Episode 7: From Russia With Love

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Pushkin.

Previously on hot money.

The evidence that led to the raid was incredibly weak and should have never have led to this raid to happen.

And we are still suffering from this raid.

If you want to guess about

how worse would an intelligence asset like Marcelek be,

then you would say, well, very worthy.

Very, very valuable as a very valuable, yeah.

It's June 2022. Jan Marcelek is in Moscow.
It's been almost two years since Wirecard was exposed as a fraud.

And during these two years, he's been in near constant contact with one person in particular, via the secure messaging app telegram right now marcelek is asking this person if their regular courier can pick up something very important for him something he has a hankering for dessert

we're going to read out his messages for you

on a personal note would he have time to drop by the saka shop to buy two cakes for me

Marcelek is after one of the most famous inventions of his home city, Sachertorte, chocolate cake.

From the moment he fled Europe, this person he's asking about the cake has been around to help him.

Life on the run hasn't always been easy for Marcelek, and this friend, he's tried when he can to offer some reassurance.

Keep your chin up, he tells Marcelek. At least the Russian women are beautiful, especially the blondes.
And Marcelec replies,

Don't tell me. I've been there.
It's dangerous. And admittedly, I never fully recovered.

Is this a reference perhaps to Natalia's Labina, the woman on the yacht with Jan all those years ago in Nice?

For the most part, Marcelec seems in good spirits. He's not one to take anything too seriously, really, including being a fugitive.
Being a wanted man helps to refine one's humor.

It might just become a little darker.

Marcelec's interlocutor has been far more than just a cake courier and wingman, however.

He's helped Marcelek establish himself in Russia, sorted out his finances, organized his chaotic paperwork, and perhaps most importantly of all, he's also been a recruiter for Marcelek.

When Marcelek took Hiel as a fraudster and was outed on the front page of the FT as a Russian asset, you might have thought the jig would be up. But it wasn't.

The only life that was over for Marcelek, the one he permanently said goodbye to, was his ordinary one, his life in Munich, his corporate persona.

Because these telegram messages lay bare what Marcelec has continued to get up to on behalf of the Russian state since he disappeared from view.

Marcelec has been running intelligence operations for Russia across Europe.

Not just one kind of operation, a whole range of endeavors, aggressive, seemingly unconnected, risky.

In this episode, for the first time in this series, we get to hear from Marcellek directly, in his own words.

Because these messages between Marcellek, his friend, and others ended up in the hands of police when a spy ring run by Marcelek was caught and went on trial.

I'm Sam Jones. From the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money Season 3, Agent of Chaos, episode 7.

From Russia with love.

So far, this story has taken me to Vienna, to Munich, to the south of France, to Tunis.

But right now, here I am in Great Yarmouth.

That's the sound of a tiny little train, one of those little toy trains going past that takes people from car parks to the seafront.

Great Yarmouth is a seaside resort on the Norfolk coast, about three hours northeast of London. There's a beautiful sandy beach, a pleasure pier and a fairground.

The seafront is lined with amusement arcades. A handful of grand buildings hint at former prosperity, but there hasn't been much money in the town for decades.

It's the most incongruous place, given what happened here and how significant it was.

But then again, in this kind of story, and in a lot of spy fiction too, half-forgotten, liminal places like this are often at the heart of the matter.

The terraced streets off the seafront are full of guesthouses, but many of these are boarded up. My producer Peggy and I are here to see one guesthouse in particular.
On Prince's Road, the Hey D.

There it is on the right. It's the white and blue one.
Oh, here, oh, at the end, yeah, yeah, I see that. Windows are all shuttered, curtains all drawn.

Opposite the Hey D, there's a pub. So we go in, hoping to find someone who can maybe tell us more about what happened here on Prince's Road on a cold February morning in 2023.

Moira Scott is the landlady. She had a ringside seat.

I turned up just before nine, always get the doors open and straight away saw over the road that there was a big tent awning thing out the front of the building.

Moira knows the rhythm of Great Yarmouth well and she's pretty unflappable.

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 barclabres on.

Earlier that morning, squads of police and security officials arrived at number 27, heavily armed, and bashed the door in.

Body cam footage of one of the officers shows police streaming into the building in the dawn light, through dim rooms on the ground floor.

At the back, they found the person they were looking for.

Orlin Rusev, a Bulgarian man. He looks terrified.
His pupils are wide.

The police officer pushes him up against a wall and holds him there. And in the background, you can hear other officers stamping up the stairs.
He stammers to the officer restraining him.

I think this is the wrong place.

The Haydi is no longer a guest house. It's Rusev's home.

And it's in Aladdin's cave, or perhaps more of a hoarder's lair. It's stacked high with boxes and clutter.

One of the rooms at the back seems to be Rusev's office. It's packed full of what police later describe as a vast amount of computer and technical hardware.

Are all of these devices yours?

I have purchased some on the eBay and I'm repairing many of those.

Rusev tells them he's running an IT repair business, but that's not true. Most of this equipment, it's for surveillance.

And it's only later when technical experts begin to pour through the stuff they've seized that they find the treasure, the telegram messages between Marcelek and his correspondent.

Because Orlan Rusev is the cake courier, the fan of Russian blondes, the man who has served as Marcelek's right hand during his exile in Moscow.

There are 300,000 telegram messages in total. 80,000 alone are between Rusev and Marcelek, and the rest are between Rusev and the agents he'd recruited to do Marcelek's bidding.

A year and nine months after the raid in Great Yarmouth, the biggest public espionage trial in modern UK history begins in London. Orlin Rusev is in the dock, and alongside him are five others.

Like him, they're all Bulgarian nationals who had been granted the right to live permanently in the UK.

The Crown Prosecution Service accuses them them of participating in a bewildering array of high-stakes espionage operations on British soil and across Europe.

My colleague Helen Worrell had a front row seat for it all. She spent years reporting on security for the FT.
It's very rare that they get to prosecute espionage, so this is a huge deal.

There's one notable absence in the courtroom, of course. I would say that Marsalek really was like a sort of ghost that haunted this trial.

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

The messages between Marcellek and Rusev are at the heart of the prosecution's evidence.

What's striking about them at first glance, though, is that they're just like any other online conversation between two, admittedly slightly odd, pals.

I mean, one thing that's quite funny is that he absolutely loves this bizarre, laughing wombat emoji, which he uses constantly when Rusev says something that sort of tickles him.

Now I felt I needed to see this for myself and I can actually confirm that it isn't a wombat but a raccoon. Helen says she's no zoologist.
Anyway.

You know, so they're sort of leering about women and there are often quite sort of long and tedious exchanges where they pontificate about geopolitics in quite a sort of boring way.

You know, this is just the sort of message equivalent of the manosphere.

As in this choice piece of bravado from Marcelek. Apologies.

I was stuck between the mafia, half of Russia's ambassadors, the GRU, a dozen naked girls, and some deep state guys, whose names no one knows, who forced me to drink a bottle of gin.

The messages found at the Haydy also reveal a closeness between the two men. At New Year's, Marcelec effusively thanks his friend for his work, and he signs off, from Russia, with love.

But far more importantly, the message is exposed who Marcelec and Rusev had working for them.

And the more I learn about them, the more it makes me wonder how it could be that Russia, an undoubted espionage superpower, has ended up depending on people like this as its frontline foot soldiers.

Let me take you through the orc chart.

Marcelec was at the top of the group, giving orders from Moscow. In Great Yarmouth, Rusev was his number two, Marcelec's ideas guy, his operations man.

And Rusev then sets things in motion via his man on the ground, his troop leader, if you will. A man called Biza Zambozov, who he and Marcelec sometimes jokingly referred to as Jean-Claude Van Damme.

That's a reference to the 1990s movie star and Belgian beefcake. Zambozov lived in North London, and it was there that he collected four underlings.

who he, Rusev and Marcelec, sometimes disparagingly referred to in their messages as the minions, after the hapless yellow comic creatures from the despicable me films.

None of them were professional intelligence operatives. By day, they had perfectly ordinary jobs.
A driver, a beautician, a decorator, a lab technician.

Two of them are women, Katrin Ivanova and Vanya Gaborova, and Zambazov had rather complicated relationships with both of them. He and Vanya were naked when they were arrested in bed together.

So this is him and his girlfriend while his long-term partner, Katrina, was at work at the time.

And actually, one of the more absurd things that came out in the trial was that he pretended to both women that he had brain cancer.

So he sort of was playing them off against each other slightly, but he was also using this entirely fake diagnosis to

essentially inveigle them into doing things that they didn't particularly want to do on the basis that he was too sick and that he was going through treatment.

There was some completely extraordinary evidence where he was shown speaking to one of them on a sort of WhatsApp call and he had wound toilet paper round his head to look like a bandage, sort of as if he had just recently had brain surgery.

You might be thinking, as I am, that all of this is beginning to sound a bit more farcical than threatening, more Keystone cops than Casino Royale.

Because when I think of what a good spyring probably needs to work, the first things that spring to mind are skill, trust and loyalty. If you don't have those, then how can you hope to stay secret?

These guys had far too little appetite for discretion. Sometimes they seemed to be a bit carried away by it all.
I think at some points they were sort of surprised by the excitement of it.

There's a photograph that was shown in evidence of Gaborova using her Ray-Ban spyglasses. Sunglasses that have been equipped with a miniature camera.

You know, she takes a photo of herself in a hotel mirror, sort of selfie in these glasses.

And you can see that there is an element of glamour here.

But here's the thing: despite how amateurish the minions seem to be, the plots Marcelec and Rusev tasked them with were frighteningly ambitious.

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In those thousands of Telegram messages I told you about, Marcelec and his minions discussed a multitude of plots. Some stayed ideas in the ether.

Others were put into action in the real real world.

I'm going to tell you about three of them which struck me, because they were operations on the front line of Russia's shadow work to manipulate its allies, sow chaos amongst its enemies, and silence its critics.

To understand the first, you need to know a little bit about Kazakhstan, the largest former state of the USSR after Russia itself.

Since independence, Kazakhstan has had a close but complicated relationship with its neighbor and former overlord.

In 2019, when there was a change in government, Russia began to worry about Kazakhstan drifting out of its political orbit. Enter Jan Marcelek and the Minions.

Russia's intelligence services brief Marcelek on their problem, and Marcelek he gets to work engineering a potential solution with Rusev.

On the agenda, putting pressure on the new Kazakh president, making things hard for him, close to home, literally, by even looking at ways to target his family.

What Marcelek describes in a telegram message to Rusev as creative ways to make their lives miserable. Marcelec spitballs some ideas, ways he can spread some nasty rumors.

Maybe a deep fake porn video of the son of the president?

Also, a honey trap for the son when he is traveling in Europe could be a fun option. It sounds like these ideas are going down well in Moscow when Marcelek writes to Rusev,

The GRU guys are saying there'll be a drama in Kazakhstan if we publish this.

To be clear, because this isn't immediately obvious, the messages show that the idea was to secretly create a problem and then offer a phony solution to it.

To set up the president's son and then offer the president fake information about the people responsible.

Because the end goal here was to actually strengthen diplomatic relationships between between Russia and Kazakhstan, to make the new Kazakh government think it still needed Russia's help and that Russia was a beneficent ally.

Thankfully for the President's son, Marcelik and Rusev eventually settle on a different course of action, an operation aimed at the Kazakh embassy in London, an operation that would actually require a lot of careful planning.

four false trails to be laid and a spectacular coup de téâtre at the end to really grab the Kazakh government's attention.

On paper, a really impressive piece of tradecraft, with a lot required to pull it off. At the centre of the plan is a protest outside the embassy.

But not just any protest, something really provocative. They discuss using drones to cover the embassy with 100 litres of pig's blood.

They will make it look like the pig's blood has been sprayed by pro-democracy protesters.

This seems to get the green light because Marcelek and Rusev go on to agree a budget before discussing details like how can the blood be diluted so that it can be effectively sprayed and how can it be mixed to glow at night?

Rusev seems to be making progress. One of the minions has sent him videos of vials of blood.
In a message to Marcelek he tells him the quote vampire team are ready for tests.

Marcelec responds Bloody glorious.

Literally. Zambazov and the minions, meanwhile, take it in turns to surveil the embassy to work out the best plan of attack, including using a drone.

Rusev gets sent videos and photos from their covert reconnaissance.

It's not just this protest, though. There's a whole hinterground that Marcelek Rusev and the Minions have worked on building out for the alleged perpetrators of this protest.

They've drawn up letters from this fake group to senior American and European politicians urging them to sanction Kazakhstan.

They've even booked out a room in a pub in London under the group's name to make it look like there was a real planning meeting taking place for their activists.

Rusev and Zambozov discuss creating a scene at the pub bar to make sure witnesses remember something was going on.

The Porcine Plan, luckily for London's public hygiene officers, never goes ahead. But the groundwork for the operation has been so successful that it alone is actually already bearing fruit.

Glorious news from

The thing is, this operation, it's super high risk. And Marcelec seems to know it when he tells Rusev.
Don't want anyone outside a small circle in the GRU to know about this Kazakh attack story.

Because obviously if the Kazakh government ever found out it was Marselek behind this, and the GIU behind him, deliberately humiliating them in public and falsely claiming to be able to help them, well, I guess they'd be rather peeved.

I wonder how all this went down in the Kazakh capital, Astana, when it came out at the trial.

Then again, when it comes to intelligence operations, one thing I've learned is that Russia very rarely seems to factor in the cost of public shame.

In another operation, the minions were being used to daub hate symbols at various public locations around Europe, including the Jewish Museum in Vienna.

They put up material that looks as if it's associated with the Azov Brigade, which is obviously this group of fighters in Ukraine who are said to have some sort of fascist or Nazi ideology, although obviously that is entirely debatable and some people would claim it's not the case at all.

But so they are

very much amplifying the Kremlin's arguments and their sort of propaganda. The intent was to generate generate news stories that would support Russia's justification for its invasion of Ukraine.

The narrative that Ukraine, Austria and Europe are turning fascist.

Which brings me to an even more sensitive mission that the Minions were tasked with about a year after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. One which could actually help Russia on the battlefield.

At this point in the war, Russia was struggling and Ukraine was pushing back. Marcelec sent Rusev Rusev a message.

He told him he was likely to have a meeting tomorrow with our friends who have asked for help in Germany with mobile tracking.

Marcelec tells Rusev that his friends, aka Russian military intelligence, want to try and locate 70 Ukrainians who have arrived in Germany for training at a US airbase.

Marcelek thinks the Ukrainians are there to learn how to use Patriot air defense systems, the missiles gifted to Ukraine by NATO allies to help defend Ukrainian civilians from Russian bombing raids.

Marcelek asks, Can we use the IMSI catcher in Germany? We need to spawn Ukrainians at a German military base.

Now, you've probably never heard of an IMSI catcher, and for good reason, because this is military-grade technology, worth more than £100,000,

and what it does is hoover up cell phone data. It collects the individual signatures and locations of devices near it.

Rusev, he's got one at home. He's excited to put it to use.
It's just gathering dust, he tells Marcelek in his quote, Indiana Jones garage.

Now, you can't buy an IMSI device anywhere, you know, through reputable means. So we don't know how he got hold of this.
And it wasn't just that he managed to purchase it.

He also then sort of retrofitted it. Rusev tells Marcellek he can hide the IMSI catcher in his car.

So he managed to sort of buy a second-hand Chrysler and he fitted the IMSI into the boot of the Chrysler and he wired it up with a red button on the steering wheel that pretty much said, you know, press here to activate the IMSI.

So he was sort of hooking together these different bits of hardware that he'd managed to acquire.

As the planning develops, Rusev sets up a Telegram group chat to loop in the minions.

He writes that he wants them to, quote, go on a tour in Germany for one or two days.

Rusev wants Zambazov and a Minion to do a recce to maybe see if there's an apartment they can rent near the base and a discreet spot close to its fence where he can park his IMSI Mobile.

The plan was to set up the IMSI catcher there for several weeks, to leave it running and to collect as much cell phone data from people on the base as possible.

and then to give all this data to Russia, so that Russia would be able to locate these trained Ukrainians and kill them.

Now, if you were a military intelligence officer from the GRU, I'm not sure you'd be able to undertake this operation, even with all the training and skills in the world.

Because in recent years, European intelligence agencies have been doing all they can to track Russian agents at work on the continent, and they're pretty good at it.

Hundreds of suspected Russian intelligence operatives have been expelled.

But if you're a Bulgarian beautician from London, or a mobile phone repairman from Great Yarmouth, who will be paying attention when you drive across a border or end up renting an Airbnb in a small town in Germany?

This whole plot, it luckily got stopped in its tracks because hours before it was due to begin, police busted down all in Rusev's front door.

But the trial revealed that the the Russian state wasn't just using Marselec and the Bulgarians to help wage its murderous war against Ukrainians.

It was also using them to help in its war against its own citizens.

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This is Michael Lewis from Against the Rules, the big short companion. This podcast is brought to you by FedEx, the new power move.

Hey, we all know those people who you run into at work who want you to think that they have power and you don't. You know.

people who show up late to meetings and events late on purpose to make themselves look like they're so busy. People who put you on hold, or people who never sit at the conference table in a meeting.

Instead, they're always perched in the back, lording over everyone. The real power move is actually having access to the biggest data networks powered by the biggest delivery network.

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Hi, Roman.

Oh, let me turn on everything. Yes, it's working.
Hi.

Hello.

Thanks very much for speaking with us.

I know it must be quite difficult circumstances at the moment, but we really appreciate it.

Roman Duborkatov Dubrokatov is an investigative reporter and the founder of The Insider, an independent media organization with a focus on Russia.

He helped uncover the identity of the Russian agents behind the Botch Salisbury poisonings in 2018, and he helped reveal the attempted murder in 2020 of then-Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny using the poison Novichok.

All of which has made him pretty unpopular with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Roman currently lives in in an undisclosed location. He's under police protection and reveals as little information about his movements as possible, so we didn't meet in person.

But once upon a time, he lived in Russia.

Yeah, well, actually, I'm in Russia every night because, like, literally every night, I have a dream that I'm there, and that usually it's one scenario that I'm doing something ordinary, like I'm preparing to go to play football, or I'm, I don't know, like speaking with my relatives or something, and suddenly at some point, they realize that something is wrong.

I just remember that actually, I can't be now in Russia. This is impossible because they are going to arrest me.
And, like,

this is

surreal as it's supposed to be in a dream.

Feeling of like what is happening to you cannot be real.

In 2021, Roman had to flee his home, his friends, and his family. It was a choice between

being

killed or imprisoned. I didn't know at this time and still don't know what was the plan.
And the other option was just to have a big risk, but try to get real freedom.

In the middle of the night, he crept across a sunflower field, out of Russia, and into Ukraine.

The second after I crossed the border, I felt, not even psychologically, but even physiologically, I felt how big was the burden that fell from my shoulders.

Except that in Europe, he wouldn't be entirely safe either.

It was November 2021, several months after Roman had left Russia behind. He finished a meeting with his team in Budapest, said goodbye to his colleagues and made his way to the airport.

But as he waited to board his flight to Berlin, he didn't realize that he had company, because one of the minions was waiting to board the plane too.

She would be sat next to him, not by coincidence, but by design. As he settled into his seat, He had no idea that someone was watching him.

We didn't even have an icon, but she had a camera in her shoulder so she could watch everything.

As it turned out, weeks earlier, Rusev had gained access to a pan-European flight booking system used by most major airlines.

And that meant that Rusev and Marcelek could put their minions next to anyone they wanted on any flight across the continent and beyond.

All of this, it's revealed in the messages sent back and forth between the group on telegram. Marcelec was delighted.
The future flights are amazing data. I absolutely love that airline system.

Roman is settling into seat 4A, and Rusev's undercover girl, as he refers to her, is in seat 4B. She'll be taking lots of selfies during the flight, Rusev jokes in a message to Marcelek.

Later, he sent Marcelek an update. Our agent was very, very observant, he wrote.
She had even watched Roman unlock his iPhone and remembered the code.

Marcelec responded with a grinning emoji and the words, Afraid of Novichok.

Indeed, stalking Roman on this flight wasn't the end of the operation against him. Marcelec seemed to have impressed the higher-ups in Moscow.

Now his team had proved they could get close to Roman undetected, it looked like they'd be offered more work, and this time it might involve more responsibility.

The following year, Marcelec wrote to Rusev, We might get the opportunity to kidnap RD.

Any ideas how to do this?

Rusev confirmed confirmed that if they got the green light for the kidnapping, he had a team ready and waiting.

A successful operation on British ground would be amazing after the fuck-up scriptile stuff.

This is a reference to the Salisbury poisonings, which had ultimately failed because the target was still alive.

If Marcelet could carry out a successful operation against a target in the UK, it would be a huge coup.

They brainstormed other ways to harm Roman, in case Moscow might want a more radical intervention, like spraying him with the nerve agent VX or burning him alive in the street.

It wasn't until the Bulgarian cell was busted by UK police that Roman found out about any of this.

It made him realize that possibly there would never be a place where he could escape the predations of his own government.

Yet for all of that, he has kept remarkably composed. I think a person cannot be like scared for too long.

Physiologically, this is a feeling that you

can have for a short time to mobilize yourself and then it just

turns off.

Perhaps he's just very brave, but perhaps too, he knows that being intimidated, it's exactly what Russia wants him to feel, and for others like him to feel too.

So

the death rate of investigative journalists is

still much lower than in a Ukrainian army. So we shouldn't

be too depressed about the situation. That's a very noble thing of you to say, given that your life must have changed completely.

I mean, not only have you left your homeland, the country you were born in, but also now, as you've just said,

you're having to move around.

You can't talk about where you are. Your life is very disrupted.
what can you tell us about the ongoing threat to you yeah so I know that

Russian intelligence

is still tasking other criminals

to look for me

Roman has been reporting on Marcelek too and has continued despite becoming a target of his spyring. And he's noticed a sort of dark parallel.

We are like people who are hunting each other from different parts of the world. So he came to Russia, I came to Europe from Russia.

I'm searched and arrested in absentia in Russia, the same with Mosalik in Europe.

So yeah, we're some kind of symmetric to each other.

On the 12th of May 2025, the Central Criminal Court in London passed its judgment. All six accused were found guilty of conspiracy to spy.
The shortest sentence handed down was for five years in jail.

The longest, against Rusev, was for nearly 11 years.

You might think, hearing all this, a tale of aggressive, complicated covert operations entrusted to amateurs with little regard for risk or consequences, that Russia is pretty out of control.

And in one sense, you would be right.

Many European governments are genuinely concerned that in recent years, Russia has, as Britain's intelligence chief told the FT last year, gone feral.

Only the rather alarming thing is that this chaos, this risk-taking, it's by design.

Coming up on the season finale of Hot Money.

They are

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

Just shows that these people were motivated by money. They do whatever work was necessary by whoever was prepared to pay them.

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 Shikurchi.

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 Garrahan.
Additional editing by Paul Murphy.

Special thanks to Rula Khalaf, 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.

Hi again, I just wanted to let you know about two corrections to previous episodes. In episode 3, we reported that Marcelek told Killian Kleinschmidt that he arrived in Palmyra in Syria in a MiG-8.

That was an error. Killian only recalls Marcellek saying that he arrived in Syria in a helicopter, and we're not exactly sure what kind.

In episode 4, we said that Marcelec left home just before taking his final school exams at age 17. In fact, he was aged 18 when he left home.

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.

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