Episode 8: Matryoshka

This is an iHeart podcast.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

More to experience and to explore.

Knowing San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

When families face their darkest moments, your kindness can be the light they need.

And when it comes to helping children in the Bay Area, you can spark hope with Shell.

When you fill up at the Purple Giving Pump at Shell, a portion of your purchase is donated to charities like the California Fire Foundation.

Download the Shell app to find your nearest giving pump, less than two miles away.

Because giving back doesn't cost you extra.

From September 1st to October 31st, participating Shell stations will donate a minimum of one cent per gallon of the fuel pump from the giving pump or a minimum donation of $300.

Pushkin

Pushkin

Previously on hot money.

First of all, I thought someone might have been murdered, but I did think, well, there's no ambulances or anything, and there's no police cars.

And then I saw these men or women, all blacked out with bar clavas on.

Marslek really was like a sort of ghost that haunted this trial.

He was clearly the organizing mind, and he was there in black and white in these telegram messages.

If I was a border control guard, though, I would notice the expiry date on that Czech passport.

Passports never last more than 10 years, do they?

Right, I mean,

I didn't know that.

That doesn't look right.

I'm back with Paul Murphy, my old editor and the person who first put me onto the Jan Marselek story.

And I've brought copies of some identity documents, passports, and a few photos.

Konstantin Vladimirovich Byazov.

I've got a picture of him here dressed in a kind of very ornate gold Orthodox priest's kind of mantle

carrying a candle.

Oh no, it's not a candle, it's a chalice covered with a cloth.

Looks like a sort of slightly more weathered

marcelic, but they do look similar.

Similar kind of face shape.

They do actually.

Yeah.

So basically he's nicked his identity.

If he's travelling to places like Dubai as a Russian Orthodox priest, that's going to kind of

crimp his operation.

I have no idea if Marcelek actually traveled anywhere dressed in the full vestments of the Russian Orthodox Church, but I do know this is one of the identities he's been using in recent years, and there are plenty more.

Some are from real people, some are names that are completely made up.

A Frenchman from Strasbourg, Alexandra Schmidt, and a Belgian of the same name, an Austrian, Max Maurer.

I've also had tips about a possible Israeli identity, even a Namibian one.

I noticed that he's um he's locked a couple of years off his age.

On which one?

The Belgian driving license.

Saying he's born in 82.

He wasn't, he was born in 1980.

For much of the last few years, figuring out ways to conceal his identity has really been the major preoccupation for Marcelek.

Disappearing in an age of ubiquitous CCTV and now facial recognition software, it's no easy task, so much so that he's even told people he's had plastic surgery.

And yet, despite being one of the world's most wanted men, Marcelek has managed to maintain allies in countries all over the world.

I've already told you about his networks in Austria, the UK, and Libya.

But his connections actually reach much further.

Something brought into focus by the reams of messages that were revealed through the case of the Bulgarian Spyring, the trial we heard about in the last episode.

Those messages show that Marcelek has a network of business contacts, corrupt officials, and pals that spans the globe.

And there's one particular network that I want to discuss with Paul.

And actually, you know,

information came to us really, well, at the end of the trial that kind of points to the fact that this network of his around the world,

it might include some contacts that are a lot more surprising than any we've found out about so far.

I'm intrigued.

Because Jan Marcelek, he's someone who's dedicated himself to acting in Russia's interests, working in the shadows to push the Kremlin's agenda, but not exclusively.

I'm Sam Jones from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

This is Hot Money Season 3, Agent of Chaos.

Episode 8.

Matryoshka.

Great.

Thanks again for picking us up.

Sure, pleasure.

Satinap takes you to a field about half a bar away.

Before we get to Marcelec's wider network, there's someone I knew I needed to speak to.

Someone who can help me understand what Russia really wants and why an agent like Jan Marcelek is the perfect fit.

Chris Donnelly lives in a remote corner of Britain.

My producer Peggy and I traveled there to meet him.

Hi there.

This is Charles

Peggy.

Chris is a respected Kremlin analyst, a cold warrior.

And at 79, Chris still finds himself a personal target for Russia.

His house burned down under mysterious circumstances several years ago, and as a result, he's still regularly in contact with Special Branch, the unit of the UK's police who handles sensitive political cases, about possible ongoing threats to him.

Still really is an issue, the police have the house under storm alert.

We've got security systems.

Right.

Right.

We're not sure

how it came to burn down.

We're sitting in the drawing room of Chris's ancient manor house.

Through the window are views across rolling hills to distant peaks.

Chris has offered us a glass of dry white wine while his wife gets an omelette lunch ready in their big farmhouse kitchen.

The contrast between what we're here to talk about, the very English romance of the setting and Chris's quiet, generous hospitality is almost surreal.

And not for the first time in this series, I feel the thinness of the boundary between the conventions of spy fact and fiction.

Especially when he tells me how all this started for him, back when he was 22 years old.

Chris was studying for a Russian language degree and had a desire to really immerse himself in the country.

On his second visit there, his idealism met with the reality of Russian power head-on.

It was 1968.

I drove my mini there with a colleague and we ended up being arrested and put on trial and thrown out the country.

Wow.

You'd driven your mini to Moscow and then from Moscow down to the Caucasus and then from the Caucasus into Ukraine.

I wonder why all the roads are full of tanks.

Chris had inadvertently driven his Mini Cooper into one of the defining events of the Cold War.

A crackdown that would forever change the reputation of the Soviet Union.

Those tanks were on their way to Czechoslovakia to unseat the country's government and stop its liberal reforms.

From the Russian point of view, it was obvious we were there to spy on the tanks, whereout from our point of view, they were just obstacles in the way of our driving.

We didn't know what was going on.

Blimey, okay.

What

must have been a bit of a hair-raising experience?

It makes you think.

And it set me on a course of wanting to understand

the mentality and why

and how Russians think differently.

Chris tells me he spent a week in jail in Odessa before the Russians sent him home.

He would go on to become one of the most respected Russia watchers in the West.

He taught for years at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and his expertise meant he would eventually advise the leaders of Western governments on Russia and how to handle it.

And then 1989 came.

By then, Chris was working for NATO.

He'd heard that something was going on at the border between West and East Germany, so he drove there to see it for himself.

And what he witnessed, it's an image that has stayed with him vividly ever since.

A family leaving East Germany.

The first time they were free to do that in decades.

A family of five stuffed inside a trabant, which is something small in a mini and made of cardboard with a two-stroke three-cylinder engine.

They then moved through the gates and out into Germany.

They were suddenly surrounded by

a thousand people waiting for them

who pulled them out of the car, kissed them, gave them money.

I thought

it's happened.

There's no control of this.

I can see exactly why this makes Chris well up to this day.

His whole adult life, he dedicated himself to trying to understand and fight this huge, repressive regime.

And suddenly, in a blink, it was tumbling apart.

All captured in that one single human moment of a solitary car, a single family.

driving to their freedom, being welcomed by thousands of fellow Germans they'd been forcibly separated from all their lives.

Chris, like almost everyone, thought the fall of the wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union that followed was the beginning of a new world.

But in Russia itself, change brought chaos.

And in the dying days of the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Putin and his people began to come out of the shadows.

So these guys are not politicians in the Western sense, of people who have risen through political party processes.

They are

former intelligence officers and military people with an intelligence war mindset, a war mindset, who have now turned the tradecraft of the KGB into the statecraft of the Russian state.

A mindset that began all the way back in 1917 when the Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power and has endured ever since.

Because the whole Russian system

remained on a war footing

and never moved to a peacetime footing because it lived with this understanding that the world was hostile.

All the outside world is hostile.

Everyone's an enemy and we might have to fight.

As Chris tells me more about how Russia thinks about war, I begin to better grasp the plots that Jan Marcelek organized to better understand how they fit into a Russian strategy and what the principles of that strategy are.

So the first principle of war in Russia is surprise.

It's actually vnizarpnest.

Suddenness.

The second principle is activenest.

Keep moving.

Keep them off balance.

The third principle is maskirovka.

Hide what you do because there's no ground to hide behind.

no hills or valleys to move up in secret.

Many of these principles, as Chris explains, can be traced right back to things as simple as the geography of Russia itself.

Like that last one, Muskyrovka.

Your forces need to mask their intentions through psychological tricks because they can't rely on the environment, the flat open terrain, to hide them.

You're all in the open, so you have to be deceitful in the good sense of the term.

Then, Tiemp Oparatsi, the tempo of the operation, you've got to keep the whole whole thing moving at a large scale and not get bogged down.

You don't know where the enemy is, so Razviad Kaboyam, reconnaissance by battle.

You actually attack the enemy to find out what he's going to do, because he doesn't know either.

So the intelligence can't do that.

So everything's proactive, starting from your basic principles.

You don't need to worry about staying hidden if you can confuse.

You don't need to be careful if you can be fast.

And with all of this, you can give your operatives, you want to give your operatives, a whole load of freedom to make decisions.

You let them succeed or fail based on their own merits.

You just set an overarching objective and then let your agents see how far they can push things.

You're giving the guys free license to go and attack what they can and destroy it as long as they maintain that main aim.

The mentality is coherent throughout the whole approach.

It makes sense.

To a Western intelligence agency, it might look reckless to cultivate an agent like Marcelek, the author of a massive fraud with an appetite for the high life and a penchant for games and mystery.

But to the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, an organization primed to test constantly for points of weakness, to act unexpectedly, and to push, push, and push in areas where it suddenly finds advantage, it makes total sense.

Now, I do want to be clear that not all Russian intelligence is like this.

But the GRU school of covert action, it's the one that has really come to dominate Russian thinking in recent years.

The GRU is having its moment.

So would, I mean, under that description, would you say that to take that kind of battlefield doctrine and apply it to European society at large, that we kind of got to a stage at one point where Russian intelligence had kind of broken through and was so successful and then people would yeah just go and make a mess go and go and break things yeah the fact there is a controlling mind directing the attack doesn't mean to say that that mind is micromanaging with a long screwdriver for every little operation

you couldn't do it

not not without slowing everything down

I suppose it's a very different way of covert action to what we think of in the UK or the US.

Yeah, one of the biggest differences is it carries with it a lot of risk.

But in Russian terms, it's not unjustifiable risk.

In war, you have to take risks and you have to reward people for taking risks.

And you have to let them make mistakes and learn from them.

You have to have trial and error in war.

At the moment, in the West, we have error and trial.

This all seems like it very neatly ties a bow on this story, that it helps us to understand Marcelek as the perfect Russian agent of chaos.

Except, as I keep telling you, spy stories, they tend to take unexpected turns.

And the more I delve into the Telegram message hall, the one from the trial of the Bulgarians in London, the more I begin to feel that there's an important complication to all of this.

Because Marselec's relationship with the Russian state, it's not entirely straightforward, not entirely clear-cut.

In today's super-competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With SuperMobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

Your drive powers your day.

Now let it power change in your community too.

And when it comes to helping children in the Bay Area, Shell can keep your kindness rolling.

When you fill up at the Purple Giving Pump at Shell, a portion of your purchase is donated to charities like the California Fire Foundation.

Download the Shell app to find your nearest giving pump, less than two miles away.

Because giving back doesn't cost you extra.

From September 1st to October 31st, participating shell stations will donate a minimum of one cent per gallon of the fuel pump from the giving pump or a minimum donation of $300.

When I think of the most successful Russian spies, of perfect agents, being a Brit, there's someone who instantly comes to mind.

Kim Philby, one of the most effective spies of the Cold War.

a Russian mole right at the top of British intelligence for years.

I don't mean to compare Marcelec to Philby in terms of what they did as spies, but just to observe that when Philby eventually had to flee to Moscow, he was given a hero's welcome, a new official life, a prestigious apartment.

And that is not what appears to have happened to Jan Marcelek.

Take all those passports Paul Murphy and I were looking at.

When I went back to the messages between Jan Marcelek and Orlin Rusev, Marcelec's man in Great Yarmouth, the the guy helping to run the Bulgarian spyring, I started to see hints of a different narrative.

We've asked a friend of the show to read Marcelec's messages.

You see, in the messages, while it's the plots and the schemes that are the marmalade droppers, droppers, it's actually the crumbs of meaning between the headline material that can open up a whole new perspective on things.

So to me, the implication here is that Marcelek's escape to Russia isn't something that's been organised with official sanction, because Russia's secret services don't seem to be automatically furnishing Jan Marcelek with new documents.

He's having to get them for himself.

through Rusev, and sometimes struggling.

And this isn't the only thing that tells me Marseillek's new life in Moscow is complicated.

After Marseillek disappeared, I suppose we all thought that this 2 billion Euro hole in Wirecard's accounts, at least some of it must have been money plundered by him.

But in reality, in Moscow, at least early on, he seems to be having money problems.

Here, he tells Rusev about his wrangles with the FSB, Russia's main domestic intelligence agency.

Sorry, I was fighting the whole day today with the cash crypto guy and the FSB.

Effing mess.

He and Rusev discuss in dozens and dozens of messages how we might open a bank account in Russia, which is near impossible without official documents.

They talk about how they might use crypto brokers to try and get money for him.

Marcelek tells Rusev it's a media narrative.

that he's got tens of millions stashed in Bitcoin.

I ask my colleague Helen Worrell about what she she made of all of this, because she covered the trial for the FT, but also because she spent many years covering intelligence and security.

He talks about at one point that the FSB having to approve his cleaning lady.

So, you know, there's obviously lots of sort of domestic issues.

You know, almost every part of his life is somehow constrained and overseen.

And you get the impression that he's constantly trying to prove his use to the FSB and the GRU in a way that sort of seems slightly exhausting and also quite kind of needy.

You can see that he's sort of bridling against the idea that he's in captivity here.

Before, obviously, he became a wanted person by Germany and Interpol.

He led this very international lifestyle, and there are signs that he's trying to sort of get back to that, albeit in quite a constrained way.

What all of this says to me is that Marslek is not an on-the-books agent, someone who is controlled by Russian intelligence in a formalized way.

And it seems he's even having to work hard to justify his host's continued protection.

But maybe there's a flip side to having a less structured relationship with the Russian state, a little bit more freedom to pursue your own interests.

Where you can, anyway.

In June 2021, for example, Marslek began discussing a new scheme with Rusev.

The Russian state will need to be kept informed.

I'm waiting for input from our friends.

And indeed, they will be a client in this scheme.

But the scheme primarily will be a money-making operation, with Marcelek and Rusev as the middlemen, to sell arms to clients in Africa.

Rusev tells Marcelec his contacts want to spend up to $60 million on guns and other weapons.

He's already organized a test run for the route, he says, via Dubai.

They will be paying in diamonds.

Fancy rebels.

Marcelec evidently sense a further opportunity if they can not just transport the arms, but also sell them themselves.

Do they have a supplier for the guns and vehicles, or can we become an end-to-end supplier?

We can also provide training if needed.

Neither of them cares who these weapons are going to.

Marcelec asks if it's a government-backed force and Rusev replies, who knows?

Then the letters TIA, which stands for, This is Africa.

It's a quote he likes to to use, he tells Marcelek, from the movie Blood Diamond.

This kind of scheme, it's not a one-off.

Marcelec is also involved in setting up a back channel to get weaponry from China to Russia, drones, for example, or ways to smuggle microchips into the country, too.

I mean, I would say that the things that involve making money are things that Rusev and Marcelek come up between themselves, sort of brokering arms deals, you know, trying to get weapons from China to

Russia to help on the Ukraine battlefield in a kind of deniable way.

So I would say their money-making schemes are things that they suggest rather than things that come down from the top.

And many of these schemes involve offering kickbacks to men at the GRU and the FSB in order to get them off the ground.

As Marcelek tells Rusev, his new life in Russia is like a Russian Matryoshka doll of motivations within secret ambitions.

You may have had a Russian Matryoshka doll when you were a kid.

They're those wooden dolls that have a series of slightly smaller dolls within them.

Marcelek reportedly had a set in his office, featuring great Russian leaders past and present.

The novelty is, I suppose, that you're never sure when you've reached the innermost doll, the core of something.

In this story, I've sometimes had the feeling that we never will, that with Jan Marcelek and his many personas, the surprises will just keep coming.

Even so, I wasn't quite prepared for the next one, which came to light at the end of the Bulgarian trial, at their sentencing.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at an OOCLA speed test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed SpeedTest Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, You won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

Your drive powers your day.

Now let it power change in your community too.

And when it comes to helping children in the Bay Area, Shell can keep your kindness rolling.

When you fill up at the Purple Giving Pump at Shell, a portion of your purchase is donated to charities like the California Fire Foundation.

Download the Shell app to find your nearest giving pump, less than two miles away.

Because giving back doesn't cost you extra.

From September 1st to October 31st, participating Shell stations will donate a minimum of one cent per gallon of the fuel pump from the giving pump or a minimum donation of $300.

In May, Orlin Rusev appeared in court to be sentenced.

At the outset of the trial, he had pled guilty.

But his lawyer had a wild card to play, a plea for mitigation.

This was a very surprising development, I have to say.

It was also, I would say, quite a sort of bold and risky gambit by Rusev's lawyer.

He essentially told the court that

Marcelek had received a request from the CIA to help airlift some US personnel from Kabul during the military withdrawal in August of 2021.

So that is quite the claim.

Marcelek contracting for the CIA, working on demand for the arch nemesis of his Russian paymasters.

Rusev's defense made the case that getting Americans out of Kabul was a humanitarian action and showed that he deserved a more lenient sentence because he had been willing to help out Western interests too when it was a question of saving people's lives.

You might recall the situation.

After nearly 20 years, the US military was withdrawing from Afghanistan.

But the final months of that process were chaotic.

The Taliban unexpectedly surged towards Kabul, the capital.

Thousands of Westerners and many Afghanis who had worked with them were desperate to flee, and there simply weren't enough flights out of the country.

The prosecution told the judge that Rusev's whole argument was wrong.

Firstly, they said there was no evidence that the CIA ever made such a request.

And second, they poured cold water on the idea that Rusev had some kind of humanitarian conscience at his center.

I mean, obviously, the prosecution came back absolutely full throttle against this.

As in, they really tried to slap it down.

They did.

And, you know, they said, look, this is not evidence of a humanitarian motivation.

It just shows that these people were motivated by money and they do whatever work was necessary by whoever was prepared to pay them.

And,

you know, the idea that somehow they were as happy to work for the CIA as they were for the GRU or the FSB

was sort of a misleading idea.

The thing is, though, this wild claim about the airlift made by the defense barrister in court, it's all there in black and white in the telegram messages between Rusev and Marcelek from the time.

Interesting request from our sort of friends at the CIA.

This is Marcelec writing to Rusev on August 17th, 2021, three days after the evacuation of Kabul began.

They urgently need aircraft

Apparently, all dodgy airlift companies in Russia and Turkey, etc., are already sold out or refused to fly because insurance won't cover the loss of an aircraft.

Do you know anyone who's a bit rogue and operates large-scale airplanes?

Now, Rusev, he does know people who can fly planes.

He replies that his father operated as a pilot of fortune for years and has lots of experience in, quote, exotic locations, like running guns into Africa, he writes.

It will be tricky, though, Rusev tells Marcelek.

The situation on the ground in Afghanistan is a nightmare.

Marcelec replies, America needs you.

Pax Americana rests on your broad and manly shoulders.

There's evidently some tongue-in-cheek here, but the telegram messages, the more of them I read, the less they seem like a joke.

There's so much detail here.

They discuss plane types, costs, timing, permissions for landings and airspace access.

Just discussing with the Americans.

Apparently since 11 a.m.

today the airport is okay and 15 military aircraft took off today.

But it can change any moment.

I can't tell you what did or didn't happen in Kabul regarding these flights in the end.

But I have three hypotheses.

One.

Marcelek has himself been duped.

The people he's talking to aren't really anything to do with the CIA.

Two, he's lying.

Either because he's trying to impress Rusev or because it's part of some disinformation ploy.

Or three,

it's true.

He really was trying to set up flights for people at the CIA or at least people close to it.

But then something else came to mind.

Something which happened way back in the winter of 2018.

Paul, Paul, do you remember the uncles?

I do.

I'm chatting with Paul Murphy again, my former editor, about a lead we had been given about Marseillek.

At the time, we set it aside because it was just a single fleck of evidence and frankly, we had our hands full.

We were at that point of intense coverage of the wire card fraud story.

And suddenly out of the blue, I got an email from somebody anonymously saying that they had been looped into an email conversation accidentally and I might be interested in the content.

Been looped in as in someone had typed the wrong email address and it had sent it to them.

Precisely, precisely that.

The person who accidentally received this chain of emails was a software engineer based in Hong Kong.

Paul dispatched a reporter to meet this person.

The software engineer didn't want to forward the emails electronically, so they gave the reporter hard copies, and the reporter faxed them to Paul.

And they're quite extraordinary.

It was a series of emails between a group of,

I assume, men who referred to themselves as the uncles.

And they were talking to Jan, who had been put in touch with them to get advice on a particular challenge.

Paul and I dug up the emails.

Here's the first message Jan Marcelek sends to the uncles.

Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure meeting you, exclamation Mark.

Our mutual friend speaks very highly of you, and I look forward to meeting you in person one day.

Thank you for introducing us and your kind introductory words.

Marcelec goes on to explain why he's getting in touch.

He needs help with a project he's working on, an attempt to move the Austrian embassy from Tel Aviv Aviv to Jerusalem.

It's been suggested that you may be able to provide us with advice on how to establish an informal channel to explore the United States position on the subject and to provide guidance on how to navigate the complexities of the issue within the international community.

Also, any assistance in shaping the domestic dialogue on the subject in Austria would be appreciated.

Suffice to say that moving embassies in Israel has become a symbolic issue for some parts of the far right in both Austria and the US.

With that in mind, the big question is, who are the uncles?

There are kind of, whatever, five or six email addresses, all proton mail

addresses.

We were able to identify a number of these.

Yeah, because there's sort of giveaway snippets of information in the emails themselves that allow us to assign identities to

these different people in this email chain, right?

With a relatively high degree of confidence of who they are.

And we don't want to mention them for legal reasons at this stage, but I mean, you can tell us about who these kind of people are, what kind of world they move in.

Okay, so one of them is a very senior former CIA officer, somebody who oversaw active operations in a certain theater of war.

Another one is a former US ambassador.

We're talking here about people who are

basically ex-US military, ex-US intelligence, all talking together online and calling themselves as a group the uncles.

The fact is, we didn't know what to make of this at the time.

No, it was just so weird because, you know, we thought, okay, we've got other stuff on our plate and this is so tangential to what we're doing.

And then seven years later, the messages about this airlift in Kabul came to light.

And I began to wonder whether there was some kind of network here after all.

A group with links to the CIA that Marcelek had somehow found his way into.

Maybe a group who shared some particular geopolitical views on the world and values.

This great line.

Let's please remember that we should also pay some attention to financial opportunities while you all play your game of thrones.

It's which encapsulates for me the kind of like this the kind of weird world that these people are in where they are simultaneously looking for opportunities to make money through corruption and you know dodgy dealing business and also they're looking to kind of you know exert geopolitical leverage and change through informal means, through back channels, through people like Jan Marcelek.

There's a real sense here that

Jan was actually knitted into this group.

Yeah, what we don't have is any, you know, huge trove of evidence, but what we do have is kind of an intuition that there's something here.

There's the shadow of some kind of network or world or, you know, a group of people that crosses countries that Marcelek is involved with and this isn't just a Russia thing anymore

when I think of many of the people I've learned about as I've reported on this series people who've been cultivated by Marcelek and who have cultivated him money power and risk those seem to be what motivates them all.

But actually, something else I think is behind the pursuit of those things.

The key, something we've been bumping up against for this entire series.

Disdain for the way the ordinary world operates.

For living by the rules, being limited by them.

I mean this both as a psychological characteristic, but also as a broader political one that you might better describe as anti-establishmentism.

A political belief that things need to be undermined, broken.

For Jan Marcelek, I've come to understand this as a big part of his view of the world.

A gifted, if flawed young man, but someone whose pursuit of what made him different fed a deep cynicism about what he saw as the pieties of the world most people lived in.

And he sought out worlds that seemed to expose that.

A payment processing company making its money from gambling and porn.

The ease of establishing a vast international fraud.

And of course spying.

It's one of the biggest seductions of spying that you're inducted into a secret club.

The people who really run the world.

People who make decisions and don't have to follow the normal moral rules of society.

When I first heard about Jan Marselek, I felt he was the key to understanding something about Russia, the country that first lured him in, a country whose government had turned disdain against the liberal world order into its entire mode of statecraft.

But actually, what I now think is that it's not just a story about Russia.

It's a story about us too.

Because this disdain, This anger against the establishment, it's spread.

It's no longer something in the shadowy world of crime and clandestine political networks.

It's a political force.

It's a way of doing business.

Funnily enough, I think it was Killian Kleinschmidt, who we met in Tunisia, who first latched onto this notion.

Fitting, I suppose, given that he was the first to give me an insight into the destructive life of Jan Marcelek.

That's his kick, that's his Adrienne Arena.

It's like playing a video game or something.

The rules-based world is increasingly collapsing, so it gives also more and more space for this.

That's what has been happening over the last few years.

So it's kind of Jan's world out there.

Marcelek and people like him, they are agents of chaos.

They're playing a game against the world they were born into.

And they're winning.

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 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 de 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 Kalaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuele Saragossa, Nigel Hansen, Vicki Merrick.

With special thanks to the studio Audio Berlin and to James Morris, who read Jan Marcelec's messages, and Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix, and Greta Cohn.

I'm Sam Jones.

I want to take a moment to thank you for being a Pushkin Plus subscriber.

I hope you're enjoying hot money.

Be sure to take advantage of all Pushkin Plus has to offer, including ad-free access to all Pushkin shows, bonus episodes, early access, exclusive binges, and full audiobooks after this episode.

When families face their darkest moments, your kindness can be the light they need.

And when it comes to helping children in the Bay Area, you can spark hope with Shell.

When you fill up at the Purple Giving Pump at Shell, a portion of your purchase is donated to charities like the California Fire Foundation.

Download the Shell app to find your nearest giving pump, less than two miles away.

Because giving back doesn't cost you extra.

From September 1st to October 31st, participating Shell stations will donate a minimum of one cent per gallon of the fuel pump from the giving pump or a minimum donation of $300.

Ah, smart water alkaline with antioxidant.

Pure, crisp taste, perfectly refreshing.

Whoa, that is refreshing.

And a 9.5 plus pH.

For those who move, those who push further, those with a taste for taste?

Exactly.

I did take a spin class today after work.

Look at you.

Restoring like a pro.

I mean, I also sat down halfway through.

Eh, close enough.

Smartwater alkaline with antioxidant.

For those with a taste for taste, grab yours today.

Top reasons your career wants you to move to Ohio.

So many amazing growth opportunities, high-paying jobs in technology, advanced manufacturing, engineering, life sciences, and more.

You'll soar to new heights, just like the Wright brothers, John Glenn, even Neil Armstrong.

Their careers all took off in Ohio, and yours can too.

A job that can take you farther and a place you can't wait to come home to.

Have it all in the heart of it all.

Launch your search at callohiohome.com.

This is an iHeart podcast.