Elon Musk is right: Bellingcat is a Western ‘psy-op’
The Twitter CEO draws establishment media outrage for criticizing a NATO state propaganda outfit.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has triggered headlines by claiming that the website Bellingcat, a trusted source for establishment US media outlets, engages in “psyops.”
Musk invoked Bellingcat’s role in “psychological operations” while expressing skepticism about the group’s claims that the mass shooter in Allen, Texas was motivated by white supremacist views. Prominent voices came forward to defend Bellingcat as a “a great journalistic organization” (CNN anchor Jake Tapper), and “a treasure trove of hugely important investigative journalism” (Yale professor Timothy Snyder).
While the available evidence supports Bellingcat’s findings about the Allen gunman, Musk is correct about the group overall. With complete uniformity, Bellingcat’s media cheerleaders omit that the group is funded by NATO states and their contractors. And just as Musk suggested, Bellingcat has regularly promoted propaganda that advances its backers’ foreign policy objectives.
Since 2017, Bellingcat’s top financial donors have included the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. government organization founded by Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief, Bill Casey. From its inception, the NED has served as a front for US intelligence operations, including destabilization and regime change in targeted states. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA,” the NED’s first director, Allen Weinstein, told the Washington Post in 1991. NED board members have included veteran neoconservative bureaucrats Elliott Abrams and Victoria Nuland.
The NED conceals its funding for Bellingcat, to the point where a search of its database does not return any results. For several years, Bellingcat also refused to specify its NED funding, until finally admitting that the US government organization was its highest “non-profit” donor: more than €112,000 in 2020 and €212,000 in 2021. (Bellingcat has potentially received more NED funding via other conduits, according to Declassified UK).
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.