Sam Jones on Jan Marsalek's Secret Life | SpyCast Interview

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Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

Today, he's one of the most wanted men in the world.

But before Jan Marcelik fled to Russia, he was the COO of payment processing firm WireCard.

Officials and investigators say Marcelik used the company to finance Moscow's covert operations and spy networks in Africa and in Europe.

In 2020, nearly $2 billion vanished from WireCard, along with Marcelik.

Reporter Sam Jones has been following the case through the Financial Times podcast Hot Money.

Sam, who was Jan Marcelik before the elaborate schemes for Russia?

What was his life like that maybe drove him to make some of these decisions?

He's an Austrian guy who grew up in Vienna, the capital of Austria, actually on the outskirts of Vienna.

He came from a well-off family.

When he was really young, he went to the French-lycée in Vienna, so like a French private school in Vienna to learn French, among other things.

And then at about the age of 12, he goes to a local public school outside of the city.

And the people we've spoken to that knew him back then say, you know, he was a talented kid who had a real aptitude for computers, but that who people liked, he didn't really sort of stick out.

He was somebody that got along with people.

He did have this kind of dark element to his life, which was that he had a very difficult, it seems, existence at home.

So he had a very tough relationship with his mum.

And his dad was also not present.

Those circumstances on their own kind of aren't that unusual.

I guess there's lots of people that come from, you know, quite difficult family backgrounds.

So it's been quite tricky for us to understand, you know, how do you go from that, that sort of background as being a talented young kid, to what he eventually ended up being, which was, you know, a fraudster and a spy.

His grandfather was also a founder of Austrian intelligence, right?

So this is a fascinating thing, right?

So his grandfather is this guy called Hans Marcelchter.

He died in 2011, but was best known as like a resistance fighter to the Nazis.

Actually, he had been a communist in his youth.

And then immediately after the war, you're right, he joins like the Austrian state police right at the time when it's being set up.

And he's given this role within the police, in the kind of political department of the police, to keep tabs on counterintelligence stuff, basically.

The fascinating thing is that it turns out that he was himself also being investigated at the time for potentially being a Russian spy.

But it's not unreasonable to assume that this guy must have played some kind of big role in young Jan Marcelek's life because his dad was away, he didn't like his mother, and then you've got this grandfather who's in the media all the time.

And this all started with the Financial Times uncovering fraud at Wirecard.

Tell me more about what happened.

Yeah, so that was the kind of unusual beginning to this spy story.

Basically, two colleagues of mine were looking into this company, Warcard, this big German company, and they were convinced that it was a fraud, that there was something about its numbers that really didn't add up, that there was something dodgy about the company.

And they'd kind of embarked on this years-long piece of reporting to prove this.

My colleagues, they found themselves under surveillance, and not just like small amounts of surveillance, like, you know, phishing attempts on your email stuff, but big physical surveillance operations.

You know, it subsequently turned out teams of dozens of people following them around London.

So that was the first big kind of red flag that something weird was going on.

And the second really, and this is where I got involved, was when Paul, who is the investigations editor at the FT, he decided he would meet with the chief operating officer of this company, Jan Marcelek.

And he had a sort of really surreal experience meeting him.

First, because the meeting was set up because Paul had been told through a back channel that Marcelek wanted to bribe him, wanted to offer him $10 million to stop writing about Wirecard.

Paul was intrigued enough to go to this lunch and then two subsequent lunches.

And the weirdest thing happened on the third when Jan Marcelek basically said to him, hey, I've got some documents for you.

And he gave him these documents, which were all about the Salisbury poisonings, basically an assassination attempt in the UK against the Skripals by Russian military intelligence.

A former Russian intelligence officer who was now living in the UK.

Right, exactly.

And the Russians tried to kill him using Novichok, this secret nerve agent they developed in the Cold War.

But the weird thing was that, you know, Marcel had these documents, which was a confidential dossier produced by the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Warfare.

This is not a document that anyone should have had access to outside of classified channels.

So Marcelek's giving this to Paul and saying, hey, you might find this interesting.

I bet he did.

Yeah, exactly.

Not for the reasons that Marcelik wanted.

Exactly.

Paul was like, what the hell?

Where did you get this from?

And I think Marcelik said to him, well, actually, you know, I have lots of friends in interesting places.

And, you know, maybe if you continue working with me, then I can get you other interesting pieces of information.

And then the company, it goes bust because it is a fraud and the fraud is exposed.

And at that moment, Marcellek goes into hiding.

You eventually found through your own reporting that he was tied to Russian intelligence, to the GRU military intelligence.

Do you have a sense of when he was recruited or how?

We have some ideas.

So

we know that Marcelec, quite early on in his youth, he had become associated with a thing in Vienna called the Austrian-Russian Friendship Society, which doesn't exist anymore, but is basically a network, a forum for in which there's lots of Russians and lots of Austrians based in Vienna that come together to discuss things.

Now, that society and the people connected with it are currently under investigation for possibly being some kind of espionage ring.

And then we also know that in 2014, he meets this guy called Stas Petlinski on a yacht.

And this guy, Stas Petlinski, is somebody who describes himself as a security consultant in Russia, but he does appear to have lots of close connections to the GRU, to Russian military intelligence.

So what did Marcelik have that the Russians wanted?

And then what did the Russians have that Marcelik wanted?

He was in a position to facilitate the movement of money for Russia on a grand scale for schemes.

And we know that that has always been a problem that the Russians are very aware of in their intelligence operations, is that basically the Western financial system is, you know, it's stitched up.

It's under the surveillance of organizations like the NSA in the US and GCHQ in the UK.

So they need ways to avoid detection, basically.

So Marcelik potentially offers that.

And he also is able to gather information on customers, which reportedly included Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, as well as its domestic intel agency, the BKA, which would have potentially given Moscow insight into payments and locations and potentially details on operations, right?

Right, exactly.

So for sure, there was an intelligence value for them in Marcelik having access to information about the company's other clients as well.

So what did Marcelik get out of this arrangement?

It seems like he's giving a lot.

What's he getting?

Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to know, isn't it?

Because I don't really have the impression, and this is my impression, that he was coerced into doing anything or that he's doing this because he's been tricked into doing it.

I kind of feel that a lot of this is because he thrills to this kind of activity.

He was maybe addicted to risk-taking, but maybe a serial liar.

I don't really know.

But it feels like there's a big psychological element to understanding why he was doing this.

And some of it, I think, is possibly ideological too.

I think probably he felt that what Russia stood for, stands for in the world, and their way of doing things

is a better way than the sort of liberal Western international rules-based order that the rest of the kind of European and Atlantic world abide by.

It's interesting that there are certain people who seem to really have bought into the brand of the James Bond, the Jason Bourne, and they want to live that sort of exciting, glamorous, flying high lifestyle.

And maybe he was one of them.

You found that he had been funding and running covert networks across the globe.

And one of those places was Libya.

He was very interested in establishing some kind of border force or a militarized force in the south of Libya.

And what he described to people he was working with in his idea was like 10 to 15,000 people,

maybe local kind of tribespeople or former militiamen, who would be kind of regularized into some force and armed and equipped and controlled by him or people close to him.

On the one level, this had a humanitarian gloss, right?

He was interested in restoring law and order to an area of the country that was a a kind of complete badlands at this point.

But on the other hand, all of this is taking place right against the backdrop of a huge migration crisis in Europe and at a time when lots of intelligence agencies, the US in particular, is calling out Russia for its efforts to try and manipulate migrant flows into Europe.

So, you know, really, I think the other way of looking at what he was up to in Libya is to say that this was part of that scheme.

Of course, Russia's paramilitary, the Wagner Group, also has a presence in Libya.

And analysts today say that Russia sees Libya as a logistics hub for its operations, as well as a place of value because of the significant oil producing aspect of the region, and that that could ultimately help them gain leverage over global markets.

How does that tie into what Marcelik was up to?

You know, it's interesting for all those reasons you've described, right?

That's the way that the Russians operate is I think quite rarely do they have like a super discrete operation with one outcome and one objectives.

Really, they're looking to sort of push on multiple fronts at any given moment.

And you are conducting intelligence operations

through reconnaissance in a way.

So you're learning on the ground, you're learning as you go and you're kind of pushing forward with the things that work.

So a place like Libya is interesting for multiple reasons.

You know, there's financial reasons, there's the oil, there's the arms trade because Libya was a a huge buyer of Russian arms.

There's the migrant thing, and there's the fact that it's a huge country, you know, on the top of Africa.

And if you can establish bases there, then you can extend your operations deeper into the African continent, which is a thing the Russians are really conscious of their weakness around.

After the break, more on Marcelik's schemes and the questions that linger.

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You also found that the head of Wagner's intelligence service took Marcelik on a trip to Syria.

Yes, that's right.

So one of the sort of first things that we were told told when we were discovering, finding out about Marcelek's sort of alternative life was that he had this association with Wagner.

And Anatoly Karazzi was one of the people he was introduced to at Wagner.

And Karazi, as you said, he was Wagner's intelligence chief.

And basically, he invited Marcel to come on this kind of boys' tour of Wagner troops in Syria, in Palmyra, in fact, the Roman ruins there, which ISIS had taken over and made a big deal about, you know, destroying the kind of statues and the antiquities there.

And the Russians, the Wagner group, had made a big, equally big point about seizing back as a kind of victory for civilization.

And Marcelek was one of the first people on the ground there who wasn't of the of Wagner or Russia's military themselves.

And he obviously loved it.

Back to your earlier point, Sasha, about him

being, you know, kind of obsessed with the James Bond stuff.

There's pictures of him in his blue aviators, stood outside tanks.

There's him firing a bazooka, there's him playing war, basically.

And he obviously, it was a huge opportunity for him that he really enjoyed.

What was the ultimate result of the work he was doing in Libya?

Do you have a sense of whether he was able to accomplish some of the things that he had set out to do, that the Russians had wanted him to do?

It's hard to know how far he got with the Libya scheme.

So obviously we know that the specific scheme he was discussing with the militiamen, that never came to anything.

But he had other interests in Libya.

He owned a bunch of cement factories there, weirdly.

We know that they were being used as a site for Russian mercenaries.

And we know that he had some contacts with the Libyan military authorities under General Haftar.

So we don't exactly know what the nature of those was other than his sort of commercial interests in Libya.

But we've got an idea now that he's caught up in arms trafficking.

So there's entirely, there's a possibility that you can pull a thread back and that may well be something that he was engaged in in Libya too.

Jumping across the globe, he was also active in Vienna.

He was running a network there that almost had real ramifications for Austrian intelligence.

Tell us about that.

So Vienna was his native city.

And I guess the earliest place that he started building out his own business network and social network.

And it turned out that Vienna was really a place where he had some of the deepest connections with people that worked in intelligence and insecurity.

What transpired was that he had developed this kind of network of current and ex-intelligence and police officers, many of whom were politically aligned towards Austria's populist far-right party, the Freedom Party, and others who I think were just quite disgruntled with their situation at work and things like this.

And he was manipulating this network, I think.

I mean, he was getting them to do all kinds of things.

So he would, you know, get them to searches on intelligence databases for people he was interested in.

How was he getting them to do that?

He knew how to manipulate people.

He knew how to exploit people and told them a story they wanted to hear about, you know, they weren't being recognized at work enough.

And, you know, he had this idea for a different kind of way of doing things and they could work with him and so on and so forth.

And he was interested definitely, I think, in building his own kind of intelligence agency, maybe even a commercial venture, I don't know.

But one thing that he was really pushing to accomplish in Austria was actually a takeover of Austria's existing intelligence agency to kind of maneuver

people he wanted into the top of that.

And that was the domestic intelligence service, the BBT.

That's right.

Yeah.

So it's like Austria's equivalent of the FBI, basically.

So then he orchestrates this takeover.

Tell us more about how that worked.

So it started as like a whispers campaign, basically, that people who he was working with started sending out like anonymous dossiers on the people that were in charge of Austria's intelligence agency, accusing them of various kind of illegal activities.

And the context for this is that Austria has a new government at this time

and the far right is in power in this government and they control the interior ministry.

They're kind of paranoid about a deep state that's working against them and you know trying to expose their connections to radicals and so on and make them appear unelectable.

And these dossiers that are circulating, they play on these fears.

They kind of say the chief of the intelligence service, he's doing this, he's doing that.

You need to look for this file in the archives and so on and so forth.

And what happens is eventually the interior minister who is a member of the far-right party, he orders a raid, a police raid, on the intelligence service.

They barge in and they confiscate a bunch of documents and hard drives.

And among the things they confiscate are hard drives that contain sensitive shared intelligence.

that's been given to Austria by the Americans, by the British, by the Germans, and so on.

So this creates a huge international outcry.

And Austria basically gets frozen out of intelligence sharing networks.

So after these documents are exposed, after this raid, then what happens?

So what later emerges is that this raid has happened, the agency is in chaos and the interior minister is getting given these other documents on the side from a very trusted aide and he's getting them from a guy who he describes as Jan.

And this Jan claims to be

an insider in the intelligence service who knows exactly what's been been going on.

And he's got a bunch of suggestions about what they can do to rectify this problem, about how they can create a new intelligence service.

And the Austrian authorities start to take this seriously, the far-right party does, and they're looking into that.

And then everything kind of hits the rocks.

because this other scandal erupts and the government gets chucked out of power basically and then the next government they obviously decide this is a huge mess and so they set up an investigation and they set up a new intelligence agency, which is like super heavily vetted.

And its main goal really is to rebuild credibility with Western allies.

And the investigation, meanwhile, that's kind of going on.

And it's that that slowly begins to uncover a lot of the links between Marcellek and his Austrian network.

So eyebrows and flags are raised based on what happened in Austria.

Exactly.

There's definitely, suddenly it's kind of clear that this guy is involved with a lot more than we thought.

And then we move on to to the UK, where he essentially led a team of Bulgarians who were working on behalf of Moscow.

They were caught, sentenced to between five and ten years.

They were tracking and planning to abduct journalists who had exposed poisoning attempts, including on Alexei Navalny, one of Putin's greatest foes.

They also went to a U.S.

military base in Germany to gather intelligence.

Why did he go to these lengths to recruit someone who then recruited what became known as the Minions?

What was the value in that for him?

It's hard to know other than he was someone that was very good at building his own networks that could perform a range of tasks for him.

These guys, there's like a beautician and a driver.

No one who's like mega-skilled or certainly no one who is trained or by an intelligence agency or even a police agency.

But on the other hand, they are, you know, they were described as the minions, they're very biddable, they do what they're told.

And they are, he needs these people to go and, you know, he needs people on the ground to go and do stuff for him.

Not least because after 2020, he's fled to Moscow.

So he's no longer able to fly around himself and get stuff done.

He needs a team.

And he is also now in Moscow and I suppose trying to convince the Russian authorities or Russian agencies that he is still useful to them.

So he needs people who can prove that use.

Some of the Bulgarians are pretty useful.

I mean I'll give you one example.

This guy called Orlin Rusev, he managed to gain access to the airline booking database that exists.

is pan-European and exists for most airlines, which essentially meant that this group and Marcelek, they could change bookings on any plane they wanted.

They could book themselves onto a flight and put themselves in the seat next to you or in the seat behind you or whatever, which was hugely useful for surveillance operations.

And that's what they did with these two journalists who the Kremlin was really angry with.

Marcelek basically operationalized this group and got them to follow and surveil these people and they didn't realize what was going on.

At the same time, he left behind thousands of text messages, which was almost like a breadcrumb trail to Russian intelligence.

And he left all of these surveillance devices, plus a minion toy in his guest house which British law enforcement raided.

Yeah, I mean ultimately the whole thing was a disaster and hugely embarrassing because

this guy, Orlan Rusev, his house gets broken into and they find an unencrypted set of phones or a hard drive with messages between him and Marcellek backed up on it.

And like you said, there are tens of thousands of messages.

It's just this huge intelligence trove that kind of really indicates a whole range of activities that Marcelik is involved with.

So does that then come back to haunt Marcelik?

Would he be blamed for that while he's sitting in Russia?

Well, we don't know.

I don't see how it couldn't be.

I mean, the messages are embarrassing because apart from the fact that it's leaking details of secret operations they were up to, they kind of reveal his disdain for some of the Russian intelligence agencies.

He says that these guys don't understand, they're so useless.

You know, he's complaining about them all the time.

You know, they're so slow, they're so stupid, they've had this idea, another crazy idea, you know, this kind of stuff.

So it's not the kind of thing that would really enamor you

to him

if you were his host.

It's a bit awkward, awkward moment for Marcelic sitting in Moscow right now.

Definitely.

And, you know, he's to some extent he's there under sufferance.

Like, here is a guy who created a ton of negative headlines and whose face is literally on billboards all over Germany, wanted for a massive fraud.

And now he's hiding in Moscow and he's saying, I'm still useful to you.

So what is this guy doing to get back in Putin's good books?

Now we're kind of in speculative territory, but some stuff we do know of the things he's interested in from the Bulgarian messages are more activities in Africa.

So he's interested in, you know, diamond smuggling and he's interested in weapons trafficking.

And he's very interested in a way, I think, although this isn't articulated clearly, but he's sort of going down this Victor Boot kind of route of being like somebody who can maybe help the Russians as a logistics guy, as a facilitator for operations.

Notorious arms dealer who was termed the merchant of death for some of his deals.

That's the guy, yeah.

And who of course is now in Moscow, having been swapped in a prisoner swap after being incarcerated in the US.

Maybe they're sitting down and having some vodka together.

Could be,

could well be.

But, you know, he's still a capable and young guy.

And so I think the Russians are also pragmatic.

And I'm sure despite the kind of the mess, he might still find ways to be useful.

But he is, you know, he is also very conscious of his high profile.

The other kind of quite sad thing, in a way, that's revealed in some of these messages is he's talking about all the extensive surgery he's having to have to change the way his face looks so that he can't be detected in the future.

He is very interested in facial recognition software and programs and how they work and how they can be evaded.

And so you also definitely have this impression that he is feeling slightly trapped out there in Moscow.

There's another occasion where he's messaging one of his Bulgarian guys and saying, hey, you're going via Vienna.

Can you, you know, pack me a suitcase with some Sakatort cake, Austrian chocolate cake, and bring it back to me in Moscow?

Because I guess he misses some of these things.

Now he's stuck in Moscow and the Russians won't let him go to places.

They are controlling or telling him which countries he's allowed to make a trip to.

Him having surgery to change his appearance makes you wonder if he's just staying in Russia, why he even needs it.

But I kind of get the impression he wants to be on the move again.

He doesn't imagine spending the rest of his life in sat in Moscow.

So what are the mysteries that remain about this man?

The mysteries are still really around

what he thought was going to happen, I think, because he surely didn't imagine that he would, you know, that this life he was living was sustainable.

And one of the reasons I say that is because, you know, right from the beginning of this story, he was kind of wanting people to know that he was living this life, right?

He gave the Novichok documents to my boss Paul, and he told other people that he was in Palmyra with the Wagner group, and so on.

So, I think part of it was about image, and he wanted to be seen as mysterious.

If you're going to be like that, then you know, there is a limit to your clandestine life.

So, what did he think was going to happen?

And the same goes for the fraud.

You know, he must have known that it couldn't have lasted forever.

But the other big one is really about how extensively WireCard was being used by the Russians to hide or launder money and just, you know, what kind of operations that involved.

We've got snippets of some of them, but so much of that information is still under wraps.

Maybe we'll never know exactly what it was used for.

But that's a real kind of intriguing element to it as well.

Sam Jones of the Financial Times Hot Money, thank you so much for sharing your fascinating reporting.

Thanks very much, Sasha.

It's been a real pleasure being here and talking to you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Spycast.

If you like the episode, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating or review.

It really helps.

And if you have any feedback or you want to hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast at spymuseum.org.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and the show is brought to you from Airwave, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

This is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record.

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