If you found yourself chatting with Eliot Higgins at the bar in a pub (remember those?) and asked what he did for a living, theres a good chance hed smile shyly for a moment behind his thick beard and glasses, wondering what to say. Hed probably settle for investigator. And if, curiosity piqued, you questioned what his most recent case was, how would he answer?

Theres a secret Russian nerve-agent programme that has been used for assassinations, both at home and abroad, by both the domestic intelligence services and the foreign services this is where people start looking at me as if Im mad, he tells i.

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Leaning back in his chair in his small office at home in Leicester, wearing an Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia hoodie and drinking the green smoothie his wife has dropped in for him, its fair to say from our video call at least that Higgins looks an unlikely opponent to Vladimir Putin. But as the founder of Bellingcat defined as an intelligence agency for the people in the slogan for his new book his groups achievements are startling.

We proved that the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fired chemical weapons at his own people, he writes in We are Bellingcat. We showed who was behind the downing of Flight MH17. We located Isis supporters in Europe. We identified neo-Nazis rampaging through Charlottesville. We helped quash the floods of disinformation spreading alongside Covid-19. And we exposed a Kremlin kill team.

Bellingcats list of scoops is even more startling for an organisation launched through a Kickstarter campaign in 2014, growing out of a blog about the Arab Spring that Higgins wrote while working part-time in admin for a lingerie company, and which still employs just 18 full-time staff. (Oh, and with an unlikely name taken from the fable Belling the Cat, about mice deciding to fit a bell on a cat to know when their enemy is coming, only to wonder who among them is brave enough to do it.)

Many journalists start out by blogging and have stories of being rejected for training schemes as Higgins was by the BBC and ITN early in their careers. Plenty are also self-trained in their specialisms, just as Higgins became an expert in weapons being used in the Syrian civil war by researching online every day.

What makes his work more extraordinary is that Higgins, 42, helped to invent a new kind of reporting. Working with fellow obsessives that he met through website message boards, they would meticulously scour social media to find and study photos and videos taken in conflict zones. They would identify times and places through geolocation, matching minor details with satellite images on Google Maps and other data sourced online. This would piece together what really happened in atrocities such as the Isis execution of US journalist James Foley, or Assads Sarin attack in Ghouta. Everything would be shared independently and for free, with explanations, plus tips and invitations for others to join in.

Open-source intelligence, or Osint, has existed for centuries. Higgins now an adviser to the International Criminal Court and his allies have revolutionised it. But taking on the worlds autocrats has led to hacking and phishing attacks, disinformation spread online, and great personal risk of becoming the next person on Russias hitlist.

The latest case for Bellingcat centres around Alexei Navalny, the Russian anti-corruption activist who has become Putins biggest opponent and was barred from running against him in the 2018 presidential election. Navalny fell violently ill during a flight in August and was taken to Germany, where doctors found that he had been poisoned by Novichok, the same chemical weapon that was used in the attempted assassination of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. (It was Bellingcat that revealed the true identities of the two Russian GRU agents alleged to have poisoned the Skripals.)

Bellingcats team, headquartered in the Netherlands but with most working remotely, began investigating. Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian researcher, examined flight records and phone data and discovered that from 2017 Navalny was followed on around 40 trips by officers from Moscows FSB security service, who may have tried to murder Navalny on other occasions.

There seems to have been at least one previous case in July, where his wife was affected by a toxin, says Higgins. They also found FSB flights that overlap with the movements of other people who either died or were taken seriously ill. It appears there are multiple other cases where theyve been targeting people forassassinations.

As for how Bellingcat alerted Navalny, it sounds disarmingly simple. Christo basically just messaged him and said Hey, we know who tried to kill you, says Higgins. They met up in person and Christo took them through all the evidence, loads of spreadsheets and databases. Putin called Bellingcats investigation a falsification, but admitted Navalny was being followed, it was the FSB.

We thought: This is fantastic, hes just confirmed half our story, says Higgins. What about the other half? Putin denied the agents tried to poison his rival, but Bellingcat had already obtained proof by Navalny posing as an FSB generals aide, calling an agent, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, and tricking him into confessing they had placed the nerve agent in his underpants.

Higgins says that until a recording of the 47-minute conversation was released by his team, even he hadnt realised who made the call. I just didnt think the FSB officers would be dumb enough to talk to Navalnydirectly.

Navalny returned to Russia last month and was arrested immediately. That didnt stop his team releasing a near-two-hour video, viewed more than 100 million times, alleging that Putin owns a palace with a casino, ice rink and vineyard spread over land that is 39 times the size of Monaco, saying its 1bn cost was paid for with the largest bribe in history. The president has denied this but protests have been held across Russia with chants of Putin is a thief, resulting in thousands of arrests.

What will happen next to Navalny and his movement? Hes been poisoned to prison before, says Higgins. If any harm comes to him whatsoever, I think thats key.

Is Higgins, a married father of two children aged six and nine, worried about risks to his family? At one point in our conversation, the phone on his desk unexpectedly comes to life with the sound of a voice, and he deadpans: Its the Russians. Nevertheless, he and Grozev do have serious concerns.

I have the police coming over, checking on me every month, advising me that I should have cameras all over my property, he says, well aware the Skripals were probably poisoned by Novichok placed on their front door. If I touched my door handle and it had anything on it, I would very quickly wash my hands.

At a hotel where hes a regular guest, he has thrown away complimentary cookies delivered to his room in case theyre poisoned. Anyone could get a name badge and say theyre the duty manager, he says. You have to have that level ofparanoia.

Danger could also come from extremists picketing Bellingcat events. You dont know which one of the conspiracy theorists thinks youre a satanic paedophile and decides that you need a good stabbing. He adds: Im quite introverted, so I dont mind being in the house all the time. But it still sucks.

Bellingcat partnered with CNN, Der Spiegel and The Insider for their Navalny investigation, but those outlets made it clear who obtained the data. As the Washington Post puts it: Bellingcat breaks stories that newsrooms envy using methods newsrooms avoid. On this occasion, Grozev paid a reported 22,000 to obtain the phone and flight details via Russias black market for data, where information often leaks easily for a price.

Higgins knew this could be controversial. We had a lot of discussions about whether or not we should do this, he says. When I first started blogging, it was about the phone-hacking scandal, so Im very aware of using information obtained by non-traditional means. But we arent looking into celebrities, were looking into international assassination programmes It would possibly stop more people being poisoned, and reveal more assassinations.

Russia was not going to investigate and no other states, including Germany, had any jurisdiction to do so. Bellingcat felt they were the only people able to find out what hadhappened.

RT, the Russian news organisation, which the UK Foreign Office says plays an active role in spreading disinformation and has been fined by Ofcom for impartiality breaches, dismisses Higgins as a professional web-surfer. Among its recent headlines about him and his team are Bellingcat reacts badly to scrutiny, What have they got to hide? and Bellingcats (race) war against RT.

They doorstepped my mother, says Higgins. He claims that RT sent a crappy comedian to visit him in Leicester for an interview, who began visiting addresses linked to him, including his brothers house where his mum opened the door. She was really upset about that. (RT did not reply to is invitation to respond about this.)

Bellingcat has no advertising on its site but allows people to donate. It raises a third of its income from reporting workshops. Among six grants it receives is one to train journalists abroad from the National Endowment for Democracy, which takes funding from the US State Department, and Eliot Higgins says the Foreign Office once paid for a Slovakian journalist to attend a workshop. These links, he says, are twisted by opponents to discredit their work and independence.

Vladimir Putin claims that Bellingcat uses materials of American intelligence agencies, but Higgins says they have never been handed information by spies, adding claims they are funded by the CIA are nonsense.

Talking about the reporting workshops in a 2018 New Yorker article, Higgins said: Were going to start explicitly saying that people from intelligence agencies arent allowed to apply Its awkward for everybody in the room if theres an MI5 person there. However, he says in reality he has never been approached by a British or US spy, and its defence officials from smaller countries being turned away.

Bellingcat has been contacted by the FBI over specific kidnapping cases that weve been working on some people who went missing in Syria just so they could pick our brains, says Higgins but Bellingcat does not routinely provide services for the FBI as they have enough resources to bloody do it themselves.

Having spent his teenage years reading Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein and watching Michael Moore, Higgins identifies with the leftist politics but not the alt-left media which sees everything through the lens of the 2003 Iraq War, and hes happy to work with politicians from the centre right.

He finds it frustrating to hear arguments that Bellingcat focuses purely on Russia, even though were challenging the UKs arms exports to Yemen in court and covering many other stories worldwide, including the baseless QAnon conspiracy that Donald Trump has been fighting a cabal of sex-trafficking cannibals. Hed like to work on China but says a new network of Mandarin-speaking investigators would be needed.

More disheartening for Higgins is uncovering troubling facts about Russia, only to see the UK and its allies fail to take significant action. We have politicians going: Lets do some more sanctions, thatll work. Its honestly pathetic. He rails against leaders who are all just spineless middle managers who dont stand up for anything. They dont really believe in anything apart from them having the job.

Regretting that it has become uncool to speak about Western values, Higgins also points to the Trump fanatics who attacked the US Capitol and two QAnon believers who were elected to Congress.

It is about standing up to stuff, not just laying back and thinking things are going to be OK. Because you look over to the US and see what happens when you do that: extremists become radicalised and start taking over and becoming part of the government. If we dont really stand up for what we believe in, and what our democracies are based on, then we cant expect them to besustainable.

The internets greatest strength bringing like-minded people together is the root problem, he argues, as it also encourages conspiracies to radicalise people and cut them off from reality. Its basically about the integral structure of the internet The way the social media companies work, the way you get recommended stuff from Facebook or Google, is part ofthat.

Its all very well banning thousands of Twitter accounts that propagate QAnon lies, he says, but if the big tech firms arent forced to take more fundamental action, then its just going to happen again and again: well have these communities build up and then theyll burn down a building or kill someone, and then theyll be shut down, and then itll happen again. Until thats addressed, its going to be very difficult.

The problem is that social media companies and Google base their income on this model, and youre basically asking those companies to give up vast amounts of income. Are they really going to do that without a very big stick? I cant imagine what the carrot would be.

We are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins is released on Thursday (Bloomsbury, 20)

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Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins on messaging Alexei Navalny to say 'we know who tried to kill you' - iNews