Schrödinger's Spy: Businessman, Fraud, or Russian Agent? - with Sam Jones

Pushkin

Audiences have always loved a spy story.

Be it the third man, the born identity, or of course, James Bond, espionage as a recipe for a box office hit.

And I've recently been enjoying an excellent spy thriller, but unlike those examples, this one is completely true, and the spy at the center of the story is certainly no James Bond.

My Financial Times colleague, Sam Jones, has been on the trail of an Austrian financial fraudster who ran intelligence networks across Europe for Russia.

The result is the fantastic podcast, Hot Money Agent of Chaos.

I have loved listening to it.

I think you will too, but before we play you the very first episode on the Cautionary Tales feed, I've got Sam Jones himself with me to whet your appetite.

Hello, Sam.

Hey, Tim, nice to be here.

Well, it's great to have you.

And we should start by covering your role at the Financial Times.

I can't remember the actual job title.

You're basically the spy correspondent, aren't you?

I mean, that's a fair description.

The cover description is European Security Correspondent, but

it's covering intelligence and espionage.

Are there any spy stories you can briefly share that do not involve the subject of Agent of chaos?

Yeah, a few.

I mean I properly used to cover security and defense for the FT sort of 2013 to 18, which was an interesting period.

Obviously that's when Russia first invaded Ukraine and also when the crisis in the Middle East with the civil war in Syria blew up.

So there was a lot going on, especially with Ukraine.

That felt like the moment where you know, the whole kind of geopolitical saga we're now right in the kind of center of began to first play out, began to first unspool.

I suppose this idea of mentioning James Bond, all the old James Bond stories often involve the Soviet Union and watching some of the films in the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, you think, oh well that you know it's not like that now and then you think well actually maybe it is like that now because Russia is the adversary and I guess that's back.

Yeah, there was a sort of return to history.

Suddenly that's when I think the beginning of the interest in kind of spying and espionage began to tick up and of course there were the Skripal poisonings in the UK, with the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal by the Russian state.

And so suddenly there was this, oh my gosh, what is going on in the shadows?

And one of the striking things was just discovering the extent to which actually Russian intelligence, aggressive Russian intelligence operations in Europe had never ended.

They were ongoing and really they were only just coming to the kind of fore in terms of the headlines.

because they'd got so, so kind of, you know, far down a road that they'd got to a point where they were very happy for some of these kind of aggressive actions to come into the open.

So there was, for example, an ammunition factory in the Czech Republic blown up.

The Russians were willing to do that in Europe, you know, endanger lives.

One story we did, which will harken back to a very classic English spy tale, was we uncovered an attempt by Russian intelligence to kind of infiltrate something called the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, which was basically an academic group in Cambridge staffed largely by ex-spies, but also students of post-grads mostly who were studying intelligence or security study.

And the Russians had sort of very subtly worked out that this might be a good recruiting ground, that they could possibly infiltrate this, find people who are interested in intelligence, and possibly may go on to work for Western intelligence.

And so they could potentially find recruits there.

So it really sort of harked back to this Kim Philby kind of idea of agent recruitment going on on the kind of college lawns of Cambridge University in the UK.

Kim Philby, of course, being the most notorious British traitor of the 20th century who worked his way right to the top of the secret intelligence service in Britain and who all the while was a Russian mole.

It was a sort of really striking rhyme, a historical rhyme, if you like.

But yes, been a real kind of roller coaster in the last 10 years of working out that Russians really, whatever you think they might be doing, they quite possibly are.

Speaking of roller coasters, we should talk about the series Hot Money: Agent of Chaos, but first, the cautionary tales theme.

Sam, at the center of your series, Hot Money Agent of Chaos, is a character called Jan Marselek, who, on the face of it, seems like a conventional subject for an FT story.

So tell us how you first encountered him.

Yeah, that's right.

So Jan Marcelek was the COO, this big German fintech called Wirecard,

a German financial technology company, a sort of up-and-coming web-based digital payments company.

but big, you know, really processing millions and millions and millions of transactions online every day.

And so big, in fact, that it was actually considering at one point a takeover of Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest bank.

So this really was an up-and-coming company.

And my colleague, Dan McCrum, here at the FT had essentially discovered or worked out this company was a huge fraud.

And he had spent months, years digging into them, trying to work out what the nature of of the fraud was.

I think he had a very strong intuition that something was up.

And so he was investigating them for that.

And he sort of came to this conclusion that really the spider in the center of the web, if you like, was the chief operating officer, was this guy Jan Marcelek, who was very young relative to other kind of chief operating officers,

but supremely confident and so on.

And we should say

this is a huge story for the Financial Times.

It was an amazing, epic piece of investigative reporting.

It was absolutely.

You know, the FT kind of went toe-to-toe with the German regulators

who were basically trying to shut the investigation down because they felt it was a British newspaper trying to do Germany down.

And this was kind of the Enron of the day.

It was enormous.

Absolutely.

But it turns out there's more to it than even

met the eye.

Yes, that's ultimately really how I kind of got entangled in it was because Dan and his editor, Paul Murphy, the FT's head of investigations, they were reporting this story, but they also then found themselves essentially under attack.

They were under surveillance, they were being hacked, they were under constant physical surveillance, and they were the subject of a very widespread, very expensive, dirty tricks campaign.

So it stank, everything about the company stank, that it made Paul, in particular, I think, begin to wonder whether this was more than just a fraud.

There was something here that was peculiar.

And the real, you know, the best example of that was Marcelec himself basically coming to Paul Murphy and offering him a huge bribe, which is sort of insane because it's a gamble on Marcellek's part.

Because if Paul says no, then you've effectively confirmed that the company you're running is a criminal enterprise.

And, you know, why take that risk kind of thing?

And Paul came to me and told me about that.

And I was working covering intelligence at the time.

And he said, look, I know they work with a lot of former intelligence people.

Maybe you can ask around.

Maybe you can work out what's going on here.

Who are the people Marcellek knows?

What do we at the FT need to be doing to protect our own security?

So that was the start of it.

And it then kind of went in an insane direction and just continued to get weirder and more surreal.

Yeah, it's an enormous risk that Marcellek took in offering that bribe, but he was very much a risk taker.

I mean, that's something that your series covers over and over again.

I don't want to reveal too much of the series, but I wanted to ask you about something that you say, which made me think.

You say at one point that spies tell us a lot about our own societies.

So tell us a bit more about that thought.

Yeah, I very strongly feel that, that spy stories, good spy stories, good spy fiction is successful and enduring kind of in the same way that good crime fiction might be, I think.

Not because there is obviously the palpable interest and excitement in the adventure.

but also because I think it tells us about flaws in our own societies or gaps or weaknesses or vulnerabilities.

And really, you know, spy stories are about, okay, yes, they're about betrayal and they're about those intense kind of personal relationships.

But they also show how we are vulnerable, how we are exploitable, how people in our society can undermine us through their own betrayals and why they do that.

And someone like Jan Marcelek, somebody who was able to reach the kind of pinnacle of the German corporate world, who developed this fantastic network of contacts all across Europe and beyond, in government and elsewhere, how was he able to do that, particularly as somebody who was a pretty volatile and risk-taking figure, but that I think illustrates something about our society.

You could look at this and say, look how kind of aggressive and

pernicious Russian influence and agent recruitment activities are, or you could say, oh my gosh, look how vulnerable we are and how easily people in positions of authority in our society are swayed by money or the promise of power or you know I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine.

Really, I think a lot of modern spying as well is often a story about corruption, particularly where it comes to Russia.

And that, I think, is something that you know we don't need to blame on Russia.

That's something that's our own to tackle.

Reporting on Russian intelligence.

I mean, these guys don't mess around.

Actually, that's not quite true.

They love to mess around.

They mess around in all kinds of ways, but they're they're dangerous people and they're unpredictable people.

So I'm just curious about what what precautions you have to take as a reporter traveling around and covering these kinds of stories.

Certainly one is careful.

Online, digital security.

I suppose where it spills over is when you become aware that, you know, okay, there's maybe a physical surveillance element to this too.

So it does affect you personally in that regard.

You know, we know that Marcellek has his agent networks in Europe have deliberately targeted journalists who have reported on him or negatively on the Kremlin.

I mean the the most prominent examples being um Kristo Grozev and Roman Dubrokotov, two journalists who who formerly worked for Bellingcat and an outfit called The Insider, and reported actually on the Salisbury poisonings and exposed the Russian agents responsible for those attempted poisoning.

And as a result, Marcelek was one of the people tasked with potentially finding ways to kill them and kill them quite horrifically as well.

And Marslek and his his network, they had these people under close surveillance and they were talking about doing quite nasty things to them, like cutting their heads off in the street, burning them alive, quite grotesque things as a sort of sign of retribution.

Those elements of it do give one pause for thought.

At the same time, Russian intelligence agencies and their proxies are prone to misreporting, if you like.

And that's one of the features of authoritarian regimes.

on authoritarian intelligence agencies everywhere is you kind of want to tell the boss what he wants to hear.

And so there is a natural tendency in Russian intelligence agencies where I think they overstate their capabilities and ambitions.

And with Marcelec as well, there's this weird element of game playing and risk-taking and adventure.

And he's a sort of Schrödinger spy.

You know, he's a very good spy, and he's also simultaneously a terrible spy.

In what way is he a terrible spy?

You know, who goes around trying to bribe journalists?

Really, I think if you're successful,

you don't exist, right?

No one will ever know who you are, and so on and so forth.

Whereas I think Marcelec was driven by a psychology that made him fascinated with spying and willing to do the bidding of people in the Kremlin and elsewhere, and conscious of things like security and surveillance and stuff like that, but at the same time, flamboyant.

He really liked to live the high life, didn't he?

Absolutely.

He'd fly down to Monaco and Nice, all along the Cote d'Azur-Cannes, on Tibes, for the weekend, get a little private jet, you know, sometimes take his girlfriend from Munich there, sometimes go and meet his other girlfriend from Russia down there, a woman called Natalia Zlubina, who was actually a former sort of softcore porn actress,

who now,

it is believed, has close connections to Russian intelligence.

And, you know, he'd just be partying down there on yachts.

There's videos of him sabering champagne in restaurants.

He really loved the kind of ostentation and the glamour of that kind of lifestyle, which made him all the more peculiar, I suppose, as a spy.

Champagne sabouring should be done in the privacy of one's own home, but there we go.

And he lived across the road from the Russian consulate.

Feels like a bit of a hint.

Right, in Munich, and sort of, you know,

had people, you know, invited into his kind of palatial villa in Munich, and there was like, you know, an air-gapped room and stuff like that.

He almost had a compulsion that people should know he was entangled with odd things, you know, in his office in Munich, for example.

Did anyone stop to ask why he had a row of Russian officers' caps on his mantelpiece?

You know, it's sort of odd things like that that I think he wanted the world to know in a way, which of course is terrible to be a spy.

That feels more like a sort of Hollywood version of a spy.

I mean, James Bond, he'll walk into

some luxury hotel in Monte Carlo and he'll say, you know, the name's Bond, James Bond.

You think, do you not maybe use an alias?

I mean, this is extraordinary behaviour, but Marcelik sometimes seemed more like that than a real spy.

Aaron Powell, yeah, and I think that's an astute observation because I think Marcel was kind of cosplaying being a spy in some way and borrowing from the conventions of spy fiction as much as reality.

Not to downplay what he was doing, because I think this is the important thing to understand, is that, you know, Russia has

basically three spy agencies, and the one that Marcelec was most closely associated with, the GRU, they don't seek to stay secret.

In fact, a lot of their operations, it's quite good if they become semi-public.

And listeners might recall, certainly in the UK with the Salisbury poisonings, when the two GRU agents who had undertaken that were exposed, you know, the Russians put them on TV back in Russia saying they were going to go and look at the cathedral spire in Salisbury.

So they were sort of deliberately taking the mickey.

And they don't mind that.

That's okay.

They're kind of active measures.

And a proxy like Marcelek was kind of an ideal for them in that regard.

He was arm's length enough, but also willing.

Yes, and extremely effective in some ways.

But another aspect of his personality that I wanted to ask you about was his likability.

So quite a lot of the people that you interview, even people who basically lost everything, lost all their life savings as a result of trusting Marcelek,

they still liked him.

I was curious as to whether you liked him.

Yes, definitely.

The moral ambiguities are kind of what attracts me to it.

Marcelek has done some terrible things.

You know, he was fascinating as somebody that was so charismatic, so charming, so to many people, likable and dynamic.

How did he end up going down this path?

It went when a large number of people in Europe were beginning to see Russia as this kind of destabilising, aggressive, dangerous threat on their doorstep, murderous country.

that Marseillek, highly educated, charismatic Austrian man, went entirely the other way and decided to kind of essentially stake everything on Russia.

That's fascinating.

And I think his charisma and his dynamism with the world were very compelling because there was that mystery, but also because it wasn't like you were spending time in the company of a monster.

And, you know, my colleague Paul, who met him three or four times, even knowing him to be a fraudster responsible for the wildcard fraud, assuming that they couldn't get that story off the ground, Paul would have stayed in touch with Marcelle because he found him compelling and interesting.

More than James Bond, there's a sort of something of the Lacare about that, a perfect spy, you know, characters like Magnus Pym, who are these kind of amoral criminal, it's a kind of roguishness that's not entirely unlikable.

There's a sort of an element of it that's gripping, an element of that personality that's intriguing and feels kind of quite human.

Listening to it, one of the things that I learned was just, wow, the Russians are kind of, they'll go anywhere and they'll try anything.

It may or may not work.

I'm wondering what other

lessons I should be drawing about Russia.

They gather information through reconnaissance more than they do through strict intelligence.

Don't get me wrong, they do have the SVR, a foreign intelligence services, you know, sleeper agents who are down behind enemy lines for 10, 20 years kind of thing.

But the...

intelligence through reconnaissance is more about pushing pushing and wherever you go wherever you break through wherever you find an advantage just pour in resources there.

Keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing.

You need to sort of be testing all the time, seeing what works, seeing what fails.

That's the sort of reconnaissance element of it.

And it's much more about engaging with your objective.

You know, things like the troll farms and all of their online campaigning.

You know, initially, I think that was just a sort of let's see what we can do here.

And then it worked.

And then they kept, you know, more resources went into it.

And I think that's the kind of thing that they do.

And I also think that some, you know, another lesson is that we tend to have discrete outcomes in intelligence operations.

Here's what we want to achieve.

Is it achieved?

Tick.

Let's do it.

Whereas the Russians, by virtue, I think, quite a lot of Soviet thinking, but even before that, I think it's deeply ingrained just in the whole strategic thinking of the country, being a country that's so big and dominated by such a tiny.

ruling caste, they don't think of conflict, for example, as something that is on or off.

We are at war, we are at peace.

They think of everything more as a sort of constant competition.

People that worked in Russian intelligence services, you know, that was the sort of milk that they imbibed when they were younger, and that's exemplified in Putin.

You know, his entire kind of intellectual worldview was honed within the KGB.

So, yeah, I think that's the other key thing to think about the Russians is they will never go away.

For example, if we have a ceasefire in Ukraine, that is not the end of the conflict with the West.

You know, it's not just a small localized issue.

For Putin, it's about a whole broader range of issues to do with NATO, to do with Russia's role in Europe, to do with his belief that there's him, there's China, and there's America, and everyone else is just zones of influence for those three.

So I think

that

we should definitely have in mind that the Russians won't be seeing a ceasefire as the end of anything.

It will be the beginning of a new phase of conflict with Europe, which might move back towards

other kind of non-violent means.

It might be economic, it might be political pressure, it might be more espionage, more online information, misinformation, that kind of thing.

But it will not stop.

There will be no kind of enduring

period of

concord between Europe and Russia, I don't think.

Which is a pretty bleak outlook, but that would definitely be my perspective.

Sam, I'm curious, is there anything that you couldn't quite squeeze into the podcast that you wished you could?

I think what we reported on with Marcelek and what he is up to, we covered, you know, the tip of the iceberg.

There were some fantastic little anecdotes that I was sad didn't get in.

I mean, one of my favourite moments really was this point where Paul Murphy, the FT's investigation editor, discovered that there was this huge physical surveillance operation against him and Dan McCrum in London, that they were being tailed.

And also a a lot of his contacts, a lot of his sources were being tailed by people in London.

Anyway, one of the kind of more roguish, shall we say, of these sources confronted one of his trails and basically pushed this guy up against the wall and said, you know, tell me who you're working for, kind of thing.

And found out that this guy was working for the former head of Libyan intelligence, who was this chap called Rami El Obedi.

So Paul thought, okay, well, I'll just get in contact with Mr.

Obedi.

And he did,

and discovered that this guy was quite the sort of playboy, really, and often to be found in Mayfair hotels.

So the next thing Paul knows is that he sat at his desk in the FT and he gets a call from Reception saying, Mr.

Murphy, we've got a huge bunch of flowers down here for you.

And Paul's baffled, doesn't know what on earth this is to do with.

And he comes down to reception and he finds dozens and dozens of red roses and a little note.

And it says, Dear Mr.

Murphy, I'm so sorry for the inconvenience we've caused you.

I'm a big fan of your work.

Yours sincerely, Rami El Abedi.

And it kind of illustrates this weird kind of semi-playful world in which everything's taken a little bit lightly.

You know, yeah, we spied on you, but you know, here have some red roses.

Yeah.

So it's the head of Libyan intelligence, just to be clear.

Yeah, yeah.

And these roses came along with a card for like a gift voucher at the Dorchester spa and for like hundreds, hundreds of pounds.

And were they sort of a playful apology or a kind of revealed threat?

Well, exactly.

So this is the best bit, right?

So these roses and the spa voucher had actually been sent from the Dorchester's concierge service because Mr.

Obedi likes to stay there.

And inadvertently, or maybe not, they had included by accident as well the sort of the email, the original email from Mr.

Obady to the Dorchester Concierge team with the instructions, you know, please send to the Financial Times six dozen red roses.

And in this email, which was sort of scrumpled up in the bottom of the package, it also said, please make sure that they are extra thorny roses,

which I thought was like a particularly piquant little touch.

I mean, it is a bit of a veiled threat, but I think the kind of game-playing element to it, that sort of...

That sense in which everything is a bit of a game and everything's up for grabs and who cares about, you know, the seriousness of things.

That's definitely a thread that kind of runs all the way through, and

was true of Marcelek as well.

I think he loved to play games.

Well, there you go.

If that story wasn't even good enough to make it into the podcast, you know how good the podcast must be.

It's called Hot Money Agent of Chaos, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

I've been talking to Sam Jones.

Thank you, Sam.

Thank you, Sim.

And you don't need to go anywhere to hear the first episode because we are going to play it for you after this break.

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It's a winter's day in 2018.

Paul Murphy is standing in front of the mirror of the Gent's Lavatory at work.

He's changing for lunch.

I'd kind of stopped wearing ties, but I think I put a tie on for that occasion.

Paul is in his mid-fifties.

He's got a slightly grizzled look about him.

You wouldn't pick him out in a crowd, but that's an advantage in his line of work.

In his hands, Paul is holding a small silver disc about the size of a penny.

He takes his shirt off, grabs a piece of medical tape, and fixes this disc onto his shoulder, because this disc is a tiny microphone.

He slips his white shirt back on, puts a jacket on top, and with one last glance in the mirror, he's ready for lunch.

Paul is the head of investigations at the Financial Times in London.

He takes a cab across town to Mayfair to a venue called 45 Park Lane.

It's one of those places that is priced to keep out ordinary people.

You know, it's all glass windows and bling and mirrored interiors and very few customers, very few.

It's Dubai style, essentially.

As Paul Paul walks in, he tries to keep his cool.

Despite four decades in journalism, this is a first for him.

He's never actually worn a wire himself.

It's very, very nerve-wracking.

You know, I've got a bug on me.

You know, I didn't want our undercover team to get discovered.

That would be hugely embarrassing.

So I was, you know, nervous.

The Maitre D escorts Paul across the room, and there, rising from his chair, smiling courteously, and greeting Paul with a handshake, is the man he's come to meet Jan Marcelek very slim athletic build a razor sharp blue suit

Paul came here to set a trap to get this successful businessman on tape but by the time they finish their meal he wonders if he's the one who has walked into a trap if I'm honest I felt a bit amateurish you know we were out of our depth this guy was very very slick

controlled careful, polished,

and

you know, I'm not.

My name is Sam Jones, and I'm a journalist with the Financial Times.

I'm a foreign correspondent based in Central Europe.

This lunch you've just heard about It's the unexpected beginning of an investigation that has, in one way or another, preoccupied me for the past five years.

At the center of it is the man in the sharp blue suit, Jan Marcelek.

A man who, I discovered, is so fascinated by risk and deceit that one identity, one life, wasn't enough for him.

I find it's often people like this, the most unusual people, who reveal universal truths.

The fact that we're all inventors of our own personal narratives.

How fictions can be stitched together to create realities.

This tale begins in London and Munich, but leaps across the globe, from Libya to Austria, from Bulgaria to Afghanistan, from the Cote d'Azur to Moscow.

Jan Marselek's life is a window into a hidden world of geopolitical power games.

Games which, in ways big and small, govern our lives, games which have never felt more relevant, or the players of them, harder to fathom.

This is a story about espionage, about Europe, about Russia, and ultimately, America.

From the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money Season 3: Agent of Chaos.

Episode 1: The Bribe.

Paul Murphy hired me to work for the FT 17 years ago.

It's been a long time since Paul was my actual boss, but he was and still is a mentor to me.

All of my best habits in journalism, and some of my worst ones, I've picked up from Paul.

Pretty much since starting my career, every couple of months or so, I end up at lunch with him in Sweetings.

It's a noisy, crowded fish restaurant deep in the city, London's financial district.

It's distinctly old school.

Even a bowler hat wouldn't look out of place.

And coming here, it underscores lesson number one in the Paul Murphy School of Journalism.

You have to get out of the bloody office, get out of the bloody office.

Young reporters in particular think that you can do everything digitally.

But actually, you get a lot more information of somebody face to face.

You have to win people's trust.

And one way of doing that is have lunch with people.

It's a great social setting

to develop, you know, a relationship with somebody who you need them to trust you.

I want to paint a bit of a picture for you about Paul because it pays in this story to try and get the measure of people's character.

Or at least to try and understand the version of themselves people present to the world and why.

Although Paul spends a lot of time at lunch, he's definitely not just another city soak.

Most people tend to miss the little silver ring he's wearing, a skull designed by his daughter.

People miss a lot about Paul, but that's part of the trick.

He's very good at being underestimated.

And because of that, he's also very good at getting people to trust him.

to talk to him and to give him information.

To understand why I was drawn into this story, you need to know a bit about the reporting that was dominating Paul's life back in 2018.

He and his star reporter Dan McCrum were neck deep investigating a German company called Wirecard,

a company that was run by the man in the razor-sharp blue suit, the man who Paul would eventually meet for lunch in Mayfair, Jan Marcelek.

Wirecard ran the financial plumbing behind billions of online transactions.

It was so successful at that point, it was even secretly plotting a takeover of Germany's biggest bank.

So to the world, WireCard was a booming digital payments company.

To Paul and his reporter Dan, Wirecard was a huge fraud, and they were well on the way to proving it.

But it was no normal fraud.

Because for months, Paul and Dan they suspected they'd been under intense surveillance, all directed by someone at WireCard, from its base in southern Germany.

I mean, it's kind of like, almost sounds silly to recount it, but, you know, we were paranoid about being followed around London.

We would get on and off tube trains quickly, just in case somebody was getting on the same tube train as us.

We would turn off our phones so that our location couldn't be tracked.

Dan had already had his emails hacked and some of them leaked online.

It was an attempt to embarrass and discredit him.

There had been a mounting and seemingly coordinated attack on his reputation on social media.

When Paul told me all of this over a series of lunches at Sweetings, I guess he was doing so because he wanted to know if I had any contacts in private intelligence or even in the actual intelligence services, people who might be able to help.

Because the subject I really write about, the subject that has become my specialism at the FT, is spying.

Paul was probably also telling me out of frustration, because back then he and Dan had hit a bit of a wall in their reporting.

They'd published all they could about Warcard based on the evidence they had gathered so far, but they still didn't have a smoking gun, and Warcard's aggressive lawyers, Schillings, had meanwhile come down hard on them.

Dan had only just avoided a ruinous lawsuit.

It wasn't a great time.

It was this sense that...

What have we got ourselves into?

That was like a real low moment.

Maybe I've got myself into a bit too much hot water here.

You do start to worry what you've sort of brought down on your family.

It was quite oppressive.

There was this turning point for Dan.

One of his sources rang him up to tell him he'd been roughed up on the street by two thugs right outside his children's school.

They demanded to know if this source had passed on confidential information about Wirecard.

Hearing this sent Dan into a bit of a tailspin, because suddenly he was worrying about the safety of his own family.

My first thing was I sort of go home and obsessively change every single one of my passwords, start checking all the security on my house.

I mean, the worst moment is we had just moved into this rented house, and

I suddenly realised I haven't checked the lock on this patio door at the back of the house, which we'd never used.

And it just slides straight open.

Like our house had essentially been unlocked for the last couple of months.

And at that point, I really did start freaking out about security, who might be after us.

And I basically became really paranoid.

It was right at the peak of this paranoia that something even stranger happened.

Something that led to that lunch at 45 Park Lane.

Paul was talking to one of his oldest sources.

And we got onto the subject of wire card, just a completely, you know, innocent, relaxed conversation.

And this guy just suddenly said,

you know that they'll pay you a lot of money to stop writing about them.

And I kind of laughed.

And he stopped me and said, no,

they will pay you $10 million

to stop writing about them.

I don't know if you work in the kind of job or live the kind of life where you've ever been bribed.

But even as a journalist for the FT, this doesn't really happen, let alone for such a ridiculous sum of money.

I mean, for $10 million,

what would you do?

And as such, it takes Paul a while to realize that this is a serious offer.

How do you know this?

He asks.

Through my son, his source tells him.

He's got to know someone at Wirecard pretty well.

They've been out together a few times, carousing.

He's called Jan Marcelek.

And then Paul's source, he says something which makes Paul clock that this offer is real.

Marcelek is paying this guy more than $200,000 just to convey the message.

You should meet him for lunch, he suggests.

So what does Paul say?

Tell me when and tell me where.

Paul has no intention of taking the bribe, but this back channel offer, it seems to confirm everything they suspect about Wirecard.

Absolutely confirmed all our suspicions.

So sure that the company is a criminal enterprise.

Absolutely.

This was kind of tangible evidence.

All they need now is for Marcellek to offer the bribe himself and to get that on tape.

It's time for the FT to mount its own surveillance operation.

So that day at 45 Park Lane, the formal introductions over, it's time to order.

Steaks.

The overpriced speciality of this place.

Around £170 for a six-ounce filet mignon.

Right from the start though, Paul begins to feel that Marcellek isn't quite what he was expecting.

Paul is on edge, but he's not alone.

To his relief, it's not long before he spots his undercover support team, three FT colleagues who pose as wealthy ladies catching up over lunch.

They've snagged a table just next to him, and they look pretty convincing.

One of the reporters places her handbag on the back of a chair.

Hidden inside, a camera films the lunch at an angle, catching Jan Marcelek in profile.

You can hear the tenor of his voice, but the background noise means it's impossible to make out his words.

To me watching this footage back, it's striking how animated he is.

He turns from side to side, addressing everyone at the table as he talks.

His face lights up.

He's sort of holding court.

emphasizing his words with expansive hand gestures.

He almost looks like a politician.

The longer the conversation goes on like this, the more clear it becomes to Paul that Marcelek is the one in control.

This guy is expansive and engaging, charming, but not at all defensive.

There's no trace of anger, or guilt, or care.

He gently protests about the FT's unfair coverage of Wirecard, as if it's been an inconvenience.

But his whole tone seems to be saying, let's put this behind us.

As they settle into the meal, Paul nudges the conversation into more dubious terrain.

Eager to get something incriminating, even if it's just a hint of something, on tape and on camera.

I certainly talked about the kind of the aggression that the business had shown us.

And we also talked about whether journalists were corrupt.

And he absolutely assured me that he knew that journalists could be bought.

I remember saying, we don't take bribes.

And I remember him very specifically saying, I know that, Paul.

I know you don't.

I've seen evidence that you don't take bribes.

And I thought, oh,

you've seen my bank account.

I remember the kind of jolting that

he was kind of like stating this so openly.

But the conversation continues in this vein, nothing concrete.

The killer offer of a bribe Paul had been hoping for.

Well, it's clear that Marcelek is far too savvy an operator to make it here and now at their first meeting.

I pretty quickly, you know, came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to be offered a bribe in front of these people.

A bit of a damp squip, in a way.

Yes, it was.

So Paul is now left wondering, what does Marcellek want from him?

Why has this meeting happened if he's not actually going to make him some kind of offer?

The lunch lasted about 90 minutes, and at the end Marcelek insisted on paying.

And pulled out a gold credit card, a novelty credit card of

solid gold.

Was he a bit of a show-off?

Well, yes, you know, we're in one of the most expensive restaurants in London, eating kind of 200 quid steak, and he was paying for the bill with a

gold credit card.

So, yeah.

As Paul leaves the restaurant, he almost laughs at himself for having thought he'd be heading back with something explosive.

But he also realizes that this experience actually hasn't been a busted flush.

Far from it.

Meeting Jan Marslek has only intrigued Paul more.

It's put him into 3D.

There's something about Marslek he can't quite put his finger on.

I felt I'd met somebody who was very controlled.

and confident, who was almost certainly corrupt.

I basically said, can we do that again?

And indeed, Paul does meet with him again.

That's coming up after the break.

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When Paul first started telling me about Wirecard, I think I treated it all as entertaining table talk.

Paul is a great teller of stories, and I always enjoyed hearing the gossip about what his investigations team was up to.

After he told me about meeting Marcelec, though, something began to needle at me.

Just a feeling about what kind of person Marcelek was.

A feeling I couldn't pin down.

Until I heard about the second lunch.

One month after that lunch at Park Lane, Paul met Marcelek again.

This time without undercover colleagues or secret cameras.

It was just the two of them.

They met at the Lanesborough, another high-end hotel in London.

We talked about geopolitics.

We talked about technology.

We talked about finance.

You know, we talked about the state of the world.

He had interesting opinions and

information on all these things.

If I'm honest, at this stage,

I'd become fascinated by this character because he seemed to know so many people.

And I kind of, I was thinking, well, you know,

he's probably not going to offer offer me a bribe.

We're not going to just catch him.

He's not that stupid.

This guy is smart and he knows people and he has information.

At this point, did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way?

Yes,

it did.

But he was a charming man.

Did you like him?

Yeah.

Yes, I liked him.

If Wirecard, if you hadn't have known it to be a fraud, do you think you would have sought to stay in touch with him?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I mean, in actual fact, you know, my thinking after that second lunch, I did.

I actually thought I'm going to, you know, develop this guy as a source.

What did you think he

was hoping to get out of a relationship with you?

Actually, it was very clear.

We posed an existential risk.

to Wirecard.

He knew that by, you know, building a relationship directly directly with me, that he could potentially

stop

us writing about them.

Or at least he'd get the kind of intel in advance about what we were thinking.

So as Paul tells me about all of this, the feeling I get most is that a game is afoot.

And both Paul and Marcelek are enjoying playing it.

They've both established rapport.

they're both working to build trust, but they also test each other, push, try to implicate each other in this polite conversation.

And all of this grips me because in it I see so much of the kind of psychology that I've spotted glimpses of covering intelligence and espionage.

I recognise the shape of this kind of interaction.

A certain amused, matter-of-fact detachment from things, despite the stakes.

Think about it.

Marcelek is lunching happily with a man who is trying to destroy the company he works for and put him in jail.

And Paul?

Well, in a funny way, Paul is being encouraged into a minor transgression.

Something that almost felt to me like a textbook trick from an intelligence recruitment manual.

An indiscretion that might later make you vulnerable.

Because Paul does all of this, works Marcelek.

behind the back of the lead reporter on the Wirecard project, Dan McCrum.

Why were you dealing with Marcelek and not Dan?

Dan and I are different characters.

Dan is a guy, you know, he's tall and he has all his features in the right place.

And if your daughter brought him home as a boyfriend, he'd be really happy.

You know, he's a good guy, he's intelligent, he's articulate, he's well-educated.

But actually,

actually,

actually, Dan, Dan is lethal.

Dan's like kind of smiling axe man.

He's dangerous.

He's forensic.

Yes, he's absolute forensic and he won't let it lie.

And, you know, I have a different style.

All right.

I'm much softer and I, you know, chat people up.

And, you know, I present myself as being very kind of clubbable.

You know, all journalists have different styles.

I mean, I think you're probably more comfortable playing a role as well, no?

Possibly, yes.

Reading between the lines, I think probably a doubting part of him was also wondering whether the Warcard investigation was at a dead end.

The threat of a lawsuit from from Schillings meant their reporting had stalled, and if that was the case, it might be worth Paul pursuing Marcelek as a source of his own, someone who could help him with other stories.

Then, around six months after that second meeting, Paul gets a call from an intermediary.

Marcelec conveys that he has something very interesting to offer.

Documents.

He hints at what they're about, and it sounds outlandish.

But it's enough of a hint that Paul agrees to Marcelec's suggestion that he fly out to Munich, where Marcelec lives, in order to get them.

I kept it completely private.

Only just the managing editor at the DFT knew what I was doing.

They meet at the Kieferschenke.

It's a Munich institution, patrician, reassuringly expensive.

White tablecloths, paneled rooms, but warm and efficient service.

And it's practically Marcelec's house restaurant.

Jan was waiting for me outside.

We went in.

We had a little private room.

I remember having salmon with caviar.

And as they talked, Marcelec pushed a brown folder full of papers across the table towards Paul.

But of course, it's in a restaurant.

I couldn't pull them out and start reading through them.

I just had to kind of politely say thank you very much.

I'll have a read of those.

And then we just had a kind of stilted, awkward lunch conversation.

We talked about his bad back.

If I'm honest, I was trying to get out of the lunch as quickly as possible because I wanted to see what was in the folder.

They finished lunch.

Marcelec said he had to go back to the office.

The restaurant has lots of kind of separate bars and rooms, and so I literally went down some stairs and found myself a little corner and sat down and opened the folder.

These documents, they related to something that happened in the UK that spring.

Something awful, which had shocked the whole country.

Yesterday afternoon, passers-by noticed two people, apparently unconscious, on a bench in Salisbury, the area of the Salisbury poisonings.

As a police presence remains here in the city whilst they investigate, residents and visitors to the city have been reacting to the news.

Yeah, just completely surprised and shocked that something could happen like this in Salisbury.

An assassination attempt against a former spy using one of the deadliest nerve agents ever created, a chemical that only a handful of government specialists knew about, Novichok 234.

The spy was found half-dead alongside his unconscious daughter, but thanks to some remarkable medical work, they both survived.

Another local resident, a mother of three, did not.

She died after coming into contact with the Novichok.

It had been hidden by the assassins in a perfume bottle.

The intended target was soon identified as a Russian intelligence officer who had fled to Britain in 2010.

Prime Minister Theresa May announced to a shocked parliament that Moscow was to blame.

The government has concluded that the two individuals named by the police and CPS are officers from the Russian Military Intelligence Service.

also known as the GRU.

The GRU, the main directorate, Russia's fearsome military intelligence agency, an organization with goals that should have consigned it to Cold War history, misinformation, civil disorder, violence, assassinations.

Under Vladimir Putin's long watch, the GRU has quietly grown in power and influence.

In the weeks that followed the poisoning, Russia aggressively denied its involvement.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, meanwhile, launched its own investigation, sending its experts to Salisbury to pour over the evidence.

They produced a highly classified dossier based on shared intelligence and chemical analysis from the site.

The dossier also included Russia's own version of events.

These were the documents Paul now had in his hands.

It was fascinating to read all this kind of close detail, you know,

the Russian version of the story.

And then the other very interesting part of the documents was the actual formula for Novichok.

The chemical diagram for the poison, a technical outline for something that had been kept hidden from the world for decades, a weapon of mass destruction.

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So what have we got?

Fart one, two, three, four, five sort of staple sheafs of paper.

Those documents that Marcelek handed over that day at the Keifashenka, Paul showed them to me.

And, well, they're internal documents from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

And these have been sort of illegally photocopied, right?

Or so I think they're photocopies anyway.

Yeah, they're all kind of photocopies, except that one is a PowerPoint presentation.

They've all got barcodes on them.

And this sort of big stamped watermark which says...

This printout may contain OPCW confidential information warning.

Yeah, they're all different copy numbers though as well aren't they?

That's one of 16.

This one's 21.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is an international body based in The Hague.

Almost all of the world's big military powers are signatories.

Its job is to police and monitor weapons like Novichok to ensure they are never ever used.

What was going through your head when you kind of first pulled this out of the Manila envelope that they were all in?

Well, I was looking for a story.

You know, the Salisbury poisoning had been headline news for weeks on end.

Suddenly, I had, you know, what clearly were kind of classified documents

pertaining specifically to that event.

There had to be a story in it.

You know, that's what I was after.

And I was struck at how detailed and careful and yet completely fanciful the Russian version of events was.

In the documents, the Russians made the case that the British had manufactured Novichok.

Because Salisbury is just down the road from Porton Down, a highly secure military research base.

And the Russians, they argued that the British government had somehow leaked the Novichok from its own chemical research lab.

You know, I asked him, you know, point blank, where did he get this information?

What did he say?

He said he got it from a friend.

And he did actually say that, you know, if I wanted further information,

I should try him in future, that I'd be quite surprised at the sort of information he could access.

So this was sort of like a little bit of an opening, kind of showing his wares, you know, that if you wanted to keep him on side, then he could push other material your way.

Yeah, absolutely that.

He was basically saying, look, I have friends in interesting places.

I can help you in the future.

We were building a relationship on both sides.

While all of this unfolded, Dan McCrum, the lead reporter on the Wirecard investigation, hadn't been sitting still.

In fact, he'd just found his very own treasure trove of documents.

And these documents, they would change everything because they finally gave Dan the ammunition he needed to prove that Wirecard was a fraud and that Marcelek was at the center of it.

So when Paul got back to London and Dan told him all of this, Paul knew it was time to go back on the offensive against Wirecard directly.

and also therefore that it was time to fess up to Dan and to tell him he'd been secretly lunching with Marcelek over the past few months.

Paul, you know, he'd gone to meet Marcelec for lunch and he was kind of cultivating this parallel kind of, you know, relationship with Marcelek.

When did you find out about that and what was your first thought?

Oh, man.

There are moments in life when you are taken by surprise.

I basically think

he hadn't wanted to like blow my mind whilst I was focused on getting the story because the important thing was to get the story out.

But it had reached the point where it was sort of becoming embarrassing that he hadn't mentioned that he had quietly been dining with Jan Marcelek.

I'm like, sorry, what?

But then he goes, he's been flashing around top-secret documents with a recipe for Novichok on them.

I think my reaction was if he had just tried to tell me that Marcelek had faked the moon landings.

It was

so

completely out of left field that you're like, sorry, what did you just say?

To be clear, we had no evidence that Marcelek actually had anything to do with carrying out the poisonings.

But the fact that he even had these documents was a bombshell.

Not only because the documents made it clear that Marcelec was entangled with something besides just a huge corporate fraud, but also because Marcellek had effectively chosen to disclose this.

Marcelec pulled the spotlight onto himself, and it made us realize how little we knew about him at all.

At that point, we just kind of had this sense that Marcelec was this kind of...

man of action and was mixed up somehow in Viennese politics.

Wirecard's aggressive surveillance of Paul and Dan intensified, and they managed to trace it back to a private security company in Vienna, the capital of Austria and Marcellek's home city.

Paul and Dan were now going to spend the next few months battling to prove the fraud with the new documents Dan had received.

But me?

I was about to start a foreign posting in Switzerland and in Austria.

If I was going to be on the ground, Paul thought, then I could surely make some inquiries.

We already knew that there was a big Vienna angle to all this.

We just didn't know what the angle was.

We just didn't know which doors you had to knock on.

We didn't know who you needed to get to.

Yeah, well, it worked.

I remember thinking you were mad.

I just thought, okay, all right.

I'm just going to go to Austria and start talking to people about, you know, Marcelik, but, you know, you were right.

Sometimes it's the smallest, most unpromising or unexpected little thread that you pull on that suddenly unravels something.

Sometimes that thread is just an intuition, a feeling about someone, a sense that there's definitely something more here I don't know about, but that I recognize the shadow of.

As it turned out, this particular trace, well, it would slowly unravel into a story that wasn't just the sordid tale of one well-connected fraudster, but instead, the tale of one of the biggest spy scandals to have hit Europe since the Cold War.

To this day I remember that first note coming back from you just saying that you needed a secure channel to communicate.

The detail you put in that first note was just mind-boggling, absolutely shocking.

It was like a whole world just opened up.

You know, this was no longer just about some weird German corporate.

There was this kind of huge geopolitical kind of side to the story that was only just coming into view.

Maybe you've felt in recent years that the world is a less certain place.

That from the background there are threats or worries you'd never had to think about before that are suddenly present.

Wars that look like they might tip out of control, radical politicians tearing at the threads of civil society, lies turned into truth by money.

Well, this story is, in some senses, an accounting of that.

A story that can sometimes make you realise how tissue-thin the idea of a stable, law-abiding society can be.

One that's governed by economic, political, and moral rules we've all agreed on.

It's a story about what kind of people get drawn into the world on the other side of that, and what kind of world that is.

A space carved out by crime and corruption, where money and power are unchecked by laws, or borders, or markets.

That kind of world might sound terrifying, but to some people it's irresistible.

To some people, it's not an alternative world at all.

It's the real world.

Coming up this season on hot money.

I know politics is corrupt, I know everything, I know that, I know that, I believe to know that, but this is too much.

I thought, I hope that he will talk to you and you will be able to investigate on it.

And perhaps misdeeds and misbehavior is stopped.

Very fast actually he started then talking about his experience in Syria.

He definitely has a view that he's operating with complete freedom to do whatever he likes.

I don't know if they followed me to my home.

The decision was very simple.

It was a choice between being killed or imprisoned and the other option was just to try to get real freedom.

How much of it was an act?

How much was genius?

How much was learned?

How much was instinctive?

I often ask myself now, did I

know the true Yan at all?

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones.

The senior producer and co-writer is Peggy Sutton.

Our producer is Izzy Carter.

Our researcher is Maureen Saint.

Our show is edited by Karen Shikurji.

Fact-checking by Kira Levine.

Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo d'Oliveira, with additional sound design by Izzy Carter.

Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet.

Our show art is by Sean Carney.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines-McQuaid, and Matthew Garahan.

Additional editing by Paul Murphy.

Special thanks to Rula Calaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuela Saragossa, Nigel Hansen, Vicki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix, and Greta Cohn.

I'm Sam Jones.

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