piece of information on Twitter from a Bellingcat principal with caveats, but for me it passed the smell test (for what _that's_ worth), and I don't see how putting it out there helps Russia/the FSB in any way even if it turns out to be faked. It wouldn't be some huge scandal if it turned out to be, but one reason it passes the smell test for me (apart from how it reminds me of 'Scientist' in Stalker I mean!) is that it doesn't really advantage Ukraine much if it's circulating either. They're in such deep trouble that it's a footnote or rounding error on the scale of things.

No, I bet it will turn out to be real (though we may never know), and to reflect the consternation of an inner-circle operative confronted with the biggest fuckup in Russian history since they invaded Afghanistan. And that was the USSR. So, the biggest fuckup in Russian history since the USSR fell.

Comparable in that way to another similarly totally unwarranted fuckup, the invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003. And undoubtedly to produce a similar decline in global credibility and standing and influence (already has).

I just hope we're not looking at an August 1914 scenario. Whew! "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake" [Stephen Dedalus by James Joyce]

Best,

Michael

On Mon, 14 Mar 2022 at 18:01, Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com> wrote:

Has it occurred to anyone that Bellingcat cd have been set up by the FSB in an attempt to discredit them? I can imagine a scenario where a “trusted insider,” who has been allowed to leak certain truthful information, in a time of war give false information which he knows will be publicized in order to achieve the larger goal of discrediting a very large thorn in the side of the FSB.

On Mar 14, 2022, at 5:51 PM, Michael Benson <kinpix2001@gmail.com> wrote:

So concerning Stefan's position on Bellingcat, evidently grounded in a couple URLs to be taken "with a grain of salt" and the views of Craig Murray, interestingly enough earlier today I was following some argumentation by this same Craig Murray concerning Bellingcat. Which he described in much the same terms as Stefan, in a kind of verbal duel between himself and Andrew MacGregor Marshall, a journalist specializing in Thai affairs:

https://twitter.com/BensonImages/status/1503395047223480327

(It opens on my comment at the end, but if you scroll up you'll get the thread.) As you'll see if you take the trouble, Murray describes Bellingcat as a "security service outlet," Marshall disputes this and asks for evidence, and Murray provides a link to a piece in MR Online, as in Monthly Review, a self-described independent socialist magazine.

But when I read that piece, which is titled "How Bellingcat launders National Security State talking points in the press," I quickly discovered that their evidence for this rested in part on the "alarming number" of people at Bellingcat who've come from "highly suspect" backgrounds. Such as the US Secret Service and the British Foreign Office. That plus some funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, an NGO funded by the US Government that has been criticized by both the left and right.

Ok, fair enough. (And let's set aside the rather obvious laundering of Kremlin talking points evident in MR Online as being off topic.) This was the first I'd heard of Murray, so I went to his Twitter profile to check him out — and discovered that he is himself a former UK Ambassador, something he's proud to highlight. And thus is himself a former senior official of the British Foreign Office. (He served in Uzbekistan 2002-2004 and prior to that in a long string of FCO positions in Africa and elsewhere.)

Of course with this we enter a hall of mirrors, in which by the same standard Murray himself offers as evidence, he must himself be a "security service outlet." Essentially a version of Epimenides' paradox, in which a Cretan offers up that all Cretans are liars.

But let's be charitable and take one resolution to the Epimenides paradox, that Epimenides only meant that all Cretans _tell_ lies, not that every single statement by every Cretan is a lie. And according to Wikipedia (which I then went to, in my ongoing low-budget, low-fi emulation of Bellingcat's methodology, albeit without bank account backdoors to the national security state, alas), Murray was removed from his post at Foreign Office and subsequently became an activist and human rights campaigner.

Ok, fair enough again. Still, he was impugning the veracity and motivations of _others_ who'd left _their_ respective official services in government and became investigative journalists specialized in OSINT at Bellingcat. Which, I would submit, apart from its journalistic bona fides, produces outcomes necessary to the furthering of human rights activism. Because I think it undeniable that they've produced some rather spectacular results, even if they simultaneously sometimes evoke Cuban expat cartoonist Antonio Prohias's classic "Spy vs Spy '' strips in Mad Magazine decades ago.

I mean honestly, who doesn't get a bang out of the fact that in collaboration with other investigative news organizations, Bellingcat was able to use cellphone data to track known FSB operatives who'd attempted to assassinate Alexey Navalny in Tomsk in August 2020, thus using tools traditionally associated with espionage to out FSB assassins, something ultimately allowing a miraculously still-living Navalny to actually _call_ one of his would-be assassins from Germany, impersonate a senior FSB official, and actually get this man (Konstantin Kudryavtsev) to describe to exactly how this attempt _on the life of the man he was speaking to_ was made? Namely by smearing Novichok on Navalny's underwear? Thus confirming both the allegations against him and his own status as Keystone Spook for all the world to know?

If that's not for the ages — a story worthy of Pliny the Elder — what is? Let me end simply by observing that regardless of the above, Christo Grozev himself was never an ambassador, secret service agent or military guy (ok ok, "we might never know"), but rather a successful entrepreneurial journalist for over three decades, who with his team won a European Press Prize for unmasking exactly who'd poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal (with Novichok, of course) in the UK in 2018. And that if you're tempted to see him or Bellingcat as being engaged in right-leaning, pro-national security state, pro-NATO, anti-socialist activities, consider that he and his collaborators have also followed all manner of fact-tendrils inconvenient to the UK government and other NATO countries, for example by investigating illegal arms sales to the Saudis by NATO countries.

Best,
Michael

--
Michael Benson
Kinetikon Pictures
michael-benson.net
kinpix2001@gmail.com

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