Episode 6: Maestro

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Previously on hot money,

he would probably be interested to take the Russian side because for him, Russia would be acting properly and more correct than the West, for example.

I would say that we are actually at the doorstep of a new ideological war where this counts again as a motive for becoming an agent, for becoming an informer, because you want to contribute in this geopolitical power struggle going on between East and West.

It was a bitterly cold morning in February 2018.

In Vienna, the snow in the gutters and on the rooftops had hardened into grey ice.

At a busy intersection on the outskirts of the city stand two tall white stucco buildings, set at a right angle to each other, over-decorated with pediments and such in the usual Viennese imperial style.

Between the two buildings is a huge armoured grey gate.

There's no sign, no indication at all of what this place is, just a small plaque that tells you it's property managed by the government.

But every window is mirrored in dark blue, iridescent glass.

This is the BVT, the Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz und Terrorismus Bekemfung, Austria's intelligence agency.

At first, it seemed like a routine visit.

The buzzer for the outer gate sounded, and the duty watchman saw the image of a single individual dressed in civilian clothes flicker up on his screen.

The visitor holds up a police ID badge, and he says he has a meeting in the building.

The watchman flicks a switch to operate the first gate, and the policeman swings through the big iron single-person turnstile.

He steps into a grey room on the other side.

And it's at this point that things take an unexpected turn.

The man the watchman just let in, he's no ordinary policeman.

He slams past two officers in the little grey room and through the open door of the guardhouse control room, and demands the master key.

He's here under orders from the Ministry of Justice, he says, acting on behalf of the Anti-Corruption Bureau, and he's got a warrant.

Under pressure, the duty watchman, he folds.

This was not in his training.

He gives the policeman the master key.

The grey gate swings open.

And then, at speed, from places hidden on side streets not far from the gates, vans scream into action and drive into the courtyard.

Inside the vans are dozens of police officers, wearing balaclavas.

They get out and they pour into the building.

This is the day that Austria's intelligence service was on the brink of being hijacked by a foreign power.

A foreign power working so deeply in the shadows that it turned the Austrian security services against each other.

What would unfold reveals how seemingly small acts of misdirection and slow manipulation can compromise the national security of a whole country.

A kind of intelligence operation that Russia is very good at.

And that it's put to use on a decade-long campaign to manipulate Europe's far right for its own ends.

The person behind what happened that day in Vienna is someone whose name you know well by now.

Jan Maselek.

I'm Sam Jones.

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

Episode 6.

Maestro.

To learn more about what happened that day at the BVT, I sat down with Peter Gridling.

He served as Austria's intelligence chief, the head of the BVT, for more than a decade.

What makes a good intelligence officer?

Interest, first of all.

Interest in developments, interest in following up things, a certain feeling, because whenever you see that something happens, you never know how this will develop.

That feeling, is that sort of, would you say, intuition?

I mean, I suppose what you've got often in this world is only a few small bits of evidence.

It's never the whole picture.

And what you're talking about is the ability to see the links between them.

Exactly.

It's often intuition.

Peter is careful when he talks, deliberate, disinclined to make definitive statements.

Even for a career spy, he's remarkably taciturn.

He was the man in charge when the raid on the BVT's headquarters, the biggest disaster in the organization's history, took place.

A year before the raid in 2017, nine years into Peter's post, something strange happened.

A 39-page dossier was mailed to politicians, police and a group of Austrian journalists.

A dossier of accusations against the BVT, including against Peter.

The dossier listed examples of alleged corruption, incompetence and conspiracy within the BVT.

It also painted a picture of an organization that was conspiring to keep Austria's far-right Freedom Party out of power.

You might remember the Freedom Party because they're the ones that ended up in an Abithan villa appearing to make deals with someone posing as a Russian oligarch's niece, all caught on tape.

The dossier was also spiced with lurid details of sex parties at the BVT for good measure.

Peter was baffled about where all these allegations came from, although the detailed knowledge the dossier contained about the BVT's personnel and operations made Peter think it might be an insider.

I only had the opinion that it must be someone on a higher level who has

insight in BVT.

The claims are so fantastical though that Peter feels he won't have too much trouble pushing back against them.

When I read the allegations, I thought this is stupid and I offered myself to provide documentation that this is stupid.

that isn't anything.

But things get a little more complicated when a new government is formed.

The Freedom Party gain control of the Interior Ministry.

The Interior Ministry is like the Department of Homeland Security or the Home Office.

It's the department that's in charge of the security services.

So the Freedom Party are now in control of the BVT.

The problem is that dossier.

It's seeded distrust.

And the Freedom Party are now paranoid that they're under threat from the BVT.

It's a bit like how Trump and the MAGA movement have seemed to feel about the FBI, convinced that powerful figures within the agency had been conspiring against them.

This all sounds quite tricky for Peter.

He's a pragmatist, though, and prosecutors don't take further action, so he pushes it all to one side and hopes it'll go away.

But it turns out that this is only the start.

I never had an indication of

what kind of problems would come up.

And so the 28th of February 2018 was an absolute surprise.

When police swarm into the BVT on that cold winter's morning, Peter Gridling is not in his office.

He's across town with his boss, the Secretary General of the Interior Ministry.

An An urgent meeting.

The Secretary General informed me

that there are also

investigations against me.

He presented to me the written allegation against me.

Which was what?

Which was that I have misused my authority in two cases.

Once

I have not ordered the deletion of data and once

I had allowed the storage of data which was illegally obtained.

And both of the cases were nonsense,

but I had the impression that at this early stage of the official investigation the prosecutor was not really interested.

They listened to me, they gave me a chance to explain, but they didn't really listen to what I said or look at the documentation that I offered to provide.

Peter realizes that this is all linked back to that anonymous dossier.

Previously, prosecutors had dismissed the allegations about the BVT, but now they seem to be taking them seriously after all.

We knew that

The information based on the anonymous letters was never enough for the judiciary to take measures.

What has changed in the meantime that suddenly that was the first

When he finally gets out of the meeting, Peter speaks with panicked colleagues.

They tell him what happened two miles away, at the BVT's headquarters.

It sounds like it was chaos.

It seems like police didn't even really know what they were looking for.

They went from room to room in the building, indiscriminately snatching up documents.

But the BVT offices are labyrinthine, and since the whole layout of this building and everything about it is secret, no one even really knew where to go.

Did they know what they were looking for?

Was it specific?

That was not well prepared.

When you don't know what you look for, you will never find the information that you look for.

If you want to seize electronic information,

you should know something about the organization and their ID in order to be prepared and not to come in and say, where are your computers?

But then one police squad, they inadvertently do something disastrous.

They barge into the IT department itself.

This is the moment that the raid sends shockwaves beyond the BBT, beyond Austria, even.

Unfortunately, one officer in the IT was preparing for the annual backup of the intelligence system.

That's why he had a hard disk on his table

which contained sensitive intelligence and this hard disk was taken.

In fact, it was probably one of the most sensitive things that the BVT has in its possession.

This hard disk doesn't just contain BVT intelligence but also intelligence shared under strict secrecy by partner agencies from all over the world.

Classified documents from the the CIA, from Britain's MI5.

Peter and the senior leadership of the BVT go into crisis mode that afternoon, and it becomes pretty clear that they're going to have to get in touch with their allies and tell them what has just happened.

It was a shock.

It was clearly expressed that our partners

influences their cooperation because

we were not able to protect their interest.

I can't imagine those were comfortable conversations.

No one likes to have to call up a friend and tell them that the thing they entrusted to you, something secret and sensitive, well, it's no longer a secret.

Only in this situation, lives could be at risk.

Details of sensitive operations, potential information that could identify agents.

The consequences are pretty dire.

Austria becomes an intelligence pariah when it's frozen out of the club.

A top secret club, the Klube de Bern.

Can you explain what the Klube de Bern is?

No.

The Klube de Bern is a pan-European intelligence network named after the Swiss capital of Bern.

Its workings are highly secret.

Officially, it has no secretariat, no physical presence.

All All of Europe's spy chiefs are members, and gather for secret meetings several times a year to discuss the most pressing issues on their agendas.

And members of the club, they use their resources to make sure other members are safe.

So, not a good thing to be kicked out of.

To add insult to injury, this ostracism, it becomes public knowledge.

Someone leaks a communication that the club has sent to its members.

The document's header reads, To all except except BVT Vienna.

The Austrian media have a field day.

Peter's own situation, meanwhile, gets worse.

The Interior Ministry suspends him, and he finds himself questioning everything, wondering how things have fallen apart so quickly.

Is there anything that you have done wrong and your thoughts go around and

it costs you some lights?

What he doesn't realize yet is that there is is more going on beneath the surface.

Because all of this is being orchestrated by Jan Marcelek and his associates.

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Peter Gridling couldn't stop turning everything over in his head.

Why had the anonymous allegations made against him and the BVT suddenly been taken seriously?

He might never have found the answer to that question or understood the events that led to the raid had there not been an unexpected change of government in Austria.

In 2019, the year after the raid happened, the Abitha scandal erupted, and the far-right Freedom Party, they got kicked out of government.

The new government ordered a police inquiry into what became known as the BVT affair.

A special investigatory group was set up called Arge Pharma, Pharma, from the Greek word for rumours.

Arge Pharma started out investigating the BVT affair, but what it found out led it to switch its focus to Jan Marcelek.

The first thing investigators wanted to get to grips with were the events that had led to the raid itself.

What they soon found out was that days before the raid, a crucial piece of written evidence had landed on the desk of the anti-corruption prosecutor in Vienna.

It was a witness statement, sworn testimony from one of the most senior employees of the BVT, and it seemed to confirm that those anonymous allegations from the previous year were true after all, that some kind of conspiracy was underway, that the BVT was working to undermine the far-right Freedom Party.

And this witness, it was the BVT's head of operations, one of the agency's most powerful figures, one of Peter's deputies.

That was Martin Weiss.

And how would you describe Martin Weiss?

One of my biggest disappointments.

Peter and Martin Weiss had worked closely together for more than 25 years.

It was even more than a professional relationship, it was kind of friendship, and that's why I was really very disappointed about him.

Because he betrayed you.

That was my feeling, yeah.

Peter couldn't understand why Weiss would have done this.

They'd had a disagreement at work the year before, but nothing serious.

Peter had put his foot down about something, so maybe Weiss was still angry with him.

But as Peter turned all of this over in his head, he began to wonder if this was more than just a workplace grievance.

Because he also learned the name of the person investigators suspected of writing the original dossier, someone who happened to know Martin Weiss well.

Egisto Ott, a burly, no-nonsense former police inspector with a varied career working for the BVT and counter-terrorism around Europe.

Europe.

He's a complicated personality and indeems was always a problem with him.

He could not integrate.

Ott had been on Peter's radar earlier for an entirely different reason.

Peter had suspended him and reported him for suspected espionage.

Peter said he'd been tipped off by a partner agency, a major ally, who'd told him they had evidence Agisto was a traitor.

And it it

went back to his time in Turkey, where he,

according to a source of the Badna service, he had

many contacts with Russian intelligence officers.

So there was a suspicion that he got cultivated there and that might be the case, that he has

worked for Russians here in Vienna.

Investigators thought there could be a Russian angle to the BVT story too, and in January 2021, they arrested Ott and Weiss.

Both later got released, but only after investigators had made copies of all their digital records and searched their houses.

After Martin Weiss was released, he disappeared.

He left Austria and moved to Dubai.

We tried to reach him, but couldn't get in touch.

In his interviews with police, Weiss always denied having worked for Russia.

I also spent months trying to contact Agisto Ott.

And then, right before we were due to release this episode, I finally managed to reach him.

Hello?

Hello, Agisto.

Here's Sam Jones from the Financial Times.

Ah, hello.

Do you mind if we speak in English?

Yes, we can speak also in English, but I beg your pardon.

Ott is half Italian, and Italian, he tells me, is his mother tongue.

German second, English third.

He spent his life working for Austrian police and intelligence in various locations around Europe.

Most of what he did is secret, but we do know that Ott worked on uncovering the fascist letter bomber Franz Fuchs in the 1990s.

Ott is proud of his career, and he's deeply frustrated by the investigations against him.

It's against Ott, he is the big spy for Russia.

He denies this.

I'm working for Russians, but where's the evidence?

There's no evidence.

Ott says that his lawyers have demanded four times to see the evidence that backed up Peter's claim he was working for the Russians, the one that led to Peter suspending him in 2017 before the raid even took place.

But it hasn't been provided, and Ott thinks that Peter has just made it up.

We have not got any information.

So do you think he...

He was lying, he made it up.

Exactly.

Because

he cannot say the truth because he cannot say okay this was only bullshit this was only a storytelling by me

he says it's the same with the accusation that he is the author of the 39 page dossier the one that led to the raid i didn't write them there is no evidence they only are writing stories

bott says this whole thing isn't about russia he says the bvt themselves in cahoots with members of the austrian political establishment set the whole thing up The raid was basically their plan all along.

And that they did it in order to discredit Austria's far right by making it look like they'd caused this mess only months after they'd been given control of Austria's security services for the first time.

In Ott's version of events, Austria was suspended from the Club de Bern not because of the raid, but because Peter Gridling secretly asked for the suspension, specifically to create bad press about Austria.

So you mean you think that Peter asked the Klube de Bern to suspend the Bléfaltee?

Exactly.

We have the witnesses.

What he did is normally called uxerat.

Like high treason.

Exactly.

I should note here that we haven't seen any evidence to support this claim and Peter Gridling, he denies ever having done anything like this.

Ott admits that he and Martin Weiss, they were close, and they did regularly discuss what they saw as big problems at the BVT, because they thought it was in the pocket of the Austrian political establishment.

He thinks he and Weiss were framed as the provocateurs responsible for the raid precisely because they'd complained about corrupt activities at the BVT in the past.

Now they are saying we are corrupt.

Very beautiful.

Now all of this is getting a little bit smoke and mirrors.

The thing is, there's a reason why the cloud of suspicion isn't so easily dispersed from around Agisto, despite his protests.

It's because he and Martin Weiss, they both knew, they both worked for someone else.

In my memory, he was very, very smart, tough, smart, young, good, close.

The story that is out out there that's different to yours is that actually this guy Jan Masalek is behind this and that he was using you and Martin Weiss

to try and manipulate the ministry and gain control of the Beifati.

nothing about this actually

because we haven't been used for for this or something.

No, it's not true.

Ott admits that he knew Jan Marcelek, but in his telling, he only ever really did a little bit of freelancing for him.

Ott says the reason he knew Marcelek was because Martin Weiss, who Ott was close to, had gone to work for Marcelek.

In fact, Weiss even had an office of his own in Prince Rigentenstrasse.

And one day, Weiss asked Ott to help create a wiretap-proof room there.

What did Martin tell you about Marcellek?

Did he ever talk about who this guy was?

It's only

the

CEO of Wirecard and smart, tough.

He is traveling a lot.

When you found out or heard, I guess, read in the newspapers that Marcelek had disappeared and Wirecard had gone bankrupt.

Did you do anything?

What was your reaction?

No, please,

it was

in these days,

I think it was 2019, 2020.

20.

I don't remember.

Yeah, when it came out, I was even surprised.

Did you tell anyone that you'd been to his house and had this, you know, he wanted a secret room?

No, no, no.

Marcelec had just become one of the most wanted men in Europe, suspected of being a Russian spy.

It seems strange to me that Ott wouldn't mention to anyone that he knew Marcelek.

But then again, this is what he told me when I asked him who he thought Jan Marcelek really was.

Do you think he's a Russian spy, or do you think he has other interests?

No.

I don't think so that he's a Russian spy.

I don't think so.

Ott rejects all the allegations about his role role in the BVT affair and says he definitely wasn't a Russian agent.

But he actually sympathizes with the objective of the plot.

He says he wishes the Freedom Party had kicked out Gridling and completely reformed the BVT,

and that Russia's threat to Europe is overblown.

On the contrary, he thinks that there are powerful hawks in the West, he calls them eagles, trying to stoke tensions with Moscow by confecting all of these scandals.

Igusto, you were a counterintelligence officer at the BFLT for a long time in your career.

What do you think

is Russia a threat to Austria?

No, no.

I think there are some

ideas here

in the Western part and even in Austria and in the European Union.

I'm thinking really they want to have the Third World War.

I'm so happy that I was born in 1962 and we grew up very

peaceful.

Even my kids have grown up very peaceful.

And I want even that

my grandsons can grow up without a war.

And now we have more than 80 years that we don't have a war.

There's no reason that Russia will attack the European Union or will attack Austria.

Ott is not alone in this view of Russia in Austria or elsewhere in Central Europe.

I hear it a lot.

Of course, like all pieces of good whataboutism, there's truth in it.

The last 30 years have involved a lot of big wars started by hawkish politicians in the West.

But Russia is no paragon of peace, and you might feel rather differently about Putin's threat to Europe if you were sat in Tallinn, or Vilnius, or Riga.

European capitals that Russia very much believes belong within its sphere of control.

The idea that Russia is a good neighbor, it's just not remotely true.

Ott was charged with breaching state secrecy in November 2024.

The trial opened this March, and three days later, he was acquitted.

Prosecutors are considering further charges.

There's a reason why espionage trials are so rare, because trying to prove someone is a spy is not like proving any other crime.

Everything can hinge on almost impossible to answer questions of motive and awareness.

I can't tell you what Ott really did or didn't know about Jan Marcelek's involvement in the BVT affair, but I can tell you that there is more evidence to weigh in the case than just his perspective versus Peter Gridlings.

Peter, in any case, isn't under investigation and he retired in 2020.

Over the last five years, Argay Farmers investigators have been slowly amassing a trove of evidence, pulling in more and more witnesses, gaining access to more and more messages from suspects' phones, on the trail of what the BVT raid was all about, and on the trail of Jan Marcelet.

And I just so happen to know somebody who has access to a lot of that evidence: Steffi CRISPR.

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.

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You might remember Steffi from one of our earlier episodes.

She's the Austrian MP and a member of the two special parliamentary committees that were set up to get to the bottom of what happened.

Not only did Steffi have access to the classified information regarding the BVT affair, she also had access to the classified information surrounding Austria's far-right Freedom Party and their links to Russia.

If you have so many people being some are critical of the institution they work in, it's dangerous because it makes them also be receptible for corruption or working for other people's interests.

And that's what we realized that it really happened because we know nowadays that Marseillek was able to find people in this

institution B Fote

that are

open for working with him, so against the interests of Austria.

Steffi was in a position to see the three sides of this plot.

She knew that investigators believed Ott had manufactured the first dossier, despite his denials.

Weiss had then provided sworn secret testimony to substantiate it and trigger the raid.

And Marcelek?

Well, Steffi also found out that Marcelek had been playing the role of conductor, Maestro.

Steffi had gained access to messages exchanged between senior members of the Freedom Party and people at the top of the Austrian-Russian Friendship Society, among them Jan Marselek.

In these messages, Jan presented himself as a BVT insider who was offering solutions on how the Freedom Party might try and reform Austria's security apparatus, which, he agreed, was operating as a deep state against the interests of far-right politicians.

Carefully and slowly, Jan floated the idea of creating a new intelligence agency to replace the corrupt BVT.

Some in the Freedom Party were so interested in this idea that they even began drawing up policy papers on how to achieve it.

The plan was that this new agency would be run by reliable people, and this Jan

knew exactly who the right people might be.

After seeing the evidence, Steffi is sure that none of this happened by chance and that Marcelek was undoubtedly advancing a plan.

The raid was just the first step.

I think

that he could use

any allegations

to push for

something like a raid to happen

for him to be able to say, now we reform the whole thing, and for him to put then their people there, and not objectively the best and the most competent.

But the people controlled by the FPU.

Exactly.

The FPU, as in the Freedom Party of Austria.

And then I guess that makes sense for Marsalek because

those people are also his people in this instance.

Exactly.

What would that have meant for Austria,

do you think, to have an intelligence agency that was basically controlled by FBU appointees or people close to them?

It would have been logically terrible because you would have an intelligence service that is not working in a competent way for the interests of the security of people living in Austria, but for foreign interests, because from the perspective of Putin, what would be great to have in Europe

a country as a door to infiltrate whole Europe and there

install your people.

And the best would be to have them in ministries

even better in the security area, in the intelligence service.

And this is what I think started to happen via Masalak

having his people in the B4T who were perhaps only frustrated, perhaps only useful idiots, to be a source for information and perhaps in the long run also for changing the work and the focus of work in the intelligence service in the interest of Russia, away from Russia, to only other issues Putin doesn't bother about.

It's quite scary how close that came to maybe being a reality.

It is.

There's a way you can look at all of this and think, as plots go, this all seems pretty fragile.

A lot of people needed to believe the right thing at the right moment for this plan to work.

When we think of spy plots in movies, they're always so engineered.

And sure, intelligence often does work like that.

But what Russia is also very good at is influence operations, which by their nature are more exploratory, harder to grasp.

And that's what we have here, I think.

Marcelec operating for himself and for the Russians as a highly successful agent of influence.

Back in the Cold War, Russian intelligence experts talked about this idea of something called reflexive control.

It's a Russian military idea as much as it is a spying one.

the premise of which is to avoid forcing someone to do something.

Don't hold a gun to their head.

The optimum solution is for they themselves to choose to do it, because you have so shaped their reality that they don't even realise that the free will they're exercising is what you want to.

Stoking paranoia in the Freedom Party has given Russia huge leverage to interfere in Austrian politics, a trick they have repeated elsewhere in Europe too.

And maybe the lesson from this part of the story is that I think Marcelek is pretty good at doing this kind of thing.

Peter Gridling, he seems to feel the same.

Have you ever in your career come across an agent like Jan Marcelek?

Or some is does he compare to anything you've seen before?

Or

from

my experience, I have

no comparison.

We will see what on evidence is produced, but 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.

But it turns out that Marcelec's skills extended way beyond operations of influence, as Austrian investigators soon began to discover for themselves.

Because as they unraveled who all the people connected to Marcellek were, they turned up more and more leads beyond Austria.

Marcelec's very effective Vienna network, well, it wasn't the only group of agents he ran.

There was at least one more.

They carried out multiple covert operations, and they were based in the UK.

Coming up on hot money.

Marslek 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 in telegram messages.

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 clubs on

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

It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones.

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